E-commerce has swept the world and become a crucial aspect of the modern economy. As more consumers turn to online shopping, it is critical for e-commerce companies to optimize their websites for search engines to stay ahead of the competition.
SEO (search engine optimization) becomes a crucial factor in the success of an e-commerce business, as it can make the difference between being visible or invisible in the eyes of potential customers.
In this article, we’ll dive into the world of e-commerce SEO and examine the key elements that can help improve your ranking on Google and visibility, increasing your online store’s traffic and sales.
Structured Data and Why It’s Important for E-Commerce
Structured data is a way to add specific markup to the content of a website. The data provides search engines with additional information about what the content of a page represents. This information can be anything from product details to prices, from reviews to availability. By using structured data, e-commerce websites can provide search engines with a clearer understanding of their content. This can translate into better visibility in search results, higher click-through rates, and a better user experience.
For example, by adding structured data to your product information, your e-commerce store can display rich snippets in search results ( including new rich results like “PriceDrop,” “DeliveryPricing,” or “ReturnPolicy”) with information such as product name, price, availability and ratings. This can attract users and provide them with valuable information at a glance, increasing the likelihood of a purchase.
Structured data is crucial for e-commerce as it helps improve visibility and relevance of a website’s content in search results.
Business Benefits of Implementing Structured Data on Your E-Commerce Site
Implementing structured data into an e-commerce website can have numerous benefits, including:
- Better search engine visibility: Structured data helps search engines understand the content and structure of a website, improving search engine rankings and visibility.
- Improved user experience: Structured data can provide users with rich snippets of product images, prices and reviews that can improve the overall user experience and increase the likelihood of a purchase.
- Higher click-through rates: Rich snippets and improved search engine visibility can lead to higher click-through rates and more visitors to your website.
- Better optimization for mobile devices: Structured data can also improve the mobile experience of your e-commerce website, leading to more mobile traffic and sales.
- Access to voice assistants and multimodal search: With structured data, you can optimize your content to be suitable for voice assistants and multimodal search, so that your products also appear in these search results.
Overall, structured data can be highly beneficial for an e-commerce website. It improves search engine visibility, usability, and overall website performance.
Structured Data Can Produce Rich Results
By adding structured data to your products, you can get the enriched results on Google. Specifically, there are two types of rich results for e-commerce websites:
- Product snippets which allow users to see additional information that can help them make a purchase, such as ratings, review information, price and availability.
- Merchant listing experience that is based on more specific data about a product, such as price and availability. Examples include popular products, the Shopping Knowledge Panel, and Google Images.
Adding Structured Data to an Online Store
You can add structured data to your website by inserting code. The three most common formats are JSON-LD, Microdata and RDFa. Of these, JSON-LD is the format recommended by Google. In this case, you must have in-depth knowledge and technical skills to know what to do.
Another option is to use a plug-in that automates part of the process, but this also requires some technical knowledge.
Last but not least, you can use a software that lets you automate the entire process without requiring technical expertise.
The Product Knowledge Graph and How You Can Build It
WordLift is the tool that automates your e-commerce SEO. With WordLift, you can go even deeper and build a Product Knowledge Graph. This is a new way of collecting, organizing and linking your products and the editorial content about them, providing Google and search engines with all the information they need to better understand your products, their features and how they are used. You can improve your products’ search engine rankings and enriched results, leading to more organic traffic and higher sales.
If you have an extensive product record, you can sell for free on Google Shopping and benefit from free listings. These were introduced to allow smaller businesses to take advantage of the space previously reserved for those who invested in advertising, with the goal of becoming more responsive to user search intent.
To build your Product Knowledge Graph, you can start from the data you have about products on your e-commerce site. You can use the product information management system where you store all the product attributes. Or you can use Google, Bing Merchant Feed, or Amazon Seller Central Feed. These are XML files that allow these platforms to display your product on their interfaces.
WordLift PKG Builder lets you create your Product Knowledge Graph in a few simple steps, using your Merchant Feed. It is compatible with any type of platform you use for your e-commerce website (Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, etc.). You can easily enrich your dataset and get more visibility for your products and more sales for your online store.
If you use WooCommerce, WordLift has developed a specific extension that allows you to add schema markup to your e-commerce website and customize and optimize your product page to increase your sales.
How to Optimize Your E-Commerce Website
It can often be difficult to understand and measure the results of working with structured data on your website. To solve this problem, the WordLift team has developed a Looker Data Studio Connector that allows you to create reports on semantic SEO by loading data from various sources such as your Knowledge Graph, GSC and Google Analytics.
It is available for all customers who purchase a WordLift license, e-commerce included. You can use the Looker Studio Connector to understand and show others the results of working with structured data; find new ways to improve your sales performance by gaining a deeper understanding of your customers; and capitalizing on the e-commerce trends in your industry.
To find out more about how to use WordLift Looker Studio Connector to improve e-commerce performance, watch this video.
What’s Next?
As we mentioned earlier, building a product knowledge graph means you have a large, curated and accurate data set that gives you access to e-commerce SEO innovations. How you can use your data to build product descriptions with GPT-3 and other LLMs (Large Language Models), you can automatically build internal links to category pages; you can make your 404 pages smarter; and help increase sales. Nice, isn’t it?
With structured data and PKG you can stand out and make a difference in your business by innovating!