Sometimes we get an amazing event where big corporations come together and produce something beneficial and schema markup was one such instance. As you will see below, schema markup is an especially useful feature that can help improve your SEO and boost the usefulness and visibility of your eCommerce products.
What is Schema Markup?
Schema markup is a collaborative effort between multiple corporations including Google and Microsoft that is a type of semantic vocabulary. The aim is to improve SEO and create more engaging and useful content with much more description and information.
You can find full details on the official Schema.org website. Schema allows search engine robots to understand your content easier and it allows for the creation of things like rich snippets. There are different types of schema markup including:
- Organization
- Person
- Local business
- Product
- Breadcrumb
- Article
- Video
- Event
- Recipe
The aim is for everyone to use the same structured data to allow for a more concise and useful display of information on the web. It’s essentially an additional set of coding that adds more detail about things like businesses, people, and products.
5 Benefits of Using Schema Markup for Your eCommerce Store
So, schema markup looks pretty cool right? But what actual use is it and how can it benefit your ecommerce SEO? We have listed five of the main positives below.
1. It helps improve user experience
Primarily, the rich snippets generated from schema markup give users a much better browsing experience. How much info can you realistically get from a few lines of text and a link from a traditional search result?
Not too much! In contrast, rich snippets show product images, ratings, maps, descriptions and more – they allow users to make informed decisions and get more info with less effort.
2. It allows the creation of rich snippets
As mentioned above, schema markup enables the creation of rich snippets. These are the pop-ups and boxes you see that appear on search results. You have standard search results that just show a link, a page title, and meta description.
Rich snippets take things much further and include images, customer ratings, and more. This gives customers more insight into your products and rich snippets are incredibly powerful marketing tools.
3. You can better target local customers
Not only can schema markup be used for product snippets, but they allow the creation of business rich snippets. These are fantastic to target local customers and can be displayed on things like Google Maps and Google search results.
Instead of a bland link, a customer can click on your business on Google Maps and see a host of useful information.
4. Search engines can understand your products better
From an SEO perspective, an eCommerce SEO consultancy will tell you how Google and other search engines love schema markup.
The different markup categories and fields you can add give Google more data to work with so it can understand what your products/services are and how they work better. This ultimately allows for more effective ranking and product indexing which can help your SEO optimization.
5. Stand out from the competition
Two businesses – one has a standard search result and doesn’t use any schema markup. The other has a professional rich snippet that shows a map of their location, glowing customer reviews and more. Which looks better? The second company of course! Schema markup gives you a leg up over your competitors.
Make Your Products Searchable and Stand Out With Schema Markup
If you have an eCommerce store then you can benefit hugely from schema markup. You can make your products stand out from the competition on SERPs, give customers a more detailed experience, and allow search engines to understand your products better.
