The new structured data for product variants uses the Schema.org ProductGroup type in addition to Product structured data.

Benefits of Implementing Product Variant Structured Data

There are many products in the market with variants. For example, clothes can come in different colours and sizes. Phones can come in different capacities, colours, and models. The implementation of this new structured data for product variants brings advantages to both eCommerce sites and their users by:

• More precisely showcasing product offerings in search results, highlighting diverse variations such as size, color, and patterns.
• Better supporting the complex product variant scenarios for eCommerce sites and potentially increasing visibility for the diverse range of products they offer directly in the SERP.
• Improving user experience and click-through rates through offering more comprehensive product details.

Additionally, as specific, long-tail keywords become more prominent in search, this markup can help your product variants stand out. For example, if someone searches “navy blue long sleeve shirt size small,” a clothing retail site’s product variant that best fits this query could show up as a product rich result.

Prior to these changes, there was no easy way to differentiate product variants within product markup. Historically, the Schema App team tackled this problem by:

• Identifying variable pricing on a product with AggregateOffer,
• Identifying each variant as an individual Offer, with a different sku, or
• Listing each variant as an individual ProductModel to identify different colors, sizes, etc.

However, Google has expanded Product Variant Structured Data, which can help us overcome the previous challenge of dealing with product variants.

You can read this GitHub issue for more information on what sparked these changes.

In this article, we will specifically focus on the changes introduced with Product Variant Structured Data and how you can implement these changes to your eCommerce site.

Product Variant Structured Data Overview

Product variants must be grouped under a single identified “parent” product. To support this, Google introduced three new properties within the Schema.org ProductGroup type:

1. hasVariant – to nest Product variants under their parent ProductGroup
2. variesBy – Indicates the property by which the variants in a ProductGroup vary, e.g. their size or color
3. productGroupID – the ID, aka “parent sku” of the ProductGroup

Google also added a new property, isVariantOf, to the Product structured data. The isVariantOf property indicates the type of product a variant is associated with, and Google has clarified that this property supports product variants with distinct URLs.

Required and Recommended Properties for Product Variant Structured Data

To properly mark up information about your product variant within your page content, use the following required properties within the ProductGroup type. Additionally, we recommend including as many of the recommended properties as applicable to your page content.

Required: name.

Recommended: aggregateRating, brand, description, hasVariant, productGroupID, review, url, variesBy.

Refer to Google’s Structured Data Documentation for a comprehensive guideline for the required and recommended properties for Product Variant structured data.

Additional Eligibility Requirements

To be eligible for this newly enhanced Product rich result, you must also abide by the following guidelines written and established by Google:

• Each variant must have a unique ID in its corresponding structured data markup (like a sku, for example).
• Each product group must have a unique ID in its corresponding structured data markup, specified with the inProductGroupWithID property in variant Product properties or the productGroupID property in the ProductGroup property.
• Be sure to add Product structured data in addition to the product variant properties, following the list of required properties for merchant listings (or product snippets).
• For single-page sites, there must be only one distinct canonical URL for the overall ProductGroup that all variants belong to. Typically this is the base URL that leads to a page without a variant pre-selected, for example: https://www.example.com/winter_coat. Note: This doesn’t apply to multi-page sites as there is no single canonical URL representing the ProductGroup property (since the variants are distributed across equally important pages).
• For multi-page sites, each page must have full and self-contained markup for the entities defined on that page (meaning, off-page entities shouldn’t be necessary to fully understand the markup on the page itself).
• The site must be able to preselect each variant directly with a distinct URL (using URL query parameters), for example, https://www.example.com/winter_coat/size=small&color=green. This allows Google to crawl and identify each variant. Preselecting each variant includes showing the right image, price, and availability, as well as allowing the user to add the variant to the cart.

Marking Up Single-Page vs. Multi-Page Product Variants

Most eCommerce sites have two design types for their pages – Single-page and multi-page.

Single-page is when all variants are present on a single page without jumping to an alternative page for each variant (typically through query parameters).

Multi-page is when variants of the same product are accessible on separate pages.

Your variants can be:

• nested under ProductGroup markup, or
• be separate and unnested from the ProductGroup.

We typically recommend nesting your markup because it is a more accurate representation of the content on your page and its relationship to other products on your site. Nesting your markup can also help you develop a more robust content knowledge graph for your site.

The Product Variant rich result result uses properties like sku, gtin, and productGroupID to differentiate between individual products and their parent Product Group. At Schema App, our Editor and Highlighter will automatically generate identifiers in the form of @id for each entity in your markup, making it easier to query your Product data alongside other entities in your knowledge graph.

Depending on how your specific site is set up, how you mark up your product variants will differ. See Google’s examples and documentation for specific guidelines on how to markup your product variants.

Implement Product Variant Structured Data On Your Site

With constant updates and additions to Google’s Structured Data Documentation, having an agile and dynamic Schema Markup strategy and solution is critical.

The Schema App Highlighter ensures the dynamic and continuous updating of your site’s Schema Markup, aligning it with internal content changes and adjustments to Google’s structured data requirements and recommendations. This agility helps you stay competitive in search, as outdated Schema Markup can compromise your eligibility for targeted rich results.

Want to learn more about Schema App’s solution? Click here to get started.

The post Google Expands Structured Data Support for Product Variants appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

Google has continued to expand the properties around Product structured data, enabled Merchant Listing experiences through structured data, and provided more opportunities for web publishers to enhance their Product rich results with more information like return and shipping details.

Additionally, Google can now award Product rich results even without structured data. This, in theory, might sound great. But the problem is that even Google can get it wrong sometimes.

So what do we do when our Product rich results aren’t showing up as expected? Let’s jump in.

Different Types of Product Rich Results You Can Achieve

Firstly, it is important to distinguish the types of Product rich results available as this might modify how you tackle correcting the enhanced search result.

When reviewing website performance on Google Search Console, you’ll see three different types of Product search appearances in your performance report:

• Product results
• Product snippets
• Merchant listings

Product Results = Product Snippets + Merchant listings

Product results are an all-encompassing view of performance around your Product rich results. This can include Product rich results awarded directly by Google, Product rich results awarded through the use of structured data, and Merchant listings results.

Product Snippets

Product snippets are a type of Product rich result that are awarded through structured data. They typically include information such as ratings, reviews, prices and stock availability.

Example of a Product Snippet

Merchant Listings

Merchant listings, also known as merchant listing experiences, are another type of Product rich result that you can achieve through structured data or through Google Merchant Center. They tend to have more detailed information than product snippets and can show up in the Popular Products, Shopping Knowledge Panel and Google images section of the SERP.

Example of a Merchant Listing Experience

How To Determine If Your Product Rich Result Isn’t Showing Up Correctly

The answer is simple, but often overlooked industry-wide.

The easiest way to determine if your Product results are not showing up as expected is to simply find them on the search engine results page (SERP). This should provide you with all the details you may need to determine if the rich result achieved is aligned with your product details.

So, is that it? Assuming you’ve reviewed your Product rich results on the SERP, everything looks good and your traffic is increasing, then yes, it’s as simple as that!

But, let’s say your Product rich result is not showing up the way you want and you want to correct those issues. In that case, here are some of the common Product rich result pitfalls and what you can do to fix them.

Common Product Rich Results Mistakes

1. Not utilizing structured data

Google has the ability to grant Product rich results on your behalf. However, giving away control of your search appearance means you might not always get your desired display.

In our experience, we’ve seen Google award Product results to blog pages based on a price stated in a headline, or target an incorrect price on a Product page with different prices that varied depending on membership standing.

Adding Product markup to your pages is the first step to regaining control over the information you want presented on your Product rich result in the SERP. This means that you’ll need to add Product structured data to all your product detail pages and manage the markup on an ongoing basis, which can be tedious if done manually. At Schema App, our Highlighter tool allows SEO teams to automatically create and deploy Schema Markup dynamically to thousands of pages at once. If you struggle to implement and manage your Product markup at scale, we can help.

As previously mentioned, Google can award your pages the merchant listing experience based on the data in your Google Merchant Center feed. If you are not relying on structured data for your Product rich results, you should ensure that the product information on your Google Merchant Center feed is accurate and up-to-date.

2. Not utilizing the recommended Schema.org Product properties

Do you have an aggregate rating for your Product that is not showing up alongside your pricing information? Are you hoping to show off some of your shipping or return details?

All this comes down to ensuring you’re incorporating the recommended properties from Google’s Product feature guide. In the guide, Google lists all the result enhancements that you can achieve for your Product rich results by adding the relevant content and recommended properties in your markup.

For example: If you want to highlight your offer of free shipping with your product, you can include the shippingDetails property in your product markup. Your Product rich result will then showcase the free shipping offer.

It is important to follow each of the examples to determine which result enhancement is best suited for your pages and how you want to stand out in search.

3. Highlighting incorrect information

As a user who makes informed decisions based on details provided on the SERP, it can be disheartening to see the information presented on the rich result differ from the information displayed on the product detail page.

Examples of this could include indicating an incorrect price, incorrect aggregate review values or counts, and stating a product is in stock when it actually isn’t. This can easily happen when you implement structured data manually on your site and make updates to your content without updating the structured data accordingly. More commonly known as Schema Drift, this mistake can impact the accuracy of the information shown in your Product rich results and reduce your rich result eligibility.

These are challenges that need to be addressed within the structured data. If you notice your Product rich result displaying incorrect information for any of the required and recommended properties, it is important to revisit your Schema Markup to avoid any possible manual action levied against your site for presenting incorrect information.

The Schema App Highlighter can help you overcome the issue of schema drift by creating Schema Markup templates for similar page sets. Your Schema Markup will update dynamically based on the content on the page. Contact us to learn more.

4. Not correcting errors in GSC

If there is an error with your structured data, you’ll likely see it in the enhancement report on Google Search Console.

The product snippet and merchant listing enhancement reports in Google Search Console will show you:

1. Valid items that are eligible for product rich results
2. Valid items that could be improved in appearance
3. Invalid items that are not eligible for rich results and the reason for invalidity

Improve item appearances
Items that show up in this category are valid items that could be presented with more features if more recommended properties and content were included.

This can be viewed as an opportunity to ensure you’re calling out those properties where content permits. It is quite common, however, for Products to have a list of “issues” in this section because most product pages will rarely include all the recommended properties and content for those properties.

Invalid items
Items that show up in this category are invalid items that have issues preventing Google from using your structured data. This will render your page ineligible for the rich result until the issue is rectified.

If you see any invalid items on your enhancement report, you need to revisit the product markup on those pages and ensure your markup, at the very least, includes the product’s name, and either a review of the product, an aggregate rating, or a price.

5. Not being more semantic with your product markup

Search engines are shifting to semantic search and it is important for your organization to include as many details in your Product markup as possible and be more semantic with your Schema Markup.

You can be more semantic with your Product markup by linking the entities on your page to other entities on your site. For example, you can link your Brand to your Product markup under the brand property. This tells search engines that the product on this page is maintained or associated with your brand.

You can also be more semantic by linking entities on your page to external authoritative knowledge bases like Wikipedia or Wikidata. For example, if you offer free shipping within the US, you can link the USA wikidata page (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q30) using the sameAs property to the DefinedRegion of the shippingDestination.

That way, search engines have a clear understanding of which destination you offer free shipping to.

Linking the entities on your site and beyond can help you develop a knowledge graph and provide search engines with more contextual information about your organization. It can also future-proof your organization for a more conversational style of search through AI chatbots like Google’s Search Generative Experience, ChatGPT or even your own chatbot.

Consider how users might engage with a chatbot where they request a product that has a certain pattern, free shipping in the United States, and is a suitable gift for a female – these can all be informed through Schema Markup!

6. Not monitoring performance

You might’ve reviewed the mistakes we covered above and not made any of them. But that does not guarantee improved performance with your Product rich result.

E-commerce is a competitive space and your customers’ purchasing decisions could easily be swayed – both positively and negatively – based on the enhanced results provided in the SERP.

If you find your click-through rate declining when a Product rich result is awarded, you need to analyze the factors that might be influencing performance and run experiments to determine whether it needs to be corrected.

Example 1: If your product listing page contains poor reviews and you’ve included aggregate rating markup on that page, your Product rich result is very likely to showcase these poor ratings and reviews. Buyers could see the rating on the SERP and choose not to explore your product further, thus reducing clicks and click-through rate to your page. In this situation, you can consider removing the aggregate rating markup to see if your click-through rates improve after.

Example 2: If your product is expensive and you have a high price tag on your Product rich result, at first glance you might see your traffic decline. But you should also consider whether the decline is impacting your website conversion rate. Having users qualify themselves might not be a bad thing as long as it doesn’t affect sales. In fact, it might better align with user intent and lead to higher-quality traffic for your site.

At the end of the day, your rich result performance should align with your desired outcomes. If it isn’t aligning with your organization’s goals, you should consider enhancing it with different information or maybe even targeting a completely different rich result as a whole.

Scalability of Product Rich Results

Despite all of Google’s recent rich result changes, Product continues to be an exciting rich result to pursue. However, you should consistently monitor how your products are showing up in search to fully maximize your performance through this rich result.

Many of the recommendations we’ve provided can be easily tackled on a page-by-page basis. But if you’re having difficulty finding a scalable solution to help you drive performance through your Product rich results, Schema App can help.

Get in touch with us today to learn more!

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