Back in September 2022, Google search started supporting Product structured data.
The product structured data gives rich product experience to the shoppers on Google Search.
Also, although schema.org supports the product structured data, it was earlier limited to those who listed their products on Google Merchant Center. However, back in September 2022 as well, Google expanded the eligibility of more websites to implement this structured data type.
From then two categories of product structured data evolves (that is supported on Google Search)
- Merchant Listing Experiences: It is for those pages that allow shoppers to buy a product on the website.
- Product Snippets: a broader set that allows web pages that talks about a product, giving product review and more. It means, even if you are writing a blog post mentioningabout a product, you can add the product snippet structured data on the respective blog post page.
Product Structured Data Impact
Once you add the product structured data on your webpages, it will improve the user experience of shoppers in Google Search by showing rich results like these.
Product Structured Data Testing
In order to help website owners test whether the product structured data has been implemented correctly on the website, Google search console gives two reports:
- Merchant Listing Report
- Product Snippets Report
From these two reports, you can check the errors and warnings appearing in your structured data.
Merchant Listing Report
The merchant listing report identifies the structured data issues appearing in the pages that sell products. It supports a wide range of schema.org structured data properties like apparel sizing, energy efficiency rating and more.
Product Snippets Report
The Product Snippets Report helps webmasters to identify issues happening on pages that share product reviews, aggregate product data from multiple sites, and even pages that sell products.
Shipping and Return Structured Data
After supporting product structured data in 2022, Google search enhances it by supporting shipping and return structured data in 2023.
When users are purchasing a product online, they want to know if there is any shipping charge associated with the product. Is there any return policy available for the product? These factors influence users’ decision of buying a product. It may happen sometimes that a user doesn’t buy a product just because its shipping charge is high or the shipping period is slow.
Hence, displaying shipping information in Google Search helps users to decide more clearly. Google in turn rewards you with higher ranking.
Once you correctly implement the shipping information, Google Search gives your webpages rich results like these in the Google search.
Again to test whether you have implemented the shipping and return structured data correctly on your website, open the merchant listing report in your Google Search Console account. If your shipping and return structured data contains any issues, it gives you the warning.
Product Variants Structured Data
On February 20, 2024, Google Search started supporting Product Variants Structured Data.
It allows merchants to correctly show the different variants of a product on Google Search.
Let me explain a bit further.
A product might come in different variants. For example, different sizes, color, materials, or patterns. If we talk about an electronic product, it comes in different screen sizes, memory, processor and so on. By correctly marking up the variants in structured data, you are providing helpful content to the shoppers, which also triggers your website to qualify Google’s helpful content update.
How to Define Product Variant Structured Data?
As one product have different variants, we define the parent product with ProductGroup type and then inside it, we nest three more properties which are:
- hasVariant – To define different variants of the parent product.
- variesBy – To define the unit that creates the variance.
- productGroupID – To define the Parent product SKU.
Once adding the structured data, test it on Google Rich Results, if everything goes well then it will show the valid items detected on your page.
The Impact of Adding Different Product Structured Data Types
Adding different types of product structured data helps your website to gain different rich results on Google Search.
The rich results improves the shoppers user experience, which in turn improves the CTR and Bounce rate of the page.
And then finally, Google rewards your webpage with higher rankings which leads to more conversion and profit.
So, what are your thoughts about this article? Have you implemented any of the product structured data on your website? By how much percent does it impact your rankings and conversion? Let’s discuss the same in the comments down below.
