Can Structured Data Really Improve SEO Rankings?

It's already been said time and time again that Rich Results and structured data do not help rankings. Structured data is more about making your results look more appealing. You can't add structured data and expect your URLs to magically shoot up the search engine ranks.

Rankings can be impacted by a lot of things, mostly the content on your or your competitors page.

This got me thinking... What if a Shopify store had no content and was so badly designed that search engines couldn't find anything on the site worth ranking?

We're talking the types of websites that make people think the 90s are back (and not in the good way).

In that case, the structured data could potentially help search engines find what the heck the pages were about. That steaming mess right there? Oh that's a product page. That hoarder's pile of HTML in that corner? A collection page.

Given time, as the search engines probe the unknown depths that is that store, they would start to discover all its nooks and crannies. The particularly useful nooks could even start to show up in the search results.

Boom. Rankings improved due to structured data.

Now this thought experiment might not ever happen in reality.

Who knows how shitty "challenged" of a website you'd need before you notice a ranking improvement by simply adding structured data. I feel like you'd have to try really hard to make such a mess of things to be that broken. This feels like such a stretch to me.

And I'd wager that most Shopify stores with current themes can't be that much of a hot mess... right?

Let's pretend your store is THAT bad and it hasn't been updated in well over a decade. You'd be better off getting a new Shopify theme and building out content. A free theme is perfectly acceptable. You'll likely see a boost in rankings just from having a well-organized theme - though it may take some time for that to happen. Use caution and minimize changes that can impact SEO unless you want/need a complete overhaul.

At the end of the day, search engines are trying to discover content and share the best answers to a searchers question.

If structured data helps search engines find and understand your content, it'll help their algorithms work better. Help them, help you. Whether that's through search enhancements, better visibility, or even rankings.