Here we will share the importance of schema markup or rich snippets for an online store.

Further on I will show you how you can show them using Magento 2 SEO Extension and Opencart SEO Extension. Magento 2 SEO extension provides various tools and options for improving the SEO of the online store.

Using Magento 2 SEO extension, the merchants can display rich snippets for their products, categories, and CMS pages. First let’s understand some basics about SEO, schema markup, rich snippets, and a few other things.

What is SEO?
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a web search engine’s unpaid results—often referred to as ‘natural’, ‘organic’, or ‘earned’ results.

In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users; these visitors can then be converted into customers.

Why is SEO important for online stores?
Many online businesses rely on search engines for bringing traffic to their website. As the search engine is the primary point of entry to many people, the traffic from the search engines is vitally important to online stores.

Whenever we want to buy anything online, we always Google that product’s name in the search field and view the results.
The results that appear on the first page of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) are likely to get more traffic because most users click on the first results.

Role of Structured data or Rich Snippets
The structured data or rich snippets provide information to the search engines about the web page and display that information on the SERP such as price, stock, ratings, reviews, votes, etc.

With the help of rich snippets, the users can see quick information about the page even before visiting it.
Also, the search results which have rich snippets draw more attention in comparison to other search results. The rich snippets display richer information about the web page search results.

Rich snippets allow the webmaster to highlight their web page content on the SERP. Because results showing rich snippets have higher visibility within the SERP.

Types of schema markups formats:
1 – Data Vocabulary – An open-community HTML specification used to nest structured data within HTML content. Like RDFa, it uses HTML tag attributes to name the properties you want to expose as structured data. It is typically used in the page body but can be used in the head.

2 – JSON-LD – JavaScript notation embedded in a tag in the page head or body. The markup is not interleaved with the user-visible text, which makes nested data items easier to express, such as the Country of a Postal Address of a Music Venue of an Event.</p>