Customer Story
Founded in 2011, Gusto is a payroll software company serving over 300,000 customers. Their solutions are tailored towards small to medium-sized businesses and accountants, with payroll solutions at the core of their work, alongside HR solutions and benefits.
As Gusto’s Senior SEO Manager, Harinder Singh recognized the importance of providing context to search engines through connected Schema Markup.
He knew that the more clarity they could offer in the language of search engines – Schema.org – the better search engines could understand their content and present it accurately to users seeking such information.
In addition to increasing contextual understanding, he knew that proper Schema Markup would make their content eligible for rich results, further improving their website visibility and click-through rates, driving quality traffic to their site, and helping SMB audiences find valuable information.
Faced with the challenge of optimizing hundreds of pages across an Enterprise architecture, they needed to find a scaled solution that could be managed centrally.
To address this, Gusto turned to Schema App, an external Software as a Service solution enabling efficient and programmatic Schema Markup implementation at scale.
Based on his past successes working with Schema App, Harinder knew they had the best solution to take Gusto’s SEO program to the next level.
When Gusto partnered with Schema App, they leveraged the Schema App Highlighter to generate and deploy dynamic Schema Markup for different page sets across their CMSs through Javascript.
Within weeks, they started achieving Review Snippets, Product rich results, FAQ rich results and How-to rich results on their targeted pages.
Review Snippet
FAQ Rich Result
How-To Rich Result
By achieving these rich results, they gained more impressions and clicks to their pages. Rich Results showcased Gusto’s pricing, ratings, reviews, and other relevant content directly in the search results, engaging the users at the start of their search journey.
Working with Schema App enabled Gusto to implement Schema Markup on their site in a programmatic manner despite their complex web architecture. Furthermore, Gusto was assigned a Customer Success Manager to help them manage their markup and make swift changes whenever necessary.
The relationship between [Schema App and Gusto] is not transactional. [Schema App] is always willing to tweak things and invest time and resources into different things to see what would work best. This is what SEO is all about. You cannot do SEO without trying new things.”
– Harinder Singh, Senior SEO Manager, Gusto
Throughout this partnership, it became clear that search was moving from lexical to semantic search. Instead of matching keywords in queries to keywords on landing pages, search engines were now matching meaning and intent in queries to relevant landing pages.
In order for search engines to understand the meaning of content, they first need to understand the entities on a page. Gusto was able to leverage Schema App’s Linked Entity Recognition feature to automatically identify named entities in their text and link them to external identifiers from authoritative knowledge bases like Wikidata and Google’s Knowledge Graph.
Using linked data and connecting entities across their website, Schema App developed Gusto’s unique content knowledge graph to help search engines like Google reduce ambiguity in interpreting their content and match their content with greater accuracy to the user’s query.
“The support from our Customer Success Manager has been great. He constantly has innovative ideas and experiments that we can work on. There is a team that stands behind the [Schema App] product, and that team has been fantastic for us. [Schema App’s] support and ease of use is what truly stands out for us.”
Harinder Singh
Senior SEO Manager
Gusto