Impatience won't help your Shopify store's SEO

One common question I get from new JSON-LD for SEO customers is,

How long until my store’s rich snippets show up in Google?

They want to hear a simple answer like "a few days" or "72 hours" but it’s not that simple.

Like anything worth doing, it can take a long time.

SEO has the distinction of being scammy and full of tricks and hacks.

This has made search engines very aggressive at combating it. One very clever thing Google has done with their rich snippets is to put in significant and random delays.

You can’t just add structured data to your site and think that it’ll be updated in the search results in the next day.

No. Google isn’t that stupid.

What they’ve done is created this clever system with rich snippets where over 11+ weeks you get them, you lose them, a few pages have them, oh no they disappeared again… all the way to finally getting them.

It’s interesting because it rewards the long term sites. If your site is around for 3 months then you’re probably not trying to game the system.

This weeds out the bad quality.

The problem is that it also leads to a lot of questions and knowledge I have to share with store owners. It makes support difficult but I’m always happy to help stores start to think long-term.

If you’re Shopify store doesn’t have rich snippets yet, you’ll want to install JSON-LD for SEO now. It’s a quick process, though you’ll have to then wait awhile for Google to finish their dance.

But you’re in this for the long-term, right?