Did you know that search engine giant Google beats Amazon for product-search reach?

A survey commissioned by performance marketing platform Kenshoo in the US, UK, and Germany highlighted that 85% of people rely on Google for shopping and product discovery.

Amazon, however, beats Google as a starting point for product search; 35% of online buyers start with Google and 38% start with Amazon.

Despite the fact that Amazon is an eCommerce behemoth, Google beats Amazon in product-search reach because it does a few things better.

Like rich snippets.

Rich snippets are fundamentally bits of code that make it easier for search engines to understand information.

If you search for any product in Google, you will almost certainly see at least one type of rich snippet in the search results.

Here is an example:

Rich snippets, if implemented correctly, can significantly boost your SEO. Studies have shown that the organic click-through rate (CTR) from search results increased by 2-8% for a web page with a rich snippet.

Any type of content can get a rich snippet, be it an article, a news report, a video post, or a product description.

But rich snippets are most useful for e-commerce websites because online shoppers are more likely to click on links accompanied by visual information.

Consider the following search results:

Which link do you think users are more likely to click on? Most people will naturally gravitate towards results that have visual information.

You can add various schema markups – bits of code – to earn rich snippets in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for your eCommerce website.

Today, schema markup is not something nice-to-have but a must-have for an eCommerce website.

Here in this post, we will discuss the five most important schema markups that an eCommerce website should have.

Product Schema

With ‘product schema’ you can pass basic product information to Google; it’s a way of telling Google that it’s looking at a product page.

A product schema can be added to a web page that offers a product or service. For example – the rental of a vehicle, a t-shirt, a pair of shoes, a soccer game ticket, or a movie streamed online. Product schema markups can also be added for pages that aggregate offers from different sellers.

Product schema markups generally include information such as:

• Name of the product
• The brand(s) associated with a product
• The colour of the product
• The depth of the item
• The dimensions (e.g. length, height, width, etc.) of the item

You can find detailed information on different types of product markups at Schema.org.

If you find the descriptions on Schema.org confusing, you can use the Structured Data Markup Helper; it’s more user-friendly.

E-commerce web pages with product markups also appear in mobile image search results with a label as shown below.

Price Schema

Consumers always consider the price of an item before purchasing anything in an online or offline marketplace. If prices for products listed on your eCommerce website are shown in the search results, your pages will stand a better chance of getting clicked on.

Approximately 46% of online buyers want eCommerce websites to have more pricing comparisons.

Price schema markup allows you to pass on pricing information to search engines.

Your price schema can include the following information (and more) to entice potential customers searching for products you sell on your eCommerce website:

• The offer price of the item
• The currency of the product price
• Detailed pricing specifications such as the unit price and delivery charges
• An indication that a product is on sale
• % drop in price

Review and Rating Schema

More than 9 out of 10 online shoppers check online reviews before making a purchase decision.

Just as having your products and services reviewed at consumer-facing review platforms can help improve conversion rate, having reviews and ratings displayed alongside your webpage’s title and meta-description can help increase the organic CTR.

When users see that a product listed on your eCommerce website has been reviewed by others and has a good rating, they are more likely to click on the link in the search results.

Consider the following example:

Star ratings and review counts help increase potential buyers’ interest in a product page.

Even if you do not want to display the total number of reviews, just having a star rating can be helpful. Star rating is the number one criteria relied upon by consumers for judging the quality or usefulness of a product or an eCommerce website.

According to Schema.org, there are numerous ways you can update reviews and rating schema for your website.

Google will display a rich snippet containing the reviews and ratings as shown in the example above after successful validation.

Product Availability Schema

Have you ever clicked on a product page listed in the search results, only to find that the product is out of stock? Yes, it’s frustrating.

Chances are that you did not visit the website again to check the availability of that product. You may even have started avoiding links from that particular eCommerce website. After all, there’s no dearth of eCommerce websites on the Internet.

If you don’t want your eCommerce website to suffer a similar fate, be sure to add a product availability schema.

Here’s how a web page with product availability schema looks in the search results.

Adding product availability schema can help you reduce soft bounces.

Soft bounces happen when users browse your eCommerce website but do not buy anything.

Adding product availability and video schema markups generally involves a complicated process; so, you may need to seek help or guidance from professional eCommerce SEO experts

Video Schema

According to an Animoto study on video, an estimated 96% of online shoppers find videos useful in making informed purchase decisions; 58% of consumers are more likely to trust a company that produces video content.

No wonder, many online businesses today are using videos for branding, advertising, and digital marketing.

Video marketing is one of the most popular content marketing trends in 2020 and it is not limited to large-scale businesses. Small-scale businesses too have begun producing video content to boost conversion rates.

But, did you know that an explainer video can also help improve organic click-through rate (CTR) in search results? A product demonstration video or explainer video is one of the top ways to persuade users to click on your product webpage.

With video schema, a video thumbnail is shown right next to the meta-description in the search results, prompting potential buyers to click on it.

The good news is that you don’t need to host demonstration videos or explainer videos on your own server; video schema markups can also be added to embedded videos. So, you don’t need to spend anything hosting. You can upload your videos on YouTube, Vimeo, and other such video-sharing platforms.

Lastly, remember to use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to verify if schema markups added for an eCommerce website are actually working.