The difficulty of getting Google to add Rich Snippets for your Shopify store

By Ilana Davis

Getting your Shopify products into Google’s Rich Results and Rich Snippets programs can be difficult and complicated.

If you spend a bit of time searching online you’ll find a few places where people share the code that is "supposed" to work.

Just a cut and paste job, right?

Not quite.

That’s why forums have dozens of posts of people trying to figure it out, going back years and years. Nevermind the fact that code that’s even six months old could be out of date by now as Google regularly updates their guidelines, rules, and data they require.

Adding a bit of code to include structured data sounds simple but even a minor error can prevent your products from showing up at all. Something as simple as a extra dollar sign in your price will break your chances at Rich Snippets, same for adding a field in the wrong place or moving your theme’s HTML code around.

I know this because I’ve seen thousands of stores with broken markup from leading Shopify themes and even popular Shopify SEO apps. There are countless stories of Shopify stores waiting years to get Rich Snippets but never seeing them show up. If only they knew bad code was blocking them.

Luckily Google’s Search Console is getting better at detecting this and notifying store owners but even Search Console has bugs and will often make harmful recommendations (like the infamous review field warning).

Then there’s also the risk of completely screwing up your theme.

You can probably guess what types of horror stories happen where someone tries to edit their store’s theme, makes a mistake, which ruins the look of their store, causes sales to plummet, and then they have to quickly find a Shopify Expert to repair the theme — usually at an emergency rate with a steep markup.

That sucks, right?

Even then, the Shopify Expert can usually only get them back to normal. Very few will add in the structured data to get Rich Results. Many end up just recommending my Shopify app because it’ll produce the best quality data, consistent results, and the developer doesn’t need to be hired every few months to update the data for Google.

Messing around with the Structured Data required to to get your products into the search results is hard. With risks ranging from multiple month delays all the way to screwing up your store, you can see why the DIY copy-and-paste-from-the-Internet is probably not a good idea.

A question you should be asking yourself now is: with all these risks, why should I bother with Rich Snippets at all?

Traffic and conversions. That’s why.

Those two things should be enough of a reason to deal with Rich Snippets and Rich Results.

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