If you sell your products online via a WooCommerce online store then you must do everything you can to optimize your listings and make sure they are presented to Google in the best way possible.
A simple way to do this is by using product schema markup which as you will learn below helps identify important product attributes like cost, description, images, and condition so that Google doesn’t get confused.
Schema markup is an integral part of an SEO WooCommerce implementation so read on to find out what it is, the benefits, and how you can add it to your product listings.
Schema Markup - A Basic Introduction
- Did you know that a host of large corporations including Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google have cooperated to make structured data that allows website pages to be better understood? This is known as schema and full details can be found on the schema.org website.
- Schema markup is essentially additional HTML or JavaScript code that gives values to different types of data. One specific type of schema is for products and it helps give search engines and customers more information about the product like brand, product name, product IDs, and ratings.
The Benefits of Adding Schema Markup for Product Listings
So, some big companies have given you some extra work to do concerning your product listings – why should you care? Adding schema markup for products has many benefits including:
– They give useful information to customers
– Schema helps Google identify important values correctly
– They help improve product visibility on different Google features
– Schema can be used to create “rich snippets”
– They can improve visibility in search engine results
Schema can help produce rich snippets for your products which are the pop-ups or boxes that you see that show more information than just the META description and product link. You know – the boxes you see on Google that show things like star ratings, images, and prices.
These are eye-catching and can greatly improve your visibility and conversion rates on Google SERPs. Schema is also vital to aid Google in indexing and ranking your product listings. Although Google is incredibly advanced, it still needs help!
Schema spells things out plain and simple for Google and gives it your product information in an easy-to-understand format which should ultimately benefit your listings and search engine visibility.
How to Add Schema Markup to Your WooCommerce Store
The great thing about WooCommerce is that product schema markup is automatically added when you add product pages to your online store.
However, you cannot edit or optimize that schema which means that you could be missing out and important product info may not be present.
Luckily, there are a number of SEO plugins like SEOPress that have advanced schema markup functionality and give you full control over your additional product data. SEOPress, for example, allows you to enter product attributes like currency, condition, availability, thumbnails, and global identifiers.
It is a great idea to research the different options available and install a plugin so that you can enhance the automatic product schema markup that WooCommerce has already generated. Depending on the plugin you can also automate the process so that schema is added each time you add a new product.
Optimize Your Product Listings for Google Today
Product schema markup is incredibly beneficial and it helps Google index your listings in a logical way and get correct product info like prices, descriptions, and related images.
If you have a WooCommerce store then the platform does this automatically but we recommend using a third-party plugin to optimize the markup and take full control of it.
