Schema Markup for Ecommerce SEO: What You Need to Know
Schema markup is an exciting, powerful, and underutilized component of search engine optimization—especially for ecommerce businesses. Schema markup, or structured data, helps search engines like Google better understand your content, and also powers rich snippets. This translates to higher rankings, more views, and more targeted traffic to your ecommerce website.
Investing in schema markup is an excellent next step after handling the basics of ecommerce SEO, such as optimizing the on-page content of your site. This process will help ensure that as much of your optimized content is viewed by both search engines and users as possible.
Below, we explore how schema markup SEO works, including its uses in getting important product details in front of users right on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
What Is Schema Markup?
Schema or schema markup is a coding language (also called structured data or semantic vocabulary) that can be placed on your website to help search engines better understand your content and return more informative, helpful results for users. Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex collaborated to launch Schema.org, a resource for understanding and implementing schema.
What is the benefit of using schema? When a website has structured data in place, web users can view specific and relevant information directly on the search engine results page. This information might include star ratings, prices, reviews, event dates, how-to instructions, recipe steps, author details, and much more.
When displayed on SERPs, these listings are known as rich snippets. Not only does including this type of information generate more relevant results for web users, but search results containing rich snippets also tend to achieve better click-through rates and drive more traffic.
Structured Data and Ecommerce SEO
Schema and other forms of structured data play an important role in ecommerce SEO. Structured data helps ecommerce businesses make their search engine listings more robust, so more users see those listings and are enticed to click and convert directly from the SERPs. Structured data also boosts user experience for ecommerce by showing the product availability on search results. For example, if you have out of stock products, the SERPs would show that the product is not available.
While it is unclear how exactly Google structured data may influence your ecommerce site’s rankings, it can certainly help you stand out above the competition—and getting more clicks to your pages from the SERPs is always a good sign in the eyes of Google.
For ecommerce websites, schema markup is often most helpful when applied to product pages. An SEO expert can markup your data to present important product attributes such as star ratings, product dimensions or sizes, prices, and availability directly on the SERPs.
Users are more likely to trust your brand and your website when this type of content is readily displayed, as it gives them helpful information to be used in their decision-making process right from the start. Price, availability, and star ratings are particularly helpful for increasing user trust and generating more clicks.
In the screenshot above, Apple has included structured data on their AirPod product page to enable price and product availability to be displayed on the SERP. This helps users know that the product they are interested in is currently available for purchase on this webpage.
In the below example, users searching for a chocolate cookie recipe are likely to be enticed by the five-star rating displayed on this listing, compared to results without reviews. The five gold stars are eye-catching on the page, and serve as social proof that this is a high quality recipe. Users also receive a preview of the required ingredients.
Schema markup can also be applied to content pages such as how-to guides, list articles, recipes, FAQ, and other similar types of blog posts. Using schema on these pages may help your brand capture featured snippets, also known as “position zero” searches.
You have likely seen this type of search result while asking Google a “how to” question, where the answer or steps are displayed right on the SERP. For example:
Snagging one of these coveted position zero spots can increase your clicks from the search engine by as much as 20%.
How to Audit Your Structured Data
After generating schema markup code for product pages, blog posts, or other web content, it is important to test the markup before pushing it to production. This can be achieved by using Google’s Rich Results Test. This helpful tool allows webmasters to audit the structured data on their webpages to ensure everything is functioning as intended. Once you have verified the output of your Google structured data, the code can be deployed on your webpages for the search engines to crawl.
(Note: Google is currently in the process of migrating this tool to a new domain serving the Schema.org community, with an estimated project completion date of April 2021. This tool is still usable via this link at the time of publication.)
Hire an SEO Expert to Make Your Structured Data Stand Out
Schema markup is fairly code-heavy, which can make it daunting to attempt and difficult to master. As with most technical SEO objectives, it is worth the investment of partnering with a qualified SEO expert or web developer. An SEO expert can also audit your competitors’ structured data to ensure yours stands out from the pack.
Ready to experience the SEO benefits of implementing schema markup on your ecommerce website? Contact Whitecap SEO for more information and a free quote.