To gain visibility and traction for your e-commerce business, it’s crucial to utilize all tools available at your disposal. Search engines are nifty tools that need to be taken advantage of, and knowing schema markup is essential.
The content you use for your e-commerce needs to be optimized and framed by keeping schema markup in mind. Implementing structured data that makes your product stand out is crucial to succeed and being ahead of your competitors.
Search engines show rich snippets of websites through structured data on your website and on their results page. Schema markup helps search engines understand your products better, and it can help in presenting accurate information to potential shoppers. From reviews to the price of your product, schema markup can come in handy in many areas, but only when you’re using it the right way.
While schema markup doesn’t have much effect on your business’s overall SEO, it is still an aspect that should not be overlooked when you want to organically increase your reach. When you are looking to ensure that your e-commerce flourishes, here are some best practices that you should be following:
Detailed Product Information
When running an e-commerce business, it goes without saying that selling products is the main aim. When products aren’t being sold on your website, it can signify that either something is wrong with the product description or the organic reach of your website.
It is incredibly helpful to have extra information about your products so that users can make the correct choices while shopping. Depending on the type of product you are selling and who it’s catered for, search engines like Google can display the color, material, dimensions, and so on. When you make this information easily accessible on your product page, search engines can pull it up and show it to users as soon as they search for the product on the search engine.
Here are some essential components you shouldn’t miss out on for product markup:
- Aggregate rating: Average rating of the product
Name of the product - Image: It can either be a full imageObject description (https://schema.org/ImageObject) or a product photo URL
- Description: A comprehensive description of the product
- Global Trade Item Number: It is a unique product identifier (gtin8/gtin14/mpn). It is advised to use the most specific GTIN that is applicable for your product
Any available offers on the product
Reviews Are Crucial
Users need to know how others have liked the product before purchasing it themselves, and for this, aggregate rating becomes essential. Regarding the product listing for SERPs (search engine results page), reviews can ensure that your product has a better chance of being more visible.
You will need to look into getting live product reviews for your products and then derive an average from these ratings. Don’t try to get fake reviews or manipulate the reviews with bots, as this can have a bad effect on your business and can deter search engines from crawling the product pages at all.
Highlight Promotions
Search engines constantly need updated information, including any changes in prices or promotions that you are running on your website. Availability is another component that regularly needs to be updated. These snippets of information generally appear below your meta-description and will aid customers already buying the product.
Information like availability, price, currency (product is being sold in), condition of the product, and when the price is valid until are some components you should be listing for your product.
Improve User Navigation
Leaving ‘breadcrumbs’ or a trail of clicks left behind when going through a page can help search engines navigate the page better. There needs to be an established hierarchy of pages on your website and a logical categorization of pages and products so customers can browse easily.
Using BreadcrumbList markup can quickly help display accurate information and help crawl bots understand the hierarchy of your website and individual pages.
Garner Credibility
When your SEO is effective, any search queries relating to your brand should show your business website as the first link on search engines. However, if you are functioning as e-commerce for various brands also available on other websites, it can become challenging to ensure that your e-commerce business is visible.
Ensuring that your home page stands out from the rest can be tricky, but with careful SEO optimization, it can be done organically. With homepage markup, you can also gain trust and credibility, which can help boost your ranking on search engines.
Providing contact information for your business, like an email or phone number that customers can reach out to, is also ideal at this stage. It can help customers directly get your contact details through search engines.
Include FAQs
When you want to provide as much information as possible so chances of your business appearing on SERPs increases, you might want to think about including FAQs, it has been observed that category pages are the strongest performing pages for any e-commerce website, and this is because they utilize a variety of keywords that can help boost visibility on search engines.
FAQs are another great way to incorporate as many keywords as possible without making crawl bots detect any unnatural keyword stuffing. Search engines like Google have also stated that FAQ markup is accepted for non-FAQ content, making it easier for you to utilize it over various pages.
Set Concrete Expectations
Customers are always curious to know how fast a product can be dispatched and shipped to them, and you need to manage these expectations visibly. Adding shipping markup is ideal to elevate your product listing, and customers will be able to see shipping costs, handling fees, estimated time of arrival, and much more.
Provide Your Location
Lastly, providing your location, and showing that your e-commerce store has a physical location, wherever it may be, can be useful. Search engines can show your inventory when users search for products ‘near me,’ and it can help you gain more customers near your area.
Improve the information and accuracy of the data displayed for your e-commerce store, and with the right structured data, your e-commerce website will be more visible and accessible to potential users.
