Google looks to improve schema markup for Merchant Center

In recent years, I've felt like a lone wolf howling about the connections between structured data and Merchant Center. But now, in a recent Google Search Central podcast, this rings truer than ever.

The Google's Shopping team rep highlighted the importance of adding schema.org markup for Google Shopping.

They continue to share some great insights on Google's overall goal with regard to structured data:

We put a lot of effort to close the gap between schema.org and [Merchant Center] feed spec. We want to have one to one parity between the attributes, and we are working on closing that gap.

What does this mean exactly?

My crystal ball says that Google is looking to provide other viable options to get your products in front of customers without using a product feed.

Google began automatically pulling products from your online store into Google Merchant Center. Much of that information comes from the structured data on your site.

As a reminder, structured data is a way to give explicit clues to Google what that page is about. On product pages, structured data can help google understand the price, the currency, and if the product is in stock to name a few. Structured data tells them exactly what that important information is so they don't have to work as hard.

Over the coming weeks, months, and years, I expect Google to continue investing in adding more fields to structured data. All of these can then be used by Merchant Center for Google Shopping.

And believe me, I'm watching this like a hawk.

JSON-LD for SEO already provides many of the fields available in schema.org for Merchant Center. I'm actively working on new fields that are now available to you since the ProductGroup updates for variants. As new fields become available from schema.org and Google, we'll work on adding those as well.

It's important to note that there is not currently a 1 to 1 parity between structured data and the information required by Merchant Center. They are working on it though. Meaning, don't get rid of your product feed app... YET.

Over the last few years, I've seen significant interest from Google to expand the fields in structured data to align with Merchant Center. So this podcast is in line with what I've been seeing and expect to see from Google going forward.

Now we know for certain that Google will continue to invest in adding structured data. Making adding quality structured data to your site a top priority.

This is one of the most important things to keep in mind when evaluating your structured data. So many themes and apps claim to offer structured data for your store, but is it enough?

Structured data isn't a checkbox in an SEO audit. It's not about whether you have structured data or not. The quality of the structured data is what really matters.

If there are specific fields you need to add in the structured data, let me know. They may already be in the pipeline too.