You’ve probably come across marked-up content on Google’s search results pages and wondered what it was and how you could implement something like that for your e-commerce store.
Well, here’s some good news. As a Magento store owner, you have a significant edge over your competition. Magento’s default product template comes pre-configured with structured data markup based on Schema.org standards. Therefore, potential customers searching for your products are likely to see rich snippets next to your product listings on search engine results pages (SERPs).
From humble beginnings in 2009, rich snippets have come a long way. While Google only supported two types of markups initially, they now support over thirty types of markups and can display multiple rich snippets on the same search result.
Magento’s default product template only provides simplified data markups. It fails to incorporate vital product-related markups like brand, availability, offer, and review, as well as other general markups like organization, breadcrumbs, and search box.
In this article, we’ll give you a brief introduction to rich snippets and detailed instructions on how to implement them in your Magento store.
What are rich snippets?
Rich snippets are informative samples of content shown along with a listing on the search results page. It’s displayed using data gathered from the markup in a website’s code that provides search engines with additional information about its content.
Rich snippets improve the visual appeal and utility of search results, thereby improving the user’s likelihood of clicking through to a listing that seems relevant to their needs.
Adding structured data markups on your Magento store will allow search engines to display rich results containing supplementary information associated with the listings and provide more context to potential customers.
Benefits of Magento rich snippets
Implementing rich snippets on your Magento store doesn’t guarantee that it will climb up Google’s search results pages overnight. However, there are some significant benefits that you cannot ignore.
Improved visibility
Rich snippets can improve the visibility of a listing on SERPs as they add more data to an otherwise text-only result. With the proper configuration, you can make your products more visible to your customers by adding data markup that supports displaying star ratings, price, availability, and the number of reviews besides your listing.
Increased click-through rate
When your listing is more visible and displays product-related information on the results page, customers can gather more information about your products and are likely to click on your listing rather than your competitor’s one that displays plain text.
Decreased bounce rate
Magento rich snippet implementation can also reduce your website bounce rate. By showcasing vital product attributes like price, ratings, and availability on SERPs, customers can make better-informed decisions before clicking through your website.
This means, when they land on your website, they’re more likely to explore your offerings instead of clicking back because the result doesn’t meet their expectations.
Greater credibility
Rich snippets can help your brand appear more credible and reliable when you are transparent with your product pricing and availability. Being upfront about your offerings can make your business seem more trustworthy.
Rich snippets you should use on a Magento store
There are potentially hundreds of types of Schema markups that you can implement on a website. However, that doesn’t mean they’re all suitable for a Magento 2 store or must be implemented either. You should only use the ones that are relevant to your business.
Commonly implemented schema markups on ecommerce stores include:
- Product
- Category
- Landing page
- Website
- Page
- Merchant
- Breadcrumbs
- Reviews
- Rating
- Price
How to add rich snippets to your Magento 2 store
Magento supports some rich snippets out of the box, but it fails to deliver several important ones. Fortunately, Magento’s extensible architecture allows developers to customize the platform entirely and makes it easy to introduce new types of data markup easily.
You can introduce new rich snippets to your Magento store in one of two ways:
- Custom development
- or by using a third-party extension.
Custom development
You can customize your Magento store’s data markup by developing an extension that overrides its default product template and introduces structured data based on Google’s guidelines.
Custom development allows you to insert only the types of markup you deem suitable for your store. It also provides you complete control over the data markup and ensures that all markup meets Google’s quality guidelines.
Google search supports using three formats of structured data:
- JSON-LD
- RDFa
- Microdata
JSON-LD
JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data, or JSON-LD, is a linked data format that can be used to insert data markup in the form of JavaScript notations inside a <script> tag in your website’s HTML code. It’s lightweight, easy to read and write, and recommended by Google for adding structured data.
Besides being easy to use, JSON-LD allows effortless nesting and expression of data items since the markup isn’t interleaved with any user-visible text. Further, Google can also read dynamically injected JSON-LD data in a page. So you can choose to dynamically generate and insert structured data markup into your store’s HTML using custom JavaScript or Google Tag Manager.
RDFa
Developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, Resource Description Framework in Attributes, or RDFa, is an extension of HTML5 that allows developers to introduce data markup within the head and body sections of a web page.
RDFa facilitates the introduction of structured data without repeating content. It serves to simplify the process of marking up data inside HTML documents by turning user-facing text and links into machine-friendly data using a set of HTML attributes.
Microdata
Microdata was developed as a part of the WHATWG HTML standard to nest metadata inside HTML content. Like RDFa, it uses a set of HTML attributes to specify the data you want to present as structured data to search engines.
Although it’s typically used in the body section of a page, you can include it in the head section as well. Microdata allows developers to use existing popular structured data vocabularies like Schema.org and even design their custom vocabularies to describe data.
Using a third-party extension
Implementing rich snippets on your Magento store using an off-the-shelf extension is significantly faster and easier than developing one from scratch. There are many extensions available on the official Magento Marketplace and other vendor websites that enhance the rich snippet support in Magento.
For example, the Magento 2 Extended Rich Snippets extension by Mageworx allows you to add data markup using Google’s recommended JSON-LD while ensuring that all markup is kept separate from the website’s HTML code.
To implement rich snippets on your store using Mageworx’ extension, you can follow these steps:
- Install the extension by uploading the extension package to your Magento root folder or using Composer to install the package from Mageworx’s repository.
- Log in to the admin panel and navigate to STORES ⟶ Configuration ⟶ MAGEWORX ⟶ SEO ⟶ SEO Markup.
- Browse through the available options under each category and set up all data as per your requirements.
- Finally, save the changes and then test the data to ensure everything works as expected.
Using a premade extension gives you instant access to several rich snippets without spending days developing and testing your modules. Further, you won’t have to worry about compatibility with future Magento updates. The extension’s developers take care of that for you and also offer Magento support when things don’t work as expected.
How to check and troubleshoot Magento rich snippets
Once you’ve successfully implemented rich snippets on your store, it’s time to test it to ensure the data is structured correctly. You can use Google’s Rich Results Test or Structured Data Testing Tool to check the markup on your website pages in one of two ways:
- Using the URL,
- or by using the markup code.
Testing your markup with the code input option is the easiest way to test your structured data on the go. However, Google recommends using the URL input method as using the code input method presents JavaScript limitations that may occur due to cross-origin resource sharing restrictions.
The tool also allows you to choose between a desktop and smartphone user agent to crawl your website. The default user agent is set as a smartphone, and you can only preview rich results using a smartphone device because of Google’s mobile-first initiative.
After running a check on your web page, if your data markup is structured according to Google’s guidelines, you will see a message stating, “Page is eligible for rich results”. If you see any errors or warnings, there’s likely a missing property or syntax error in your implementation.
You can check Google’s guide on fixing JavaScript-related issues and even refer to their documentation detailing all types of structured data they support.
Final thoughts
Implementing rich snippets on your Magento store will provide your customers more context about your products and increase the likelihood of clicking through to your website to make a purchase. But implementing rich snippets doesn’t guarantee that your schema markup will display on SERPs.
Google’s search algorithm alters results to provide its users with the best search experience. If it determines that the data gathered from a web page is incorrect or misleading, it may choose to omit rich results and display a plain blue link.
Therefore, it’s advisable to seek an experienced Magento SEO company to optimize your website search engine performance and implement rich snippets according to Google’s guidelines. Doing so will maximize the likelihood of displaying your products as rich results and help you get the best returns on your investments.
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Author: Jan Guardian
Jan is the Chief Business Development Officer at Staylime, a Magento design and development company headquartered in Redwood City, California. He is a Member of the Magento Association and an Adobe Sales Accredited Magento Commerce professional. Jan is responsible for developing and leading the sales and digital marketing strategies of the company. He is passionate about e-commerce and Magento in particular — throughout the years his articles have been featured on Retail Dive, Hacker Noon, Chief Marketer, Mobile Marketer, TMCnet, and many others..
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