Google updates structured data to enhance brand knowledge panels, potentially boosting merchant traffic and sales.
Google has updated its structured data guidelines to support a sitewide return policy within the Organization’s structured data. This change eliminates the need to include redundant return policy information in every product listing, potentially increasing traffic and sales for online merchants.
Merchants are not required to change their current structured data, as the old method remains unchanged. This update provides a streamlined alternative that reduces the size of product structured data.
Improvement To Brand Knowledge Panel
Google’s change to the organization’s structured data will be reflected in the brand panel that appears when someone searches for a brand name. The updated brand panel will feature a new entry highlighting the company’s return policy. This eliminates the need to add redundant return policy information for every product listing structured data and can result in more traffic and sales for online merchants.
Merchants are not required to change their current structured data, as the old method remains unchanged. This update offers a more streamlined alternative, reducing the size of product structured data.
Benefits Of Organization-Level Return Policy
As part of this change, Google enhances search features in Knowledge Panels and Brand Panels to display a merchant’s return policies. This means a merchant’s return policy will be visible in search results, potentially increasing clickthrough rates from the SERPs and boosting conversion rates. Research conducted by the ICSC in 2024 shows that a merchant’s return policy significantly influences online shoppers.
They discovered:
“82% of respondents said that when shopping online, return policies influence whether they purchase from a retailer.
If retailers charged a fee to ship back online purchases, nearly three-fourths (71%) of respondents said they’d likely stop shopping online from that company altogether. In contrast, 6 in 10 said they’d likely stop shopping online with retailers that shortened the free return window.”
A return policy can drive more online sales, and Google’s new support for sitewide return policy structured data helps communicate this information directly to online shoppers from search. Google’s announcement explained:
“A return policy is a significant factor considered by shoppers when buying products online, and so last year, we enabled the extraction of structured data return policies for individual products. Today, we’re adding support for return policies at the organizational level, which means you’ll be able to specify a general return policy for your business instead of having to define one for each product you sell.
Adding a return policy to your organization’s structured data is especially important if you don’t have a Merchant Center account and want to provide a return policy for your business. Merchant Center already lets you provide a return policy for your business, so if you have a Merchant Center account, we recommend defining your return policy there instead.
If your site is an online or local business, we recommend using one of the OnlineStore or LocalBusiness subtypes of Organization.
We hope this addition makes it easier for you to add return policies for your business and enable them to be shown across Google shopping experiences.”
Google Updates Organization Structured Data Documentation
Google has added a new section to their Organization’s structured data documentation to support a new way of displaying return policies in search results.
The new documentation states:
“MerchantReturnPolicy Use the following properties to describe general return policies for your entire Organization, if applicable to your business. If you have specific policies for individual products, use merchant listing markup instead.”
This update allows merchants to streamline their return policy information, making managing and improving visibility and appeal in search results more accessible.
If you still need help, check out our monthly SEO packages and let the experts help you.
