Product schema is a type of code that helps search engines recognise the products on your website.
By marking up products you sell on your site, with either JSON-LD, RDFa, or microdata product schema search engines can more easily understand that your web page relates to a product available for sale.
The code, can be read by search engines to understand the entities that exist on your webpage and can help make your pages eligible for rich results in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Product schema markup exists within the vocabulary created as part of the schema.org community project. A collaborative activity who’s mission is to help “create, maintain and promote schemas for structured data on the internet. “
Applying schema markup to a website is an element of technical SEO that will require some technical capability and access to the right areas of your website to complete accurately.
Here we explain what product schema markup is and how we can help you add it to your website.
Why is product schema important for SEO?
Product schema is important for SEO for many reasons. A huge number of websites now use their websites to sell products.
Marking up your products with the correct schema markup can help search engines like Google, Bing and Duck Duck Go understand that your product pages are the correct pages to show for commercial or transactional keywords that users enter.
What data do you need to mark up products with product schema markup?
Various different elements of your web pages will need to be marked up with the correct schema attributes to ensure that your products are eligible for rich results.
What is product schema name
The name field should be populated with the name of your product.
What is product schema description
Use the description field to describe the product that you’re selling. It’s good to ensure the description offers an appealing assessment of the product that you’re selling and include some benefits your product offers.
What is product schema price
The price field is used to display a numeric value that reflects how much your product costs to purchase. You’ll also need to include a priceCurrency field that details the currency used to purchase the product on the page.
What is product schema brand
Enter the name of the brand of the product or your brand here. If you’re responsible for making the product, use your brand name. If you’re reselling the product, use the brand name of the manufacturer.
What is SKU data?
SKU stands for stock keeping unit. SKU’s are normally comprised of both letters and numbers. SKU numbers are not universally recognisable, but usually contain characters based on the attributes of each product like; size, colour and price.
SKU’s are a merchant specific identifier designed to help you keep track of stock levels of specific products.
What other attributes can you mark up with schema?
You can mark up products on your website with other useful attributes like;
review; mark up review scores and review ratings to help shoppers understand user feedback for your products.
review author; help search engines to understand if reviews are written by experts or other customers.
aggregateRating; show an average rating based on the overall number of reviews you have. This will help users see quickly what the overall customer experience is like for those who have purchased from you before.
pros and cons schema markup; add pros and cons relating to specific products to the schema markup code embedded in your website. This is especially useful if you aggregate products from different brands on your website.
Offer details; add details of discounts and offers, price drops or timed sales using the “offers” schema markup attribute.
priceSpecification; you can specify your prices based on volume or metres. For example, if you sell fabric by the metre or a liquid sold by the millilitre or litre.
product sku code
What types of schema mark up can you mark up products with?
There are three types of schema markup supported by major search engines like Google.
These are;
JSON-LD
RDFa
Microdata
What does product schema markup look like?
There are three different schema types that support product markup and can make your pages eligible for rich results.
The examples below will give you an idea of how each type of structured data mark up will look.
You won’t see the code when you load the webpages in a browser, but the code is visible if you inspect your pages or test your webpage in a structured data tester.
JSON-LD Product Schema Markup Example
JSON-LD is the simplest and most popular type of schema markup. It is recommended by Google as their schema mark up of choice for it’s simplicity and technical benefits.
Google recommends JSON-LD as the most accessible and simplest to add to existing websites code type. Here’s an example of product schema markup in JSON-LD.
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org/",
"@type": "Product",
"name": "Your Product Name",
"description": "Your Product description and why your product is the best choice for any home, business or scenario.",
"review": {
"@type": "Review",
"reviewRating": {
"@type": "Rating",
"ratingValue": "4",
"bestRating": "5"
},
"author": {
"@type": "Person",
"name": "Tony Customer"
}
},
"aggregateRating": {
"@type": "AggregateRating",
"ratingValue": "4.4",
"reviewCount": "50"
}
}
</script>RDfa Product Schema Markup
<html>
<head>
<title>Your Product</title>
</head>
<body>
<div typeof="schema:Product">
<div rel="schema:review">
<div typeof="schema:Review">
<div rel="schema:reviewRating">
<div typeof="schema:Rating">
<div property="schema:ratingValue" content="4"></div>
<div property="schema:bestRating" content="5"></div>
</div>
</div>
<div rel="schema:author">
<div typeof="schema:Person">
<div property="schema:name" content="Tony Customer"></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div rel="schema:aggregateRating">
<div typeof="schema:AggregateRating">
<div property="schema:reviewCount" content="55"></div>
<div property="schema:ratingValue" content="4.7"></div>
</div>
</div>
<div rel="schema:image" resource="https://example.com/photos/4x3/photo.jpg"></div>
<div property="schema:mpn" content="925872"></div>
<div property="schema:name" content="Your product"></div>
<div property="schema:description" content="Your Product description and why your product is the best choice for any home, business or scenario."></div>
<div rel="schema:image" resource="https://example.com/photos/1x1/photo.jpg">
</div>
<div rel="schema:brand">
<div typeof="schema:Brand">
<div property="schema:name" content="Your Brand"></div>
</div>
</div>
<div rel="schema:offers">
<div typeof="schema:AggregateOffer">
<div property="schema:offerCount" content="5"></div>
<div property="schema:lowPrice" content="11.99"></div>
<div property="schema:highPrice" content="19.99"></div>
<div property="schema:priceCurrency" content="GBP"></div>
<div rel="schema:url" resource="https://yourdomain.com/your-product"></div>
</div>
</div>
<div rel="schema:image" resource="https://yourdomain.com/photos/16x9/your-product.jpg"></div>
<div property="schema:sku" content="080055566444"></div>
</div>
</body>
</html>Microdata Product schema markup
<html>
<head>
<title>Your Product</title>
</head>
<body>
<div>
<div itemtype="https://schema.org/Product" itemscope>
<meta itemprop="mpn" content="555666333" />
<meta itemprop="name" content="Your Product" />
<link itemprop="image" href="https://yourdomain.com/photos/16x9/your-product.jpg" />
<link itemprop="image" href="https://yourdomain.com/photos/4x3/your-product.jpg" />
<link itemprop="image" href="https://yourdomain.com/photos/1x1/your-product.jpg" />
<meta itemprop="description" content="Your Product description and why your product is the best choice for any home, business or scenario." />
<div itemprop="offers" itemtype="https://schema.org/AggregateOffer" itemscope>
<meta itemprop="lowPrice" content="11.99" />
<meta itemprop="highPrice" content="19.99" />
<meta itemprop="offerCount" content="15" />
<meta itemprop="priceCurrency" content="GBP" />
</div>
<div itemprop="aggregateRating" itemtype="https://schema.org/AggregateRating" itemscope>
<meta itemprop="reviewCount" content="50" />
<meta itemprop="ratingValue" content="4.4" />
</div>
<div itemprop="review" itemtype="https://schema.org/Review" itemscope>
<div itemprop="author" itemtype="https://schema.org/Person" itemscope>
<meta itemprop="name" content="Tony Customer" />
</div>
<div itemprop="reviewRating" itemtype="https://schema.org/Rating" itemscope>
<meta itemprop="ratingValue" content="4" />
<meta itemprop="bestRating" content="5" />
</div>
</div>
<meta itemprop="sku" content="080055566444" />
<div itemprop="brand" itemtype="https://schema.org/Brand" itemscope>
<meta itemprop="name" content="Your Brand" />
</div>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>There are more elements available to mark up with product schema, the above are the main recommended properties.
We can customise the attributes your mark up on your pages to best reflect your product attributes, benefits and related topical
Can you use a product schema generator?
Product schema generators can help you automatically generate the correct schema you need for your website easily.
They can save you time and help your mark up products on your website with SEO friendly schema.
Once you’ve published using a schema markup generator, here is how to check if your schema markup is working.
Product schema generators are great if you’re making up only a few products, but what do you do if you’re trying to implement product schema across many hundreds or even thousands of product pages in one go?
Automate your product schema markup
We can help you automate schema markup across product pages on your website, so you can embed valid schema markup code in your webpages and benefit from the increased search features that search engines offer to product pages.
We’ll create valid JSON-LD schema markup and apply it to your product page for you. Making it easy for you to benefit without having to undertake a time consuming project to implement the schema markup yourself.
If you’d rather try this yourself, we can help you understand how to roll out schema via Google Tag Manager with our course.
Alternatively, learn more about writing essential schema types with our how to write schema markup course.
What CMS can we add product schema markup on?
We can help site owners like you add product schema markup to any CMS (content management system) and any web page, whether you’re running an ecommerce store or sell products alongside your other content.
Some of the CMS that we’ve previously added product schema markup successfully to are;
Shopify
WordPress
.net
Wix
SquareSpace
Contentful
We can mark up other elements of your pages too like;
shopping aggregator page
shipping details and costs
in stock and availability flags
What we do
We will create custom JSON-LD markup that automatically populates relevant product attributes from your webpages like;
- title
- price
- images
- description
- reviews
Try our schema markup creation service to get started.
We can even publish schema for you. We will need access to your CMS and certain tools to ensure we can set up and publish the schema correctly.
Contact us today to discuss your schema markup needs.
by Ben Ullmer
