Customer question: what is Schema and Schema.org and do they matter to my Shopify store?

By Ilana Davis

A couple of times per week I’m asked about different structured data terms. There’s so much jargon out there around it that it can be confusing for anyone to remember it all.

Even I get confused now and then, and I work with it everyday.

One question has to do with Schema and Schema.org, which a recent customer phrased very nicely.

Does this service include Schema and/or structured data implementation?

Schema and structured data are different things, though they are related.

Structured data is a way of marking up data so it can be easily found and analyzed by search engines. It’s more of a description of something than an actual thing.

Schema is what’s called a data vocabulary that describes what each type of data that can be included inside of your structured data.

Schema would describe that a Product has a name, color, sku, etc. Or that a business has a name, telephone, address, etc.

Schema.org is a website that describes all of the different types of data available in Schema.

All of this is organized by the W3C group, the people who help define how the internet works, along with representatives from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other search engines.

So whenever you see Schema or Schema.org mentioned, people are referring to the different types of structured data.

Schema is the recommend vocabulary for Google. In fact, Google dropped support for older data vocabularies in favor of Schema.

If you’re not sure if your Shopify store is using Schema or if it even has structured data at all, you might want to consider installing JSON-LD for SEO.

In about two minutes it will automatically add Schema based structured data to every page in your Shopify store. You can signup for it at the Shopify App Store or with the link below.

JSON-LD for SEO

Get more organic search traffic from Google without having to fight for better rankings by utilizing search enhancements called Rich Results.