Review website and Schema.org

Question

I'm rescripting a review website in which we review certain online services (for the sake of an example let's say antivirus subscriptions).

I'm struggling to find the right way to implement Schema.org markup for the single review pages.

Should I use the Schema.org Product type and nest my review details there? Or is the Product type meant for webshops offering the product itself?

Or should I use the Review type and state the item as itemReviewed?

Answer 1

If you are looking to do this the Google-approved way, here is Google's example for a review:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "http://schema.org/",
  "@type": "Review",
  "itemReviewed": {
    "@type": "Restaurant",
    "image": "http://www.example.com/seafood-restaurant.jpg",
    "name": "Legal Seafood",
    "servesCuisine": "Seafood",
    "telephone": "1234567",
    "address" :{
      "@type": "PostalAddress",
      "streetAddress": "123 William St",
      "addressLocality": "New York",
      "addressRegion": "NY",
      "postalCode": "10038",
      "addressCountry": "US"
    }
  },
  "reviewRating": {
    "@type": "Rating",
    "ratingValue": "4"
  },
  "name": "A good seafood place.",
  "author": {
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "Bob Smith"
  },
  "reviewBody": "The seafood is great.",
  "publisher": {
    "@type": "Organization",
    "name": "Washington Times"
  }
}
</script>

Source: Review Snippet - Google Developers

As you can see, they use the itemReviewed property to describe the item that they are reviewing. If you are reviewing an antivirus subscription, to borrow your example, you will probably want to use the Service type for your itemReviewed. If you want the structured data to really be complete for semantic web crawlers, make sure to fill in the url field with the service's official website, and the sameAs field with their Wikipedia and Wikidata pages, if they exist.