If you’re an E-commerce company, how can you afford NOT to be taking advantage of custom structured data for your products and collection pages right now?
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- You NEED to be appearing in Google Shopping results!
- You NEED to be marking up your product pages with the information in the filters for your chosen product!
- You NEED product identifiers!
- Plugin generated structured data just isn’t cutting it!
If you want to be more visible for your products, then you need to have proper nested structured data!
How To Appear in Organic Shopping
How can you rank higher in Organic Shopping results?
This is a question I get asked all the time.
The answer is clear, consistent information across ALL of your products, better product descriptions than your competitors and reviews of your products on the page, whether that’s from Reevoo or embedded reviews on your own website, that’s ok.
Adding structured data then helps search engines understand that your reviews are about your products, that YOU as a company are the seller, the features and benefits of your products and delivery and returns information.
Take a look at this graph:
This is from one of my clients, who previously had plugin-generated structured data on their site. They were also using Merchant Center feeds, but their products just weren’t showing in Rich Results. I wrote custom structured data markup for their Shopify site, and they went from 1,000 valid Product Snippets to over 43,000 in less than 6 weeks! Check out the e-commerce structured data case study here.
What Information You Need On Your Pages
As a bare minimum, you need the following on your product (PLP) pages as structured content:
- Product name – This should match with your competitors where possible.
- Product description – This could be clear, informative and mention the benefits of your product or the product you are selling.
- Price – You need an accurate price (not including delivery charges) which is clearly displayed.
- GTIN – Probably the most important thing you need to be displayed on the page. This allows Google to match your product to other sellers offering the same product so that it can compare prices and delivery information.
- Images – at least 3 high-quality images of your product, with relevant image names and ALT tags
- Delivery information – How much is postage? How long does it take to be delivered? Ideally, the postage price needs to be on the page, but if you have a lot of delivery information, then a link to the delivery page is fine.
- Returns information – Do you accept returns? If so, what are your terms? A short sentence with a link to the returns information page is fine.
Extra Information To Help Search Engines and AI
If you want to go a step further and help AI like ChatGPT display your products in AI Overviews, then you need to also add:
- Concise, extractable product descriptions using semantic triples.
- Clear question and answer based content, which you can then mark up with FAQPage, HowTo (even though Google doesn’t support this anymore), Article or FactCheck.
- Bullet point lists of product pros and cons, or product features, again using sematic triples.
What Information To Put Into Your Structured Data
If you’ve got this far, you’ll want to know what you need to add into the actual JSON-LD structured data markup!
The bear minimum won’t cut it here. You need to be appearing for both Product Snippets and Merchant Center Listings to show up in organic shopping Rich Results. There’s also other Rich Results you could possibly appear for as well – check out our ultimate guide to SERP Features and Rich Results here.
You need the following:
- Product Name (name) – try to match this with your competitors where possible, and definitely match it with the product name on the page
- Product images (image) – as many images as you have on the page. At least 5 images is recommended. Pictures with a white background which clearly show the product in question are preferred.
- Description – a short, but detailed description of your product and what it does. Also include who it’s aimed at. Use semantic triples where possible, ideally taking the description from the product page itself.
- GTIN – probably the most important part of your structured data. You can use gtin, gtin8, gtin12, gtin13, gtin14 depending on how many numbers your gtin has. Make sure your developer gets the logic correct here, and that your GTIN’s are actually valid. Google will return a warning for invalid GTIN’s.
- Offer (offers) – this is super important to have this nested correctly within your structured data markup. I see this really often where the offer isn’t actually inside the product markup.
- Aggregate Rating or Review (or both!) (aggregateRating, review) – If you don’t have any reviews, make sure that you don’t put zeros or null, otherwise it will return an error. Take out this part of the structured data completely if there aren’t any reviews or ratings yet.
- Audience (audience) – Google only accepts PeopleAudience at the moment. You can add a suggested gender and age for your audience as well.
- Brand name – The brand of your product. Make sure you use the type Brand rather than Organization here.
- Colour – the colour of the product.
- Certification – if the product has any certifications, such as energy efficiency ratings for things like fridges or freezers, then add those in as well.
- Material – the material that the product is made of.
- MPN – if applicable, the manufacturer part number.
- SKU – the stick keeping unit number if applicable.
- Pattern – if the product has some kind of pattern on it, then you can add that in as well.
- Size – this is another really important one, especially for clothes. You can either use text here, or SizeSpecification, which allows you to be more specific. Google has guidelines for this, and particular size systems for each country.
- Return policy – you really should add the hasMerchantReturnPolicy information in as well.
- Shipping information – This can be really useful for customers, and can also display in search results.
Organic Shopping Results Filters
Just look at these filters on the shopping results tab. Where do you think Google gets this information from? It gets it from the information on the product page, but it can also get it from your structured data as well. Make Google’s life easier by providing as much of this information as you can on your page.
You’ll notice that these filters for the folic acid product supplement above are very specific, allowing users to refine exactly what they are looking for. Every single one of these can be marked up with bespoke structured data, even if Google doesn’t actually support that particular structured data type or property.
