So it comes time to Google gift ideas for your dad’s birthday.
You open your browser and start firing away with keywords and questions on what to buy.
As you make your way through the search results, you can’t help but notice that some of them seem to stand out in eye-popping fashion…
With all of the options on the table, this one clearly draws your eye, like a clear dark desert sky.
Well, this one’s rated five stars… *Click*
The listing gave you extra information to consider before you even visited the page.
The other results did not provide a product review to consider and only provided a small description of what the page is about.
Review stars, a relatively small difference, can make a HUGE impact on click-through rates in the SERP (search engine results page) thus bringing more traffic and more potential customers to that particular website.
Many businesses or e-commerce shop owners wonder why they do not have this kind of extended real estate in the search results.
Often times they simply do not understand or fail to look into it.
The reason your listing does not have “rich snippets” is due to the fact that your website is not providing Google with additional metadata, in this case “structured data markup.”
Structured data is a way to tell the search engine crawlers more about the web page.
It needs to be applied directly to your website in order for it to work properly.
Many websites have some form of structured data markup, but it is not up to date or is in need of repair. This means that you are providing Google/Bing/Yahoo with an incomplete set of data that they need to provide you with an enhanced listing.
This is a technical requirement that needs to be addressed in the code itself. It is not anything you can do differently to the content of your post or product listing.
What’s the Solution?
Google often changes the requirements that are necessary to be eligible for rich snippets.
The only way to know this is to keep up to date with the information and guidelines they release.
This is where I come in.
As an SEO expert and consultant, it is my job to monitor and track the changes that Google announces.
Once they are announced, the next step is to determine where and how to use this information to enhance the web presence of the people and companies that I work with.
For e-commerce in particular, product pages are one of the most important areas in which you can greatly enhance your overall presence, especially in the search results.
As seen in the example above, product review stars are a great way to draw the attention of a potential customer and attract a click.
The extra bonus is that Google factors in click-through rate when determining how to rank various pages on the web.
After all, it’s a good way to judge how keywords, queries and voice search match up to what Google is presenting in the search results.
If more people click on listing number four than listing number one for any particular query, then it’s a good indication that result number four might be a better result, so it makes sense that they would pay attention to what gets clicked on.
How does WitBlade help me evaluate my website for errors or missing structured data?
That’s easy – my team and I do this all the time and we know exactly what to look for in almost every case.
You see, schema.org provides the various ways in which we can declare entities for Google to come find. Remember, the idea is to give Google a better idea about “what we are talking about” on any given page.
It is constantly evolving, like a new language that is designed for machines to understand.
It’s in my best interest to learn everything I can by following the various updates from schema.org in order to bring the most professional application service to the businesses that I work with.
It really doesn’t matter what platform your website is using. WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, and even Shopify are setup well or just require a few tweaks to get them in great shape.
If you would like me to evaluate your site for structured data errors or potential, please contact me today.