Shopify Structured Data: Improved organic traffic that converts, without chasing rankings

Every Shopify store wants more revenue and profit. For many stores that means more traffic at the top of their funnel.

Organic search engine traffic is great because it’s free, but the time required to build it up can be pretty intense. Since every one of your competitors is fighting for the same traffic and rankings, it’s a zero-sum game.

In order for you to win more traffic, your competitor has to lose.

This quickly veers into the huge landscape of SEO. Where PageRank, backlinks, and complicated schemes are the norm.

More traffic, same rankings

For ecommerce stores, there’s a better way though. A way to get more traffic with the search engine rankings you already have.

One that works in tandem with anything else you do for SEO.

It’s also a one-time activity that you set up once and then only takes minimal upkeep.

Sounds like some SEO secret that you’d need to buy some info product to get right?

Nope, none of that here. It’s actually a Google thing and something they want you to use.

Rich Snippets / Rich Results

I’m talking about Google’s Rich Results program (aka Rich Snippets).

These are search enhancements that Google adds to your store’s search results to show additional data about each page.

You’ve actually already seen them before but you might not have realized that’s what they were called.

For Shopify stores, the primary goal is to get Product Rich Results so your product data appear directly in the search results. A secondary goal is to get article Rich Results for your blog articles and pages.

Rich Results examples

Here’s an example of a search result for "alpine spice scented soy candle".

This first one from Pure Placid is a fantastic example of Rich Results. Not only do we see price, but we see a price range, the product availability, reviews, delivery costs and return window! Notice how eye-catching those orange rating stars are.

The second and fourth results from Amazon and Etsy are plain ol' normal results. Nothing fancy or special here.

The third result from eBay shows a common Rich Result that I see on most stores. The price, product availability, delivery costs and return window. Though reviews are eye catching, not every store has reviews and that's fine. We can still see how much better this result stands out over the other plain ones.

Think about your customers buying habits and what they might do with these results.

Knowing my own habits, if I saw these search results, I'd likely click on Pure Placid over Amazon. Especially because I try to shop smaller stores rather than Amazon any day.

Unfortunately for them, the Amazon and Etsy results likely wouldn't get a click. Even if they had higher rankings, when comparing them to these competitors their listing looks pretty sad.

This goes to show, with the right Rich Results your store can beat out the likes of Amazon.

Benefits of Rich Results

I covered a lot of the benefits in the deconstruction of the examples above but I’d like to spell out the two important ones here.

1. More visual weight

First off, you get more visual weight to your search listings. Comparing a regular listing to one with all of the extra data means that you could increase the size of your product’s page in the search results.

Especially if you are able to get product reviews into the listing. Those orange stars really stand out on Google’s search pages.

2. Better quality traffic that converts

Second, with Rich Results you’re going to get better quality traffic. Instead of fly-by window shoppers, you’re going to get more wallet-out “just show me your add to cart button please” customers.

As you can see in the examples, someone is able to check the stock, price compare, and do a basic store evaluation all from the search results.

That means your traffic is coming primed to buy which will drive up your conversion rate.

The process to get Rich Results

Getting Rich Results is a pretty simple process but it does require a lot of patience. Google is known to take its time adding any sort of search enhancement so it’s a “hurry up and wait” situation.

• Add structured data to your store to describe what’s on each page.
• Google will recognize the structured data during its crawls.
• Google will analyze the data and if they like what they see, they'll award Rich Results to your page.

Primer on Structured Data

The first thing you need to do, and really the only thing you have to do, is to add structured data to your store.

Structured Data is a term that encompasses a huge body of information so it’s easy to go off into the deep end with it. I’m going to describe the minimum you may find helpful in order to get started, focusing on what Google needs.

Structured data format

The format of the structured data is how it’s assembled. There are three main formats of structured data:

• Microdata
• JSON-LD
• RDFa

They all can work but really I see microdata and JSON-LD used the most with Shopify stores. Google recommends using JSON-LD since it's vastly easier to work with. As such, most Shopify themes have moved away from microdata to JSON-LD but I do see some microdata on occasion.

Data vocabulary

In the past, we've had a few different vocabularies to use. However in the last few years, Schema.org is the last man standing.

If your data is using a data vocabulary other than Schema.org, it's outdated and no longer supported by search engines.

Data Types

Finally, there are the types of data your store needs. These describe what things are on your site and for ecommerce sites there are five that you want to have:

• ProductGroup and Product to describe your products and their variants.
• Offer to describe how you’re selling or offering your products (e.g. price, options).
• AggregateRating to summarize a product’s rating and reviews if you have product reviews.
• Organization to describe your business.
• WebSite to tell Google how you want your business name to show up in search results.

There's more, but that's the quick list of the most important ones

My recommendations

Put all that together and you want to use:

• JSON-LD
• using Schema.org
• with at least those five sets of data

Existing structured data

Your store might have some structured data in place already. For example, all Shopify themes offered in the Shopify Theme Store are required to have some structured data.

Unfortunately, most of the time the structured data that comes with Shopify themes are lacking. Shopify only requires that structured data is included, they aren't vetting if that data is high quality or even current. 

The problem is that structured data isn’t very well known among web developers and designers. I’ve worked on websites professionally for over ten years before I actually learned about how to use structured data properly.

Testing your store’s structured data

Luckily there are two tools you can use to test your structured data, both of which are from Google called the Schema Markup Validator or the Rich Results Testing Tool. 

Using either of these tools, you can put in different URLs for your store and see a list of the structured data that is discoverable by search engines.

You’ll want to test a few pages: your homepage and a couple of product pages. Use this guide to walk you through testing the structured data on your pages. 

You can also test competitor pages which can be especially useful to figure out how they got their own Rich Results.

Setting up structured data

If your store doesn’t have any structured data or something is wrong with it, you have a few options.

DIY approach

You could go the DIY route and update your store’s structured data yourself, filling in the missing pieces, and correcting errors.

It’s not terribly difficult if you have a moderate level of web development experience - though I know that's not the case with many of my customers. With some research into structured data and Google’s documentation, it could be done.

I'd estimate around 5 hours of research to learn about structured data and be able to add it to a store for an experienced developer.

Depending on your store theme, the actual time needed to perform the updates can vary wildly. I'd estimate another few hours to update data across the entire store.

So you’re looking at about 10 hours or so of work to add them yourself, assuming you’re at a moderate level of experience in development.

Depending on your situation, this might not be the best use of your time though.

Hire a general web developer

Alternatively, you could hire a general web developer to do the updates for you. Same basic idea as the DIY version just you wouldn’t have to edit things yourself.

This is a great option if you have someone on staff or an agency on retainer.

Apps and Services

Structured data is interesting. Unlike visual design, it’s very structured (pun intended). This means companies are able to standardize the process and make it really easy to systematize and automate.

Remember how the DIY method required a few hours to learn about structured data and how it works?

With structured data apps or consultants, you can take advantage of the company or software already doing that research and just knowing what to do. Then it’s just a process of implementation.

I’ve seen consultants who specialize in structured data as well as apps like my JSON-LD for SEO that go a step further and completely automate it. This frees you up to focus on other areas of your business.

Where you need structured data

You’ll want to add structured data on every page of your store that you want Google to enhance with Rich Results. 

In Shopify, I'd expect to see the appropriate types of data on your homepage, products, collections, blog posts and pages.

Keep in mind that not all pages can qualify for every Rich Result. The markup must meet Google's guidelines and it must be related to the content on the page. Meaning you can't add Product markup to the Blog Post that has nothing to do with a product nor the ability to purchase the product.

Ongoing maintenance

The final thing to do after you have your structured data set up on your store is to schedule a time to regularly review it.

Like I mentioned above, many web designers and developers don’t know about structured data.

Google frequently updates their guidelines and if it's been a while since someone's looked at the code, there’s a strong chance of it becoming outdated or invalid. 

That's the biggest benefit of using an app for your structured data. App's like JSON-LD for SEO eat, sleep and drink structured data. We're always watching what's coming down the pipe and often know about potential updates before the general public. Letting an app maintain your data and keep your data up to snuff is one less thing for you to worry about. 

Google can be pretty quick about removing your Rich Results when your structured data breaks. One customer lost her Rich Results in a week after a redesign. Luckily she caught it and was able to fix them and recover fairly quickly.

Summary

This guide has been a walk-through of how you can start to get more organic search traffic by using Google’s Rich Results and structured data.

It’s an easy process to go through and could increase the quantity and quality of your search traffic with a bit of upfront work.