What is JSON+LD?
JSON+LD is short for "Javascript Object Notation Linked Data". JSON is a notation for exchanging information between computers. Many different formats can be used when a computer needs to provide information to another computer, and JSON is becoming one of the most widely used in the web world.
LD stands for "Linked data" - a kind of "linked data". Together it becomes JSON+LD and you can rightly ask "why is this relevant for a webshop?"
It's of interest to webshop owners because we want to let Google and other services know what we have on the site. For example, it's nice for you that Google knows something like:
- Are your items in stock
- How much the item costs
- How many reviews the item has received
- Is it a new or used item
- And much more...
This kind of information is usually pretty easy for a human to find - especially if your site is well designed. But a computer doesn't know that a green dot means the item is in stock.
That's why they came up with a common language that all search engines could recognize and called it structured data. They agreed on a way to mark your information and then Google could register it and choose to use that data.
Along the way, there were different ways of structuring this data and in recent years we've come to the conclusion that JSON+LD is the most appropriate way to do it.
Example of JSON+LD for a product
You might also want to see an example of what JSON+LD looks like. Here you can see an example of what it might look like for a product.
<script type="application/ld+json"> { "@context": "http://schema.org/", "@type": "Product", "name": "Awesome product", "url": "https://www.dinwebshop.dk/awesome-product", "image": "https://www.dinwebshop.dk/images/myproduct.webp", "description": "Here is a product description", "sku": "667455568", "brand": { "@type": "Thing" , "name": "Awesomebrand" }, "offers": { "@type": "Offer", "priceCurrency": "DKK", "price": "379.00", "itemCondition": "NewCondition", "priceValidUntil": "2022-02-18", "url": "https://www.dinwebshop.dk/awesome-product", "availability": "InStock" } } } </script>As you can see above, it is also human readable and Google (and other crawlers - e.g. also price robots) can read it.
Resources
We know online marketing in Shoporama
We've been working with online marketing ourselves for decades. As the only shop system in the country, we have spoken multiple times at conferences such as Marketingcamp, SEOday, Shopcamp, Digital Marketing, E-commerce Manager, Ecommerce Day, Web Analytics Wednesday and many more.