In this article:
You'll be glad to know that Easy Content Builder now supports structured data (schema.org) to create rich snippets for the Circle Menu, Accordion, and Featured Products sections, as well as all blog posts. This will help improve the overall SEO performance of your Shopify store.
What are Rich Snippets
Rich snippets, also referred to as rich results, are search results that provide additional information about your Shopify store, such as ratings, review count, prices, and product availability. These details can help to attract more clicks to your content.
Google extracts this extra information from schema markup code. Once Google finds the structured data when it crawls your site, it will decide whether to display rich snippets on the search result page.
Example of a product rich snippet
While rich snippets don't directly influence how Google ranks your website, they can make your website's search results more appealing and helpful to potential visitors, ultimately boosting its click-through rate (CTR).
Easy Content Builder’s sections now supports rich snippets
As a Shopify store owner, it's essential to include structured data markup following Google's guidelines to qualify for rich snippets. The process involves three main steps: creating your schema markup, validating your code, and then uploading it to your Shopify store.
With Easy Content Builder's sections, rich snippets are automatically supported, eliminating the need for you to manually generate and add the code yourself.
Here are the sections that support structured data for rich snippets:
Circle menu
Easy Content Builder automatically supports structured data (schema.org) to generate rich snippets for the Circle Menu section.
Easy Content Builder’s circle menu section
The Circle Menu section allows you to transform the collection list into a unique 'bubble navigation' that highlights your featured product collections throughout your Shopify store. You have the flexibility to select a menu style that complements your store, such as a circle menu, square menu, or pill menu.
You may already be aware that Shopify's main weakness is its lack of category structure. By adding structured data for the Circle Menu, you can get sitelinks on the SERP and help Google index your Shopify category structure, which is great for SEO.
Featured Products
The Featured Products/Collections is another section that also comes with product rich snippets by default. These rich results provide detailed information about your products, including their rating, review count, price, and stock availability.
Easy Content Builder’s featured products
The product markup snippet is crucial for any Shopify store. By using the Featured Products/Collections section, you can effortlessly add a featured product grid or slider to any Shopify page, showcasing specific products or an entire collection. This section offers various settings to customize the featured product showcase, such as Ajax add to cart and displaying multiple images within each product card, etc.
Accordion / FAQ
According to Google's latest announcement on September 14, 2023, FAQ snippets will now be shown only for trusted government and health websites.
Easy Content Builder’s accordion section
While FAQ snippets may not directly impact the visible search results, they can assist Google in gaining a better understanding of your Shopify store's content. Given this, we will still suggest and implement FAQ schema (which is readily available in the Accordion section) for important pages, but it may not be as critical as other schema markup that directly affects rich snippet results.
Article / Blog posts
In the newest free Shopify themes such as Dawn, structured data for articles is automatically included by Shopify.
Easy Content Builder’s article section
In our Easy Content Builder, we've included a block called Article that enables you to control the fundamental elements of your blog post's content, such as Title, Content, Meta data, and Tags. We also support structured data (schema.org) to generate rich snippets for this Article block.
Other sections
In addition to the rich snippets mentioned earlier, Reviews are among the most valuable rich snippets for a Shopify store. Depending on the review app you use, it's important to inquire with the app developer about the presence of structured data.
Regarding the Shopify theme, it's also crucial to verify the structured data. Starting with the latest free Shopify themes like Dawn is advantageous as it includes initial structured data such as the organization snippet for your homepage, product snippet, and article snippet.
Test your structured data
Shopify pages containing invalid structured data will not be displayed as rich snippets, so it's important to identify and resolve these issues. Here are some useful free tools to test your Shopify theme's structured data:
- Google structured data guideline: here.
- Schema markup validator: https://validator.schema.org (scan your Shopify pages with this tool to identify any issues it might have with the schema markup)
- A free tool by Google to check the rich results: https://search.google.com/test/rich-results
- You can also check rich results status using Google Search Console (GSC).
Note:
- It's important to test actual pages from your Shopify store using the tools mentioned above. Testing our Easy Content Builder’s demo pages might not yield accurate rich results because the sample/testing content was created for demonstration purposes and may not fully comply with Google's guidelines.
- Even if you include correct structured data markup without any errors, Google states that there's no assurance that your pages will be displayed as rich snippets. The decision to show a rich snippet is entirely up to Google.
Conclusion
You don't have to be a coding expert to obtain rich snippets for your Shopify store when using the sections provided by Easy Content Builder, as mentioned earlier.
While there's no guarantee that rich snippets will appear even when everything is set up correctly, we strongly encourage implementing structured data for your Shopify store. It not only helps Google better understand your store but also increases the likelihood of your pages appearing in rich results.