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~ Lorna Leaver ~

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WHY SEARCH ENGINES PREFER STRUCTURED DATA

Hands up - who has an Amazon Alexa or a Google Home device? I have a feeling that I might be seeing a lot of
raised hands right now. Hands up - who has bought something using said device?
I reckon there are still quite a lot of raised hands here, too.

n 2019, eMarketer said: “We expect 31 million people While the early days of e-commerce touted SEO as the
in the US will shop via a smart speaker this year, up equivalent of a solid marketing campaign; the reality is that
I31.6 per cent from 2018. (According to our definition, this is now a profit-generating venture, and organic search can
shopping includes browsing, researching products and often be hijacked by sneaky algorithm hacks or those with the
adding things to a shopping cart.) By 2021, this figure deepest pockets.
will climb to 38 million as more than four in ten US smart
speaker users look to these devices for their shopping GS1 looks to develop industry-wide standards to make doing
capabilities.” business easier for everyone, and nowhere are standards
needed more than the wild west of the internet.
Already, we can see that there are a lot of people out there
doing just that. Enter GS1 Web Vocabulary…
Previously known as GS1 Smart Search, GS1 Web
How does the device choose which item to tell you about, Vocabulary provides a simple, logical, and inexpensive
though? When there is no screen to give you multiple method of ensuring shoppers find your product when they are
options? searching. Not what the highest bidder wants them to see.

With data! It was the first approved extension of schema.org to build on
The device needs to have enough data about the product to product-based attributes. Launched in 2016, Web Vocabulary
understand, firstly, that it is the product that it thinks it is, is actively looked for by the search engine bots that scrape
and secondly, that it matches what the person is searching for. your website pages.
Ideally, it also needs to be in a machine-readable format too,
which is different from how humans read web pages.

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