BrightonSEO. eCommerce Summit - Katherine Khoo - The Importance of Understanding Product Schema & What this means for SEOs

Katherine Khoo
iPages (Khoo Systems Limited)
The Importance of Understanding
Product Schema & What this means for SEO’s
@iPagesCMS
http://www.ipages.biz

www.slideshare.net/iPagesCMS@iPagesCMS
Who am I?

Who is in the room?
slideshare.net/hegakhakhfakgfka@iPagesCMS www.slideshare.net/iPagesCMS@iPagesCMS

What do we already know
about Structured Data?
slideshare.net/hegakhakhfakgfka@iPagesCMS www.slideshare.net/iPagesCMS@iPagesCMS

How is this
implemented?
Talk Structure
What is
Product Schema?
How does this help sales?
(also Multi-channel?!)
What’s next?

Let’s start with Structured Data…
- Explicit clues about the meaning of a page to search engines.
- OpenSource project by schema.org
- A standardised format for providing information about a page and
classifying the page content
- Coded using in-page markup (JSON-LD, Microdata or RDFa)
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/intro-structured

https://schema.org/Product

Schema is website-wide…
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/intro-structured-data
But we’re just going to focus
on products.

What is Product Schema?
Structured Data that relates to a product…
“It’s a product”
“They cost £2.50”
“Actually, they’re on offer and cost 50p now”
“Here’s a bit of a description”
“Specifically, it’s a mug”
“They could be described (or tagged)
as Bone China, Small”

Some interesting developments to schema.org …
Launched June 2011 by Bing, Google and Yahoo!
February 2016 GS1 added to the vocabulary. An overview
document provides more background, and the schemas
itself are published at gs1.org/voc/
August 2017, Schema.org 3.3 released to add
vocal around news, fact checking, legislation,
finance, schedules, howtos, tourism and toilets!
to “create and support a common set of schemas for structured data
markup on web pages

SmartSearch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxzhE1CHU-o

How is Structured Data implemented?
What is
Product Schema?
Integrating Schema.org structured data
does not have to be intrusive or difficult.
For standard markup:
Coded using in-page markup (JSON-LD,
Microdata or RDFa)
For Smart Search
Work with GS1 for the verticals they have
identified (Apparel/Food&Beverage)

How is Structured Data implemented?
What is
Product Schema?
MICRODATA: Microdata is a web standard used
“to annotate content with specific machine-
readable labels.” Effectively, it places short bits
of markup inline with other HTML to better
describe the associated HTML content.
JSON-LD: JSON-LD has advantages over
microdata, including being separate — i.e.,
inside of a script tag nested in the document
head — from the HTML markup.

JSON-LD
https://online-sales-marketing.com/schema-for-products/
<script type=’application/ld+json’>
    {
        “@context”: “http://www.schema.org”,
        “@type”: “product”,
        “brand”: “Raven Tools”,
        “name”: “Site Auditor”,
        “image”: “https://raventools.com/img/og-raven.png”,
        “description”: “Site Auditor analyzes your site to find all of the SEO issues
that may be keeping your site from ranking on search engines.”
      }
</script>
https://raventools.com/site-auditor/seo-guide/schema-structured-data
https://www.slideshare.net/sandersal1/brightonseo-structured-data-by-alexis-sanders
Here’s a code example of Schema JSON-LD:

It depends how the website is built…
If it’s built on a platform… If it’s custom built…
Some templates
have built in.
If not, Shopify
Developers/ How-to
Guides
WordPress
Plugins
Magento
Developer
Built-in A nice
Developer

Some additional resources
General information
• Schema Documents
• Intro to Structured Data — Google Developers
• Marking Up Your Site with Structured Data — Bing Webmaster
Schema generators
• Data Highlighter — Google Webmasters
• Markup Helper — Google Webmasters
• JSON ID Generator — Hall Analysis
• Schema App
Schema testing tools
• Structured Data Testing
Tool — Google Search
• Rich Cards Tool — Google
• Microtest Tool —
Webmaster

How is this
implemented?
So, what’s the effect on sales?
What is
Product Schema?

So, what’s the effect on sales?
- Not included in ranking indicators
- Helps RELEVANCY
- Rich Snippets can help organic rankings
and increase CTR to articles etc.

Smart Search documents the following KPIs…
KPI 1: Relevant Search Improvements
Not promising general page rank improvements; pages with
structured data are easier to index = appear higher for relevant
searches.
KPI 2: Increased Sales Per Click-Through From Search Engine
Increased relevance = consumers more likely to find what they
searched for = more likely to purchase.
KPI 3: Reduced Returns
Improved quality of product data = consumers trust what they are
going to have delivered.
Returns with reason ‘Product not what I wanted’ should be reduced.  
GS1 Smart Search Implementation Guide

How is this
implemented?
What about multi-channel sales?
What is
Product Schema?

What about multi-channel sales?
For channels (such as eBay) Structured Data refers to
ensuring data is categorised, clean and validated.
“Structured data is a big topic that is driving many projects
here at eBay, and the short answer is:
Knowing exactly what products are on sale helps us make
a better marketplace for everyone”

How is this
implemented?
What’s next?
What is
Product Schema?

1) Increased dependency for quick
voice search…
- Voice search set to account for 50% of all searches made by 2020
Fun Fact: two million blog posts alone are published every day, so
how can we speed up searching?
- Rise in use of ‘Howto’ tags
- Reliance on tagging (already seen in Recipes schema) —> Further
extensions around other specific instructions i.e. common FAQs
- Mobile-first index - most content elements have a coordinating
markup language.

2) Extension of Smart Search for verticals
- Currently only documented for Beverages/Food &
Apparel, look to expand into Homeware, other
Durables
- Future partnering with businesses/platforms
(expansion in vocab due to Tesco etc)

3) Question answering…?
- Linked to the rise of voice search…
- Google released paper ‘Knowledge Based Trust: Estimating the
Trustworthiness of Web Sources.' talking about structured data
might come from a number of different types of resources that can
be identified using processes such as “markup language tag
detection, formatting instructions, file identifiers, etc.”
http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol8/p938-dong.pdf
- Query templates might be built and indexed
to provide answers to question queries.

How is this
implemented?
So, what did we cover?
What is
Product Schema?
What’s next?

Thank you! Any questions?
Email: katherine@ipages.biz
Twitter: @iPagesCMS
Slideslide: https://www.slideshare.net/iPagesCMS

BrightonSEO. eCommerce Summit - Katherine Khoo - The Importance of Understanding Product Schema & What this means for SEOs

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BrightonSEO. eCommerce Summit - Katherine Khoo - The Importance of Understanding Product Schema & What this means for SEOs