COVID-19 has disrupted our world like nothing we have seen before, and the response requires some reflection, planning, and aggressive execution. Milestone has developed and begun implementing the COVID-19 Crisis-Recovery-Growth strategy and wants to share it with the community. In this presentation, Milestone’s CEO Anil Aggarwal and VP of Marketing Erik Newton discuss insights on how to overcome the business impact of COVID-19. We will cover: — Phased tactics within local, organic, social, and paid media. — Recommendations for gathering customer insights, adjusting content, mobile, and clickability. — Moving to omnichannel measurement and offer packaging and scaling back up. — What is the current state of voice search, entity search and where it is growing. — Top tips to create AMP and FAQ pages for conversational content and voice search. — How major verticals – tech, banks, auto, hotels, and retailers – are capitalizing on these technologies to increase growth and sales. — Successful case studies and practical tips to upgrade your digital assets and use BERT to your advantage.

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SEO After COVID-19: How FAQs,
Schema, AMP & Voice Search
Help Manage and Recover

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Your Milestone Speakers
Erik Newton
VP of
Marketing
Milestone
Anil
Aggarwal
CEO
Milestone
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Omnichannel Marketing Solution
CMS Local
Reviews AnalyticsInsights
Schema Voice
Search
Design Content SEO
Paid Social Content Analytics &
Consulting
Hospitality | Restaurants | Retail | Finance | B2B Technology | Healthcare | Agency
PLATFORM SERVICES

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Upcoming CRG Webinar Series from Milestone
CRG Framework
On demand
CRG Local
Weds, Apr 15
CRG Content and B2B
Thurs, Apr 23
Intro to
Crisis-Recovery-Growth
framework
CRG Paid
Weds, Apr 29
Local channels in
Crisis-Recovery-Growth
phases
Content and B2B in
Crisis-Recovery-Growth
phases
Paid channels in
Crisis-Recovery-Growth
phases
https://blog.milestoneinternet.com/local-search/webinar-covid-19-crisis-recovery-growth-local-search/

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1. CRG Framework
2. Crisis and Recovery SEO
Tactics & Case Studies
3. Pitfalls and Don’ts
4. Takeaways and Dos
5. Questions & Answers
Today's Agenda
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COVID-19
Crisis-Reco
very-Growt
h
Framework
Key channels: Website, SEO, Local, Content
1. Maintain website and increase your digital relevance
2. Add COVID-related content – FAQs, your policies, banners
3. Ensure local listings & maps are updated
4. Start developing new content
Key channels: Paid Media, Website, SEO
1. Harvest content marketing efforts
2. Aggressively scale paid media presence
3. Leverage prospecting and lookalike modeling
4. Omnichannel synergies
Key channels: Website, Paid Media, SEO, Email
1. Generate interest with unique offers
2. Targeted relaunch of paid media
3. Invest in SEO prioritizing schemas, voice, and technical
health
4. Optimize mobile with AMP and superior navigation
5. Amplify omnichannel efforts with email
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Crisis and Recovery: Focus on 5 Key Tactics
1. Offers
2. Local
3. FAQs & Voice
4. Schemas
5. AMP

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Chinese Economy Recovers from
COVID Rapidly, Unevenly
Harvard Business Review 3/10/20

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1. Develop On-Point Offers

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•Listen, Understand & Match
– Problems, concerns, limits, needs
• Check: Google Trends, site search, CS logs, forums, social,
other countries
• Test and Plan
– Service: hours, video, delivery, in-home
– Products: new menus, bundles
– Incentives: free trial, status, membership,
subscription
– Payment: deferral, debit, credit, Venmo, Bitcoin
– Messaging: headlines, images, FAQs, CTAs

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Crisis: [Offer, Site, Local]
Papa John’s No Contact Campaign
Problem
Essential pizza service
realizes customers have
concern about virus
transmission on pizza, box,
and from deliverer
Solution
Develop a no-touch
production and delivery
method to allay fears
SEO rank is best, position 0
PAAs for no-contact not showing up
Local is up-to-date
and includes all
delivery partners

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Crisis: Papa John’s No Contact Campaign
Title, H1, Meta Keywords: Good
• Meta description not updated, Google ignored, used landing page text
• No schema code
• No FAQ section on site
• YouTube video of TV ad not up yet
• Graphic is outstanding

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Crisis: [Re-offer, Site, FAQ, Social, Video, Schema]
Best Buy’s Contactless Curbside Pickup
Problem
Shelter-at-home is a great sales
opportunity for TVs and home
theater, but people were
nervous about shopping
Solution
Repurpose and promote an
existing pick-up service to fit
with the crisis times
Top Rank
PAAs Galore

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{"@context":"http://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList"
,"itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{
"@id":"https://www-ssl.bestbuy.com/","name":"Best Buy"}}
href="/site/help-topics/curbside-pickup-faqs/pcmcat1568729727545.c?id=pcmcat1568729727545"
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/help-topics/curbside-pickup-faqs/pcmcat1568729727545.c?id=
{"@context":"http://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"Lis
tItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"https://www-ssl.bestbuy.com/","name":"Best Buy"}},
Crisis: Best Buy’s Contactless Curbside Pickup
There is a site and YouTube video, but not showing in
SERPs

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Evolution of Search
TEXT
DRIVEN
2008 2020
VOICE
DRIVEN
KEYWOR
DS
CONVERSATIO
NS
No duplicate
content
No spammy
content or links
Relevant & precise
results
Understand
longtail
(FAQ)
Local
Mobile
SERP
Quality
Local
Results
Thin Content
https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change
From Keywords to Conversations

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2. Schemas

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Do schemas correlate to increases
in rank, impressions, and traffic?
• Based on 9,400 schema
deployments – Yes, +20-30%
– Avg 40 schema types
– Avg 130 attributes and properties
Key Performance Question

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Schema Types and Facts
Schema Types
• Schemas always evolving, now
818 types, 1324 properties
• New COVID-19 Schema
– For COVID-related critical
announcements and events
Other relevant schema:
• OpeningHoursSpecification
• FAQPage
• QAPage
• SearchResultsPage
• HowTo
• Breadcrumb
• Image
Highest impact of any on-page or off-page technique, avg. 24% increase in traffic

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Schema Challenges
• Architecture & code complexity, ~750+ lines per page
• Schema.org and Google deprecation, additions
• Significant IT resources needed to deploy and maintain
Structured data markup enables search engines to understand context of website content

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Nesting is key to success
Financial Institution
name
description
areaServed
image
contactPoint
brand
logo
address
phone
fax
email
tickerSymbol
FinancialProduct
sameAs (social URLs)
FinancialProduct
name
description
areaServed
hoursAvailable
image
contactPoint
brand
logo
address
phone
fax
email
MortgageLoan
potentialAction
sameAs (social URLs)
MortgageLo
an
name
serviceType
image
url
description
broker
loanType
interestRate
audience
Nested schema architecture from a financial institution for a single
page
Schema Development Nesting Strategy

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Case Study: Restaurant Chain Schema
Deployment on AEM Website
• +33-66% boost in search impressions, +3M to 6M a day
• +23% boost in clicks on unbranded keywords
• +250,000 visits per day
Schemas deployed on October 17th and indexed on October
25th

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Case Study: B2B Enterprise Schema VMWare
Problem
Build a foundation for entity-based search
and voice search, increase rank and traffic
Solution
A robust schema implementation without
impacting internal IT resources, maintainable
Results
• Impressions 24% increase
• Clicks and visitors 30% increase
• Quick answer impressions went up 170%
• People Also Ask went up 115%
• Equivalent marketing value of over $300k

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Schema Errors Drop Traffic 35% and Fixes Recover
Traffic for Hardware Retail Chain
Product schema error and
fix
Breadcrumbs schema
error and fix
Initial deployment
results in big increase in
impressions and clicks

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3. Local

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Crisis and Local Updating Resource
https://blog.milestoneinternet.com/seo/local-search-updates-related-to-covid-19/

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Local Listings and Knowledge Panels Have High Visibility
If you do not control your local listing or knowledge panel,
Google may crowd source information from users
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Crisis: [Local & GMB Posts] Bank Case Study
Problem
Essential bank service needs
to change business hours
frequently and communicate w
customers
Solution
Milestone changed hours twice
daily and posted thousands of
Google Posts in GMB
Results
GMB views up 10X
GMB actions up 31%
Calls up 63%

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Retail Case: 48% Increase in Phone Calls to Stores from GMB
+51%
+55%
+45%
+71% +76%
+62%
+64%
After Local
Optimization
53,347 incremental phone calls between September and December vs. last
year

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4. AMP
Milestone has done more than
4300 AMP deployments

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Accelerated Mobile
Pages (AMP)
AMP pages load faster
leading to higher mobile
visibility, engagement, and
conversion
Mobile visits +59%
Visits +34%
Impressions +54%
Speed up to 10X higher
Engagement up to 20X higher
Milestone Research AMP Study
Based on 12 sites launched

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AMP Case: 100%+ Increase in Mobile Impressions
30% Increase in Mobile Traffic for Furniture Chain
AMP launched on Nov
12

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Summary: AMP
• Good for speed, user
experience
• Helps non-AMP and
non-mobile pages
• Google rewards it avg of
59% increase in mobile
visits

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5. FAQs and
Voice
Solutions

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Use FAQs & Voice Search to Increase Visibility
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Crisis-stage FAQs complement evergreen FAQs
Use online and offline sources to identify
questions your customers have

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Huge Increase in FAQ Presence
FAQ presence in organic search one
week after schema deployment
Source: Milestone Presence Cloud Insights

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Pitfalls to Avoid
1. Missing signals from
your customers
2. Lack of schema or
schema errors
3. Not saturating the SERP
w various asset types,
channels
4. Mobile speed score
below 65

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1. Create and test new offers
2. Update local, publish Google posts
3. Launch or update FAQs
4. Deploy, fix, and update schemas
5. Use AMP on key pages
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Takeaways and Things to Do
in Crisis and Recovery Phases
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• 45% of sites sampled from today’s registrants have no schema
• Only 4% of sample uses more than 8 schema types out of 818
• 11% of sites in sample using schema show errors
• Sites w schema avg 2.4X more pages indexed in Google
– 217,742 indexed pages vs 90,214 without
• Average mobile page speed score is 27.6 (this is really slow)
Brand New Schema Data from Milestone Research

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Sign Up for a Free Site Assessment
@MILESTONEMKTG
First 30 attendees* to register will
get a complimentary site review
• Schema
• Mobile
• Local & GMB
https://go.milestoneinternet.com/audit
* Not available to agencies, consultants, or individuals

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https://go.milestoneinternet.com/audi
t