A Beginners Guide to Schema Markup

Schema Markup

Last updated - July 8, 2021

eCommerce store owners use many different strategies for driving sales and brand awareness. Some of the most common include PPC campaigns, influencer marketing, and social media marketing. But, what about SEO?

Store owners could be driving much more revenue and reaching new customers by optimizing their stores and products for search engines. It’s practically free money. Most optimizations you need to make are set-and-forget. This means they are only performed once and re-audited much later.

And, one of the most important parts of on-page SEO for e-commerce is schema markup. You might have heard this term thrown around a lot lately. It’s becoming much more popular and used for boosting search rankings.

But, what is schema markup and how can Woocommerce store owners use it? Keep reading to learn.

Schema markup explained

Let’s first discuss what schema markup is before you learn how to apply it to your store. Think of it as the language of all the search engines. Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines all use it to understand a website’s information.

In particular, it helps search engines easily understand what’s on a web page, its purpose, and how it should be served to users. You most likely have already interacted with schema markup before without realizing it. For instance, have you ever come across a featured or rich snippet on Google? That’s schema markup.

It looks like this:

Schema Markup

However, that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Let us explain why next.

The most important types of schema markup

There are hundreds of different types of schema markup. They are all used for different purposes but don’t worry. You won’t be using them all. In fact, you don’t want to, either. Misusing them can have negative SEO repercussions. So, you want to only use the practical ones for eCommerce stores.

The first of which is—without surprise—is product markup. This displays detailed information about a product including its ratings, price, and features.

Schema Markup

Additionally, we recommend using the blog post markup if you regularly publish content as a part of your inbound marketing strategy. This provides additional information on search engines about content to increase click-through and organic traffic.

Schema Markup

Similarly, there is breadcrumb schema markup. Breadcrumb navigation must be already enabled on your store for this to appear properly. It will show the hierarchy of links leading to a final URL.

Schema Markup

Besides these, it’s also effective to apply the following types of markup:

  1. Organization markup to your homepage.
  2. Local business markup to your homepage if you serve a local customerbase.
  3. About page markup to your store’s company page.
  4. Website markup to all pages.

How to apply schema markup

Now that you understand what schema is and why it’s important to use, let’s get into the nitty-gritty of applying it. Luckily for you, since you’re on WordPress, there are many different plugins that will create structured data in the snap of a finger.

We recommend a free plugin like Markup (JSON-LD). Search for it via the “Plugins” page on WordPress, click the install button, and activate it.

Schema Markup

Then, navigate to the plugin’s page via the admin sidebar and click “Schema.org settings.” Hover over any schema type you wish to enable and click the “Edit” button.

Schema Markup

This will require you to fill out information like schema location, URLs, company name, etc.

Schema Markup

Click “Save Changes” when you are finished to apply any changes.

Once you’ve added schema, you’re probably going to ask “How do I confirm that it worked?” and fortunately Google has a free tool for that. Visit the structured data testing tool and enter the URL of a webpage.

Schema Markup

Click “Run Test” and it will bring you to the following page:

The left is the code that makes up the page you tested. On the right side, you will find the structured data Google discovered along with any warnings or errors. 

Conclusion

SEO is a very underrated strategy for e-commerce store owners. It can help generate organic traffic, product sales, and get ahead of competitors. However, it’s made up of many different small details. One of which is a structured data called schema markup.

This adds further data visualization to search engine listings which benefits both the search engines and end-user. Google better understands what a web page is about and users receive higher quality results.

You can apply schema markup to your website by first determining the types of data you’d like to use. For eCommerce stores, we recommend product, website, and blog post markup. However, use what’s best for your individual shop.

WordPress plugins can automatically apply markup to any page, but you may also want to consider hiring a developer if you want a top-notch job.

Additionally, we suggest using Google’s free structured data testing tool to ensure that it’s working as intended. Once you do, enjoy the added SERP performance!

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