Testing Structured Data Product 'Availability' & Its Effect On Organic Rankings
Alexander Hatala
Marketing Technology & Digital Strategy Consultant | Martech, Analytics, AI & Paid Media | Helping Businesses Scale with Data & Automation
I want to share a few experiments recently regarding product schema markup on a larger eCommerce storefront. This store has several thousand products and moves volume quickly, causing products to be in stock/out of stock every other week or month (you can see spikes and dips in my image for a specific product).
We capture SMS/email in-stock notifications for out-of-stock products, so we'd like to maintain our ranking year-round. If a product schema 'ItemAvailability' is in stock, we are?#1?in organic ranks- almost guaranteed. If the product is 'SoldOut', we usually drop to rank 7-12. I've tested different schema types, including:
The result was nearly the exact same as 'SoldOut' value- no rank increases. A few things I did notice, though:
The conclusion/AKA the most obvious: Put more effort into ranking child/parent category pages rather than the product itself. This can be difficult because Google favors a product page for specific queries, but it's worth the extra effort.
An internal tool we've developed has been beneficial in tracking our organic rankings for each product page and its stock status. This data lets us know if there's an SEO issue rather than an out-of-stock issue. I have yet to see a similar feature on other industry-standard tools (something for Ahrefs or SEMRUSH to think about).
I've had much success with the somewhat debated topic of adding schema on category pages (with ItemList), but that's a topic for another day.
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2 年Very interested in seeing more in-depth details on your process. Good info!
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2 年I have to admit, that I haven't considered optimizing category pages for stock levels - but it makes a bit of sense. My main reason for optimizing them is for ambiguity or broadness of search terms.
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2 年For product category pages, which schema do you use ? ProductGroup or ItemList?
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2 年So it's safe to say Google will always drop the rank of a product that has Outofstock schema?