The results displayed by Google sometimes varies from time to time, if you have noticed. Some e-commerce shops have taken advantage of a rather new but old way that Google parse data structure, - provided information that others do not, and the result is rather a lot different in favor of those who uses schema.org data structure. Let's look at how the structure of a product sheet can influence the results of your ecommerce website. This should be top priority at the onset of ecommerce website development.
Yesterday, a lot of people were raising question in forums regarding breadcrumb structured data. on their website due to google discontinuing use of Data-Vocabulary.org and solely focusing on schema.org structured data. The use of data-vocabulary will stop on April 6, and that will affect how goolge will display rich results, particularly breadcrumb structured data.
If you are worried this might affect your store website, check out this article on how you can implement breadcrumb structured data the schema.org way.
If you want to learn more of other structured data schema types, check out the rest of our Schema articles!
How does schema.org improves your Prestashop-thirtybees?
The goal of Schema.org is to be able to structure HTML in a more logical way by putting the important elements between specific tags, so that search engines can identify the types of data in the page. Currently it is not possible for Google to automatically display the price of a product in the normal results without schema, because Google cannot identify which kind of data structure to categorized that content, unless you give it a hand. This is where schema.org comes in.
Schema.org has a big reputation with Google and other search engines because it makes it easy for those search engines to classify any content as long as the source, in this case, the website you have, tells the search engine what type of classification to classify that particular content. For example, a blog content is classified as a blog content, an article is classified as an article, a listing classified as listing. Before schema got into the picture, all contents where classified by Google under limited classification, and with the content in the web running to quintillion bytes Google Search works doubly hard to understand the content of a page.
How much data?
There are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day at our current pace, but that pace is only accelerating with the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT). Over the last two years alone 90 percent of the data in the world was generated.
Source
You can read the whole article by following this link. How much data we create everyday?
Google is asking for a little help on sorting this immense data volume.
You can help us by providing explicit clues about the meaning of a page to Google by including structured data on the page. Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content; for example, on a recipe page, what are the ingredients, the cooking time and temperature, the calories, and so on.
Source
Let's take a concrete example of how schema.org improves your Prestashop-thirtybees
It must be mentioned that webmasters and prestashop website developers as well as thirtybees website developers have not really paid attention to this in the process of ecommerce website development, i mean as "REALLY" paid attention. A webshop owner pointed this out in a forum that he had seen something abnormal about the results at Google. Sometimes his product is marked as "out-of-stock" in the search results, but in reality it is not in the webshop, by being that, it drives potential buyers away from clicking the link to that product.
We can see clearly that the words "out of stock", as well as the price of the product. But he says, the result is false, because apparently the product is not out of stock. The reason? He is not leveraging schema.org on his ecommerce product pages. Product pages should use the product specification format to a product information for shopping ads. Submitting your product data to Google in the right format is important for creating successful ads for your products. See screenshot below:
Check out the full Product Data Specification on this link. Product data Specification.
Prestashop 1.6 and Thirtybees have a basic integration of schema Markups
We find these integration tags directly in the template structure. The integration is already prepared. For example, if you search on the "product.tpl" file for your theme, you can find tags with "itemprop" and attributes such as "availability" that tells google search engine when the product is available and what property it has. These "Markups" make it possible for Google to provide a more complete result to the user when he searches for a product.
Check the full structure at schema.org -> itemAvailability.
Thanks to these tags, we can allow Google to display a more advance results. Simple tweaks improves your Prestashop-thirtybees website. But obviously it is just the basic. There are tons of schema available that needs to be implemented. And for that, prestashop and thirtybees website developers have modules made for this alone, but they are far from being able to provide the dynamic data structure SE needs.
What solution must be done to correct the problem?
For these enriched snippets we recommend to check the official documentation of Google on this subject. Obviously it is NOT enough to put the value "in_stock" with the attribute "content" of the tag "availability". And there are a lot of other tags still available for ecommerce developers to integrate. Remember that the purpose of Google is to be able to specify the content, but that is too complex of a task even for a giant like Google, that it needs your website to tell them what kind/type of content you are publishing.
This is a huge paradigm shift as far as SEO is concerned. Ecommerce website developers and shop owners alike still have not leverage this immense potential! As far as we know, we have nowhere else to go but implement schema.org because it improves your Prestashop-thirtybees website. It may take a while before this is implement and become a norm in all ecommerce websites development, doing it now would give you one or two steps ahead of your peers and competitors.
How Does schema.org improves your Prestahop-thirtybees Search Results really?
Google is looking to structure data to become even more efficient. By helping Google speed up the sorting process of data, Google helps you in return by ranking your website higher in the search engine results! You basically become friends with Google!
This is NOT the future! This is the present!
As of today, we at shoptech.media do honestly believe that this is the case, because now we can finally "maneuver" the tags as it suits us. We can leverage the data structure to our advantage. It levels the playing field for everyone.
Imagine this case: a merchant is really out of stock, would he benefit if he has to announce it? No, because the customer would not even bother to come visit his homepage. While the customer might still find it good to buy other products, but the initial reaction to the out-of-stock search result will take over his decision. From a buyers' perspective, why would he go there knowing that the product he wants to buy is not available for him? He will just look for another online store to buy the product from, right?
So, what can be gain from this?
While there are no guarantee that Google will display rich snippets just because you ask them to, proper Schema markup boosts your odds at them doing exactly that.
It is a good thing that Prestashop and Thirtybees follows the current trend to systematize "Markup" data structure from schema.org. The real gist to all this in our opinion is that, it is Google who decides which is the most relevant. As the saying goes,
"if you can't beat them, join them!"
As we say here at shoptech media,
"If you are friend with Google, Google is friend to you!"
With that said, we have endeavored to create a powerful module to make it easy for store owners to implement schema.org and google data structure. Check for it soon! Let us know what you think about schema.org and google data structure in the comment section below! Has this article help you understand more about Google data-structure driven ranking? Will data-structure really help ecommerce website built in prestashop and thirtybees ranked better SEO results with its implementation?
