Hey guys, welcome to another video in the Shopify SEO training series, this video that I debated heavily whether I was going to include it or not. schema does confuse a lot of people. But it can be incredibly powerful if you implemented correctly on your website. And I debated whether I was going to include it because it is, or Google is quite sensitive to schema. And it's becoming more and more important on all sorts of different websites. And it is now becoming part of the Google ranking algorithms.

So it's important that it's a consideration for your eecom and Shopify store. However it can be it seems a little bit complicated to install it. There's there's apps out there that you can use, and we're going to talk about those. But I like to build schema manually, because I can include elements of schema that you won't find anywhere else in apps, or they haven't been built into apps yet. And it can be quite powerful. So if you can just bear with me on the technical side, and then there'll be a little bit of code that you need to include in the site, but it's really simple to implement.

And the code will actually be in the show notes, so you'll be able to access it whenever you need it. Firstly, we need to understand what schema is. So it's essentially a bit of code on the back end of websites. And it can be explained quite well in this Google search, result by kissmetrics. So essentially, schema markup is code that you put on your website to help the search engines return more informative results for users. If you've ever used rich snippets, you'll understand exactly what schema markup is all about.

So it can be used on local sites and national sites, and it's important on e commerce sites. And there's loads and loads of different schema types to provide Google with information on what a webpage is about that could be implemented. on a page, and that's what we're going to go into a little bit deeper in some of the elements, you can add this schema that really does help boost a page, your product pages, your collection pages, your blog posts, and your homepage. And this is these elements. A lot of people, most people won't be using them, I can almost guarantee that at the moment. And as I said, that can be quite powerful.

But you've just got to be a little bit careful how you implement it, not overdo it, because it is part of your overall optimization of your web page. So what I tend to do is implement it slowly. So when I first launched the site, I might just put the schema on the homepage will actually from the code of the site and and then that'll filter through the rest of the website. And then we add in the schema on the specific collection pages and product pages and blog posts. later on. You just monitor how the site goes and then you can add it in as you go on.

Once you come to The site's stable with schema, then you can continue to edit to more collection pages and product pages, etc. So the standard default schema, which is pretty common, or very common in e commerce stores around the world, and you see it a lot in the big stores, but also, Shopify is able to do it with apps is your product product reviews. So here where you see a star rating, such as this Amazon listing here, this star rating is produced by schema code, and aggregates reviews, everyone knows about reviews on Amazon, and that, and then Google can read that code and then place a snippet of code here. But as you'll see in a minute, that's only one part of the schema that we're going to look at in implementing on our Shopify stores. Okay, so what does the actual code look like? for many of you, it'll look like just a jumbled mess of code, which essentially it is but for example, this is a bit of code, we're going to add on a blog post that I've highlighted.

And that'll be added on the particular blog post page. And that code will basically tell Google that it's an article. And what I like to do with blog posts is add a schema type, which is called Muse article. And this essentially tells Google that it's Eddie's news. So if you're writing a piece on a new product, or a new product release in your store, it's actually news. And there's charts a chance then and I've seen it before Shopify stores where your blog post can actually appear in Google News, which is a whole nother algorithm itself and it is can provide a great boost and a great boost in traffic also.

This section here is a code for video video schema. So it tells Google that the video has been marked up on a page if we have a video on a collection page or our blog post or even our product pages at times. Now he's the this is called organization skimmer, which I like to add, throughout the site, you add in the liquid code on the front end. And it provides relevant information to Google that it's what it is what it's selling. So for example, here we can see, the type is an organization. So if you're selling stuff through your Shopify store, you can tell Google you're an organization.

It has your name here, a little bit of a description on what the store is, your logo, image, URLs, email, etc. You can also add in your social profiles, such as Twitter and Facebook. And basically what you're going to do with this code if you want to implement on your site and it's I'm going to make a disclaimer that it's entirely up to you whether you implement it on your store, but it certainly can be beneficial. So you would you you can just swap out the information for your site within your zip code which will be in the show And then this section here and the Wikipedia element, it basically just helps Google understand from a higher authority sites such as Wikipedia, that what the actual stories are what the the idea of the store. So basically what you do, you go to Wikipedia, you grab the URL for your particular type of store.

And my example here is a toy store. And then I also add in the Wikipedia URL for e commerce because it's an e commerce store. And you can add three or four more in here. And you can whatever searches you get for Wikipedia, and then you can add them here. And then we put this code in the liquid thing to work throughout the site. So it'll this bit of code will actually be implemented on every page of the site automatically.

Now, some people say, you don't want schema code on every page. But when you think about it, as long as the contents correct and A lot of sites such as you know, an e commerce store have schema with their product reviews and every single page. It's quite common. And as and we're going to, we're going to be adding as you see in a minute some other schema which provides that extra filtering of uniqueness with your schema code. Then he the the monster of schema code that I like to add is for the collection pages. And what we're going to end up adding is all this code.

Now just to work through so there's the first bit of video code, which I showed, so we're going to roll it into the collection pages, well, then we have an aggregate offer type. So essentially, what we're doing here on the collection page, we're just going to tell Google, what sort of offers we have or what sort of products we have. And then we've got the that Wikipedia URL again. So for the collection page, we delve a little deeper, we're going to do tell Google exactly what type of collection page it is, then, what I don't see very often is an aggregate rating. And this aggregate aggregate rating is what actually produces a star snippets in Google. So not only can you add them to your product pages, but you can actually add them manually to your collection pages.

Remember, we're trying to rank collection pages. So having the stars show up on your collection page in Google can be really powerful as well. There's only one thing that we need to consider here is that within Google guidelines, you need to show the review on the page. So what I like to do is actually manually writing some reviews of products that we've aggregated for that particular collection page. And then, if you remember in the collection pages, we're actually asking some questions. And we'll go through this in a second.

So we'll We had some questions we had on the page that we produced from answering the public. And we can actually add these questions in as schema code as well and provide an answer. And we mark up the page for the questions. So provide just gives more information for Google to understand what the page is about. And there's a number of different featured snippets that can show up for Google when you do this. And then the last bit we're gonna add in for the collection page is the offer catalog.

So essentially, we can on our collection pages, we've provided a bit of information on different products that we're targeting, we can actually up mock up Lowe's product offers, and just provide that extra boost within Google as well. So looks very complicated. But now we'll go through the process of doing it now because what we need to do is add the code. And then we validate it with Google. So Google likes it, and then we move on to the next edition of the code. So just to go back a couple of steps.

And this bit of feature, what this section here is called in Google is a featured snippet. And this featured snippet will only show if there's actually schemer on the back end to tell Google that it's the most important or most important result in Google's eyes. And it will start to show this featured snippet. So this snippets actually telling us what schemer is, but it's actually got schema on the back end of this, this website here that tells Google that it's very important. And that's when Google starts to show this featured snippet. So schema itself is an entirely different topic.

And I could talk for hours and schema, I'm not going to go into much more detail on exactly how schema works in this course, you can certainly do that research yourself and start to understand what schema is and the benefits that can have and it's only going to become more important and more powerful. Apple. And moving forward on Google's actually said that So, but what I will do is now show you how to implement it on our Shopify stores in our current Shopify stores to get the boost we need because essentially, the only reason I want it on a site is to improve rankings. And then also provide the snippets within the results. And those two combined can be very powerful. So to edit the organization schema that will filter through your entire site, you navigate to the theme liquid file in your editing code section, and then we're going to grab and copy and paste that bit of code and Okay, so here is the code starts from the opening script and closes at script and you will obviously, swap out your information and the only other Just go through you leave organization here, you leave that in there.

And all you will do is change out the information as it pertains to your particular site. So the Euro, the name, the description, it's always between brackets. And you'll, you'll understand in a minute that we can validate to make sure it's all correct before you edit in any way, your logo URL, your image URL, and your ID. So the ID is actually the URL of that particular page. This will make sense when we look at the collection pages and inner pages later on your email address, and then your social profiles, and then the type of Wikipedia information, your stories. So we'll grab that code.

And you can just put it in the head section somewhere so I'm just going to put it in this section here. Click Save So now saved into the theme. And now what we're going to do is navigate to a Google page, which will help us validate it. Okay, so the URL you want to navigate to is search google.com slash structured hyphen data slash testing hyphen tool. And this is available to everyone for free. And here, you can actually test your code.

Now, thing I did wrong was I actually put the code in and saved it to my site before I even validated it. So what I recommend is you validate the code first, then added to your site, and then you validate your site. So I'll just grab that code now. Okay, so I've got the code, and you just click on code snippet, and then you paste the code in and you run test. And what this will do, it'll come back, it'll tell us whether the code is validated. If you see no errors, if there's errors, which you'll see in a second.

It'll be red and orange errors here. But this code validates, so we're fine to go ahead and put that code in our in our store. So I've obviously already have done that. So what I'm going to do now, we can actually validate the store itself. So we put your URL in. So fetch URL, run test.

Okay, and it's pulled back that code with no warnings. So this section of the code is fine. So we're going to leave that as it is in our store. Okay, so now we're going to work on our collection pages. And this is a monster to build out. It just takes a bit of time to get your head around it, especially with the way we're going to do it.

But we're trying to really power up our collection pages. So it's a As I said, it's very powerful. So we'll work through that now. Okay, so here we have a collection page. Shopify doesn't provide a way to add the code with a feature. There are apps out there, but it doesn't use all the elements that I like to use.

So I don't use apps. And You're quite welcome to look at, obviously, apps that the best ones are paid, we might look at one a little bit later on. And the product reviews you can get for free. But we'll get to that we'll get to the product pages. So we're just going to add as HTML. So we can just click on a source code here, and we're just going to add the code under the section here.

So I'm just gonna go grab my code. And we just paste it in, underneath. And remember, that was this really big bit of code here? Then we can just go back to our normal editor and click Save. Of course, again, I haven't validated the code first, but I know it's gonna work anyway. But we'll just do go and check it anyway.

In Google, so we just paste the code in all that code here, we're going to run the test again. And you can see it brings back now errors. And it separates out the different types of codes. So we have a video object and you can open it up and see the code in there. This is not filled out correctly. I've just got placeholder sections here.

I will talk about each one in a second, the question aggregate offer and then the offer catalog. So now we can grab a URL. And now we'll run the test on the URL itself. And we want to see the same sort of result and here is the result to pull organization because that was the code we put on the home or in the liquid thing that goes right through the site. And then for others, now it's up to you whether user leaves, and this is quite full on. And I do use it on some stores, I don't use it on all stores, depending on the competition and the size of the store.

And, of course, it takes time to build these out. So but, you know, overall, I think I think it's worth at night, and we definitely see a nice boost when we're doing this. So let's just work through some of these sections. So the video object is we have a video on that page. So essentially here with the code, you would just add your changes to the name of your video, the new duration, so amount needs to be added in as an ISO format. So you can google how to do that.

For the duration, and description of the video. The thumbnail URL usually normally I just put a YouTube URL itself, the content URL, which would be Also, you would put the YouTube URL, the upload date, and the thumbnail URL again. So I'm not sure why it needed twice to be validated. But it does, if you leave it out on leave one of these out, it might validate. So the key is to ensure they will validate with Google. Now obviously, if you don't have a video on the page and the collection page, you don't add the video object script.

And when I put these in the show notes, there'll be separated out in separate files for each one. So you'll know exactly what the code is. Now question, and this is where it gets a little bit tricky. So we'll work through that now. Okay, so if you remember when we built out our collection page, we asked some questions. So we've got a question here who created PVC, and that's the only one we'll put in a moment.

We've actually got a question up the top here. And we then added in the table of contents. And if we click on table of contents, it takes us to that particular section. And what that does that actual link to the question, create a unique URL. You can see at the top here, it's got creator, or PVC, which will show you how to do in the blog post video. So you need to we're going to keep these URLs because we need them to build out our schema.

Okay, so here is the the schema code for question was question the type question. And you can see here, it's got the question type there. So now you can just swap out these with your questions. So doesn't need to be identical because all we're doing is telling Google what it is and then the URL will actually validate where that question is. So even though our question was who created pvz I'll put any who developed babies that because we again, we don't want to over optimize. So we've actually added the question in there, the date the question was created.

And then the URL was the unique URL that was created by the jump to URL, as I mentioned before. So that's where it just gets a little bit tricky to get your head around. But basically, we're saying that the question is being asked at this URL, then the end is an answer section as well. So to say, you can you could actually add the answer in so whatever the answer is to the question you can put it in. And then if you've written the answer with it with a jump to URL on the page, you can add the URL in here, or what I do normally is just add the same URL because it's all within the same section of the page. And the person who asked the question and the person who answered the question and that's fine if it's yourself or someone else.

So you can add as many questions as you like, using this format. So you can just keep filling this out. And if you've got six or seven questions on the page, you can build this out, six, seven times, obviously a lot of work, but it can have big benefits. Okay, the aggregate offer. So this is the section that will allow stars to show up on your Google results. So we've got all the sections here.

So you just swap this out with your information. So the aggregate offer stays as it is, and then you just swap out what's relevant to your page. So the ID now with ID when you've ever seen scheme you ever see ad ID, that refers to the actual page where you put in the schema. So it's actually the collection page we put in here. Then URL and for that you just use the Primary URL, the name and the description to a range of plants versus zombies toys, including plush and stuffed animals, just a pretty standard description, grab an image, it's on the page and put it in there. Generally I use the image that I use in the opposite end content, you can add in your same as again, generally, probably a wouldn't do this because we've already got the same as in our organization up up here.

So you it's best, you don't add them in to us. So in that case, would remove the same as from the code. Another additional type, because we can add it to the collection page, what it is, and then aggregate rating. So here I've got a writing value of five and that will show five stars and these two ratings. So to do that, though, What we would do is on the collection page itself is maybe just manually in opt in, right? A couple of the reviews that you've got in in that actual content section.

So simply manually write them out, and then Google can actually see they're there. Makes sense. And then that just ensures that you're within Google's guidelines. To be honest. We've got pages out there that don't have reviews actually showing on a page physically showing on a page. And the stars have been around in the snippets have been around ranking really well for over a month now and haven't had a problem.

But just to be safe, you want to make sure you have those reviews on the page. And generally it's for for a manual review. So Google employee actually reviews a particular site or page and they say there's no reviews, and that's when you can have an issue. So that's why we like to do it. And then the last One is the offer catalog. So, as mentioned, if we've got a particular product we're discussing on that collection page.

So we can see here we're discussing some different products. And these are what we're going to add into our offer schema. So the way we build out the office schema is the type is an offer catalog, so that remains the same. And the type is an offer. And now this is the first section of your own products. So you put the product name in here, the Euro, as it pertains to, and you can use that unique URL we've created with the jump twos.

So that comes in handy again, you leave the type as a thing and the name as a product. And then you've got another one, the next one down here. So you can build these out further and further if you've got seven or eight products on that page. So just building relevance building authority, and Google loves it. So As I mentioned, it's entirely up to you whether you go as in depth as this. But if you really want your store to do is rank as best you possibly can.

I highly, highly recommend you work on learning this and building out your pages. Okay, now we're going to look at product pages and blog pages. Okay, so with product pages, Shopify has a bit of an issue at the moment where they've hard coded into some schema, but it doesn't validate correctly in Google. So without doing quite a bit of coding on the back end, you can't get that removed. We're actually working on a solution for that. So everyone in this course will have access to that solution when we when we get it sorted.

But at the moment, the schema doesn't validate well. So if we just grab that URL, we'll go and test that. But just to show you what I've done here, I've added a free Customer Review app. And there's a heap of different apps you can use This was just a free one in the App Store. And I've got a review in there. And it's five stars.

And we can just see how that validates in Google. So we will test the euro. Okay, so the test is ran. And we can see that we have a some errors here. And if we look on the product preview, it'll actually show us how the product will show in Google. So this is the availability in stock, and that's part of a snippet review.

And then we just open this up, we can see all different types of schema. So all this is created by Shopify itself, so you don't need to worry about this. But then we've got the aggregate ratings or the review ratings, which is actually created by the review So these errors at the moment, they're not causing an issue that we see in terms of ranking. Obviously, if Google says there's an error, it's not ideal. I think over time, when you've got errors, it will certainly suppress rankings, but at the moment, it's fine. But if you're using Shopify, you can't do anything about this without doing a bit of coding anyway, so, but as I said, we're working on a solution.

So what I wanted to suggest here is either just leave the product pages as they are, if you want to add your schemer in on your product pages for your ratings. Do that it certainly helps with conversions when you have ratings on your store and I show in the snippets, so that's probably the best place to start there. Okay, so we have a blog post here, and I've added the news article. schema into it. I'm just going to bring the post over. So it's this post here.

Yeah, it's got a video in there. So we could add video schema if we wanted as well. I haven't done this in this particular case. And then if we just look at the structured data testing, the news article validates fine. But again, there's an issue with the Shopify, a schemer itself. So, again, not seeing any negative results so far, but it will become an issue in the future.

So if you're ahead of the curve, you'll be able to understand why it's important. And with the solution we're looking at, hopefully, we can mitigate all these issues and it's all clean and ready to go. So that's it for schemer. A little bit more in depth and detail and a little bit technical. But as I keep mentioning, it's something you really should consider on your store. If you got a time and inspiration to go ahead and add it, you can always test it.

And the great thing about scheme you can just pull up As Oprah back in as you need, if you think see changes that are not working, and you can go as deep as you want with different types of schemer as well, but these, these elements and these types of schema is what's working for us at the moment. And if there's any changes, we will update with more videos on schema, and within this course, and that's, that goes for anything that we see changes in a particular setup. And the setup you've seen right through the course is what's working really well for us at the moment. The schema code will be in separate files in the shownotes. So go and grab that and you can swap out your your information within that schema code and put it in your store. Thanks for your time.

We'll see in the next video.