Why You Should Implement Rich Snippets in Your eCommerce Store?

The fact is — rich snippets are one of the most prospective ways to stand out among competitors in search results.

How Do Rich Snippets Work?

Using structured data markup, one can inform the search engines about important product or service details (price, rating, availability, etc.). The search machines, in turn, may include this data into their search results.

Such an extended product or service presentation can make the difference and tip the scales in your favor when everything else is equal.

How to add Rich Snippets to an eCommerce Website?

Adding structured data markup is not a rocket science — even a beginner eCommerce merchant can easily do that. It can be done either manually or with the help of a special toolkit.

Say, if you are a Magento 2 user, you can take advantage of the default functionality that automatically adds markup tags to your store pages. Or you can extend this functionality with some 3rd party extensions, for example, Magento SEO plugin. That is one of the most top-rated modules to implement the advanced rich snippets in a couple of clicks.

Most Wide-Spread Mark-Up Tags

Markup tags are generally added to product pages.

It’s quite important to show a product price and description. You can also make a step further and add an image to your offering. Also, it may be a good idea to show a link to the related products or a path to a product.

Such a product presentation will be more noticeable in search results and give you an edge over your competitors.

1. Product Reviews

Reviews is the 1st thing that evokes trust. Hence, adding this data to search results can significantly raise trust to a website and increase its click-through-rate.

Note that BOTH positive and negative reviews matter in eCommerce. And sometimes negative feedback (and specially the way how you handle it) can be even more important.

To prove the importance of reviews, let’s look at some data reported by econsultancy.com:

• shoppers are 63% more likely to buy a product that has a review;
• generally, reviews produce an 18$ lift in sales;
• even bad reviews can improve conversion, approximately by 67%.

2. Product Ratings

The same thing is true for product ratings.

When you see a five star feedback, you start thinking that a certain product is quite good and want to learn more about it. Moreover, a large number of reviews and good ratings indicate that your business is trustworthy.

3. Pricing and Availability

To improve your chances for a better conversion right from the search results you need to provide your customers with as much valuable information as possible. And pricing is the one of the biggest importance.

By providing these details right in the search results you are eliminating the need to open the page if the pricing doesn’t suit a shopper. Thus, searchers can compare different offerings and choose the one that suits them best.

At the same time, you need to make sure that a customer, who chooses your store, will find a certain product in stock.

In other words, the information about the product’s availability should be displayed in the search results.

4. Special offers

If you are selling some products with special pricing, this information should be reflected in rich snippets as well.

Usually, any special offer arouses interest and attract a bigger portion of targeted traffic. Thus, information about sales, lower prices and limited time offers can be included in rich snippets to empower your selling efforts.

5. Open Graph and Twitter Cards

The importance of social medial can’t be exaggerated nowadays. The majority of eCommerce stores has their own social representations. That fact should be taken into consideration.

Creating an account or a group on Twitter, Facebook or any other popular social network is only a part of the job. Using open graph for Facebook, Google +, LinkedIn and Twitter Cards for Twitter, you can dramatically enhance your posts that contain links to the product pages.

The situation is quite similar to rich snippets. You can add various types of information to every social post, including a quality product image, a short description and rating or reviews. By combining these types of content your social posts become worth clicking on.

Bottom-Line

By adding structured data markup to your product pages, you diversify the information about your offerings. From product and category pages to extended information about your eCommerce business – all these details can be added with the help of rich snippets.

Hence, rich snippets are the most efficient way to increase CTR of your store and get a bigger amount of targeted organic search traffic.

Author Bio

Vitaly Gonkov is a Chief Marketing Officer at MageWorx – one of the leading Magento plugins developer. Vitaly has been actively involved with online marketing since 2010. He has a broad range of expertise that spans many different types of eCommerce strategies and techniques. He is passionate about blogging, social networking and enjoys the challenges presented by the dynamic industry.