Ecommerce Rich Snippets for SEO & CTR

What are rich snippets?

A snippet refers to your websites link and description within Google, which is made up of your Page Title, Page URL, and your Page Meta Description.

A rich snippet simply refers to a snippet that contains rich data, descriptive for the type of web page that a user will visit if they click on it.

Here is an example of a rich snippet:

They can be used for Products, Recipes, Events, Local Businesses and many other types of web page.

History of Rich Snippets

Structured data (that creates rich snippets) has been around since the invention of Schema.org by the major search engines in June 2011. Here Bing, Google and Yahoo joined forces to set and support a common set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages, which allows search engines to better understand a page, and display rich snippets as a result.

In the year 2012 the ontology called GoodRelations was introduced into schema.org, which is more strongly associated with ecommerce websites.

Why use snippets in ecommerce?

Rich snippets are particularly important for ecommerce websites because the Product markup provides users with so much information before they click.

It shows users the price, whether the product is in stock, and how it has been reviewed.

When someone knows what they're getting before they click (aka remove uncertainty) they are much more likely to feel safe in clicking the listing.

This results in more clicks, higher rankings and more sales.

So it's well worth doing!

Best Snippets for Ecommerce Websites

Product Page Rich Snippets

Here are the most important rich snippets to include in your product pages, which are based upon the Product schema.org markup:

Offer - this markup contains price information, and stock information.
Name - the product name
Image - the product image
Aggregate Rating - this shows the average rating, used for the stars in the SERPs.

Those combined will give your website the full rich snippet in the search results.

Category Page Rich Snippets

Now category pages are slightly different, and don't always provide you with a full rich snippet, however there are some bits of markup that can be beneficial here:

SomeProducts - this can show the number of products in a category, the price range, similar type of product (using the Productontology categories), isSimilarTo, isConsumableFor, brand, category (and sub-categories using / ).
VideoObject - if your category page contains a video then you can mark it up with this.
Organization - Now this isn't specific to your category page and can be applied to all pages, but it helps to tell Google about your company and related profiles (using sameAs).

Adding these to your category pages will help to increase the chance of you receiving a rich snippet there.