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The deadly side of a hero image is when the store owner or marketer focuses on their own needs and not their visitor.

As of October 2020, the average Shopify conversion rate was 1.83%. This expectation that we must get at least a 3% conversion rate is misleading.

That's 148 different tweaks or changes we could do to your store. These tweaks or changes can improve web accessibility, SEO, customer experience, and more.

Baymard, the most respected UX research company, recently published findings on size selections. Their findings shed some light on why the use of buttons is always the better option.

The alt text is an alternative for the image and is used to describe what is happening in the image. A great alt text may look something like this:

You are showing a customer something they want and before they click, the banner rotates away. You may as say "Oh did you like this? Too bad!"

In the moments of valleys, it's even more important to come up with new ways to drive traffic to your Shopify store.

You're missing a golden opportunity. These pages are driving traffic to your store. To Google, these are the most important pages at that moment.

Likely one of two things will happen the day people open their gifts for the holidays. Either way, I've got a quick, easy win for you.

Asking for help at the right time means you fully understand your customers and the questions they have about your products.

Ignoring other celebrations, could leave you with missed opportunities and missed revenue. It's high time we celebrate our differences instead of assuming everyone is just like us.

Buying from small businesses doesn't just add more money to their pockets or pay the salaries of their employees. This was how parents put food on the table, pay for summer camps, jerseys, equipment, and so much more.

Preparation for Black Friday, Cyber Monday isn't just about sales and marketing. Anyone who has gone through a few seasons knows there's more to do.

Pooh, when trying to come up with an idea will sit, one arm supporting the other as he taps his head saying "Think! Think! Think!"

When I visit websites and see font sizing as small as 12 or 13 pixels, it's clear to me that there is still confusion between points and pixels.

Many argue that dynamic checkout buttons hurt AOV which isn't wrong. The counter to that of course is that dynamic checkout buttons increase conversions.

A new JSON-LD for SEO customer was asking about any best practices to get the best Rich Results possible by Google.

The best practices I’ve seen are:

1. make sure your data is correct in Shopify. e.g. Products: title, price, inventory (if you use it). Pages/blog posts: title, author, image, excerpt, etc.
2. make sure your page has a lot of high quality content. Regular SEO-advice applies.
3. don’t change your urls (e.g. handles, domains, or collection urls if your theme has coded them into links (which they shouldn’t have))

Much of the rest is already handled by the app. It’s been optimized to pull out as much data as possible from Shopify and format it for Google’s liking.

If you don’t use JSON-LD for SEO yet, you’re at a disadvantage. Especially if your competitors are.

Unlike your Shopify theme and many other apps, JSON-LD for SEO’s results is constantly monitored and optimized to best fit Google’s guidelines. Even to now I still see stores using data that is years behind and hurting their SEO.

Ellipsis is Google’s way of saying they are generating the description for you and ignoring the actual SEO meta description

A JSON-LD for SEO customer asked yesterday about the future of JSON-LD which was rather timely given recent news with data-vocabulary:

Is there a chance the app could become redundant in the future? Or will Google be using JSON-LD for the foreseeable future?

No one can predict the future of Google but they have been integrating JSON-LD into more and more products over time.

It’s a big part of Search, Image Search, Ads/Merchant Center/Shopping, Search Console, Gmail, and probably others I’m forgetting.

That’s just Google. There’s also Bing, Yahoo, Facebook, Pinterest…

As of right now JSON-LD is Google’s recommended structured data format. It has been for a few years now.

One way to look at this is to see how they treated a prior structured data type.

Back in 2011 the data-vocabulary type was phased out of the search engines in favor of the Schema.org type. But Google still supported data-vocabulary until April 2020 when it’s going to actually be removed from Google. So it’s been a dead technology for 9 years before it stopped working in Google. Even if JSON-LD is replaced by a newer technology tomorrow, it’ll have a long life before it’s completely unsupported.

(And don’t forget how many Google products and initiatives end up getting cancelled or closed after they are tried for a bit)

But until that happens, JSON-LD for SEO is the safest, most effective, and fastest way to win Rich Results from Google. It’s helped thousands of stores acquire Rich Results since 2015 and there’s no sign of it stopping.

A JSON-LD for SEO customer was asking about Google Search Console the other day:

While your rich snippet data may be better than Shopify’s even on a good day, we’re still seeing more & more products being flagged in our search console as time goes on.

First you need to look at the trend graphs:

If you see just a slow growth, that’s Google crawling more of your products. Google will slowly find new pages as you publish them.

If you see spikes, that’s probably from a major change in your store or the Google algorithm. New apps, new themes, or changes to either can cause spikes.

For example, just last week one review app updated their structured data to comply with Google’s guidelines, but they missed a few fields and so now every store has 3 new warnings/errors all of a sudden.

But you need to be careful reading Search Console’s aggregate reports.

The problem is that Search Console reports on every piece of data BUT Google Search will use their smarts and evaluate the data they find and pick only one set that’s the best, ignoring the rest.

Just make sure to take any url Search Reports a problem with and double check it in Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool and look for one set of good data. You’ll probably find Search Console is reporting on data that Google Search would just ignore.

Would you like more organic search traffic from Google? With JSON-LD for SEO you can get more traffic, without having to fight for better rankings through the power of Rich Results.

Recently Google Image Search started showing the product availability in the Rich Results for image searches.

Recently Google updated the design of the search results on desktop. The big difference is that they are now showing the favicons, add a bit of branding and color to the search results.

As part of JSON-LD for SEO I’m privy to a lot of questionable SEO “advice”. Part of having happy customers is that they trust what I say and will forward me questionable advice other Shopify SEO apps and consultants give them.

Some of the advice is so bad that I get upset for the customer and all the other stores who’ve followed that bad advice and were harmed by it.

Other times the logic is so bad I can’t help but laugh and poke holes in it. Like this “claim”:

Having multiple copies of structured data will cause Google to read it as spam.

At first that sounds like some expert advice. Something that sounds similar to other advice from Google about content duplication and spam.

But here’s the catch…

Every single Shopify theme comes with structured data by default.

It’s limited.

It probably won’t get any results.

But it’s there.

It was actually required by Shopify a couple of years back and themes would be rejected from the Theme Store if they didn’t have any structured data.

So when this Shopify SEO app is installed and adds their own structured data… by their own claim, they are causing every Shopify store to be considered as spam.

Whoops. face-palm.gif

If a Vulcan read that, they’d conclude either:

1. their SEO app is causing spam and is harmful to install or
2. their claim about duplicate copies of structured data is false

Now if that SEO app did their research like I did years ago, they’d see that Google doesn’t care about multiple sets of structured data at all. All they want is one good set to use and they ignore the rest.

I’ve personally looked at thousands of Shopify stores as part of the by-hand monitoring in JSON-LD for SEO Plus+. I’ve seen nearly every one of stores accumulate Rich Results that have a several sets of duplicate structured data on every page (bad theme coding). Didn’t hurt them one bit because JSON-LD for SEO’s data was so good that Google was ignoring the bad sets.

Doing the research that other app would also learn that getting flagged for spam in the structured data is really hard and only happens with very egregious errors (e.g. fake review, invisible content, keyword stuffing).

I’ve seen structured data get marked as spam four times over the years:

• two were combining product reviews with fake reviews,
• one had invisible keyword stuffed content,
• and one inflated the review numbers in the structured data (due to a bug in that app who made this claim, amusingly).

But I guess it’s easier to use the scare tactic of calling something spam than doing the hard work of researching and educating your customers.

At least until the scare tactic bites backs and the app gets caught in the lie.

For me, I’d rather take the harder path of educating customers on what’s actually happening so they can be focused on the results. It takes longer and more work on my part but that’s why JSON-LD for SEO has such a high success rate over other structured data apps. It’s not just some code someone slapped together and started selling.

The idea of gift cards isn't new. They have been available for years, but only recently across all Shopify plans. Yet still, many Shopify stores don't offer them.