Share:
;
What is structured data
If you know what structured data(or rich snippets) is you can skip this part and scroll down how to implement it in Shopify.
To simplify structured data is a way to enrich your content and make it easier for google and other search engines to understand what your page is about. But, not only that, having structured data on your page enables your page to be displayed more prominently in e.g. search results.
There are 3 main structured data markups
Rich snippets
Although Twitter cards and OG (open graph) are nice to have, they are not essential.
What you need is Rich Snippets.
Rich snippets makes your results in Google more promintent with reviews, stock status, and price displayed prominently which studies show to lead to higher CTR.
Adding structured data to your Shopify store
Product structured data
It is outside of the scope of this article to go in-depth in to all the different markups, but bellow is a quick summary of the markups recommended to a Shopify store and further down we will review some of the Shopify specific issues questions which may arise.
Index Page
Webpage Localbusiness (in most cases) BreadcrumbList WebSite
Category Page
WebPage - with OfferCatalog
LocalBusiness (or Organization)
BreadcrumbList
Website
Product Detail Page
WebPage
LocalBusiness (or Organization)
BreadcrumbList
WebSite
Product
Blog/Article Page
WebPage
LocalBusiness (or Organization)
BreadcrumbList
Website
Article
The more of the markup you have, the better and the larger SEO impact that has.
Product Markup
The vast majority of Shopify themes come with the most important product markup per default, such as name, description, price, etc.
Note, if you have a theme that uses as markup description the same description you use for the product itself and this description is very long you may want to evaluate using a separate attribute for markup description.
The general consensus is that markup description should be kept under 500 characters.
The more of the requested attributes you have, the better quality your markup is.
If your current are missing some of the attributes, your most cost effective solution to remedy this is most likely to install a module, e.g. this one
Article Markup
If you have a blog or something similar on your page you will definitely take advantage of the new Article structured data markup. This will make it more likely that your article/post is displayed prominently in Google results.
You get Article markup to your blogposts with the same module mentioned above, which you could use for Product Markup as well.
Article markup in action.
WebPage - with OfferCatalog
Since October 16th Google will validate your products anywhere in the structured data tree, for this reason you want your OfferCatalog on category pages working as expected as well.
As with everything else in this post, this won't work per default in Shopify. Unfortunately once again there is no single app which will solve this and everything else for you either, but to get this working you can use this app
BreadcrumbList
Oddly many, if not all, templates come per default without breadcrumb snippets, which for all intents and purposes is a must for any serious e-commerce store.
Here you got two options, you can either go with an module like e.g. this one or you can add the breadcrumbs directly in your themes.
We would recommend adding them directly in your themes are keeping external modules down to a minimum is always preferable from an performance perspective.
If you wish to add BreadcrumbList manually to your templates open up your breadcrumb.liquid(or, if you don't have one which is possible create it).
In your breadcrumb.liquid put something like the following code (might differ depending on your template)
...waiting for Gist...
Press Save, and go to your theme.liquid and place in the <head> section the following
{% render 'breadcrumb' %}
BOOM, you got Breadcrumblist structured data on your page now.
Adding BreadcrumbList to <head> section.
Conclusions
Getting your structured data to work in Shopify as expected often requires you to use a patchwork of different modules with a pinch of your own coding thrown in, the obvious risk is always that the apps will not play nice with each other.
If you are serious about structured data in Shopify you will as of January 2020 need to build your own solution as none of the apps out there will solve all of it for you.
If you need help with your Shopify SEO needs, please drop us a line bellow.
