Guest episode of Slow & Steady — A Podcast by ARTILLERY. Eric and Jake got connected through a mutual client, and Eric has done the schema work on ARTILLERY sites since.
In this episode, Jake sits down with Eric Franzon of Smart Data Websites in Missoula, Montana, for the clearest hour on schema markup you'll hear all year. Eric has been working with structured data since 2004, seven years before schema.org existed.
He was an Advisory Committee rep at the W3C. He ran the first non-academic conference on commercial semantic technology, and schema.org was announced from that stage in 2011 with Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex standing on it together. He has done this work for RAND, Intel, Wondery Podcasts, the official website of The Simpsons, and a labrador breeder in Montana. The story that convinced him it worked for small businesses: 45 minutes of code on his wife's nail salon website, and a month later they cancelled a $1,500 Google AdWords bill.
This episode is for business owners who have heard the word schema, maybe flipped it on in an SEO plugin, and never knew whether it was doing anything.
In this episode:
- What schema actually is, in plain English: classes, properties, relationships
- Why schema is a delivery system for ranking factors rather than a ranking factor itself
- The $1,500 ad bill a nail salon cancelled after 45 minutes of structured data
- Where Yoast and Rank Math defaults stop, and why WordPress calls your bio page an "article"
- Why wrong schema is worse than no schema
- The three-page, fifteen-minute test with validator.schema.org and Google's Rich Results Test
- What LLMs do with structured data, and why hallucinations make it matter more
- The time AI wrote him schema and invented three classes that don't exist
About Eric Franzon
Eric runs Smart Data Websites, where he builds sites, manages them, and does the structured data work most agencies skip. Twenty-five years in web development, a W3C Advisory Committee seat, and a client list that runs from Fortune 500 brands to one-person shops. He has also taught improv, blues harmonica, early childhood education, and gender studies, and he credits improv for how he explains technical work to non-technical people.
His mantra: "The web guy you wish you'd hired in the first place."
Smart Data Websites: https://smartdatawebsites.com/
Free 30-minute consult for Slow & Steady listeners: https://smartdataseo.as.me/slowandsteady
Email Eric directly: eric@smartdatawebsites.com
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