What You Need to Know About Product Snippets and Your Salesforce Ecommerce Website
How often are you looking at your live pages on Google’s Search results? As digital marketers, it’s easy to get caught up making changes on-site but sometimes it’s good to take a step back and see what your work looks like on the live search results pages. At PixelMEDIA, we work with ecommerce brands to help them maximize results in online search.
For the past few years, Google has been trending towards presenting more information on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) by way of ‘snippets’. This trend started with structured data, but today, research now suggests that 12.29%* of all SERP’s contain what we know as, featured snippets. This is why we think it is so important to be monitoring the SERP’s in your vertical. These enhancements in the SERP results can change shopper behavior and result in a major impact to your rankings and click-through-rate.
In our monthly monitoring, we discovered a snippet that began to display for the outdoor sporting goods vertical. We are unofficially calling these product information snapshots “Product Spec Snippets” and here’s why we think this highlighted content is so important.
What are Product Spec Snippets and Why Do They Impact Your Ecommerce Site?
Product Spec Snippets are a type of rich result that displays under a search engine listing typically content populated from product pages. Unlike most rich results, product spec snippets are not supported by schema.org. Google shows Product Spec Snippets in order to provide searchers with more detailed information about a product. The results on a Google search are much more engaging and effective with 20-40% higher website traffic and an increase in click-through rates as high as 677%.
With the increase in online shopping, it’s important to prioritize strategies for the display of your products at the top of the SERPs. These Product Spec Snippets benefit shoppers who are searching by specific product attributes, enabling you to drive more qualified traffic. Product Spec Snippets can also be viewed on mobile devices in addition to the standard ecommerce schema, and product image.
Where Do Product Spec Snippets in Google Come from and How Do You Enable Them on Your Google Listings?
Product Spec Snippets are populated from a table on the corresponding landing page that includes technical details about your product. There is no structured markup for Product Spec Snippets, and you won’t find them on schema.org. There is virtually no information from Google about these snippets, yet these snippets have some compelling and competitive advantages for the domains showing them in the search results, as we just discussed.
Limited information available on how Google determines which sites have Product Spec Snippets has inspired us to establish our own testing. For example, we were able to successfully test and implement code changes to help our client GregoryPacks.com obtain product spec snippets.
To earn these Product Spec Snippets, we created some template changes to the original product landing page. These changes included the addition of a table that includes a great deal of technical information about the product. The information on this table was compiled from historical data, user research interviews, and keyword research. There are other benefits to including relevant information for shoppers, including strengthening product page rankings for additional long-tail searches, a win/win.
Three Reasons to Optimize for Product Spec Snippets
- Own More Real Estate in the SERP’s: Let’s review two organic listings for the Baltoro 75 backpack. The Gregory Mountan Products result has significant more information on the product displayed in their listing. This not only gives the shopper more details up front, it also establishes a sense of trust in the display.
- Increase Relevance Increase Qualified Traffic: Product Spec Snippets provide more information to make the overall listing more relevant to long-tail queries. By providing information including volume and weight in an easy to digest/scroll format, shoppers are more likely to click through the listing.
- Increase Conversion Rate: As mentioned above, the numbers speak for themselves. With research showing an increase in click-through ratings as high as 677%, ecommerce sites are also experiencing an increase in conversion rates due to these Product Spec Snippets.
Industry Matters
Product Spec Snippets have started to display across a few different industries, but it is important to note that optimizing your product page does not guarantee that Google will display Product Spec Snippets. Since there is no official word from Google on these snippets, they are considered to still be in the beta phase. Google is only choosing to show them in select industries for select products. Overall, we have seen the most product spec snippets across the retail industry. Some of the verticals include:
- Outdoor Adventure
- Outdoor Sporting Equipment
- Camping Gear
- Hiking
- Sporting Equipment
- Technology
If your Salesforce Commerce Cloud site needs to be optimized for Product Spec Snippets, let’s talk.
