For many websites, there is a great opportunity to boost the SEO performance of pages with a few lines of JSON-LD Structured Data. It’s a low-hanging fruit, and we should take advantage of it.
A big part of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is to help Google crawlers easily parse your web pages and correctly understand their content. One way to reach that goal is to use HTML tags properly, provide a meaningful title, and use well-written content, etc.Â
There is a lesser-known way to improve your site’s SEO that can help you convey the page’s critical information to the crawler in a clear, plain, and unambiguous way. This technique is called Structured Data. It’s not an alternative to properly using HTML tags and good content. It’s an optional but powerful complement. Structured Data for eCommerce can significantly improve your website’s performance on search engine result pages (SERPs).
What is Structured Data, and what is JSON-LD?
What is Structured Data? It’s an on-page markup that helps Google’s crawlers better understand your web page’s content. One way to implement Structured Data is to use a special JavaScript snippet embedded in the page’s HTML. The JavaScript snippet describes the page content according to a standard format. JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) is the most popular Structured Data format. JSON-LD is also a W3C standard. Other accepted formats, also called encodings or Schema Markups, are RDFa and Microdata; they don’t require JavaScript.
JSON-LD is an on-page markup that helps Google’s crawlers to understand the content of your web page.
A JavaScript developer can quickly create a description of a product, person, organization, event, or recipe with just a few lines of JSON-LD snippets. For an e-commerce website, generating all the JSON-LD snippets can be easily automated. It should become part of all standard product page templates.
A JSON-LD Complete Example
The JSON-LD example below was generated by the product page template I created for the Novedge eCommerce website. The product described in the JSON-LD is Rhino 3D. It’s a popular software tool for industrial designers developed by Robert McNeel & Associates. You can find this code or an updated version live on the Rhino 3D product page on the Novedge eCommerce website.
The meaning of this snippet should be transparent even for a non-programmer. What you see is a JSON description of a product made of SKU, Name, URL, Image, Description, etc. When the Google crawler fetches the latest version of a web page, it reads the HTML and recognizes the snippet as a semantic description of the page’s content. If the JSON fragment is syntactically correct, it extracts the information and uses it to improve the page’s classification and the comprehension of its content. Unlike pure HTML pages, the crawler doesn’t have to guess what product the page is about, its selling price, or brand. The Structured Data provided in the JSON-LD snippet clearly and unequivocally describes the page’s content. No guessing or complex analysis required.
JSON-LD and SEO
When a page supports Google crawlers by providing machine-readable information, such as JSON-LD, directly in the HTML, it receives preferential SEO treatment. The page receives a small but essential boost in its ranking. SEO performance improvement is noticeable.
A page that includes JSON-LD snippets gets rewarded by Google with higher Page Ranking
In the snapshot below (where I intentionally removed the ads), you can see the same web page appearing on the 1st page for one of the most popular searches related to the product offered, after the manufacturer page and Wikipedia.
Many websites have not yet implemented Structured Data, while some provide syntactically incorrect JSON-LD. While this is regrettable, it is also a great opportunity. My recommendation is to take advantage of this opportunity and add this information to all your pages!
Pointers
- Before deploying a new JSON-LD snippet, you can test it online on the JSON-LD Playground, a powerful JSON-LD checker.
- Once the JSON-LD snippet is included in the page’s HTML, it can be validated with the Google Structured Data Validation Tool.
- If you want to learn more about JSON-LD use and syntax, and access complete examples, I would recommend the JSON-LD Primer.
- For richer snippets and to implement cross-references among objects described on different pages, you might need to allocate some time to understand the reference Schema.
- You can also manually generate a JSON-LD snippet using a powerful but simple schema generator online.
What Google thinks of JSON-LD
A few words from the most famous Google SEO guru: John Mueller.