Entities Part 10 : Speaking Machine - Your Practical Guide to Schema Markup

Tool mentioned in the podcast: https://validator.schema.org/


Machines don’t reward guesses; they reward clarity. We walk through a practical, four‑step framework to make search engines and LLMs understand your brand, your people, and your offers without ambiguity. The focus is on schema markup that scales: JSON‑LD for clean implementation, @id for stable references, and a connected entity graph that links Organisation, Website, Person, Product, and Service into one coherent map of your business.

We start by establishing a sitewide identity with Organisation and Website markup, then strengthen it with authoritative sameAs profiles so your name is matched to the right entity in the knowledge graph. From there, we embed authorship into Article schema and connect each writer back to the brand via affiliation, with optional knowsAbout fields to highlight topical expertise and support EEAT. Next, we mark up Products and Services with properties that mirror visible content, reinforcing trust and unlocking eligibility for rich results. Finally, we tie it all together using @id URLs as canonical anchors so every reference points to a single, durable source of truth.

Along the way, we share common pitfalls to avoid, why isolated page labels leave performance on the table, and how a connected schema strategy helps search engines attribute content, surface it confidently, and reduce confusion with lookalike brands. We also cover essential tooling: the Schema Markup Validator for structure and the Rich Results Test for feature eligibility, plus pointers to research resources for deeper implementation.

If you want your authority recognised by both users and machines, this is your blueprint to ship. Subscribe for more hands‑on SEO strategy, share this with a teammate who owns structured data, and leave a review telling us which schema type you’ll implement first.

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"Werq" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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Chapters

• 1:45 Welcome And Series Context
• 2:11 Why Schema Markup Matters
• 3:12 JSON‑LD And How It Works
• 5:06 From Labels To Entity Graphs
• 5:40 Step 1: Define Organisation And Website
• 6:33 Step 2: Establish Authors And EEAT
• 7:26 Step 3: Mark Up Products And Services
• 8:13 Step 4: Connect With @id Canonicals
• 9:27 Validate And Test Your Markup
• 10:11 Resources, Next Topic, And Closing CTA

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:53

Hello and welcome to SEO's Not That Humber. I'm your host, Ed Dawson, the founder of the SEO intelligence platform KeywordPeopleEase.com, where we help you discover the questions people ask online and then how to optimise your content for traffic and authority. I've been in SEO from online marketing for over 20 years, and I'm here to share the wealth of knowledge, hints and tips I've amassed over that time.

SPEAKER_01: 1:15

Hello and welcome back to my serious uplife file. It's me here at Dawson as usual. And today we're on top 10 of our entity series, which is Speaking Machine, your practical guide to schema mark. We've now arrived at the implementation phase of our journey here with entities. We've done the strategic groundwork with MAFTA entities, audited our competition to uncover the gaps, and we've built a content blueprint grounded in information game, bringing something new to the story. So you now have a plan for creating typically deeply authoritative, X-level content that's going to provide real value to people, but there's one step before all the hard work pays off. We need to make sure that machines, two jokeers, and increasingly models that read and summarize the word to understand our content just as clearly as humans did. In other words, it's time to speak their language. So stay with Game Labor, but don't worry, we're not going to get too deep. We'll keep it as simple and broke as we can. We're talking about one of the most powerful ways to get directing search engines, and that is schema markup. So what exactly is schema markup? The simplest way to think of it, a schema, is as like a universal translate for your website. It's a shared vocabulary tags, which are like a structured layer of code. You can add to your web pages to tell search engines exactly what your content is about. Imagine we talked about the analogy of using your website as a library and considering each page as like a book. The content on the page, your words and images, videos, etc., that's the story inside the book. A search engine can read the story and guess what it's about. But when you add schema mark core, you are also given a clear machine readable label to the cover. So you think things like this is an article. The headline is intimate vibe to pour over coffee. The author is a person named Jane Doe. Jane Dog knows about coffee brewing. The publisher is our organization, the coffee collective. So what you do with this is you're removing much of the ambiguity that natural language introduces, so you'd go provide structured data that explicitly, definitively defines the entities on your page and the relationships between them. Now there are a few formats spreading this code, but the one Google recommends, or the easiest to maintain, is called JSON LD, which stands for JavaScript Object Notation for Linux Data. JSON LD. Actually, it's JSON Heiston LD is how you see it spelled out. It's just a short script. You typically place it in your site's head section, and it sits separate from your visible content, which can make it tidy flexible, and make it easy to update. And the relationships between it popular. It won't magically improve reference on its own, but it will really dramatically improve where your entities are understood. The common mistake people often do in that's this they add schema to individual pages, so article on a blog post product on a product page, and then they just stop there. The real powerful magic happens when you start connecting those schemas together. So instead of isolated labels, you start to build a cohesive entity graph, which is like a web of relationship, represents your entire business and all the pages and products and everything within it. So you're not just typing individual books anymore, it's more it's more like having a map of your entire library. Think about how we build it step by step. So the first step, step one is your foundation, this is your site-wide identity. And this foundation your entire schemograph is on the home page. So this is where you can find who you are using two essential schema types, which is organization and website. The organization markup is like a digital business card, it includes your legal name, the URL, conducting, things like that. But the most powerful properties you can give it is called STEMAS. And SAMAS tells the search engines when you see your name, this isn't the same entity as these profiles. And you can link to other authoritative external identities like your company's LinkedIn page, your ex Twitter page, YouTube profiles, crude base, Wikipedia, Wikidata entries. And this helps Google and other systems disambiguate your brains. Connect your website to the correct real-world entity and global knowledge graph. Step two is then defining your expertise, your authors and your content. Which your organization is defined, establishing the expertise behind your content is your people, your authors. And this supports Google's EEAT, it's experienced in Torridor. So for every blog post using article schema, inside it includes the author property, the link to a person object. So your person schema should include name, the author's full name, job title, their affiliation, which is the link back to your organization because they are affiliated with the organization. And if you want to go a step further, you can use what this optional knows about property, which has helps specify what topics the author had expertise in. For example, knows about search engine optimization. That's not a Google requirement, but it is a smart way to normate your author expertise more machine readable. And then we move to step three, which is where we define what your your products or your services. Defining what your business actually offers. You use your product scheming for things you sell. The service scheming for offerings like consulting or design work. In these link back to your organisation organization that's using the provided. This shows your organization is the one providing these specific offerings. It more closely couples the semantic connection between brand and product. Just make sure you structure data, always matches what's just on the page, Google strip by that. You can make stuff all and put it in the steamer hoping to fool people. It does cross-correlate what's on the two. So always make sure that you keep them in sync with each other in a line. And then step four, final step, this is where we connect all the dots. So you can link all our entities together. We use that ID attribute, which is it's a unique permanent identifier for each entity. So it's like a stable address, it's like having a phone number or a URL, whatever. It is the kind of canonical naming convention for each one of these things. So for your organization, you use your home page URL as the at ID. For an author, you use that binary page URL as the RAT ID. And for a product, it's a product page URL for that edition. Basically, you take a canonical version. This is canonical version for this entity. So then whatever you reference to elsewhere, say the article schema reference in your organization as a publisher, you can just point to that ID instead of repeating all the details, but instead to the machine, if you want the details of the organization with this article or this product, whatever, don't here. And you can just get it all that you'd have to beat over and over again. This creates a really clean connected structure that machines can easily follow. So the person who wrote this article published by this organisation, you've provided this service. You're not just tagging your mapping relationship creating like your own little mini knowledge wrap for the machines to read well understand. So this week, what I suggest you do is do a quick non-intimidating technical checkup. So if you go to the schema of validator, which is an official tool from schema.org, I'll put the name for the show notes. You drop the choice Google's rich results test if you want to see which features your markup might qualify for. Enter your page URL and run the test. Then look for two settings. Do you signalise a sheen addition to detect when you expand it? Does it contain the same authority and KGOSL or profiles? Both a true great and got a solid foundation. If not, you know what to fix. Now I know this is probably quite taken on a podcast episode. I've given you loads of different terminology and schema entities and things to look at. Go to Google Gocio.ai, research these topics so you can get in much more detailed how to do it. Just give you the high-level over the concept, how they work together, and why it's interesting to do. You really want to dig into this? You don't have to do go and research how I want to put it. But it's a really powerful method here to link it all together and you link all the activities together and give the machines a real clear understanding of the pre-free organization, entities, products, services, etc. all linked together. So now you've got a plan for creating your authoritative content and for structuring it for a machine I was telling with just one PT. So in the next episode, we'll talk about failure to optimise your writing itself. So that AOIs, LLMs, which essentially nowadays are people of answer engines, which essentially they are like ChatGPT. So until next time, keep optimising, stay curious and remember. SEO is not that hard to anyone's done the basic.

SPEAKER_00: 10:25

Thanks for listening, it means a lot to me. This is where I get to remind you where you can connect with me and my SEO tools and services. You can find links to all the links I mentioned here in the show notes. Just remember, with all these places where I use my name, the Ed is spelt with two D's. You can follow me on LinkedIn and Blue Sky, just search for Ed Dawson on both. You can record a voice question to get answered on the podcast. The link is in the show notes. You can turn up my SEO intelligence platform, keywordspupleuse, at keywordspupleuse.com, where we can help you discover the questions and keywords people asking online. Post-less questions and keywords into related groups so you can know what content you need to build up your authority. And finally, connect your Google Search Console account for your site so we can crawl and understand your actual content. If you're interested in learning more about me personally or looking for dedicated consulting advice, then visit www.eddawson.com. My Philadelphia, and see you in the next episode.