Harry Graham is a Marketing Executive at Supadü, who are experts in web build, eCommerce, site search and data management for publishers.

Managing our metadata used to be so simple. Nowadays, metadata management for publishers has become a highly complex process. It is all about digital discoverability now – how we get found, how we stand out.

This is where metadata enrichment comes in. In this article, we discuss how improving and widening the quality of your metadata can lead to success in discoverability, Google rankings, data manageability and more…

Once upon a time, marketing a title or group of titles was simple: artwork, print run, distribution – easy to price up and easy to measure your return on investment. Now the focus is about digital discoverability – how to get found, noticed and what differentiates us from our competitors?

What is metadata enrichment?

Metadata enrichment enhances discoverability, user experience and engagement as well as positively impacting on SEO and your Google rankings. Metadata enrichment usually comes in a number of forms:

• Additional Supplementary Materials
  ONIX does not support some invaluable supplementary content: videos, PDFs, author and product pages by way of example. ONIX is logical functional data – but it isn’t consumer or web friendly.  Users want more information, and so does Google. Google’s algorithms look for fast accessible rich metadata that is accurate, concise and matches the website’s HTML meta tags.
• Common standard format
  You can enhance metadata through the creation of a common standard format that interfaces with web services, web applications, and is visible to Google. ONIX is not visible to Google on its own. Additional tagging allows for linked content, to overcome misspelled searches and incomplete searches.
• A manual override facility
  This gives marketeers the ability to update their metadata in real time, which is an essential requirement for campaigns – for example, a campaign specific language, to accommodate regional price differences, or for short term promotions. The ability to override ONIX is essential.
• Product boost
  Although not metadata enrichment as such, the facility to apply a weighting to your search results is a great way of pushing key titles or authors

How to enrich your metadata…

1. Create as much content as possible around each title, author and catalogue. Enrichment should combine complete accurate ONIX files with supplementary content that can help engage your audience and improve discoverability: for example, the addition of author videos, PDFs, and individual product pages. Your audience will respond positively to relevant engaging content which in turn will drive sales.
2. Ensure you have accurate, detailed HTML metatags that directly reflect your website content. This will significantly aid accessibility (screen readers read the metatags), drive your google rankings (accurate meta-tagging curries favour with the Google algorithm), and enhance the effectiveness of your website search by drawing more relevant content into your search results.

Conclusion

You can’t always measure discoverability – how can you measure the loss of sales potential or the number of titles your users missed? However, you can be sure that investment in digital discovery will produce significant tangible results. Start with enriched metadata!

Supadu works with trade publishers of all sizes, from giants like Harper Collins and Macmillan to medium sized and even one-man bands. Supadu not only creates and manages your website design and content – we also manage and improve your metadata, meaning you get the most out of your site.

Our Supafolio API is a powerful site search and metadata management platform for publishers, installable by any developer or Supadu into a website, chatbot, mobile app or other service.

To find out how Supadu can help your business, get in touch for more information