Boost Your E-Commerce Success with Product Schema

In today’s ultra-competitive market, it’s not enough for Google to rank your e-commerce store. You should do everything possible to make users click your result over your competitors. 

That’s why e-commerce entrepreneurs and marketers must implement product schema as part of their e-commerce SEO strategy. 

Product schema is a form of schema markup that highlights key information like price and customer reviews. It makes your listing stand out, improves the searcher’s shopping experience, and increases click-through rates.  

In this article, you’ll learn everything you need to know about product and e-commerce schema, including what it does, why it’s so powerful, and how to add the markup to your site. 

Key Takeaways

• Product schema is a type of markup that displays product information under your link on Google’s results page. 
• There are two types of product structured data: product snippets and merchant listings.
• Product snippets are link-based results that include information like customer reviews, pricing, and availability. 
• Merchant listings are enhanced SERP features like Google’s shopping and product discovery tools. Only product pages can be featured in these listings. 
• Adding product schema to your site makes your links stand out in Google’s SERPs. Users see additional information under your text link (like pricing). This can increase click-through rates and improve the user shopping experience. 
• Add product schema to your website using an SEO plugin like Rank Math or the Schema WordPress Plugin. These plugins will automatically create schema code and add it to your site. 
• Validate your schema using Google’s Rich Results Tool. It will flag any errors and show you what your results will look like in the SERPs.

Table of Contents

• Key Takeaways
• What Is Product Schema?
• Product Snippets vs. Google Merchant Listings
• Benefits of Product Schema
  • Stand Out in Search Results
  • Increase CTR
  • Help Search Engines Better Meet User Intent
• How to Add Product Schema
  • 1. Add Required Properties
  • 2. Follow Google’s Guidelines
  • 3. Test Your Code
  • 4. Confirm Google Understands Your Structured Data
• FAQs
• Conclusion

What Is Product Schema?

Product schema (also called product structured data) is a type of markup that displays detailed product information directly on Google’s results page. 

It’s one of many schema types (along with video schema, local business schema, and review schema).

If Google enhances your SERP listing with schema, it’s called a rich result. Here’s an example of several rich results on a search for bean-to-cup coffee machines:

The results for TechRadar and Wilbur Curtis all include a product picture. Amazon has an even richer result, which includes a customer rating (4.5 stars). All three results are much more useful to shoppers further down the purchase funnel than Reddit’s link, even if it is the top result—and they’re the kinds of consumers you want to attract most of all.   

Here’s an overview of the properties you can highlight using product schema:

• SKU
• Size
• Brand
• Price
• Color
• Images
• Ratings

You can find a complete list of product schema on the Schema.org website.

Product Snippets vs. Google Merchant Listings

There are two ways your page can appear in Google when using product structured data: as a product snippet or a merchant listing. 

Product snippets are results that include additional information about a product, like reviews, pricing, and availability.

Here are some examples of product snippets for outdoor retailer REI:

Google prioritizes product and category pages to appear in  product snippets. With that said, pages that feature products but don’t have them for purchase—think shopping guides and blog posts may show as well if Google deems them relevant. 

Merchant listings are a set of enhanced SERP features that serve online shoppers. They include the shopping knowledge panel, shopping discovery elements, and popular product results.

Here’s an example of merchant listings from a search for “sleeping bags”:

These results highlight more information than product snippets, including product sizes and individual ratings. Only pages that let shoppers purchase products directly are eligible for merchant listings. 

Benefits of Product Schema

Adding product schema takes some additional work, but there are plenty of reasons to add markup to your website.  

Here are three of the biggest benefits. 

Stand Out in Search Results

When over half of American searches are zero-click (searches where users don’t click through to another website), you need to work harder to drive organic traffic. Product schema lets you highlight relevant factors like price, availability, and reviews that encourage searchers to click. 

Increase CTR

Adding product schema doesn’t just make your link more noticeable; it increases the likelihood consumers click on it. 

Product schema drives higher click-through rates from the SERP in the following ways:

• Upfront pricing entices bargain-hunting buyers 
• Review data builds consumer content
• Availability information (whether a product is in stock) gives consumers the confidence to click

Moreover, research shows users click on rich results (those using schema markup) 58 percent of the time, compared to 41 percent of the time for non-rich results. 

Help Search Engines Better Meet User Intent

Schema gives search engines more context about your content, helping them to meet search intent. If a searcher is looking for a sleeping bag under $150, Google can use your site’s schema to show relevant products in shopping results. 

Schema markup also gives Google wider context about your site.

For example, product schema shows Google you run an e-commerce store rather than a blog. This could mean Google is more likely to feature your store when it thinks searchers want to make a purchase rather than find information about a product. 

How to Add Product Schema

It doesn’t matter which product features you want to highlight in the SERPs, the process is always the same. 

Follow the steps below to learn how to add product schema to your site correctly.

1. Add Required Properties

The first step is to add attributes to your pages, so Google knows what information to feature. 

Google requires name, image, price and availability to be added. If you’re serious about earning a rich snippet, make sure you add aggregateRating, review, and offer attributes at a minimum. The more detailed your product schema is, the better optimized it will be for rich snippets, and Google can better understand and display your product information in search results.

There are several ways to add this data to your web pages, but Google recommends using JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data). That means adding a script to the HTML head of your pages.

Here’s a screenshot from Google that shows what this might look like:

Scary, right?

Luckily, you don’t have to add this code yourself. SEO plugins like RankMath and All in One SEO have schema capabilities, for example. There are also dedicated schema plugins like the Schema WordPress Plugin that automate the process. 

Here’s what the process looks like using RankMath:

Google also recommends adding data into a Merchant Center feed to maximize your eligibility for rich results. Read my guide to Google Shopping to learn how to set up a Merchant Center account if you haven’t already. 

2. Follow Google’s Guidelines

You must follow several guidelines for your product markup to be eligible for rich snippets.

• General structured data guidelines: Google has a set of general policies that govern the quality and completeness of structured data. This includes using one of three supported formats (JSON-LD, Microdata, and RDFa), not blocking pages using robots.txt, following Google spam policies, and adding all required properties. 
• Search Essentials: Check that your content is in line with Google Search Essentials—a set of technical requirements, spam policies, and best practices that govern your eligibility to appear in Google.  
• Technical guidelines: Currently, rich snippets only support pages that focus on a single product or multiple variants of the same product. Brands must have a separate URL for each currency in which the product is available. 
• Content guidelines: Google doesn’t allow content that promotes prohibited or regulated goods or services that can cause severe immediate and long-term harm to people. This includes weapons, smoking products, and gambling products. 

You can read a complete list of guidelines on Google’s website.

3. Test Your Code

You’ll need to test and validate your code once you’ve added it to your site. This just means checking it works correctly. 

The easiest way to do this is using the Rich Results Test:

Enter your page’s URL or code into the search bar, and Google will list which schema items it detects and whether there are any errors. These can include the following errors:

• Invalid values (the value you add isn’t valid for the attribute)
• Incomplete content (a field or value or missing)
• Parsing errors (missed errors or parentheses)
• Invalid character (unexpected or invalid characters like accents)

I recommend fixing critical and non-critical issues to improve the quality of your structured data. 

For example, Google is flagging this product listing as lacking information about shipping details and the return policy. 

Adding both bits of information will better optimize this product and give shoppers more information. 

4. Confirm Google Understands Your Structured Data

Once you’re done, submit a crawl request to accelerate the indexing process and make sure Google picks up on structured data changes. 

You’ll also want to use the URL inspection tool to test how Google sees your pages. This tool provides information about Google’s indexed versions of your page. 

You’ll need to wait for Google to recrawl your site. But once it does, use the Enhancements part of the report to find information about your page’s rich result types.

You aren’t guaranteed a rich result even if Google understands your structured data. Google only cares about delivering the best results to each searcher’s query. If your product schema isn’t relevant, Google may not show it. 

FAQs

What type of schema is used for e-commerce websites?

E-commerce website owners should use product schema to create rich results in Google’s SERPs. Product schema lets you add additional information about your products, such as their price, size, color, availability, and ratings.

What are product snippets?

Product snippets are a type of rich result that shows detailed product information directly in Google’s search results. These snippets can include attributes like price, ratings, availability, and reviews.

What is product schema?

Product schema is a type of structured data that gives search engines more context about your products. It uses the Schema.org vocabulary to define attributes like price, availability, and reviews. If you implement it correctly, you can create rich results in Google’s SERPs, which stand out from competitors and increase click-through rates.

Conclusion

Implementing product schema is an easy way to make your e-commerce store stand out in search results and increase click-through rates. 

By following the implementation guidelines I’ve listed above and regularly reviewing your structured data, you can increase the reach of your products and help potential customers make informed purchasing decisions.
Product schema is just a part of a wider e-commerce SEO strategy. So ensure you’re also improving your store’s internal linking, fixing common SEO issues, and building as many high-quality backlinks as possible.