As ecommerce brands gear up for the holidays, a top priority seems to be helping search engines understand the context of webpages.

With SEO planning for the holiday season already underway, schema usage seems to be a top priority for ecommerce brands that own the top-ranking keyword positions.

Compared to 2022, schema adoption has increased 4x, according to data from SEO enterprise platform BrightEdge.

Why we care. Ecommerce is often a bellwether, where SEO strategies, tactics and techniques change before other sectors. So it’s always interesting to watch and see what’s trending among the leading ecommerce brands and what they prioritize in their holiday strategies.

Trending schema types. This year’s big focus is on images and products. Three types of schema are trending among ecommerce brands:

• Image object
• Organization
• Offer

Last year, brands were more focused on articles and items.

Why the shift. There are at least two Google-related factors at play here:

• Helpful content update (HCU). We know a helpful content update is coming, but not when or how big of an impact it will have
• Search Generative Experience (SGE). We know SGE is Google’s vision for the future of search, but we don’t know whether SGE will be fully deployed to all users before, during or after the holiday season.

• “With SGE and HCU, providing proof of who you are and showing credibility through third-party confirmation is vital. Schema is becoming a necessity, not an option as shown by brands increasing usage. To stay ahead and succeed in AI-driven search, it is crucial for organizations to incorporate schema markup and focus on structuring the data on their websites,” said BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu.

Brands starting early in 2023. JCPenney is one brand that is starting earlier than ever.

• “We just kicked off our back-to-school season and all the optimization that goes with that, but we’re also scoping out what we want to do for the holidays by researching our competition and content gaps to put our site and pages in the best positions possible. Starting earlier and planning with our other teams puts us in a really good position to be ready to pivot and adjust as needed,” said Timothy Huneycutt, JCPenney’s SEO manager, digital operations.

About the data. The insights from BrightEdge are based on tracking 6,000 ecommerce keywords in 10 categories, which the company has been doing for the past four years.