The journey of bringing Schema App to its current state has been nothing short of remarkable for us, Mark and Martha van Berkel, the creators behind it. Through three business cards, four pivotal shifts, and the unique perspective of being our own target audience (as an agency), we have found ourselves in the fulfilling position of spreading Schema Markup excellence across the globe, all while living out our passion every day.
This is how we got here.
Where Schema App Began
We started the company in 2011, we were in the busy market of creating a platform to help homeowners find contractors. We then pivoted to help contractors manage their online presence, but it turned out they didn’t care about their online presence. What we found out was other small businesses did care and would pay money to learn how to do it themselves.
For two years, we were an online marketing agency focused on micro and small businesses, helping them get more business online. However, we were frustrated, while we understood the land of SEO, it didn’t get us excited and it didn’t feel authentic. What we did find exciting was semantic SEO, semantic technology, and the process of selling it in order to solve problems for clients.
Our Background
Mark studied semantic technology in 2005 when it was theoretical and didn’t have a lot of business applications. You can imagine his excitement when Google started to adopt structured data as a way to connect knowledge on the web. So, while Mark consulted doing semantic tech and marketing, he started building tools to make his life easier and automate mundane tasks so he could focus on solving more interesting problems.
As I learned more and more about what the technology could do and the lack of platform solutions for semantic markup in the market, I wanted to jump in and focus our business solely on enabling structured data markup.
But the timing was wrong.
In the summer of 2014, Mark attended the Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Jose. He spoke to Aaron Bradley and other thought leaders in the area of semantic markup and shared that he had built a platform that could generate JSON-LD. Unfortunately, Google wasn’t ready to support JSON-LD for structured data. So we went back to serving our clients and finding semantic technology consulting jobs for fun.
Then in the Summer of 2015, Google started supporting JSON-LD for their features.
So in a 6 week timeframe, we decided to shut down our online presence agency business and focus solely on Semantic Search and enabling the world to translate their websites for machines to understand.
Schema App Was Born.
Since the inception of Schema App, we’ve helped customers like SAP and Keen Footwear to reach their online business goals through customized schema strategies.
Are you ready to unleash the power of structured data?
Martha van Berkel is the co-founder and CEO of Schema App, an end-to-end Semantic Schema Markup solution provider based in Ontario, Canada. She focuses on helping SEO teams globally understand the value of Schema Markup and how they can leverage Schema Markup to grow search performance and develop a reusable content knowledge graph that drives innovation. Before starting Schema App, Martha was a Senior Manager responsible for online support tools at Cisco. She is a Mom of two energetic kids, loves to row, and drinks bulletproof coffee.