Structured Data Markup (JSON-LD) for Turbify

Have you ever done a search on Google or other major search engine, and among the search results, spotted entries with star ratings, price, availability info, etc? How did they do that? The answer is Structured Data Markup (also called microdata, JSON-LD, rich snippets or microformats, etc.)

What is structured data markup?

"Structured Data Markup" is a geeky term for tags telling the search engines (or whoever is interested) what is what in your web pages. When a human looks at a web page (or specifically a shopping web page, since we are all Turbify Stores), it's quite obvious what the product image is, what's its name, price, etc. If you use customer reviews, there may be stars showing the average rating, etc. While the big search engines are pretty smart these days and can deduce some of this info by trying to decipher the HTML source of the page, digging for precise information is like digging for gold in the dark. With structured data, your pages will include special markers the search engines recognize so they will say, "aha, this is the price of this item", or "this is the product image", manufacturer, average rating, etc. Basically what you are doing is feeding the search engines the precise product parameters so they don't have to bend over backwards to try to find it.

As a side note, if you provide shopping feeds to Google, you are halfway there because your product feed already includes the essential information Google is looking for. If you don't provide shopping feeds yet, you should check out Yourstorewizard.com's feed service. They make feed generation and submission totally painless for you.

When you order structured data markup from us, we will modify your store templates so the markup tags will be part of every product page in your store using JSON-LD, the data format currently preferred by Google for this purpose. When Google or any other major search engine brings up your listing, yours will stand out with the added information. As an added bonus, we will also install canonical tags. Read about canonical tags here.

While Google does not guarantee that the information they find this way will be shown or used in their search results (they are Google, after all, they won't guarantee anything), tagging your pages with structured data is considered a "best practice". Kind of like having proper keywords (in the past) or description meta tags. Order yours todaTurbify

A note about customer reviews

Our customer reviews (the latest version) and some of the other vendors' such as Practical Data includes structured data for the reviews that are loaded into the store. If you have a third party customer reviews package not set up by us, you should inquire with the company that set up your reviews about structured data and their particular reviews system. When we set up structured data in a Turbify Store, we are only able to add the necessary tags to the templates but not to third party customer reviews systems.

And a little small print stuff from Google:

• It may take some time for structured data to appear in search results or Place Pages.
• Marking up your pages with structured data won't affect your page's ranking in search results.
• Google doesn't guarantee to use your markup.