Ep 22: Product Schema Markup SEO

Have you used product schema or any other type of schema for that matter on your store? Today, we’re talking about product schema and why it matters for SEO.

Hey everybody. Welcome to this week’s episode of Marketing in 10, this is Jim Lastinger. Hope you’re doing well, hope everything’s going well for you, and everybody’s staying safe and healthy. This week we’re going to do a deep dive into a fairly technical SEO topic. We’re going to be talking about product schema on your Shopify or any other e-commerce store.

So first of all, let’s talk about what schema markup is. So schema is a type of markup code. So it’s code that you add to your HTML pages, essentially. So schema is a type of markup code that you can add to your website and to individual pages and the schema can do a bunch of different things. So schema can tell search engines who you are, what social profiles should be associated with your site, how your pages are related to each other, like pagination. Product reviews is a specific type of product schema, or is a specific type of schema, and what we’re going to be talking about today, which is product schema.

So I’ll put a link in the show notes to the product schema specs, so you can see what the options are there. There’s a lot of options and if you’re not familiar with schema markup, it’s probably a bit overwhelming at first. So take a look through the unofficial schema markup site and you’ll get a good idea of what we’re talking about here. So take some time and get a good feel for it. The show notes will be up at jimlastinger.com/22.

So the question is why does product schema matter in the first place? Well, product schema gives you a way to tell search engines exactly what you want them to know about a product. So that includes titles and descriptions, pricing details, any promotions or sales that you’re running, give you a specific link to the image, aggregate review data for that specific product. And there’s a lot of other things you can send as well.

And this is important because you’re telling search engines, specifically Google, that you have a product, and that this is the product, and here’s everything you need to know about the product. So being very clear about your product information is the best chance that your particular product will have in being shown when someone’s searching for that product. So it gives you a very good opportunity, very clearly tell Google what product you’re offering, and all the information about that product. And depending on the particular search that someone’s doing, your search engine result page listing might even include some rich snippets based off of your product schema. So it could show a current pricing or a sale pricing or any reviews or anything like that, and you wouldn’t get that without product schema. So that’s why schema matters.

Okay. So another big question is how do you edit and control the product schema that your site is creating? So for Shopify, this code is automatically generated for you, but there are extensions out there that help you customize this, take it a step further, and probably give you a little bit better control. So you can look around in the app store for that. A good example of an app that has schema markup is [Yatbo 00:04:00]. Yatbo enables product level ratings and reviews that isn’t built into Shopify. So that’s not exactly the same thing as product schema, but that’s a good example of the type of functionality that we’re talking about. Most e-commerce platforms should pull the schema data directly from your basic product info, such as title, description, prices, images, variance, colors, all that kind of good stuff. So that’s where I would start with editing or updating your schema. And if you found something you want to edit, but can’t figure out how to, then you might want to look into plugins, extensions apps, depending on whichever shopping cart system you’re using.

Okay. So how do you optimize your schema for SEO? First, you’ll want to give as much accurate information as possible. You want to be thorough with the information that you’re giving, but you don’t want to bloat anything either. So make sure you fill out as many schema fields as possible. If you have a GTIN number, then you make sure you enter that as well. This is the best way to make sure that your products is being shown when someone searches for it. So Google has a vast database of knowing what GTI and numbers are associated with which products. So associating those things on your site is a very, very important part of the SEO process. If you have a sale going for our product, make sure that shows up in your schema markup. And you also want to use SEO keywords in your schema markup whenever it’s appropriate. So feel free to use high value keywords in your product titles and descriptions, but you want to be careful with it, be judicious about it. Don’t stuff keywords. The same kind of SEO advice that goes for any other type of on-page optimization goes here as well.

Another question is, how would you check to see what schema markup you’re already pushing? What are you generating right now? And my favorite way to test that is Google’s own … It’s called the structured data testing tool. And I’ll put a link to this in the show notes as well. Again, they’ll be at jimlastinger.com/22. So all you have to do is you’ll enter your page URL, so specifically you’ll want to pick one of your product pages in this example, but you’ll enter your page URL and it’ll give you a list of all the different types of schema markup that it finds, and then you can drill down into that. So you’ll see all these markups and then click the one that says, “Product markup,” and it’ll tell you exactly what information you’re sending and it’ll also highlight any errors or anything that’s missing. So it’ll give you a good idea of everything that you’re currently doing and what you need to improve upon.

All right, that’s it for this episode. That’s everything. I’ll be back soon with another episode of Marketing in 10. Until then, take care, have a great day. Talk to you soon.