Should You Implement Schema on Your eCommerce Website?
Short answer, yes. Long answer, read on.
Today we’re going to share the basic benefits of using product schema on your website, as well as the newly added opportunity implementing the markup lends you through Google shopping.
Benefits of using schema for eCommerce:
There are 4 main reasons to implement product schema on your ecomm site that we want to stress today.
- Enhances SERP listings
- Improves bot crawl time with increased cadence
- Competitive advantage when done correctly
- Automatically includes your products in the new free Google Shopping listings
Important note — the ultimate and overarching reason for implementing product schema that each of the above items ties back to is increased revenue; the primary goal of any goods and services business here in the digital space.
The first three reasons for schema implementation are not new to those familiar with optimizing ecommerce websites to actually sell product. However, number four is interesting to note as new to the arena as of April 2020.
Enhances SERP Listings
Implementing a rich library of schema tags will highly improve the amount of information your product listings on SERPs show, such as reviews, price, availability, etc.
This statistically leads to higher click thru rates and lower bounce rates — both metrics that are signals of page value and contribute to higher page rankings. As you’re well aware, higher organic page rankings on high value terms leads to greater revenue.
Improves Bot Crawl Time With Increased Cadence
Product schema on your site also significantly improves Google bot crawl time on your site and can even increase how often your site is crawled. This means not waiting days to a week to see changes you deployed show up on Google.
Consequently, the most accurate information will be shown on search results pages, leading to higher click thru rates from users who know before clicking on the listing that where they are going to land answers the “question” they searched. So, once again, higher click thru rate with a lower bounce rate, leading to higher page value, better rankings, more conversions, more revenue.
Competitive advantage when done correctly
Here’s a surprise: despite the just discussed revenue-oriented accomplishments of structured data markup, most e-commerce companies are not implementing it correctly. This means that, unlike other SEO best practices like keyword targeting (been there, done that), you have a competitive advantage simply by doing it.
Automatically includes your products in the new free Google Shopping listings
Finally, having product schema is one of two either/or criteria for your product ads to be eligible for the new free Google shopping listings. When leveraging the new free listings, we recommend the auto opt-in via schema markup option because of the additional benefits using structured data correctly offers your site.
Brief Explanation of structured data
A quick interjection for anyone about to open another tab for a refresher on what exactly structured data markup is:
At its core, schema.org is a system of tags that defines what a piece of information on your site is for search engine crawlers, i.e. that $49.99 is a price. The tagged information appears on your product listings in SERPs.
There are 3 ways to write this structured data markup, and we — along with Google — recommend using JSON-LD over the older techniques of using microdata or RDFa.
Which product schema tags are the best
The collaborative creators, a.k.a Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex, have provided a long list of defined product schema tags you can use to mark up your product landing pages.
While the more complete the markup the better, our ‘must-haves’ for optimal (read: higher click thru rates) search listings are as follows:
- aggregateRating
- brand
- category
-
description
- id (required for free shopping opt in)
- image (required for free shopping opt in)
- itemAvailability
- link (required for free shopping opt in)
- review
-
title (required for free shopping opt in)
How to implement schema on your site
There are a couple of different ways to go about implementing schema on your ecommerce site. Here’s a little tech speak for you —
You could ask your developer to use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper to generate code using the schema markups that you want to tag and then add the JSON-LD markup to the header of your webpage.
However, it is more efficient to install a plugin, extension or app to your CMS to auto generate and implement the necessary JSON-LD markup data.
Select your CMS below to find our recommended schema.org integration: