In The Schema Things: An essential guide to schema for your website: Part 2
Following the introduction to schema in the last instalment of our blog series where we focused on schema that should be used on all sites, in Part 2 we will be looking at schema for E-commerce Sites.
Product Schema Markup
What is Product Schema Markup?
Product Schema Markup provides search engines with information about your products so that it can provide details in the form of Rich Snippets in search result pages. This schema should be used on individual product pages to provide details such as the name and image of the product. These two properties are required, but you can also add additional information such as the product brand and descriptions. Product schema should not be used for general category pages as it is specific to each product.
What is the benefit of using Product Schema Markup?
Adding this type of Schema to your product pages will allow search engines to provide searchers with useful information about your product directly on the search results page. The addition of this markup to gain a rich snippet helps to encourage potential customers to click through to your site or buy your product. It also tags images as products in Google Images search results on mobile, again potentially increasing Click Through Rates.
Offer Schema Markup
What is Offer Schema Markup?
Offer Schema markup is part of the Product structured data type. Offer schema has three required properties; availability, price and priceCurrency. This allows you to put this information forward to search engines to be added to your results listing.
What does it look like?
As Offer Schema is part of the product type, it is shown on the search result listing for the product page. As we can see in the example below, the price and stock availability is shown below the breadcrumb.
What is the benefit of using Offer Schema Markup?
Adding offer schema markup to your product pages allows searchers to find some of the most important product information (price and availability) directly from search. Including this important information on the results page attracts traffic to your site which is more likely to convert, as the site visitors are already aware of factors which may affect their decision to buy a product.
Review & Ratings Schema Markup
There are two types of ways of displaying review rich snippets; using Review schema and AggregateRating schema.
What is Review and AggregateRating Schema Markup?
Reviews and Rating schema is displayed as either excerpts of reviews, numerical ratings (often out of 5 or 10) or star ratings. Review schema can be added to individual products, but AggregateRating schema is added to category pages and combines data from multiple reviews to give an overall rating.
If you add review or rating schema to a product, you must also have this information visible on the product page. Search engines will find and validate the markup and may then choose to show a rich snippet if the guidelines are adhered to.
For each review, you must provide the following properties: the author of the review, the name of the item being reviewed, and the type of item, the rating given in the review, and scale of the review system.
Aggregate Rating schema insists on similar required properties except that it does not need an author and requires the number of ratings or number of people who provided a review on your site.
What do they look like?
In the example below, we can see that review schema has been added to the individual product and is pulling through review stars, a numerical rating and the number of reviews left for this product.
What are the benefits of using Review and AggregateRating Schema Markup?
There are many benefits to adding review and rating structured data to your products. It is a way of displaying your hard-earned reviews, creating a larger and more eye-catching listing on the SERPs, building the trust of potential customers and improving the click through rate, therefore driving more traffic to your site’s product pages.
This list is not exclusive and there are other types of Schema Markup that may be useful for your e-commerce site, for example, Local schema. We will be covering this and many more types of schema in our upcoming blogs.
Key Takeaways:
- Product schema can be added to individual product pages on an e-commerce site to provide search engines with important information about the product, including its name and images of the product.
- Offer schema is added to product pages to give search engines and searchers product information directly from the results page listing. These properties include price and stock availability.
- Review and Rating schema is added to either product or category pages in order to encourage search engines to display a star rating, numerical rating or review excerpt on the SERPs.
- Search Engines can use product, offer and review/rating schema to generate rich snippets on your product page listings.
- Adding schema to your product pages can build searcher trust, improve click through rates and improve the quality of traffic to your pages.
We hope you have enjoyed our second blog in our ‘In The Schema Things’ series, focusing on schema for E-commerce sites. Our next instalment of the series will be looking at schema for online publishers.
If you are interested in finding out more about optimising your site using Schema, contact the experts at Varn.
