Rich results for products with Schema.org structured data

You see them in search results a lot: product listings with added metadata, like price, availability, reviews, and specifications. However, not every site offering the same product has the same rich results or rich snippets. This could have two reasons. One, Google doesn’t deem the site important enough to show additional metadata. Or two, the site hasn’t been — properly — enhanced with Schema.org structured data. In this article, we’ll focus on Schema.org structured data for product listings.

Structured data for product snippets

The information in rich results doesn’t just magically appear; you have to add the data to give Google a chance to add it to the results. Even then, it’s up to Google whether your data is visible. Google uses structured data to build rich snippets in the search results.

The markup for structured data is taken from an open initiative called Schema.org. Several search engines develop this data format to interpret specific data consistently. You can add all kinds of stuff, like product information, ratings, reviews, or information about your local business.

To implement structured data, you must offer search engines the correct markup. Microdata, RDFa, and JSON-LD are the most important technologies used to work with structured data. JSON-LD is a lightweight data format easy to read for humans and machines and is favored by Google these days. Bing, a notorious JSON-LD holdout, jumped on the JSON-LD bandwagon.

Yoast SEO and Schema

Yoast SEO automatically adds structured data to the essential information about your site, articles, authors, and more. In addition, you can pick a specific piece of Schema that describes this particular page best — i.e., you can say that your contact page is a contact page. You can do that in the Schema tab of Yoast SEO, right in the sidebar or in the meta box. Last, developers can extend it, as the Yoast SEO schema documentation explains.

For products, we can help increase the chance of Google showing rich snippets of your WooCommerce and Shopify store in the search results. Our WooCommerce SEO plugin and Yoast SEO for Shopify app automatically add structured data to your product listings to make sure Google can pick these up properly. 

Recently, we’ve expanded product structured data in WooCommerce SEO to incorporate things like material, brand, color, pattern and manufacturer properties. You can easily add these from within your WooCommerce store. This guide tells you how to add Brand, Manufacturer, Color, and Pattern attributes to your products

Works on mobile image search as well

Adding schema structured data to your products lets them stand out in the regular search results and image search. Google will add a Product label to your product’s images, helping searchers distinguish them from other listings. You’ll see that some retailers even get a green In Stock label signaling the product is ready to ship in the screenshot below. Awesome, right?

For inclusion in image search, Google requires a couple of properties. For the rich image listings, you must include the name, image, price, and priceCurrency properties. If you want your product info to appear in the related item’s listing, you must also include all of the above, plus the availability property.

Rich results for an example product

There are two kinds of product information you can show in search results. A product page describes a single product, while a shopping aggregate page describes a list of a product and different sellers offering that product.

Your landing page should contain a Schema.org Product type; this is your selling product. It should also contain a nested Offertype; this type describes how the product is sold; this includes the item’s condition, price, availability, et cetera. You should present the data in the HTML code and not rewritten in JavaScript.

You need to follow a couple of guidelines to work with product markup. For instance, you must use it only for individual products, not a product category. You cannot use it for adult-related products, and a reviewer’s name must be a valid name or team.

Example structure

The code below describes an example product. In this code, you see different parts of Schema.org code, plus the way JSON-LD presents these. Some highlights:

• type: Describes what kind of product it is
• name, image, and description: These are quite obvious
• brand: The brand of the product
  • thing: A thing is the most generic type of item
• aggerateRating: A nested aggregate rating of the product
  • ratingValue: This is the average rating of the product
  • reviewCount: The total number of reviews
• sku: Merchant-specific identifier for a product.
• mpn: One type of global identifier could also be ISBN or gtin13, for instance
• offers: This is an indication that the product is for sale
  • offer: An offer to provide a service or sell a product
  • priceCurrency and price: These are quite obvious
  • availability: If the product is in stock right now
  • priceValidUntil: Use this to describe when the currently set price will change — handy in case of a sale. Not required, although Search Console will moan about it
  • url: A link to the product page
• review: A written review of the product, plus a rating
  • type: The Schema.org type is a review, of course
  • author: Who wrote it? Has to be a real name
  • datePublished: When was it published?
  • description: The body text of the review
  • name: The title of the review
  • reviewRating: What grade did it get (1-5)
    • bestRating: Five is the max
    • ratingValue: The rating the reviewer gave
    • worstRating: One is the lowest

This is just the tip of the iceberg. You can add other things to your page: availability, different kinds of product identification, model, color, height, depth, et cetera. Our WooCommerce SEO add-on helps you add details for materials, patterns, brands, manufacturers, and more. It also helps you add product identifiers to your WooCommerce products.

What’s more, there are new ways of specifying more information about your shipping arrangements with OfferShippingDetails. Also, Google now shows your price drops in the search results — for this; it calculates the sales prices based on historical pricing data for your product.

Example code

Here’s an example product page schema.

<html>
  <head>
    <title>Example product</title>
    <script type="application/ld+json">
    {
      "@context": "https://schema.org/",
      "@type": "Product",
      "name": "Example product",
      "image": [
        "https://example.com/photos/1x1/photo.jpg",
        "https://example.com/photos/4x3/photo.jpg",
        "https://example.com/photos/16x9/photo.jpg"
       ],
      "description": "Example product is the best example product out there. Make sure to get the one and only -- the original.",
      "sku": "0374984678",
      "mpn": "738930",
      "brand": {
        "@type": "Brand",
        "name": "Example"
      },
      "review": {
        "@type": "Review",
        "reviewRating": {
          "@type": "Rating",
          "ratingValue": "4",
          "bestRating": "5"
        },
        "author": {
          "@type": "Person",
          "name": "Hank Williams"
        }
      },
      "aggregateRating": {
        "@type": "AggregateRating",
        "ratingValue": "4.7",
        "reviewCount": "1455"
      },
      "offers": {
        "@type": "Offer",
        "url": "https://example.com/product",
        "priceCurrency": "USD",
        "price": "49.99",
        "priceValidUntil": "2021-11-20",
        "itemCondition": "https://schema.org/NewCondition",
        "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock"
      }
    }
    </script>
  </head>
  <body>
  </body>
</html>

Ratings and reviews

A review star is one of the most eye-catching elements of a fully formed rich result. However, getting these is not as easy as it used to be. You can read up on ratings and reviews in another article, but we’d like to highlight them here for a bit as well.

Keep in mind that there’s a small but essential difference between a rating and a review. A rating is a value a product gets on a scale from one to five. A review uses the same scale but adds a written explanation text to the rating.

We’ve added a rating and reviews section in the code example above. This information can be picked up by Google and shown in the search results besides your product listing. A couple of years ago, Google became stricter in determining what types of products can get stars in search.

Shopify & product structured data

Are you a webshop owner with your webshop on Shopify? Shopify itself and most themes in the Shopify environment output a bit of structured data; most of it is for products. If you need a more complex setup without coding, you can use one of the structured data apps in the Shopify App Store. But there’s also another possibility: install Yoast SEO for Shopify.

Yoast SEO for Shopify outputs (in JSON-LD) the following markup: Product, Organization, WebSite, WebPage, BreadcrumbList, Article, and Offer. Besides this, Yoast SEO outputs AggregateRating if you use one of these review apps: judge.me, Opinew, Ali reviews, Areviews, Fera or Loox.

WooCommerce & product structured data

WooCommerce is the go-to platform for WordPress users who want to run an online store. While WooCommerce automatically outputs structured data for products, it doesn’t do that in a very integrated way. This tends to append the product schema to the page instead of integrating it with the rest of the structured data on the page, like all the data about the site and brand. There’s a fix for that: the WooCommerce SEO plugin.

The WooCommerce SEO plugin is an add-on that ties all the product schema into the Yoast SEO structured data graph. This way, your product data is connected to your site’s data, which means happy search engines and a bigger chance at full, rich results. It also fixes annoying errors that tend to pop up in Google Search Console.

Rich results for products are only the beginning

We’ve only shown you the tip of the iceberg. There’s a lot more you can do with Schema.org, and there are a ton of terms you can add to make your listings even richer. Schema.org is a treasure trove of structured data vocabulary. On pending.schema.org, you can find upcoming terms.

Remember that you should never provide incorrect metadata for Google. So whatever you do, don’t forget to test your code with the Rich Results Testing Tool!

Read more: How to check the performance of your rich results in Google Search Console »