Look, up on the web, it's a bot, it's a link, it's ... Doctor Digital! The world's foremost expert on superheroic SEO, is here to provide the plus ultra power of SEO knowledge to the world, saving the day like all tried and true heroes who take up the mantle. With great traffic, comes great searchability and Doctor Digital is here to provide that uncanny boost! So without further ado, "It's Optimizing Time!"
The Making of Doctor Digital, World's First SEO Superhero
Yes, that is exactly what you think it is. A superhero comic strip about Structured Data, where I make Google's RankBrain a character.
At this point you're either completely hyped up that the world of SEO and Superhero comics have collided into what you now see before you, or you're confused. So let me take a moment to explain.
My name is Steve Myers, and I'm the creative force behind The Adventures of Superchum and the Mighty Befrienders. I've been a comic artist and cartoonist my entire life. But my career path has taken me into a whole other world of twists, turns, and adventures. I currently work as a Search Engine Optimization manager. And I've been working in the field for over a decade.
SEO is hard to explain sometimes. It's weird and technical. You get terms like Term Frequency versus Inverse Document Frequency. You get coding like CSS and JSON-LD. You work on page speed, and JavaScript. You constantly have to explain keywords, long-tail keywords, the difference between users and sessions in Google Analytics, or why your Search Console stats never match up to your Analytics stats.
It takes a superheroic effort to analyze, consult and practice SEO in today's internet. And I constantly found myself having to teach both my bosses and my clients about what it is I actually do. From basic concepts to complex code like the JSON-LD that is the framework of structured data (and why that's important for Rich Results).
Understanding Comics ... Understanding SEO
So one day while walking to the train station for my commute home from center city Philadelphia, I had a revelation. I constantly express myself through my comics. It's the way I see things, the way I process information and the way I feel most comfortable telling stories.
I was then reminded of two things:
First, a Marketing Lesson
One of the biggest aspects of marketing, especially in a crowded space like digital marketing, is having something unique that makes you stand out. The buzz word for that is differentiator. In SEO in particular, one of the biggest examples is Rand Fishkin and his Whiteboard Fridays. Those videos are amazing, and have helped me and countless other SEOs over the years learn concepts and engage with each other. And those videos are what made Moz and Rand stand out in the crowd. That content is unique and everyone from Matt Cutts to Danny Sullivan to me associates Whiteboard Fridays in SEO with Moz.
For me, the one thing that makes me different is my comic illustration. It's something I do that not a lot of SEOs do. And overall in my career it's kind of ironic. In the world of comics I don't stand out. I'm another artist in the crowd. But turn that around, and put out an SEO comic, and suddenly I'm one of the only ones in the world doing that.
Second, Scott McCloud and Understanding Comics
Beyond just having a comic strip though, I needed my idea to really be about something. And that's where inspiration struck next. I've always been a huge fan of Scott McCloud's book Understanding Comics. This graphic novel is an essential piece of reading for comic fans and comic pros. It teaches you in one of the most visual and engaging ways how comics work and gives you a deep appreciation for the art form.
But what always struck me as the most clever aspect of this book was its own construction. The text reads like a term paper or an essay. That is then taken and illustrated into a very easy to follow visual narrative. The book is constructed as the most perfect example of its own topic: Its a testament to sequential art.
And that's where the full idea of Doctor Digital came together. I want the work on this strip to be fun, visual, goofy storytelling— which is my personal style. But I also want it to be educational in the vein of Understanding Comics. To explain SEO and teach the things I'm constantly teaching my clients and co-workers about SEO, but through the lens of sequential art.
At that point, my creation becomes the unique differentiator I want it to be. The world's first and currently only SEO Superhero.
So who is Doctor Digital? And what can he do?
The concept for the character was relatively simple. I take an SEO professional and give him (since I'm basing this off of my own experience in the field I made the character a male to make it more authentic to myself) super powers related to SEO.
The design was easy. The "secret identity" is just an idealized cartoon version of myself. With a power button on the pocket of his lab coat. He pushes that button and "transforms" into Doctor Digital's Superhero Form.
The design for the form was inspired from three of my favorite characters to doodle over the years, as I figured that would make it easiest on me to draw.
The badge or symbol is heavily inspired by the Star Trek The Next GenerationComm Badge. And the color scheme is heavily influenced by the Ted Kord Blue Beetle.
But now that I had the look, what was he going to be able to do?
I'm pretty much winging it here. I want him to be able to move in between the SERP dimension and our reality. So he can physically interact with the concepts of SEO. The goal of the narrative is going to be to put him into situations where he has to deal with SEO related crises each time out.
These are going to read a bit like Understanding Comics, a bit like the old Hostess Fruit Pie ads, and a lot like talking to me about SEO.
I hope you enjoy the good Doctor and his amazingly weird adventures in the world of SEO!
Now that you know a bit about where Doctor Digital, SEO Superhero, comes from, I'd like to share the original article that spurred me to create the above comic strip in the first place. It was a blog post I wrote for a former employer. And in the middle of it I felt like doing the same old thing, and using stock art was just going to get the piece lost in the crowd. So I drew the first Doctor Digital adventure to go with it!
Rich Results and Structured Data:
The Future of Digital Marketing
Welcome intrepid readers and searchers of the arcane secrets of SEO wizardry! Doctor Digital is here to amaze, astound and astonish with a journey into the mysteries of yet another news article about quirks and qualities in Google search features! The 9-panels of full-color senses shattering SEO insight provided by the Doctor Digital comic strip delved deep into the super duper effects of structured data.
But what was Doctor Digital really experiencing?
Rich Results are the Next Generation of Structured Data
One of the fundamental principles behind what Doctor Digital and his sidekicks the Google Girls do is we ensure that the techniques and technology his team use in digital marketing campaigns are the best they can be.
We’re talking top level entities taking on the titans of AI themselves!
From deciphering JSON-LD to Enhancing Google My Business listings, Doctor Digital stays on top of it all. And this month he tackles Rich Cards.
Doctor Digital used his effusive eloquence to elucidate and pontificate not a moment too soon, true believers!
With the speed that the internet changes, keeping ahead of fast moving digital marketing trends takes dedication. It seems that once every year everything changes and what once drove your online presence to its peak is now dragging you down.
A great example of this is that just a few years ago not having a mobile-friendly website
wasn’t a big deal. Today that would be considered the death knell for your internet marketing campaign. Google will reconsider how much weight it gives your site in their Google search results for not taking a mobile presence, mobile speed, and mobile search into account.
It is in this vein that Doctor Digital shifts focus to the world of structured data
and its little brother rich results.
There's a New Tool in Town
Everyone who has been involved in a conversation about web marketing or SEO – from SERPS obsessive SEOs to Local Business Owners to Site Owners to Google Webmasters – has probably seen or heard something about Google’s newRich Results Testing Tool.
Google announced the new tool in conjunction with its decision to group all of their terms, such as rich snippets and enhanced results under the umbrella of rich results.
Since its debut in 2018, there has been a deluge of information surrounding this new initiative by Google to bring the visual format of their SEO interpretation to the next level. Please join Doctor Digital as he delves into this new tool and the implications it will have for your business and online marketing presence.
Rich Results: What is Structured Data?
Like any good yarn worthy of spinning for eager listeners, we must start at the beginning. For those out there who are still in the prehistoric keywords can be stuffed onto a page era of SEO, here is a quick crash course in structured data markup.
This isn’t a technical white paper that focuses on machine language, markup languages, relational databases, business intelligence data structures, or relational database management systems. Doctor Digital is your SEO Super Hero and we’re here to focus on the keys to your online marketing, like customer behavior and easy to understand data management.
Structured data are snippets of metadata information that are encoded into a web page’s back end. But this far more intricate than just a basic meta description. These snippets of information, which can be created via JSON-LD, Microdata, or RDFa types, are designed to enable search engines like Google to better classify web pages for both desktop and mobile search results pages.
The best way to think about it is to imagine that your web page is an object that you are trying to describe to someone who has no frame of reference. For instance, if you were to explain to a blind person what a bicycle is you would start with the basic structure. Explaining that it consisted of wheels, handlebars, and a seat would be things that would help give a better context to establish that frame.
The same thing is true of a website and each page’s content. Structuring your data to give the object of your website specific types of clearly defined characteristics that potential customers may be looking for. A great example that has been used by many is a web page that contains a recipe. By giving that web page structured data that defines that recipes ingredients allow for that page to return not only for the recipe name but a new search result format that showcases its ingredients or cooking time.
The best place to learn more about structured data and schema markup is schema.org. Their homepage gives you the full rundown on what structured data is. They provide excellent examples of semantic web data sources and then provide large volumes of structured data examples to teach you how to code them.
Rich Results: What is a Rich Card?
Now that we’ve gone over the basics of what structured data is, let’s turn our attention to what Google calls rich cards.
These all began as rich snippets that showed authorship and star ratings next to books that got reviewed on Google. Users reacted favorably to these previews of their content on Google search pages and now new rich cards have exploded in variety, including accelerated mobile pages that display news articles differently in search, recipes that showcase recipe cards on search, and even job openings being displayed in their own area of Google search results.
A rich card is just another way of customizing your Google search result to further stand out from the pack. When you type a search into Google and the first page of results are returned you will most likely notice that there is a result pinned directly to the top of the page that is enclosed into a raised box.
This feature allows your result to stand out regardless of the platform your clients choose to search from. If you are viewing this on your laptop or desktop computer it will probably resemble a 3×5 index card. When viewed on a mobile device, the rich cards appear as stylized tiles, especially when the results are an amp page.
In addition to giving a more appealing visual to your results in the search window, structuring your data with a rich card in mind will also allow you to target your potential client base with greater precision. Using structured data as the backbone, rich cards will allow you to market directly to customers in the search results window. Embedded images and star ratings will make your website outshine the rest without the stigma that has become attached to pay-per-click advertisements.
Rich Results: What is the Testing Tool?
The success of Rich Snippets has sent ripples through the digital marketing industry. Hopefully, our discussion thus far has gotten you interested in diving into the cutting edge world of rich results for your Internet presence. Now that we’ve gotten your feet wet with an introduction to the hows and whys of rich results we turn our attention to the newly released Rich Results Testing Tool.
Google has long been steeped in search analytics, and data report driven marketing tactics. From Google new Search Console to Google AdWords Keyword reports, Google has committed to real-time performance monitoring across its channels. Testing and providing developer documentation for the structured markup of Google Rich Cards was no different, and Google created its new testing tool.
This is not to be confused with the tried and true Structured Data Testing Tool
– one of Doctor Digital’s favorite tools in the whole wide universe of SEO.
Nay, the purpose of this new tool is different. The Rich Results Testing tool exists to allow companies like yours an easy and intuitive way to determine if their website is optimized with Rich Results in mind.
This new tool is the next step in the evolution of Google’s search engine algorithm. It functions as a sidekick to the structured data testing tool. It’s Robin to the SDTT’s Batman.
So while the structured data testing tool is useful mostly for determining issues with code samples of the website, the rich results testing tool is to be used for a quick assessment of whether your website supports rich results in the first place. The information that this provides will enable you to make increasingly accurate decisions on where your marketing dollars are best focused.
The interface came out of closed beta in a limited format, and only supported testing for recipes, jobs, moves, and online courses. But it was paramount in connecting the dots throughout Google’s other channels as it worked in conjunction with Google Search Console
and its Search Console Rich Cards Report.
Rich Results: What are the Next Steps?
Like Google, Doctor Digital is constantly searching and exploring. He looks to “boldly go where no one has gone before” with his online heroics and SEO Superhero Adventures. The good Doctor is eager to discover what’s next.
Too many things change in this industry too quickly for Doctor Digital to stay in one place.
You’ll note that our entire exploration of Google Rich Snippets and Rich Cards was focused on search engine results from Google. This is because they are the leader in search as well as the types of rich snippets and featured snippets that are displayed on search engine results pages.
However, all major search engines are involved and following Google’s lead, including Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex.
Have any questions? Then contact Doctor Digital on his social media spaces like Facebook or Twitter. Ask him anything, be it how to code a span itemprop, what script type do we recommend for your structured data, is unstructured data harmful, what’s the best WordPress plugin for schemas, or do you even think structured data is a ranking factor that can affect clickthrough rate and SERP features?
Doctor Digital is ready to heed the call! Be here next time as Doctor Digital delves into Google Algorithm Changes!
You'll meet new antagonists like the Source Code Supreme and the Superior Spider-Bot!
You'll discover that the good Doctor has a team of assistants all dedicated to helping him!
"Oooh, Superchum sounds like it could be a really good comic! You've definitely done a great job at it so far! I plan on coming back and continually reading this story. "
