How To Improve Your Personal Branding Using Structured Data
It is a fact that structured data helps search engines to understand web content. Thanks to linked data, search engines can relate topics to each other and understand the relationships between entities (things, places, events, companies, and people).
With all the data in the knowledge graphs, search engines can quickly contextualize a person’s role in our society and understand their range of interests and expertise; in other words, they understand a person’s authority on certain topics.
An excellent personal branding strategy should include structured data for three reasons:
In this article, we will focus on disambiguation and building relationships between entities, two critical approaches to a personal branding strategy related to the concept Google expresses with the acronym E-E-A-T.
E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust) is a complex concept part of Google’s search quality evaluator guidelines, indicating the quality of a page, content author and domain.
Using structured data on a web page can help search engines understand the E-E-A-T of content authors on a topic. How? Not directly, but it can help search engines recognize the data and relationships between the content creator, the website, and the main content to other entities around the world.
For example, we can use Author within a BlogPosting or Article schema class to specify name, age, nationality, occupation, education, relatives, company ownership, and many other attributes about the person who wrote the article. This allows search engines to recognize or create a new entity based on the information collected via structured data.
The above image is a snapshot from the official Schema.org website. It shows a type of structured data for a person. Many properties describe a person’s personal information and help search engines to capture this information and store it in their knowledge graph.
In addition, several properties establish a relationship between entities, e.g., the university where the person studied or the awards he won during his professional career. Let us dive into Person’s properties and use cases to understand the potential of linking data for E-E-A-T purposes.
The Schema.org property alumniOf describes the relationship between an individual and an academic institution from which they graduated. This property can be used to describe a person who has earned a bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral degree, for example.
The value of “alumniOf” is an object of type “CollegeOrUniversity” with a “name” property to indicate the name of the academic institution. A degree that is relevant to a particular subject increases a person’s authority.
The Schema.org property award describes an award or recognition received by a person or organization. It describes awards received for work, art, science, technology, culture, education, solidarity, etc. The award property is a property of the Person and Organization classes, and its value is a text string that describes the award or recognition received.
Information about awards and recognition you have received can be helpful for your personal branding because it shows your expertise and success in your field of work or interest. “award” can help you stand out from other professionals and demonstrate your experience and unique accomplishments.
The Schema.org property hasOccupation describes a person’s current or previous occupation: a full-time job, a part-time job, self-employment, or a general career. The hasOccupation property is a property of the Person class, and its value is an Occupation class or a subclass of it.
As for personal branding, the hasOccupation property can describe your current or past employment and help make your experience and skills known to potential clients, employers, or business partners. It can also help establish your reputation as an expert in your field and increase the visibility of your brand. HasOccupation can be used in conjunction with jobTitle.
