Getting your website ready for peak means more than just loading up your listings and running promotions, you need to attract traffic to your site and there are ways to make this much more cost effective than simply paying Google for advertising.
Do you want to get more traffic to your site without having to pay more in PPC?
Then you need to tell the search engines what products you’re selling in a language they understand.
And the best bit… getting your website ready for peak is not as complicated as you might think.
Enter GS1 Web Vocabulary…
Launched in 2016, and previously known as GS1 Smart Search, GS1 Web Vocabulary was the first approved extension of schema.org to build on product-based attributes.
In short, it provides a simple, logical, and inexpensive method of ensuring shoppers find your product, when they know exactly what they are searching for.
This means search is no longer beholden to the highest bidder.
So, how does this work?
GS1 Web Vocabulary is essentially just a structured data model for the web, that gives e-commerce and marketing managers a standardised way of describing products, which can be read quickly by machines.
This means when search engine bots are scraping web pages looking for relevant information, the data is in an easily digestible format and can be surfaced to the shopper much more quickly than non-structured data.
As a result, bots actively look out for GS1 Web Vocabulary, so applying it to your website can help increase the online visibility of your products.
You can find out more about structured data and GS1 Web Vocabulary by downloading our ebook, “Harness the Power of GS1 standards for retail success”.
What does this look like in practice?
To a shopper, a web page with GS1 Web Vocabulary looks no different from a page without. They will still see the same listing and have the same purchasing options.
But to a search engine, a web page with GS1 Web Vocabulary is much easier to add to its index, because the data is presented in a clear and structured format (see below).
By calling out all the key product information clearly, search engine bots are able to understand exactly what the page is describing. Therefore, they can more easily surface the information that the shopper is actually looking for, rather than guessing.
Bots can also use this content to create rich snippets, such as reviews, recipes, and events.
What are the benefits of using GS1 Web Vocabulary?
Once you’ve implemented GS1 Web Vocabulary across your site, you should start seeing the following metrics:
- Increased page visits
- Decreased bounce rate
- Increased conversion
This is great news to all the e-commerce and SEO managers out there, particularly when you are planning for the competitive peak selling period and need to boost your sales metrics.
However, it is important to note that the speed at which you’ll see these metrics will depend on how much traffic you have coming into your site and how quick you can get the site re-indexed – this can take up to a couple of weeks.
How do I implement GS1 Web Vocabulary?
If you are a GS1 member, Web Vocabulary is included in your membership. This is because the team at GS1 are focused on providing a clear, standardised approach to product identification and data management, so they want to help you to do this as much as possible.
To learn more about GS1 Web Vocabulary, visit the online dedicated online resource area or get in touch with GS1 UK directly, by emailing lorna.leaver@gs1uk.org, who can guide you through implementing GS1 Web Vocabulary on your website.
Alternatively, for those of you who are more technically minded, or want to jump straight in, you can find all the relevant documentation at github.com/gs1/WebVoc.
You can also test to see how your website currently performs and what structured data can be seen on your webpage with this testing tool.
