Page 7 - SEO Mad Scientist 2020 Report

Test Results: February 7, 2020

After indexing the page, and even waiting 3 weeks, we saw NO movement on the GMB for the
related term in both organic and maps. We "could" conclude that referencing a term in the
Schema will not help local ranking, but unfortunately, there is not enough data here to make that
call, which is why we call it inconclusive. We are continuing to monitor this test, but these results
led us to start an additional 3 Schema tests to determine if Schema actually helps with local maps
rankings.

In our quest to quantify the SEO value of Schema markup, we’ve found it was not indexable,
meaning if you have a term only in your Schema, Google will not return the page on your
website (unlike major ranking signals such as headings or metadata). But does Schema markup
give you any competitive edge with the actual rankings?

Can You Trigger a Video Snippet with Video Schema?

Test Setup: February 21, 2020

Next we looked more into video Schema for generating rich snippets in SERPs. We had 2 video
Schema tests running - could we trigger a video snippet with video Schema markup and

To test if we could trigger a video snippet, we took a group of pages across different websites
and embedded a video along with the video Schema markup. We tested videos from the youtube
channel connected to the website brand, as well as videos from other channels that are not
owned by our site. We were tracking a number of keywords and waiting to confirm Google
re-crawled the page as both showed the last crawl in 2019

Test Results: February 28, 2020

Our tests to get video snippets in the organic SERPs using Schema markup were unsuccessful.
After confirming Google’s recrawl of both of our tests, we have yet to see a video snippet appear.
We ran another 5 video Schema tests to be sure and upon recrawl, we found the same result -
there must be more to getting these snippets than just markup.

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