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Before you can add Structured Data to your Shopify store, you’re confronted with several decisions. The one which will have the largest cost impact is:

Which format should you use? Microdata? RDFa? JSON-LD?

Both microdata and RDFa require you to add your structured data directly on your HTML elements.

This means that the HTML element for your product price needs to have the price microdata added. It also means that some parent element needs to set the datatype to product.

While this is a perfectly valid way of working, it makes your structured data very brittle and easy to break.

Any change to your theme that adds, removes, or moves around your content has the potential of changing your structured data so that it’s no longer valid. Even apps pose a risk to your microdata if they modify your theme.

(I’m looking at you, automatic currency apps…)

Invalid structured data = search engines aren’t going to like you.

An alternative to microdata and RDFa is JSON-LD.

Instead of having to add the structured data markup to the HTML elements, JSON-LD can be added to a page with a single block of data that contains all of the structured data needed for the page.

This keeps the data more organized, less prone to breaking as your theme changes, and also easier to update and maintain over the long-term.

That’s why I’m starting to recommend that every store uses JSON-LD for SEO. Some stores, maybe even your store, might have good structured data in place now but unless you’re careful with your theme, there’s a risk of breaking non-JSON-LD formats later.

I’m frequently asked what are Rich Snippets, Rich Cards, and what the hell structured data even means.

Here’s a short primer on everything about it, and why this matters for your Shopify store.

Structured data is a way of marking up data so it can be easily found and analyzed by search engines.

JSON-LD is a format of structured data that uses the JSON format.

Microdata/microformats are another format of structured data that typically is added inside of a theme’s HTML.

Rich Snippets are Google’s product and are used to enhance a site’s organic search results. A site is required to have structured data to get Rich Snippets (e.g. JSON-LD or microdata).

Rich Cards are a variety of Rich Snippets that appear on the top of the search results in a carousal. They are only used for Recipes and Videos right now, usually on mobile. Since Rich Cards are a version of Rich Snippets, they also require structured data.

Here’s another comparison of Rich Snippets and Rich Cards by Google. The screenshot there is a very good overview.

My JSON-LD for SEO app adds JSON-LD structured data to every page in your Shopify store. It includes products, business information, and the articles.

Once it’s installed and Google finds that data on your store, Google may enroll you in Rich Snippets. They also may enroll you in Rich Cards if you have those types of pages (Recipes, Videos). No one except Google has control over which sites get Rich Snippets/Cards but having structured data is the first step.

Hope this helps you understand what Rich Snippets are and how they work. There’s a whole bunch of technical details behind all of this but this is a good summary of it all.

The app adds a bit of code (liquid) that pulls the data from the Shopify database directly and formats it into JSON-LD.

With so many integrations, which product reviews app should you choose? I have a list of the review apps that JSON-LD for SEO integrates with, anyone of them will work.

JSON-LD for SEO adds a handful of fields for every product in your store. Most of which are dynamic. Here’s a list of what might be added.

JSON-LD for SEO adds a snippet to the Shopify theme which will auto-detect and markup a few types of content (Organization, Website, Product, Article).

Having added integrations for Stamped.io and Shopify Product Reviews, I’ve decided to keep up the momentum by adding an integration with Orankl to JSON-LD for SEO.

Automatic product reviews integration

Now if you’re using Orankl for your product reviews, JSON-LD for SEO can automatically export them and add them reviews to your Shopify store’s Structured Data.

This integration is automatic once you’ve installed Orankl and JSON-LD for SEO.

Just install JSON-LD for SEO and it will start to export the reviews into Structured Data. Then the next time Google crawls your store, they’ll detect them and can start the Rich Snippet analysis process.

Learn what's needed for Shopify SEO including page content, hidden content, Rich Results, internal links, backlinks, and more.

As part of JSON-LD for SEO I review the structured data from a lot of themes.

Many themes have poorly designed structured data which results in Google ignoring it completely, which prevents the store from ever getting Rich Snippets.

The number #1 problem I see?

Product prices formatted incorrectly.

Product prices are such a key data item that even if the theme does everything else correctly, the store is still at a disadvantage.

Showing your product prices in structured data is easy too. All you need is a price attribute with the decimal price and a priceCurrency attribute with the currency name.

That’s it.

The problem is that many themes either don’t list the price at all which is an error or they try to combine the price and currency which results in a warning.

An error will mean you don’t get any product rich snippets.

A warning means that Google might try to fix it for you and give you rich snippets. But since that’s the wrong format, they could change their mind at any time and remove your rich snippets.

To see if you’re store is affected, run your store thorough Googles Structured Data Testing Tool and see if your product are showing up with prices.

If you want to ensure your structured data is complete and error-free, JSON-LD for SEO is my Shopify app that creates and exports your structured data automatically. It’s an easy way to handle any broken theme structured data by adding a well-formatted JSON-LD set of structured data.

Now JSON-LD for SEO will automatically find, extract, and format the review data from Shopify into the JSON-LD structured data format needed to get Rich Snippets in Google.

Product reviews and the Rich Snippets that come with them are one of the most powerful Rich Snippets you can get for your Shopify store.

To further expand JSON-LD for SEO’s usefulness, I’ve added support for Stamped.io product reviews to JSON-LD for SEO’s product snippet.

This integration is automatic once you’ve installed Stamped.io’s Product Reviews Addon and JSON-LD for SEO.

All you need is a paid Stamped.io account, JSON-LD for SEO, and some product reviews.

Just import your product reviews into Stamped.io and JSON-LD for SEO will start to show them immediately to Google.

JSON-LD for SEO integrates with various reviews apps in order to pull out your product reviews and format them for Google.

After installing JSON-LD for SEO and checking your product pages in Google’s Structured Data Testing tool, you may see results returned for multiple products, like this:

The most likely cause of this is that your theme’s page markup contains existing structured data markup in the form of Microdata.

Don’t worry if you see this.

In almost all cases, Google is able to recognize that the two sets of structured data are related to the same product. They will simply use the most correct and complete version of the product in their data analysis and ignore the others. If there are inconsistencies in the product data or something else is wrong, you’ll receive a warning about it in Google Search Console.

One of the big advantages of JSON-LD for SEO is that is can provide structured information to Google about your brand or company.

Google may choose to display your brand's search results with a Sitelinks Searchbox indicating how customers can perform a search on your site.

This article is for the legacy version of JSON-LD for SEO only. There are no theme changes to Shopify stores who installed JSON-LD for SEO as of January 2022 or who has migrated to the App Embed version of the app. The App Embed version of JSON-LD for SEO does not alter your theme code in any way.

JSON-LD for SEO installs a single snippet called json-ld-for-seo.liquid into your theme’s snippets directory. It also adds a single line of code including this snippet into the bottom your theme.liquid layout.

The snippet renders the appropriate type of JSON-LD markup for the page, whether you’re on a regular content page, product page, article page, or any other Shopify page.

I do not recommend making changes to json-ld-for-seo.liquid. This is because as new JSON-LD features become available, they are automatically added to your store so that you can benefit from them without having to manually do anything. This means that any changes you make to json-ld-for-seo.liquid will be lost.

If you or your developer do have the need for some custom JSON-LD, get in contact with me to let me know what you need. If the change you’re after is something that could benefit all users of the app, I’d be happy to build it in to the app itself. I’ve done this for many customers already to the benefit of everyone.

Uninstalling JSON-LD for SEO

If for some reason you’d like to uninstall JSON-LD for SEO and remove it’s snippet, you just need to do the following.

1. Remove the snippet from your theme’s layout

Open your layout/theme.liquid file and look near the bottom for a comment saying This line added automatically by JSON-LD for SEO. Remove that comment and the {% include 'jsonld-for-seo' %} that follows it.

Removing that will no longer load the snippet of code from the app.

2. (optionally) Delete the snippet file

To completely purge JSON-LD for SEO, you can also remove the snippet file itself. It’s located in snippets/json-ld-for-seo.liquid.

Rich Cards are a feature offered by Google, building on the success of Rich Snippets.

The advantage of JSON-LD for SEO is that it will not only provide the same sort of information, but additional info about your store that allows Google to include your store in the Google Knowledge Graph.

Google takes your structured data, combines it with what they find on the product page, and decides which pieces of information to include in your rich snippets.

I recently got to see the impact of structured data on sales. Or rather, the negative impact when structured data goes wrong.

The Shopify App Store includes reviews for each app and it adds those reviews along with the structured data to each page.

This is what let Shopify apps appear in the Google search results with the orange rating stars and number of reviews.

Recently Shopify updated how reviews are shown for each app. As a consequence of this update, there are now errors in the structured data which means that apps are no longer showing their reviews in the search results.

So searching for one of my apps looks like this.

Rather plain right?

At first I thought this was something minor that Shopify would fix, but then I checked the number of installs via organic search from before vs. now.

Installs (purchases) are down 58% from before the change.

Nothing else changed on the page. In fact, things should be better because I’ve started to market the app and collect even more reviews.

Let’s take this back to your store.

Imagine losing 58% of your sales from your organic SEO. That’s the impact (improper) structured data can have.

Or if you don’t have structured data at all, that’s traffic and sales you could be missing out on.

If you want an automatic structured data installer, JSON-LD for SEO might be able help you out.

(And if you install JSON-LD for SEO, you’ll help prop up my weakened organic SEO)

The standard answer is to do SEO and build more links. Then you’ll rank higher and get more traffic. That’s a great strategy but not all search results are created the same.

An easy way to find only your website in search results is to use Google’s site scope with your store URL. Use this exact query needed to find all your product pages.

This guide will walk you though testing your structured data. Make sure to read it all the way through including the testing tips at the end.

How long until my store’s rich snippets show up in Google? Most are hoping for a simple answer like "a few days" or "72 hours" but it’s not that simple.