Why Are Rich Snippets & Breadcrumbs So Necessary For Your Magento Store And What Is Their Future?

Introducing search results with rich snippets:

… and without rich snippets:

Rich snippets are structured data mark-ups that are recognized by the biggest search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex), basically because they (search engines) initiated the creation of schema.org – a vocabulary of schemas for structured data on the Internet.

In other words, schemas are the structured sets of tags supposed to help search engines get the maximum amount of information about your web page.

In ecommerce, the most commonly used schema`s category is Product, and features the following properties:

1. aggregateRating – displays overall rating, using a collection of reviews of a particular product;
2. brand – simply shows the product brand;
3. model – shows the model of the particular brand product;
4. review – displays the current number of item reviews;
5. price – price of the item;
6. SKU – or the Stock Keeping Unit, a merchant-specific identifier for each item, or the product ID to which the offer refers.

And the next mark-up, which is related not only to the product category, but also to the website in general, is the so-called breadcrumbs schema. Breadcrumbs are extremely significant for ecommerce stores.

When customer see these mark-ups (breadcrumbs---"them" seemed too vague), they get a quick glance of the categories they're looking for at an online store. This most likely prevents store owners from receiving accidental clicks and a high bounce rate. Here is how breadcrumbs appear in Google SERP:

Sounds intriguing, no? But what about rich snippets and breadcrumbs implementation in Magento?

Magento 1

Unfortunately, in Magento 1, this can only be executed by manually inseting the code in PHTML files. This is your best bet if you don’t have a special extension, of course.

However, if you do have the extension (again--I put 'the extension' in because 'it' sounded too vague) installed, here is how these features are implemented in Mirasvit Advanced SEO Suite for instance:

Now let’s check out what`s changed using Google's Structured Data Testing Tool, and which data has become available to crawlers. I decided to pick a random store page to run a check process:

Test results:

It worked! The whole set of data became available to search engines. We suggest you examining your own website using Structured Data Testing Tool to figure out what Google can get about it: https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/

Magento 2

What about Magento 2? Developers made a bold claim right in the box interface, that there`s no need to make modifications to get rich snippets ready.

To figure out which snippets Magento 2 supports without any extensions added, I decided to run a test using same old Google Structured Data Testing Tool.

Test results showed me the following:

Apparently, the Price, Rating, SKU, Description, Category – all basic snippets – are integrated into Magento 2, which covers pretty much all the essential information about the Product that a customer would need. Unfortunately, Organization or any other data is not available.

So, if your company is already popular among your target audience or you are looking to really bring it to life, rich snippets will influence your rankings in the long-term perspective.

To enable a wider range of SEO options in Magento 2, you should modify built-in templates using FTP and add missing schemas manually. Still, the good news is that you can always use a special Advanced SEO Suite extension to simplify the SEO processes in your online store.

Regardless of which Magento CMS version you use, keep in mind that SERPs are changing all the time, and in 1 or 2 years, it will likely be hard to find plain text on the first 4-5 pages of the search results.

Today, rich snippets and breadcrumbs are sort of a competitive advantage, but tomorrow they will become a strong necessity for every ecommerce store.