Google’s John Mueller recently addressed a few important questions about how search engine use schema markup and where to invest your efforts. Check out the video for the same.

Being a part of eCommerce business, you will miss tremendous SEO value if you are capitalizing on schema markup. I would like to talk not only what Mueller clarified but also how fruitful will be implementing schema on your website.

In this blog, I have mentioned about Rich Snippets and how you can add Schema Markup to your eCommerce website to help search engines display rich snippets that you can learn from the following guide.

Let’s get started.

What are Rich Snippets?

Rich snippets help website owners adding extra details about their website as it is a form of structured data. Rich snippet helps google search engine in better understanding, interpreting and displaying relevant data.

It’s a general language that you can use to describe your website, that ultimately helps search engines perform better in presenting important information to potential customers.

To sell more products from your eCommerce shop, google knowledge graph and rich snippets are both essential for entity-based search that presents a powerful means.

Rich snippets like a variety of categories, including products, recipes, reviews, events, and software application are some of the examples that Google supports.

We will make you understand more clearly about how rich snippets work in further explanation.

Google does not take single reason to rank your site, as per the SEM post and other sources, rich snippets do not directly result in higher rankings, but it can help search engines to better understand the content they crawl and that can help indirectly in getting a hike.

Importance of Rich Snippets for eCommerce

What’s even more important than being NO1 is the rich snippets give you to stand among the warm prospects of search results (that is, people who are searching for your product) increases your CTRs. For a demo, check the below four listings which result catches attracts your eyes immediately?

amazon-schema

A product on amazon with 3.9 star-rating and fourteen 17 reviews catches your eyes of course, though it has a lower ranking. The extra visual details attract user attention and ultimately making the sale.

Also, consumer reviews increase purchase ratio by 66% reported by ecommerce.com

  • 66% chances increase of buying with the presence of product reviews.
  • Reviews build trusts and ultimately lifts sales by 18%.
  • Bad reviews give the opportunity to the seller of satisfying the user that actually improve conversions by 67%

Here’s How To Implement Them

Though you have lower ranking rich results make your listing eye-catchy and energetically improves your click rate. Checkout how rich snippet can improve CTR by 30%.

how-to-implement-them-schema

So, what you should do in order to make this happen?

Let’s begin with the product folio.

1. Products

When it comes to product searches, google stands the first with enormous results.

It is very much important for an e-commerce site to make sure their products have all the schema markup necessary to earn rich results in the SERPs. Google’s guidelines advise you to for product review markup:

  • Use markup for a precise product, not for a list of products.
  • Reviewers name needs to be the authentic name of a person or team that review the product.
  • Utilize name, image, price, PriceCurrency, and availability properties in your product information in the image viewer.

Now let’s get into the quintessence.

Describe simple, don’t forget that all the information in your markup will preferably show up in the rich result, so make sure they are written for humans, not a machine. As per illustration, you should write the actual name of the product instead of a model number, unless you analyze if people looking for the product with a model number. (even then you should mention product name rather than replacing it).

See the example below of the markup for a single product page, provided by Google. We will go through step by step.

product-schema

Line 1 tells that this markup if for a product that is necessary and nothing should be changed here.

Line 2 informs google the brand name of the product. Change “ACME” for the product brand. You should know that this is the product brand not your brand, including the brand is advisable, not mandatory.

Line 3 is the product name and it is mandatory. Leave everything else alone by changing “executive Anvil”.

Line 4 decides which image is affiliated with the product. This is suitable for general search and required for image search. Change out “Executive Anvil logo” for a concise description. Search engine use image alt to identify what is inside the image, but also considered for use by the visually impaired, virtual assistants and image substitute if browser fails to load an image. Google demands the image should be product image, with no jumble, on a plain (white) background.

Lines 5 to 8 describes a product. Text your product description changing “sleeker” and leave rest alone. With no limit to the length of your product description, the text will display directly on your page that you will enter here. In simple words, this is a product description that will make your user see when they actually visit your page. The schema markup solely clarifies for the search engines informing description is about the product.

Line 9 is optional that is manufacturer product number. This is helpful if you think human searches will be looking for the product with exact product number.

Lines 10 to 13 are vital. Getting the star ratings in the search results is the process of average review ratings that line 10 to 13 tells the search results. These start ratings in the search results is based on reviews left the actual customers. There are many plugins that can accomplish this for you, like WP Customer Reviews for WordPress and Shopify’s product reviews app.

“4.4” and “89” are the values that need to be swapped out. The text “stars, based on” and reviews” text is included here for the user’s benefit, will be visible on the site.

Line 15 makes us meet with the “Offer” section that is closed off on line 27. This section includes properties like product price.

“Regular Price, discounted price, fixed price is the optional text for the user’s benefit. You can put any you want here or anywhere within your schema markup.

Line 17 is about the currency. You can leave this if it’s in US dollars otherwise replace it with the appropriate three-letter ISO 4217 code.

Line 18 tells google the price of your product, interchange “119.99” for a variable storing the product’s actual price.

Line 19 and 20 informs the search engine how long the price will be reliable. The text “(sale ends,” “2nd January!” and “)” is all included for the user’s benefit. “2020-01-02” could be replaced by a variable storing the true expiration date. Make sure that “2nd January!” acts like an anchor text for the time attribute, that is what the user will see, while “2020-01-02” is for search engines that will be invisible for the user.

Line 21,22 and 23 forms the real seller. If you are a seller and not a product brand, you can use this an opportunity in getting your name into the structured data, note down, this is not necessary. The “Executive Objects” text will be visible for user and this should be interchanged for the seller name. “Available form” is for the user’s benefit in this example.

Lines 24 and 25 aware of the search engine what “condition” the product is in. this is optional and you can interchange “UsedConditon” with “NewCondition” if the product is new. It also has other conditions like “DamagedConditions” and “RefurbishedConditions”. The black text inserted here is for the user’s benefit.

Line 26 is discretionary that allows you to tell users about the product’s availability. Options are “Discontinued,” “InStock,” “InStoreOnly,” “LimitedAvailability,” “OnlineOnly,” “OutOfStock,” “PreOrder,” “PreSale,” and “SoldOut.” Again, the black text is for the users.

Ans that’s all for it! You can include, use many other schema properties that are available but these are the ones google clearly mentions, so these are the ones you should keep your focus on. Implement others if you expect usage by search engines in the future or if you want to maximize the ability for the crawlers to understand your sites.

2. Aggregator Ratings and Reviews

We many times ask for the reference before buying any product in person, right? The same way selling products online with customer review increases the sales by 80% of local business consumers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation and as per the anonymous study, 69% of online users are seeking more reviews from eCommerce retailers.

Let’s see an example as if you are listing the same product with different variations from multiple sellers with multiple price points. This is usually referred to as “aggregator page”

We will cover aggregate ratings as it gets included in the SERPs. You should not use “critic reviews”. I will recommend this only to use when you are doing actual product reviews and get star ratings for your product and consider using them on your blog.

Usually, it will look all the same. Let’s take a look at Google’s example

review-ratings-schema

As you can see the example above is genuinely minimal, you can elaborate on the product example listed above if you want.

3. Breadcrumb

You need to ensure where your users will land(their position in your website architecture) and how they got there. As a human needs to have a complete understanding to answer any query same way search engines needs additional information to place your selection of page listings to understand the goal of your page is to sell a product or generate a lead.

breadcrumb-schema

Examples

Breadcrumb is used by Google to categorize the information from the page in search results. Remember your google search when you arrive at a page from different types of search queries and it is possible you may return the same web page. Here comes the role of breadcrumb that helps to categorize the content within the context of the google search query.

4. Videos

We all know we love hearing and someone explaining the query we have. Here is a video markup that rounds you up and helps you get extra information in the video search and special badges that draw more attention.

Let us see at the below google’s AMP-compliant example:

video-rich-snippets

You can leave line 1 to 4

Interchange “video description” for your video description on line 6, and treat it like a meta description.

Reciprocate the URL on line 7 for a thumbnail image, so google doesn’t have to choose thumbnail for you. This example only shows one thumbnail, you can use all three images as shown in the example from the “article” section above.

On line 9 you can use the ISO 8601 formation for the “duration” which is your video’s length.

Replace “example publisher” with your company name or (or announcing name) on line 12.

On line 15 swap out the URL with your logo’s URL.

Inline 20 exchange the URL with your video URL (not the page it resides on).

Your embed URL should be exchanged with line 21 URL. This URL directly takes you to video player containing your video as hostile to the raw file. This is advisable but not strictly mandatory.

You should replace the variables storing the number of views your video has on line 22.

Types of Implement Structured Data & Schema Markup

Search engines understand almost everything when it crawls your web page, but there are some elements that search engines have a problem in understanding and they are videos and reviews aren’t easily understood. Hereby adding schema markup (structured data) engines can be informed what information web page contains. There are several search engines from which the most popular search engines support three types of schema markup formats:

Microdata

• You can use microdata to mark up your web page that is a set of tags added directly to the HTML.
• Itemscope, itemprops, and itemtype will be considered with each set of tags.
• Itemscope is followed by an itemtype tag that is used to identify referenced item. itemtype helps is identifying the type of item that microdata is referencing. For example, it could be entrepreneurship, local business, or recipe.

RDFa

To markup data within web pages, RDFa (Resources Description Framework in Attributes) is used as an extension to HTML5. It can be said that microdata and RDFa are similar and it uses tags inline within the existing HTML like Microdata does.

• JSON-LD
• Google, Bing, and Yandex the biggest search engines support JSON-LD (javascript objective notation for linked data) to markup your website. It is a highly recommended method by google for implementing structured data.
• The main advantage with JSON-LD compare to other methods is that it can be embedded in a <script> tag, can be placed anywhere on the page with no requirement of necessity to be present in the <body> of a page. you can stay tension free as JSON-LD does not have to be placed inline as other methods do.

Testing Schema Markup for Your Ecommerce Website

Finally, you’ll want to test your schema markup using the Structured Data Testing Tool to make sure it validates.

test-your-structured-data

Does Structured Data Help Rankings?

To lessen the doubt, your rankings are not impacted directly by structured data. Yes, it can dominate rankings by clearly identifying the content of the page and that is what can help you rank for the correct search queries.

Many years ago, google expressed that structured data might flow into the rankings.

With the update in Google algorithm, Google’sJohn Mueller officially reversed that saying last year on twitter, “There’s no generic ranking boost for [structured data] usage. However, SD does ease the work of google in understanding what the page is all about, that helps to show where it’s relevant (improves targeting).

Conclusion

Every new thing seems to be complicated for the first time and the same could result in adding rich snippets to your e-commerce site, however, it is worth for long run.

It can really be helpful in increasing offline and online sales.

What results you will get after using rich snippets or rich ads in marketing your products?

With the experience of 10+ years, we will expand the reach of your eCommerce business with eCommerce SEO Services. Call us or fill out the contact form to calendar free site review.

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