In September 2022, Google announced a new update of Merchant Listing search experiences and product snippets. This change directly affects merchants, product review websites and product information aggregator websites.
If you are doing business online, it’s crucial to know about the update.
So in this article, we will walk you through all the newest Google updates to help you take advantage of them.
Let’s learn it!
Expand Eligibility For Product Rich Results
Table of Contents
Enhanced experiences, or rich results, are search features that can provide more information than a regular search snippet. A product rich results include images, price, review ratings, availability, shipping information, etc.
Google has provided shoppers with rich product experiences in search results for some time. However, previously it was only available to Merchant Center users.
Now, to make these experiences more accessible, Google has expanded eligibility for Merchant Listing search experiences and product snippets by using structured data. Now, all website owners can list their products for free on Google properties.
Upgrade your Magento product snippets with Magento 2 SEO Extension to take advantage of Google’s new update!
After adding structured data, this is how a merchant listing experience may appear in search results.
Merchant listing experiences offer enhanced experiences, including the Shopping Knowledge panel & Popular Products, and shopping experiences in Google Images & Google Lens.
And the rich snippets will look as below.
Google also made a major update to Product structured data documentation. They now added “color”, “material”, “pattern”, as well as “EnergyConsumptionDetails”, “inProductGroupWithID” and “audience” to the list of recommended product schema properties.
Check out the structured data required for merchant listings and product snippets in Google’s Product structured data documentation.
New Search Console Reports
To help website owners take advantage of these experiences, Google replaced the Search Console report for Product structured data with 2 new reports:
- Merchant listings report
- Product snippets report.
These reports are grouped under the Shopping section in the Search Console navigation bar.
The reports allow you to see warnings, errors, and valid pages for markup implemented on your website.
Merchant listings report
The new Merchant listings report has 3 key features:
- Identifie structured data issues for free merchant listing experience
- Cover the wider range of schema.org structured data properties & types for advanced cases (apparel sizing, energy efficiency ratings, etc.)
- Relevant to pages that sell products
It shows the valid items which are eligible for Google Search’s rich results.
The valid item detected is also built into the URL inspection tool and rich results tools.
Websites that sell products should use this report.
Product snippets report
The new Product snippets report has 3 key features:
- Identifie structured data issues for product snippets
- Replace the Product structured data report with adjustments related to the separation of merchant listing validations into a dedicated report
- Relevant to pages that share product review information/aggregate product data from multiple websites
Websites that publish product reviews should use this report.
Conclusion
For eCommerce store owners, with the new Google update, your products may now show up in more places and in a richer way than before. So make sure to use product structured data to benefit from this.
We hope this blog is helpful and good luck to you!
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