Banksalad's SEO Optimization Case Study for Financial Shopping Service: Implementing JSON-LD and Rich Snippets

Banksalad Web Frontend Engineer Kim Hee-chan introduced the SEO optimization process for the 'Financial Shopping' web service, which provides financial product information based on MyData. Given the nature of a web service exposed to all users, the key was defining and applying structured data so that search engines could accurately understand the site's information.

Approach to Applying Structured Data

For search engine optimization, the team used the FinancialProduct type from schema.org to process information on financial products such as cards, loans, and deposits. They adopted JSON-LD, the format recommended by both Naver and Google, as the default, and excluded Microdata based on the existing HTML spec since it is not recommended by Google. They used validator.schema.org as a validation tool to check code validity.

Rich Snippet Exposure Issue and Resolution

The team attempted to generate rich snippets by converting actual user cases of financial products into structured data of the FAQ type. Initially, this displayed correctly in Google's Rich Results Test, but after production deployment, the issue arose that it was not showing up on Google.

The cause was a violation of Google's guideline clause stating that 'all FAQ content must be visible to users on the source page.' The Google bot judged this as a mismatch because the question content displayed on the page did not match the question content in the structured data. To resolve this, they modified the question and answer text in the structured data to completely match the actual text displayed on the page.

Final Results and Implications

After the fix, when indexing was requested through Google Search Console and Naver Search Advisor, rich snippets were successfully displayed on both Google and Naver. They also confirmed that, besides FAQ, the Featured Snippets feature—which displays content at the top of search results based solely on content—could also be leveraged. This case demonstrates how important the accuracy of structured data and its consistency with page content is for search engine optimization.