Structured Data For Shopify : The Ultimate Guide

Everybody is browsing the Internet on a day-to-day basis. Whether you are looking for a piece of specific information, need to quickly find an answer to a quiz question to impress your friends, or just feel like googling something to get away from work, you will most likely come across a Rich Snippet as seen on the screenshot above (two sentences in, and we’ve already scratched the topic; nice right?). While typical search results offer fewer data than rich results such as title, meta description, and URL of a webpage, rich snippets offer us additional website data such as reviews, recipes, and events; these are more eye-catching and will most likely generate an increase in click rate; that’s their main benefit.

As an owner of a Shopify store, you might have more interest in Google suggesting rich snippets for your store rather than regular search results. To implement this, it is crucial to add structured data markup to your website. 

You need to have skills in Shopify Liquid, HTML, JSON-LD, and schema.org, but even for an experienced Shopify developer, it could be challenging to know how to implement the exact type of data and properties for your Shopify store.

Luckily, you came to the right place! At HulkApps, we provide expert services for Structured Data & Schema Markup Setup, teaching you how to add structured data to your Shopify store whenever you need to do so... Hopefully, by the end of this article, our  expertise and experience will help you improve your understanding of structured data and show you ways to implement and use it properly.

Additionally, if you need instructions and guidance with specific schema.org data properties, we can help out with that as well!

What is Shopify Structured Data?

The screenshot below shows a structured data markup.

And this is how it looks like when implemented:

Search engines can find structured data markup valuable in finding more information about the website and its related content. As you implement structured data, it helps sieve information for Google that further encompasses ecommerce data such as quality ranking, price tags, and product reviews.

You can also utilize Google to harness information related to your business, such as your business logo, address, contact information, and social media pages, which is crucial in today's commerce.

Why does Google recommend  such information?

Using structured data is essential for search engines and web systems that  analyze your website. It enables Google to improve the accuracy rate while  analyzing it and it also provides full and complete details about your web pages.

Additionally, structured data is a key factor for creating rich snippets, as Google can easily automate the product feed for Google Shopping Ads. 

Side Note:

Google does not keep any data that confirms it creates  rich snippets even if webpages are marked up with structured data. An explicit statement can be found in Google's Structured Data Guidelines:

However, if your website ingests structured data markup, in most cases, Google will ensure your website comes up rich snippets.

Structured Data Formats & Schemas

Structured Data Formats

According to the Google Webmaster Blog, a small line of fixed data structures that help encode descriptive data are called structured data formats.

Structured data formats are comprised of three types, which are: 

JSON-LD

Microdata

RDFa

As Google recommends using JSON-LD for structured data, we can safely say it’s their favorite format.

Source: Google, Understand how structured data

The takeaway: If you are using RDFa or Microdata, Google insists on JSON-LD migration. The reason behind this is because JSON-LD is faster and more user friendly, with flexible updates. Apart from being dynamically data compatible, it also reduces the effort needed to work with HTML codes to display structured data's whereabouts.

 Here’s how a JSON-LD shows up on a product page:

               <script id="productLd" type="application/ld+json">

                {

                    "@context": "http://schema.org/",

                    "@type": "Product",

                    "name": "Shopify Structured Data for E-commerce",

                    "image": "https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1564/7647/products/StructuredDataforE-commerce_600x600.jpg?v=1587479185",

                    "sku": "",

                    "description": "In an SEO setting, &quot;structured data&quot; ordinarily alludes to actualizing a few sorts of markup on a webpage, in order to supply extra detail around the page’s substance. This mar...",

                    "brand": {

                    "@type": "Thing",

                    "name": "HulkApps"

                    },

                    "offers": {

                    "@type": "Offer",

                    "priceCurrency": "USD",

                    "price": "149.0",

                    "priceValidUntil" : "2020-08-19",

                    "url" : "https://www.hulkapps.com/products/structured-data-for-e-commerce",

                    "availability": "http://schema.org/InStock"

                    },

                    "review": {

                    "@type": "Review",

                    "reviewRating": {

                        "@type": "Rating",

                        "worstRating": "0",

                        "ratingValue": 5,

                        "bestRating": "5"

                    },

                    "author": {

                    "@type": "Person"

                    }

                }

                }</script>

With JSON-LD implemented on your Shopify store, it helps search engines detect products and offer data. As a result, it will boost organic search results and traffic as well

Structured Data Schemas

Different terms and properties such as ‘website,’ ‘organization,’ ‘person,’ ‘description,’ ‘logo,’ and ‘name’ all consist of  structured data schemas. They also include:

Data-vocabulary.org, and

Schema.org

Note: As Data-vocabulary.org is out of date, it will no longer provide support for Google to parse rich results features as of January 29th, 2021. You will need to replace data-vocabulary.org markup with schema.org markup moving forward. Learn more about sunsetting support for data vocabulary here.

Now that you are familiar with structured data, why you should use it, and the chosen structured data format (JSON-LD) and schema (schema.org), let’s move further with implementing everything you’ve learned so far! 

Key considerations before implementing structured data

First and foremost, our advice would be following  these three crucial things:

• Carefully read Google's Webmaster Guidelines & General Structured Data Guidelines for details.
  Image

• Mark your primary page types; (In Shopify, primary pages include the homepage, collection, blog, articles, and product page)
• Decide which types and properties from schema.org should each of your Shopify pages contain (homepage, product page, collection page). For example, the below screenshot is how a structured data markup should look like
  Image

The image above  clearly shows that structured data encompasses types and that each type contains a set of properties. For example, product  type has a set of common properties such as description, productID, name, weight, mpn, height, etc.

Each type represents and follows other types in the hierarchy. For instance, the Product type can include Offer types. Your product variants are part of those Offer types and they contain different properties such as availability and price.

“The fundamentals of schema.org now incorporate 615 Types, 901 Properties, and 114 Enumeration Values.”

Please keep in mind that only a few numbers of Types, Properties, and Enumerations are available, but before we do anything with Types and Properties for your  Shopify page, it is important to know and understand different ways how we can implement structured data.

What are the ways to incorporate structured data into the Shopify website?

To incorporate structured data into the HTML of your Shopify store, you can find two ideal methods:

• If you are a skilled HTML developer, you can do it manually. You need to understand programming languages such as  Shopify Liquid, HTML, schema.org, and JSON-LD to be able to successfully incorporate structured data. However, if you do not possess such skills or you lack an in-house team that can help you with the implementation, our advice would be to outsource the service.
• Reach out to Shopify experts with a click of a button! We at HulkApps offer a wide range of SEO services such as SEO audit, Structured data optimization, Shopify site speed optimization, TF-IDF Reporting, and others, and we would be more than happy to guide you through structured data and its implementation. To get you started, here’s a free article on how to add structured data to the web pages of your Shopify store. 

Moving further,  let's take a look at the various forms and properties of schema.org data you need to apply to different pages on your website.

What does your Shopify homepage contain as structured data markup?

• There are two types of data to add to your homepage:

  WebSite data

  Organization data
  

WebSite data

Schema.org defines 'WebSite' as a set of related web pages that usually share the same domain. You have to include the following properties in the WebSite data type:

• URL - your website's URL
• target - "Indicates a target EntryPoint for an Action" (source: schema.org)
• query-input - this is a text search deep link with -input that inlines "the resulting value of -input properties into action URLs" (source: schema.org)

Organization data

For example, organization data could be presented as Store, SportsOrganization, Corporation, LocalBusiness, BikeShop, BookStore, WorkersUnion, hardware store, etc. Note that the more specific the Organization type is, the better. You have to include the following properties in the Organization data type:

1. name - your Shopify store or website's name
2. URL - your website's URL
3. description - a description of your business (who you are, what you do/sell, how your product/service benefits customers, etc.)
4. logo - Google displays your logo in search results and in the Knowledge Graph

• 4. image
  5. sameAs - links to your social media profiles (Facebook business page, Twitter profile, YouTube account, Instagram account, etc.)
  6. address (PostalAddres) - streetAddress (street and number), addressLocally (city), postalCode, address Country (country)
     
     

  Other than the aformentioned , information such as  contact information , price range (priceRange) or geolocation could be benefitial as well..

  What structured data markup to add to your Shopify product pages?

You need to use three kinds of structured data for your product pages:

Product data

Offer data

BreadcrumbList data

Product

Product type data refers to products themselves, including product SKU, size, barcode, etc. As product variants encompass offer types for one kind of product, there needs to be one type of offer for the product variant. If a product variant is unavailable, other properties can refer to price, barcode, and SKU. Shopify ingests all these details as a default variant - this variant can act as your offer type in your Shopify store.

 Required properties are:

1. offers - variants of products
2. name - product name
3. image - Link of the product photo or imageObject
   

Recommended properties are:

1. brand
2. review
3. productID
4. description
5. aggregateRating
6. gtin8/gtin13/gtin14/isbn/mpn - global identifier or unique product identifiers
   
   

The recommended properties, as seen above, are used by your Shopify store to help Google identify and work with your product search queries.

You can use GTIN or Global Trade Item Number as a barcode and utilize this with your product variant. Keep in mind that GTIN performs both as MPN and productID.

Offer data

The types of offer data (Essential properties) are:

1. Price
2. availability (OutOfStock, InStock)
3. priceCurrency

Suggested properties are:

1. URL (the product page URL)
2. priceValidUntil (ISO 8601 date format)
3. itemOffered
4. SKU 
5. itemCondition

BreadcrumbList data

If you want your product page to stand out in the crowd of thousands of Shopify stores and their product presentation, Breadcrumb can help you out with that by adding markups to your product pages. This will help Google categorize those pages and show off your products the way they’re meant to be exhibited.

BreadcrumbList is the markup type that a product page must have and it contains one ListItem type with the following properties:

1. id
2. position
3. item
4. name
   
   

What structured data to choose for Shopify collection pages?

As mentioned above, the CollectionPage type, including ListItem type, are a part of your Shopify collection page.

CollectionPage

Recommended properties for collection page

• 1. URL - the collection page URL
  2. description - collection page description
  3. name- collection page name
  4. image- collection page primary image
     
     

  ListItem:
  
  

  1 .URL - the product page URL

  2. position- the place value of the product within the collection page. If the product comes at the third position, it is place value is ‘3.’
     
     

  Side Note:

  Make sure your collection pages include the breadcrumb markup; on the  breadcrumb markup, you can find the markup section for the product page.

What type of structured data does your Shopify blog page include?

• 1. URL - the blog URL 
  2. name- the blog name
  3. about- the blog description4. keywords- your target keyword
     
     

  The BlogPosting types should interact with the Blog type in numerous numbers. Each of them has a direct link to an article or a publication. Keep in mind that there are number properties that the blog posting type must contain which are:

  
  
  1. mainEntityOfPage - the canonical URL
  2. headline
  3. URL - the page URL 
  4. image (ImageObject)
  5. dateCreated
  6. dateModified
  7. datePublished
  8. logo
  9. author
      10. publisher
  

Structured Data Markup Testing

You can use the following tools to check if your pages are marked up correctly and if you’re eligible for rich results:

• Rich Results Test

Google Structured Data & Rich Result Testing Tool

The structured data testing tool allows you to test URLs or code snippets as seen on the images below:

Kindly note that if the Structured Data Testing Tool detects an error, fixing it would be smart as it might (and probably will) hurt your rankings. Warnings, on the other hand, are not something you should lose sleep over - usually, they refer to recommended properties you could include in your markup.

2. Rich Results Test

Rich Results Test is just as easy to use. All you have to do is paste your website's URL in the "Enter a URL to test" field as seen below:

Then, click on Test URL and wait for a few seconds.

Preview the results

You can also test code snippets.

Quick Recap

Structured data markups could be a great addition to your Shopify store! As we’ve learned today, they help search engines understand what your website is all about, and they increase the chances of your Shopify store getting rich results.

This, in turn, increases user engagement and your CTR - all of which leads to more sales and growth in business. 

We’ve also become experts in understanding that data-vocabulary.org and schema.org are two types of structured data formats .that ‘build’ our website in a way which makes it easier for search engines to read, comprehend, and index them. 

There are hierarchically arranged properties and data types in schema.org markup or structured data markup and we’ve learned why it’s ideal to add structured data to your Shopify store elements such as homepage, collection pages, product pages, blog pages, and article pages. Let’s refresh our memory, and  take a look at a brief overview of properties and data types your Shopify website should have for each page:

Just before you leave us, let’s quickly recall one more time on how you can add structured data to your Shopify website:

1. Manual overhaul
2. In-house assistance

As we’ve explained already, If you seek support on implementing structured data to your Shopify website or optimize SEO of your website, you came to the right place! With with a click of a button, HulkApps is locked and loaded to guide you through all the steps we’ve talked about today.

Your turn!

You came here hoping to find a solution to a problem, and that's exactly what you did. We are confident enough to say that we have answered all of your questions today, and that’s just what we do; we can’t help it. However, if you need any additional information, have a question or two, want to one-up your skills, or just want to talk about growing your brand and business with the passion we both share, feel free to reach out. You'll receive some advice, and we'll gain a little social media exposure; win-win! Whatever it is, HulkApps always makes it personal, and always steps up. Happy selling!