How to get product snippets in search results

We’re well into the 3rd week of our SEO series, where we give you tips and tricks to help take your SEO to the next level. Today we’re going to explore product snippets, and how to get your products to appear in search results.

But first, what are product snippets I hear you ask?

Well if we were to take a direct definition straight from Google, the masters of search themselves describe product snippets as,

Product snippets are a richer form of presentation for snippets in search results than just text. They are used for products and product reviews, and can include additional information such as ratings, review information, price and availability.

The product snippets tend to look like this:

By using the product snippet, you’ll see increased CTR on your website and just look more consumer friendly in general. So, how do you get your product snippets in rich results?

First, it’s helpful if you have some basic understanding of how product snippets are created and the core schema markups that make it up. Your schema is what’s telling Google and other search engines what to crawl and understand.

The focus is to show users your price, availability, review ratings, shipping information, stock level and more in search results. The way to do this is by adding product structured data to your web pages and upload data feeds through Google Merchant Center – doing both is going to maximise your eligibility to be featured in search results.

Structured data is a “standardised format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content” – and so to build, test and release your structured data, you’re going to need to know and understand the required properties and how it looks.

Note: the figures are all manually inputted, and any misuse spotted equals a manual action penalty which can severely affect your ranking – so make sure your data is accurate.

1. Ratings:
It goes without saying that your rating is based on your reviews, and averaged on a scale of 1-5. So for this information you’ll need to calculate your rating average and write it into your code. This particular part will look like this:

2. Number of reviews:
The number of reviews is displayed next to your rating and in your HTML code it will be placed underneath your rating code, like this:

3. Price:
Next on the list is price, and again it sits next to the number of reviews when displayed on Google and so it comes underneath “number of reviews” (it’s almost like I planned for this to be in the right order…) in relation to the code, it will look like this:

And, of course, you can input your preferred currency to be displayed! Next…

4. Stock level:
It’s no good going through all this effort to advertise your products if they’re out of stock hey? Equally, it’s good to reflect your stock level within your schema so that people know on the top level what to expect when they click through (people love making quick decisions, so make it easy for them to do it)

And again, it will look something like this:

So if you’ve pulled all that information together, you should have…

You could spend a really long time on your structured data, but for a basic rundown of best practices for being featured in search results you can do this:

1. Think about your offering and who it is for. Creating your rich snippets isn’t a one-size fits all solution (as much as we wish it was that simple) you’ll need to consider if you’re offering a single product or software application and tailor your snippets to the specification.

For a single product you’ll need: highlight the rating, price and description of the item on one page

For a software app you’ll need: name, price, category, operating system and reviews.

2. It’s best to mark up single products instead of multiple items, this makes your content more visually appealing and can help search engines ‘understand’ your page

3. Use a Rich Results Test Tool to check your Schema, and discover if you show up in rich results. Search engines that recognise Schema markups include Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex – so it’s always best to test your Schema. The test will report on errors and recommendations for your structured data. You can use the tool here.

Again, this isn’t an exhaustive list and you could go into a lot more detail in your schema markup, but hopefully this should help break it down and help you to understand what product snippets are, how they’re created, and what to do when you’ve built out your structured data.