Microdata markup is now more important for eCommerce websites than ever
If someone asks you which result in Google gets the most clicks, you’d probably say the first result. Several years ago, you’d be absolutely right.
Ever since Google started enriching the search results with data they can understand – the data marked up with microdata markup such as schema.org – users started preferring these rich snippets and clicking on them.
BlueNile has conducted an amazing research that sheds some light on different user SERP behavior with all sorts of different enriched results. The part that’s most interesting for us are the star ratings which are usually implemented on eCommerce product pages.
BlueNile found that when 2nd result has star ratings and the 1st result doesn’t, the second result gets 76% of all clicks in that SERP while the first result gets only 9%!
How do I enrich my SERP snippets to gain those extra clicks?
The best way – industry standard that all major search engines follow – is to use schema.org microdata markup.
The same markup will be useful for other purposes as well, such as enabling you to turn on automatic product updates for your product shopping feed in Google Merchant Center.
What you need to implement in your product pages are the following markups:
Please note: Implementing those markups doesn’t guarantee that Google will use that data and turn on enriched snippets in SERP for your website, it merely gives Google the possibility to do so. In our experience, Google will most often start displaying enriched snippets for you even if you’re a relatively new and low authority website as long as the reviews are genuine.
Don’t try to manipulate your reviews. It’s disrespectful towards your customers and can lead to Google disabling this enriched snippet functionality for you or even more severe penalties in extreme cases.
If your competitors in SERP are manipulating their reviews and having fake reviews intentionally written, Google has a special form just for reporting spam in rich snippets. Offenders are dealt with pretty fast.
3 comments
2 great tutorials
https://www.byte.nl/blog/magento-rich-snippets-made-easy
https://www.byte.nl/blog/rich-snippets-magento-1-9-x
Hello @Tony,
Do you think that it makes sense to use AggregateOffer for composite products (configurable, bundle and etc.) in order to describe minimal and maximal price? Do you think that it makes sense from merchant point of view?
Hi Cecko,
That’s a very good question. We tried several approaches and due to Google Shopping Feed we decided for configurable products to markup just one product and have multiple Offer markups under it. AggregateOffer might be more suited for bundle products, though.
Also for Google Shopping, you’ll save yourselves a lot of trouble if you generate feed with preselected simple values by appending the parameter that selects the value and adjusting the schema to the selected simple instead of the configurable product. This is necessary for automatic product updates to work correctly and will prevent account suspension due to repeated incorrect price warning caused by products going out of stock between two feed generation and fetch times.