Page 10 - SEO Mad Scientist 2020 Report

Does Schema Help You Rank Organically?

Test Setup: August 28, 2020

We still see a lot from reputable SEOs in the community who swear by the power of Schema for
ranking organically, so we continued to test this. If you read our previous tests then you know our
signal variable tests did not show any real organic indexing power, and our split tests showed
mixed results where Schema-based sites rarely showed #1 compared to our other tests...

We decided to retest the split test on a bigger level to see if there was something we missed.

Registering almost exactly the same websites, we launched 2 local sites with EMD brands, a
homepage, service pages, about page, and the address in the footer. We used nothing but
headings, images, and map embeds to try and limit any variables.

One website had location markup on each page and service markup on the services pages. The
second site was left with the basic front end optimization. Our other tests only included 1 page so
we expected this to give us a better idea of how Schema strategy performs as a whole.

Test Results:

The results were inconclusive from this test. While rankings did fluctuate slightly, we did not see
anything different by using websites with more pages for our test.

Is Off-Page Schema Linking More Powerful for Rankings?

Test Setup: August 28, 2020

In this test, we did the same split test from above but without any onsite Schema markup. Instead,
we only built a brand link to each site. On test one, we had one backlink on a page with the
business NAP and Schema, and on the second test, we had only the NAP and no Schema.

We expected this would give us a good base point to determine how valuable off-page Schema
is and if it is a factor. We have speculated from observation that off-site Schema markup may, in
fact, be more powerful than onsite.

Test Results:

This test did not provide conclusive results in either direction. The off-page Schema did not
provide any additional value to rankings, but we are strategizing new experiments for this idea.

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