Martha van Berkel is the CEO and Co-founder of Schema App, a SaaS company specializing in translating web content for search engines and machines. With a background in mathematics and engineering, Martha possesses a superpower in articulating AI and search complexities to marketing leaders. Having worked with top-tier companies like Gusto and SAP, she brings a wealth of experience to digital marketing. Martha has an impressive history, including a 14-year tenure at Cisco, before venturing into entrepreneurship with Schema App. She leads her team in providing innovative SEO solutions and prides herself on cultivating a culture of transparency, ownership, and hope.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- [3:21] Martha van Berkel explains how Schema App’s technology improves search engine results
- [4:10] Knowledge graphs and how they’re used to connect data and infer relationships
- [6:29] The importance of defining relationships in your marketing data to feed AI applications and large language models
- [7:51] Martha shares the common pain points enterprises face when managing SEO in-house
- [16:09] Schema App’s customer success stories
- [19:27] The evolution of Schema App’s services and products since its inception
- [21:18] Martha reflects on her transition from Cisco to entrepreneurship
- [27:18] How market changes propelled Schema App’s growth
- [33:19] Schema App’s response to Google’s 2022 update on FAQ-rich results
- [43:01] How Martha’s diagnosis with Lyme disease helped her reframe her workplace and personal challenges
In this episode…
Have you ever wondered how search engines understand the content of your web pages? With ever-evolving algorithms and increasing complexity, ensuring your digital content is discoverable can be daunting. How can enterprises remain competitive and visible in this rapidly changing digital landscape?
High-energy entrepreneur Martha van Berkel dives into the world of Schema Markup and knowledge graphs. She shares how her company helps enterprises translate their web content into the language of search engines, enhancing their discoverability. Martha discusses the journey of Schema App from its early editor version to its current sophisticated offerings that enable complex data structuring at scale. She sheds light on the innovation, agility, and customer-centric focus that has propelled Schema App into long-standing partnerships with renowned companies.
In this episode of Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Martha van Berkel, Co-founder and CEO of Schema App, about translating web content into the language of search engines. Martha explains how Schema App’s technology enables improved search engine results, the critical role knowledge graphs play in today’s AI-driven search economy, the common challenges enterprises face when managing SEO in-house, and her vision for the future of SEO.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Special Mention(s):
- Second Bite Podcast
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz
- The Ultimate Coach by Amy Hardison and Alan D. Thompson
Related episode(s):
- “[Top Agency Series] Most Valuable Advice When Selling Your Agency With Todd Taskey of Potomac Business Capital” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
- “[Top Agency Series] Navigating a Merger and Becoming an End-to-End Digital Partner With Kevin Hourigan of Spinutech” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
- “P90X: Earning Food & Rent Money as a Mime to over $500 million in Sales- with Tony Horton [Business Inspiration]” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
Quotable Moments:
- “Educate the market and get excited about doing stuff, we’re the best solution out there to help you do it at scale.”
- “We work with some of the largest healthcare organizations, banks, and amazing technology innovators.”
- “If I can look at me getting sick as good news, then I can look at anything as good news.”
- “When you’re doing what you love, the results will come.”
- “We’re in the business of building content knowledge graphs for marketing.”
Action Steps:
- Explore the Schema App resources to gain a foundational understanding of SEO: By familiarizing themselves with Schema App’s free educational content, individuals can stay ahead in the ever-developing digital marketing field.
- Assess your website’s current SEO performance and determine where improvements can be made: A thorough review can pinpoint specific issues, allowing businesses to develop targeted strategies for better search engine rankings.
- Consider markup implementation to enhance search engine understanding and visibility: Implementing Schema markup enables search engines to comprehend and display content more effectively, potentially increasing organic traffic.
- Stay informed about the latest changes in search engine algorithms and adapt SEO strategies accordingly: Staying up-to-date with the evolving search landscape ensures that marketing efforts align with current best practices, maintaining competitive advantage.
- Evaluate the potential need for a specialized SaaS solution like Schema App for complex or enterprise-level SEO challenges: Enterprises dealing with intricate website structures or extensive digital content can greatly benefit from a dedicated tool that simplifies and scales markup efforts.
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Insider Stories from Top Leaders & Entrepreneurs…
Episode Transcript
Intro 0:15
You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr Jeremy Weisz.
Jeremy Weisz 0:22
Dr Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today, is no different. I have Martha van Berkel of Schema App, and Martha, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes people should check out other podcasts. And since this is part of the top agency series, there’s a really good one with Todd Taskey. Todd Taskey runs a Second Bite Podcast. He also pairs private equity with agencies. He helps sell agencies. And he talked about the agency space, the valuation space, just some of his journey in the private equity bridging with agency. Really interesting.
Another really interesting one was Kevin Hourigan of Spinutech. Kevin had an agency since 1995 so he talked about the internet landscape. He talked about the business landscape and the agency evolution. And Martha, I know we’re going to talk a little bit about even the past year or two. There’s huge changes. So he talked about some of those big changes throughout in the past couple of decades. Another one you mentioned before we hit record also was Tony Horton of P90X not an agency one, but very interesting journey on his path to P90X and selling billions of dollars of content in DVDs and their programs. So check that one out and more on inspiredinsider.com.
This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. And how do we do that? We actually do that by helping you run your podcast, or an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the strategy, the accountability and the full execution. We call ourselves more like kind of the magic elves that run in the background and make it look easy for the host so they can create amazing relationships, create great content, but most importantly, run their business. For me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, and I found no better way than profiling the people and companies I most admire and sharing with the world what they’re working on. So you’ve thought about podcasting. You should if you have questions, go to rise25.com or email [email protected].
I’m excited to introduce Martha van Berkel. She’s the CEO and co-founder of Schema App, and they translate web content to be understood by search engines and machines. Schema helps enterprise SEO teams develop a knowledge graph and drive search performance. And she has many superpowers, one of them being explaining AI search to marketing leaders. They’ve worked with some of the biggest companies out there. Some of their past companies they’ve worked with are Gusto, SAP, and many more. And Martha, thanks for joining me.
Martha van Berkel 3:13
Thanks for having me. It’s gonna be fun.
Jeremy Weisz 3:18
Start off talking about Schema App in what you do.
Martha van Berkel 3:21
Sure. So you actually did a great explanation of it, especially sort of, I would say, like in this new world of AI. So historically, people knew us as, sort of the people who translated their website, really into the vocabulary that Google understands, called Schema Markup. And when you did that, you got these, you know, really great features and search like stars and price information, etc. But as the world’s evolved, and as we sort of have seen more machines so AI, kind of playing out. We now sort of also, and we’ve always done this build knowledge graphs. And knowledge graphs are really, sort of, that connected data story that helps them, those machines really infer things. And so I would say, now we’re sort of in the business of building content knowledge graphs for marketing.
Jeremy Weisz 4:07
What is a knowledge graph? How would you explain to someone?
Martha van Berkel 4:10
Yeah, so I usually explain it by introducing myself by saying you heard, sort of my relationship to other things in the world. So, I’m Canadian, I’m the founder of Schema App. I’m a mom of two kids, and I’m, you know, I used to own a 1965 Austin Hillary Sprite, and my car was in the movie called Losing Chase that Kevin Bacon directed. And so a knowledge graph is where you sort of take information and you define, sort of the relationships between other things to where you can make inferences.
So if you’ve ever played the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, you now know that you’re three degrees from Kevin Bacon because I had a car, and Kevin Bacon used to drive my car. And so a knowledge graph is where we take just like flat data, and we define the relationships between it, so that you can now make inferences in it. And that’s where. How Google works, right? Like they’re trying to answer questions that people are putting in the search box. But now, if you think of from an AI perspective, all these different AI applications are trying to answer questions, right and make inferences.
And so when you put your marketing data in this content knowledge graph, you define the relationships, and that’s like, what is this page about? How is it connected to other products or things on your website? How is it connected to, like the founders or the authors? Then all of a sudden, these machines can make those six degrees of Kevin Bacon, like inferences. So that’s sort of what a knowledge graph is. It’s still, it’s been around for a long time. People know it as, like the semantic technology kind of area, but it’s really, really relevant because it helps large language models actually do things cheaper and more efficient, like more efficiently. So that’s why, like, I would say, like in the last year, it’s become way more relevant.
Jeremy Weisz 5:53
I can see you put your mathematics and engineering background to use with this, but if you are listening to the audio, there is a video component, and we are on the Schema App website. And if you want to learn more about that and kind of go deeper, because it’s obviously as a lot to this, they have a page talking about the Knowledge Graph. And basically, to me, I think as I understand, it helps search engines pull and understand what’s on your website so you can be ranked and people can find you easier.
Martha van Berkel 6:29
Yep, absolutely, yep. And then there’s some cool stuff we’re doing around, like helping content marketers understand where their content that if you really want to learn, like under resources, we have Schema School, it’s called. And I’m on a mission to, like, educate the world about sort of, not just like what this is, but like how it applies with them in marketing. So you can go, there’s free courses about the basics of schema markup. We’ve just launched our one around, like, understanding what a knowledge graph is. They’re pretty unique in market, and they’re these, like, Great Five Minute bites. So if you only have, like, breaks between meetings or sort of you want to, just like, take it in, in snippets, it’s a really great resource for you.
Jeremy Weisz 7:09
Yep. So, yeah, go to Schema App. And if you go into resources, there’s an app school, and you can see there, you know, you’re kind enough. Oh, maybe it’s because you’re Canadian, you’re nice. You didn’t charge, you didn’t decide to charge for this for people.
Martha van Berkel 7:23
No, because I see like, if I educate the market and get the market super excited about doing stuff, we’re the best solution out there to help you do it at scale. So go learn, figure it out. Ask us your questions, and then we’d love to partner with you to it, to help make it happen.
Jeremy Weisz 7:38
What are the common questions when a company comes to you, maybe we’ll take maybe, like Gusto, for example, and we could talk about the Gusto journey, but what are they asking? What do they want from you?
Martha van Berkel 7:51
Yeah, so the first thing is, is, like, they often come to us when they’ve, like, tried to do this on their own, like, they’ve been, like, Google’s been recommending people do this since 2011 so it’s not new from sort of, like a search engine kind of optimization tactic or strategy. So they usually come and say, like, tell me how you solve the pain that this is to get done, especially in enterprise where they have, like a more complex like CMS or website kind of infrastructure..
Jeremy Weisz 8:18
Is it competitors ranking, I mean, is the pain point, would they end up coming to you as a competitor ranking higher for a certain keyword, or what is like ranking them to give you results?
Martha van Berkel 8:29
Yeah, like the end game. Like the end game is, yeah, we want to get more leads, and more conversions off the web, right? So that’s sort of like the primary challenge that they have. And then they know that this is like table stakes now. So they’re like, I can’t do this on my own.
Jeremy Weisz 8:44
Have they heard of this before? Like, when they come to you, have they been like, we need to create a schema markup for our or they usually know they do, okay?
Martha van Berkel 8:55
Yeah. They usually know what it is. However, like, I speak a lot, we do a lot of work on healthcare as well as technology like us, though, as well as in finance. And we’re sort of now going and educating about, like, how search engines are really smart and really advanced, and how they are, like in large language models, and so how this is now something that, like you need to do to stay competitive. And so I would say, like, I’m now talking more and more to especially executives who are like, I’m losing to my competitors, like, help me understand what this means to me and I think what’s fun when I’m when we’re trying to executives, is that we’re talking about, like, other problems within the enterprise that they have around, like, agility, right?
Or that resourcing and it right, like they only have so many resources that need to get done. And so it’s more than just like getting the clicks. It’s also about being the innovators, being the leaders. And that’s, I think, where Gusto comes in. So Gusto, I would say, is one of those innovators or leaders, the people, the team, that at Gusto. You. So horrider and Kirill, who were there, they actually didn’t buy from me when they were at Adobe. So they decided their team wanted to do it in-house, and so they felt that pain of doing it in-house.
Jeremy Weisz 10:12
What was the reason people, what’s typically the reason people would choose to do it in-house? This feels like a very specialized knowledge to me.
Martha van Berkel 10:22
It is, well, they’re sort of like, well, we’re just going to do the basics. Like, why can’t I just do the basics? Right? And I think two, three years ago, the basics were fine, right? Like, there wasn’t a compelling reason to build a knowledge graph, like, to actually use, like, the language you’ve been using, you could just kind of optimize a page, and then that page was good, right? That page was going to perform and get perform and get you clicks and conversions. But the world’s changed, right? Like, the underlying technology now is really advanced, and so, like, it can understand what’s on the page. It wants to know, again, the context of, like, what is this product, and how does it relate to the industries and the features and the problems you’re solving.
And by the way, I want to spend, Google being the least amount of money to figure that out, right? So one of the things we saw over the last two years is the cost of indexing is increased, and so Google’s cheap about it. Like they don’t spend as much money to understand your site. And so this is really about you making it easy for them, right? Because when you make it easy for them, they do the work, and then they show you, right? So you’re making it easy for them both to understand, and then also make that inferencing. And so Gusto, like they’re really doing more advanced things, like they’re wanting to innovate, they want to be the leaders in the market, and so they’ve been adopting some of our newest features around helping them build this semantic content knowledge graph, and those members of the team understand sort of the implications of that, or the reason why that’s going to differentiate them.
Because I don’t know, I often like think future state where it’s like, Google’s like right now, where people primarily go, but a lot of these open, large language models are consuming the whole web. And so at what point are there going to be very niche services being offered that you need to make sure you’re relevant in? And it’s not just SEO at this point. It’s like data consumption and data understanding. And so they really see both, like the value externally, and then we’ll likely partner with them also to understand how they’re going to reuse this Knowledge Graph internally to understand, like, the maturity of their content and where sort of those content gets.
Jeremy Weisz 12:31
So they come to you at Adobe, right? First of all, how did they even find you?
Martha van Berkel 12:38
Well, we happened to be good at SEO, right? So, when you work in the SDSA, so we write really great content. So one of the things, and I’m really a believer, like in organizations, like, don’t write, like, generic content, right? Like super niche, specific content that, like, you know really, really well. So if you go to our blog, like, we’re not writing about just broad things we’re writing about very specific things, like the anatomy of a knowledge graph, or schema markup in like, very kind of specific things that we work a lot in healthcare.
So we were talking about here, but like, changes we’re seeing in the vocabulary that help healthcare organizations lead and sort of stay innovative, and not just about what’s happening, but our opinion on what that means, right? So that writing a really awesome content, and then we do a lot of conversations like this, whether that be on podcast or at conferences, my favorite thing, like my super strength, is sort of again, explaining and getting people excited about how this can help their organization, their marketing teams, be the innovator, and how we really partner with them to do that work. And so that’s sort of where I spend a lot of my time, just making sure people understand the opportunity that’s available to them.
Jeremy Weisz 13:53
So they find you probably through some content that you’ve put out, in addition to your reputation, and they said, We’re gonna do the basics in-house, right? So then what happens next, after that?
Martha van Berkel 14:11
Well, it usually doesn’t get done. In fact, like we just marked a deal lost, and I was like, great, put a four-month reminder in your calendar, and you’re gonna reach out to them and ask how their IT team’s doing or it seems not going to have gotten it done, or if they’ve done it, they’ve done it wrong. And then we’ll say, we’ll give them evidence of, like, how we’re getting results for our clients, how we sort of take the burden off it and partner with them to make them the hero that they get to do all the other things in addition to getting results. And then we usually sort of re-stimulate that conversation. And, like I said, like building knowledge graph, like this, like semantic technologists, like, there’s not a ton of them, and then to do, like, something in house and enterprise.
In fact, there was a stat that, like 70, like 75% of IT projects go over time and way, way over a budget. And so what’s cool about what we do is that, like, it’s a SaaS product, right? So, like, you only pay for what you’re using, so you’re not going over budget, like, as you sort of grow and you get it done within the first 30 days. So it’s like, it’s sort of like breaks down all those like headaches we have, especially in large enterprise, with regards to, the nature of IT by sort of rethinking it, reimagining how you can do this advanced tech, but in a really agile way.
And that’s probably, like the part that made my co-founder and I most excited about doing this is just that, like, we’re kind of tossing all the things we learned working in enterprise. So I spent 14 years at Cisco, and just, like, being like, well, what if that’s not true. Like, what if we can, like, just totally change the mindset of, like, it doesn’t have to be complicated, it doesn’t have to be slow, it doesn’t have to be hard. Like, what if that’s true. And we’ve proved it out, like, it’s awesome.
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