Google’s recent run of enhancement reports in Search Console gives you lots of insights into how your site is performing in search. Sometimes, though, it gives you stuff to think about, like errors or improvements to make. For instance, if you run an online store, you’re bound to have come across this structured data error: “Either ‘offers’, ‘review’ or ‘aggregateRating’ should be specified.” There’s a very easy solution for this if you run WooCommerce and Yoast SEO: our WooCommerce SEO add-on.
The “Either ‘offers’, ‘review’ or ‘aggregateRating’ should be specified” error in Google Search Console
The “Either ‘offers’, ‘review’ or ‘aggregateRating’ should be specified” happens for a lot of online stores. It means that Google misses several properties in your product schema implementation. By not offering these, your product listings will not reach their full potential in search. This way, Google has a hard time tying all the product-specific properties together to paint a full picture of your product. In some cases, though, they manage, but why let them figure it out? Fixing this becomes imperative if you want a better chance of standing out.
Who doesn’t want a product listing like the one pictured below?
Valid product schema might lead to eye-popping rich results like this one from Reverb
Oftentimes, however, invalid or incomplete structured data might cripple your perfomance in search. Errors are all too common, like the one in the screenshot from Search Console below.
The “Either ‘offers’, ‘review’ or ‘aggregateRating’ should be specified” error is very common
Help is at hand: Yoast SEO & WooCommerce SEO
WooCommerce is huge in the WordPress world. According to W3Techs, 15% of all WordPress sites run an online shop on the WooCommerce platform. That’s amazing. We have a plugin that helps customers improve their online store: WooCommerce SEO. This addon ties neatly into Yoast SEO, including the big schema graph we build for every site. It also greatly improves the product schema output by WooCommerce.
If your site runs on WooCommerce and Yoast SEO you need WooCommerce SEO. Besides all the cool behind-the-scenes improvements, it fixes that dreaded “Either ‘offers’, ‘review’ or ‘aggregateRating’ should be specified” error for you: automatically! It gives Google everything it needs to figure out your products are products and thus increases your chances of getting those important rich results.
Why you should fix this error
Google is increasingly betting on schema structured data to help understand the world. If your site offers search engines enough context about what’s on it, the rewards could be great: rich results. And for some types, visibility on other devices like smart speakers or visual assistants.
Getting your product schema right, means you can get these types of results. The one earlier in this article is from Reverb and shows a nicely formed product rich results, with breadcrumbs, product information, ratings and reviews, pricing details and an in-stock message. This is all powered by product schema.
Reporting on the performance of products
To help you track how your products are doing, Google recently added a Product enhancement report to Search Console. This report lets you know if your products are correctly structured and, therefore, eligible for rich results. This week, Google also announced that it will allow you to see the performance of your product in the search results. You can now find a new Product line in the Search Appearance section of the Search Performance section.
Search Console now has a product results view in Search Appearance
This report shows exactly how well your products are doing: how many impressions did they have and how many clicks? This is invaluable data to improve your product listings.
Fix the error and check your listings
Seeing the product schema error in Search Console? Using Yoast SEO and WooCommerce? Well, you’re in luck. The WooCommerce SEO add-on is the glue that ties the product schema structured data between those two platforms together. It fixes that dreaded error and gives you a better chance at getting your products noticed in Google!
The past week was all about two big plugins releasing important updates. Both WooCommerce and Gutenberg got significant improvements. Gutenberg saw another accessibility improvement and WooCommerce now has even more integration with, well, Gutenberg . Let’s dive in and see what’s what!
WooCommerce introduces more Block Editor integration
WooCommerce 3.7 was released last week and it brings deeper integration with our new Block Editor. While WooCommerce already provided the option to use a Featured Category, Featured Product, and Best Selling Category blocks, for instance, this version added three more blocks:
Product Categories List block; this block allows you to show product categories in a list or dropdown.
Featured Category block; this block lets you select one or multiple categories to feature on your site, and it displays the category and a link to its category archive page to customers.
Products by Tag(s) block; this block gives you the option to feature a selection of products linked to a specific tag or set of tags.
Of course, the rest of the plugin also saw overall refinements. You can now, for example, find all WooCommerce Blocks more easily when you click on the plus symbol to create a new block by typing “WooCommerce”. Read up on what these integrations look like in the WooCommerce 3.7 introduction post.
Gutenberg version 6.3
One of the areas where the Block editor still needs improvement is the accessibility of the editor. The block user interface introduces navigation from within the block itself, as well as from one block to another, which can be complex. This makes it very challenging for screen reader users to navigate the content of their posts. Gutenberg 6.3 fixes this with what they call a Navigation Mode. Or in their words:
To address that issue, we’re introducing the Navigation Mode. By default the editor is loaded in this mode, it allows you to move from block to block using a single Tab press. You can also use the arrow keys to navigate between blocks. Once you reach the block you want to edit, you can enter the Edit Mode by hitting the Enter key. The Escape key allows you to move back to the Navigation Mode.
This is a great start to make the editor more accessible for many different types of users. You can read more about why accessibility matters here.
As with the WooCommerce update mentioned above, this new Gutenberg release also comes with smaller improvements. Things like support for text alignments in table block columns, and border color support for the separator block. As usual, you can find out more about what’s new in Gutenberg 6.3 in their release post.
It’s time for another roundup, packed with updates. Today’s headlines: WooCommerce finally embracing the Gutenberg editor fully, AMP for WordPress delivering great improvements with their new update and an introduction to WPGraphQL. So much WordPress news to cover!
WooCommerce 3.6 Loves Gutenberg
WooCommerce saw an update that delivers much better integration with the new Block Editor. This update introduces blocks for Products by Category, Best Selling Products, Hand-picked Products, Newest Products, On Sale Products, Top-Rated Products, Products by Attribute and Featured Product. And I’ve got to say, having these blocks available is a huge improvement in this Gutenberg-powered era.
It’s also really good to see WooCommerce working hard on improving performance. That’s something we at Yoast are big fans of, and highly recommend all developers to have a strong focus on. You can learn more about WooCommerce 3.6 in their introductory post.
If you haven’t yet heard of GraphQL, or its WordPress equivalent, WPGraphQL, I encourage you to check out this data query solution. It’s a very performant way to work with WordPress data.
With GraphQL, the client makes declarative queries, asking for the exact data needed, and in exactly what was asked for is given in response, nothing more. This allows the client to have control over their application and allows the GraphQL server to perform more efficiently by only fetching the resources requested.
They released a WPGraphQL integration plugin with ACF last week. This plugin makes working with custom data provided by ACF a very smooth experience, with a lot of potential.
WordPress and mental health
There’s a project growing inside the WordPress Community that deserves a bit more exposure: WP&UP. It aims to support and promote positive mental health within the WordPress community. From their website:
WP&UP recognizes that members of the WordPress community can potentially manifest mental health issues from a variety of pressures. The WP&UP Health Hubs are designed to provide holistic support for the individual.
During WordCamp London, I met the team recently and learned more about their mission and goal. If mental health is (or should be) a focus of yours, do check out their website and see how they can help you.
Today’s roundup is all about various upcoming updates across the WordPress ecosphere. From WordPress itself to Gutenberg, PHP, and WooCommerce. Let’s get started!
WordPress wants you to update your PHP
If you’ve been following my roundups, you may recall that WordPress is finally bumping its minimum PHP requirement in the upcoming WordPress 5.2 release. I usually don’t like to repeat myself, but in this case, I’ll make an exception. Partly, because there now is a post on WordPress.org by Aaron Jorbin. In it he says the following:
If your site is running on an unsupported version of PHP, the WordPress updater will not offer WordPress 5.2 to your site. If you attempt to update WordPress manually, that update will fail. To continue using the latest features of WordPress you must update to a newer version of PHP.
WordPress.org
More information about what this means for you, why you should want to upgrade anyway, and how to prepare can be found in the rest of the post. I highly encourage you to read it.
A new WooCommerce Dashboard is in the making
WooCommerce, the most popular e-commerce solution for WordPress, has shared some interesting news about a new feature. They’re going to completely overhaul the WooCommerce dashboard.
It will give store owners a quick overview of how their store is performing and the ability to customize the dashboard to their needs. Store owners can view charted data directly from the Dashboard via 14 different data points, and select any chart to load an associated report for deeper analysis.
With those 14 data points, store owners can track performance with statistics, analytics, and other reports
WooCommerce is bundling this new dashboard in a feature plugin which you can download for testing. Read all about it in their announcement post.
Gutenberg 5.4
Last but not least, let’s look at the progress in Gutenberg. From the Make WordPress Core blog:
Foundational work and initial UI explorations to implement the block-based widgets screen are on-going. In the meantime, the contributors worked on a number of bug fixes and improvements. All the bug-fixes will be included in the next beta of WordPress 5.2.
Meaning, even though the features added up until Gutenberg 5.3 will be added to WordPress 5.2, bug-fixes found to those features are still being included to the betas.
If you’d like to read more about how Gutenberg 5.4 now supports vertical alignment for the columns block – and more – you can do so here.
Today’s roundup is a nice collection of interesting things that happened in the WordPress Community in the last couple of weeks. There’s some very exciting news about expanding the WordPress leadership team and I’ll discuss a couple of new features of the next version of WordPress.
Expanding WordPress Leadership
Matt Mullenweg published a post this week on the Make WordPress site where he announced two new roles to be added to the WordPress Leadership team. The first new role is that of Executive Director and will be taken on by Josepha Haden. The second role is that of Marketing & Communications Lead and our very own Joost de Valk will be taking on that role. This is what Joost had to say about it:
WordPress is paving the cowpaths for the web with projects like Gutenberg, I’m looking forward to leading marketing & comms for WordPress and working with everybody to tell the story of this awesome project and community.
Both new roles combined mark a great step forward for the growth of the WordPress Project as a whole.
Genesis 2.8 introduces Gutenberg based onboarding feature
Genesis, the leading theme framework, has introduced an onboarding feature that is based on Gutenberg. Basically, a set of preformatted and configured blocks (called Block Templates) are made available when you activate a Genesis Child Theme. This is what they had to say about it in the Genesis 2.8 announcement post:
Genesis 2.8 includes a new onboarding feature theme that authors can use to define which demo content is loaded when a user installs a new theme. One-Click Demo Install makes it easy for theme authors to load in plugins and perfectly-designed Gutenberg blocks onto the home page of a new site using that theme.
The Gutenberg project may have had some people doubting over the need for a new editor, but integrations like this – alongside an improved editing experience – that make it awesome. And this is only the beginning: it’s one of the first types of integrations like this.
Block plugins
In fact, there are already a couple of really interesting plugins out there that provide for extra custom blocks. We, of course, have our own Yoast SEO How-To and FAQ block (and there are many more on their way), but here are six interesting block providing plugins you should definitely check out:
As I’ve mentioned in a previous roundup, WordPress.org has a dedicated view for plugins that provide blocks as a library or as an enhancement to their already existing core functionality. You should definitely check that out if you haven’t already.
What next for WordPress 5.1
The next WordPress release is called 5.1 and is scheduled for the 21st of February 2019. The work for 5.1 began long before the launch of WordPress 5.0 and therefore it’ll have two very interesting features:
Fatal Error Protection
WordPress 5.1 will introduce a so-called WSOD protection (white-screen-of-death protection). This feature will recognize when a fatal error occurs, and which plugin or theme is causing it. With this new feature, you’ll still be able to access the WordPress Dashboard and the respective plugin or theme will be paused. This allows users to still log in to their site so that they can at least temporarily fix the problem.
PHP upgrade notice
If your site is still running on an old and insecure version of PHP, WordPress 5.1 will let you know after the upgrade. The lowest PHP version still receiving security updates is currently 7.1. This means all the PHP 5.x versions are outdated and insecure and the PHP upgrade notice is intended to get people to have their hosting companies change the PHP version. With the latest PHP versions seriously boosting your performance as well, trust me, you want to be on the latest and greatest, as it will make your site faster.
You can read more about these features in Felix Arntz’s introduction post on the Make WordPress Core blog. And that’s it for this roundup. What are you most excited about?
This site is for a thriving wife-and-husband business in Kerikeri, http://theparrotplace.co.nz, a bird park and breeding centre also selling pet products online.
Their WordPress-driven site had been using an outdated e-commerce system. Urban Legend converted it to the now-standard WooCommerce, which streamlines product management for the site owner, and vastly improves site useability for visitors.
We designed and coded the new theme, which went live in June 2016, based on the business’ colour motifs and logo.
Besides optimizing your product pages for user experience, you want to make sure these pages are as good as possible for SEO as well. Obviously, you might think. In this post, we’ll show you a couple less obvious — at least for most website owners — elements of product page SEO and tell you why it’s so important to take these things into account.
1. The basics of product page SEO
A product page on an e-commerce site or online store is a page as well, so all the SEO things that matter for your content page, go for product pages as well. We could go even more into detail when discussing product page SEO, but for now, this will be your basic optimization. If you offer less than exciting products on your site, you may also want to read our post on SEO for boring products. But first:
Add a great title, focusing on the product name — including a manufacturer name, if applicable. If your product is, for instance, a small part of a larger machine (screw, tube), include the SKU as well. People might search that specific.
Add a proper, unique description of the product. Most of the times, that isn’t the description the manufacturer shipped with the product. That description might be used on hundreds of websites, only to be duplicate content and a sign of low quality for your website (to Google). Prevent duplicate content due to manufacturer descriptions at all times. If all your content (content pages, category pages, blog) is unique, and the content used on thousands of product pages isn’t, most of your site isn’t. Think about that and don’t take that lightly. Google’s collection of black and white animals is waiting for you. Create unique content.
Add an inviting meta description. Usually, a product page contains a lot of general information as well, varying from dimensions to terms of service. To avoid Google using that unrelated text in a meta description, you want to add a meta description to your product pages, even more than to content pages. We often see that meta descriptions are added in some kind of templated way, where just the product name is changed per product. That’s ok to start with, but ideally, all meta descriptions are unique.
Pick a great, easy to remember URL for your product pages.
Add high-quality, well-optimized images with proper ALT text. Include the product name in at least the main product image. This will help you do better in visual search. Also, don’t forget video — if applicable.
2. Add structured data for your products and get rich results
Structured data is an essential part of a modern SEO strategy and this also goes for product pages. There is specific Product Schema that helps you get highlighted search results, so-called rich results. In addition, you’d better mark up the reviews of your customers with Review structured data. All of this will make your product page stand out and increase the chance a potential customers clicks on your link in the search results.
The importance of this for your product page SEO is that the major search engines came up with this markup, not the W3C consortium. Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex agreed upon this markup, so they could identify product pages and all the product elements and characteristics more easily. Why would they want that? So they could a) index these pages a lot better and b) show you rich snippets like this:
That’s a lot of info in the search results, right?
The Product schema tells the search engine more about the product. It could include characteristics like product description, manufacturer, brand, name, dimensions, and color, but also the SKU we mentioned earlier. The Offer schema includes more information on price and availability, like currency and stock. It can even include something called priceValidUntil to let search engines know that the price offer is for a limited time only.
Schema.org has a lot of options, but only a limited set of properties are supported by search engines. For instance, see Google’s page on product page structured data to see what that search engines expects in your code and what it can do with it.
So this is why you want to add Schema.org data for product page SEO: easier to recognize for Google, and it makes sure to include important extra’s in Google already. If you have a WooCommerce shop, our WooCommerce SEO plugin takes care of a lot of this stuff behind the scenes.
Another reason to add it is to manage expectations from customers. Your visitor knows your price up front and knows that the product is in stock. Your potential client can even see how well-regarded your product or service is by looking at those beautiful stars in search. How’s that for user experience! And that brings us to number three.
3. Add real reviews
According to Pew Research, more than 80% of US consumers check reviews before buying anything online. Although not everyone trusts online reviews – research says they are probably right -, they can be very helpful. And if you are a local company online reviews are even more important. Most reviews tend to be extremely positive, but it might just be the negative reviews that give a better sense of what is going on with a company or product.
Leading Dutch online store Coolblue gives consumers a lot of options to make relevant and useful reviews of the products they buy
Try to get your customers to leave reviews and show them on your product page. Do you get negative reviews? Contact the writer, find out what’s wrong and try to mitigate the situation. Maybe they can turn their negative reviews into a positive one. And you’ve gained a great new insight into your work. Here’s how to grow your business with ratings and reviews. In addition, getting awesome testimonials is another way of showing your business means business.
Be sure to mark up your reviews and ratings with Review and Rating schema so search engines can pick them up and show rich results in the search results pages.
4. Make your product page lightning fast
People don’t like to wait. Waiting for a page to load costs money. In today’s mobile-focused world, every second counts. Even more so if you spent a lot of time and energy trying to get that potential customer to your product page in the first place. People expect a fast page and Google does so too. Of course, there’s a lot you can do. Here’s a small collection of posts that’ll you get started:
Looking at numbers in Google Analytics, Search Console or other analytical tools can give you a lot of insights into how people find and interact with your page. These insights might help you make changes to improve the performance of the page even more. While it’s essential to keep an eye on your product pages, there’s another way of ensuring the page is as awesome as it can be: user testing.
In their 2018 Product Page UX research project, the Baymard Institute found that “the average site has 24 structural UX issues on its product pages, and only 18% of the 60 top-grossing US and European e-commerce sites have a “good” or “acceptable” product page UX performance. The vast majority of benchmarked sites — 82% — have a “poor” or “mediocre” performance. And no sites have a “state of the art” product page UX performance.” You can read that fascinating study on their Product Page UX site.
The Baymard report has loads of insights into the most commons errors seen on product pages
There are loads of issues to check out, from terrible use of images, including non—functioning galleries to bad handling of out of stock products. It also seems that many sites fail to provide accurate shipping information and return information, which leads to trust issues – see the bonus item next in this article.
While you compare your product pages to external user research, don’t forget to do your own user testing! Doing proper research will give you eye-opening results that you probably wouldn’t have found yourself.
Bonus: Build trust and show people you are for real
Getting a stranger to buy something on your site revolves a lot about trust. Someone needs to know you are for real before handing you their hard-earned money, right? Google puts a lot of emphasis on the element of trust — it’s all over their famous Search Quality Raters Guidelines. The search engine tries to evaluate trust and expertise by looking at stuff like online reviews, the accolade a site or its authors receive, et cetera.
One of the most important things to come out of that is that you should really have your About us and Customer service pages in order. So be sure that people can easily find your contact information, plus information about returns and shipping, payment, privacy et cetera. Don’t forget!
TL;DR: Product page SEO
If you’re serious about optimizing your product page, you shouldn’t focus on the regular SEO and user experience alone. You’ll have to dig a little deeper into the other aspects of the product page on your online store. For instance, add Product and Offer Schema, so Google can easily index all the details about your product and show these as rich results in search result pages. Make your product pages load super fast, add user reviews and try to enhance the trustworthiness. Don’t forget to test everything you do!
We’ve rebuilt our Google Analytics eCommerce tracking plugin and added support for WooCommerce! Read on to learn why you should buy it today. If you want to optimize your shops sales, you need to make sure you connect your visitor data to your transaction data. This plugin does just that. We’ve made transaction tracking so reliable that we can now confidently say our plugin should not miss a single sale.
eCommerce tracking allows you to do all sorts of nice reporting in Google Analytics, on which Thijs will be writing a few posts in the coming months, but let me show you the sort of reports you can get just by enabling the plugin and enabling eCommerce tracking in Google Analytics:
99.9% reliable eCommerce tracking
Google introduce a new feature with Universal: a collections API that allows us to send calls on the server side instead of with JavaScript. This means that when a customer finishes a transaction, the plugin can immediately track it, instead of hoping the customer will reach the thank you page. The plugin can do this while still connecting the sale to the customers session. Because of that, your Google Analytics eCommerce tracking becomes almost 100% reliable. Almost, because there might be the odd occasion where your server errors in sending the request and we don’t want you suing us ;)
This new tracking method also means that when you refund a transaction, the transaction gets reversed in Google Analytics. This makes your Analytics data even more reliable and therefore much more useful.
This Google Analytics eCommerce tracking extension is the first premium extension specifically made for the new version 5 of our free Google Analytics plugin. From $49 for a single site, you can have the best e-commerce reports available.
Super simple installation
The plugin has no settings. You install, activate, enter your license key and activate the license so updates will flow in and you’re done:
WooCommerce bundle
As some of you might have noticed, this is our second WooCommerce offering; we also have our WooCommerce SEO plugin. We’ve bundled the two together in a new Yoast WooCommerce bundle for our most loyal users! If you use both our WordPress SEO plugin as well as our Google Analytics plugin this bundle will save you a lot of money.
. Let’s dive in and see what’s what!
As some of you might have noticed, this is our second WooCommerce offering; we also have our