A customer asked about how JSON-LD for SEO works with old microdata, which is structured data most Shopify themes provide. A question I had was about how the old Microdata is affected by installing your app. Does this live side by side with the new JSON-LD or get poofed? JSON-LD for SEO only adds new … Read more

If you have videos in your Shopify store by adding structured data for them you can get some additional search enhancements like Rich Snippets, video previews, and inclusion in Google Image Search. JSON-LD for SEO supports the VideoObject type once you add some additional data to your Shopify store to describe the video. You can … Read more

Anyone using SEO as a marketing channel wants to protect their rankings. Recently a customer emailed asking about any risk or impact on rankings as part of JSON-LD for SEO’s structured data. If I install your app, will it in any way negatively impact my organic ranking in Google? Is there a potential for it … Read more

A couple of times per week I’m asked about different structured data terms. There’s so much jargon out there around it that it can be confusing for anyone to remember it all. Even I get confused now and then, and I work with it everyday. One question has to do with Schema and Schema.org, which … Read more

Recently a JSON-LD for SEO customer emailed me about their collections in Shopify: I would like to check with you if this will create rich snippets for my collections? So for example the brand "collection" – Acme? Will this show an accumulative total of reviews for each product within the collection, so that the search … Read more

When you’re trying to figure out which Shopify apps to install it can be confusing to compare all of the options. Especially within the SEO app space where there are dozens of apps that all do different things. I’m asked to compare JSON-LD for SEO to other apps frequently, but after one customer mentioned the … Read more

A customer Andrew emailed me a question about his traffic and SEO. I was curious if you have any tips outside of using your app to help with our website SEO? I’m getting roughly x people a day coming to the website, which is pretty low for sure. I’m not sure if this would be … Read more

Recently a new customer for JSON-LD for SEO was asking about product tags and their role with SEO. We have 20 product tags per product which are keyword rich – is the only way to get these indexed by google to have them on the product images – surely they can show on their own … Read more

A Repeat Customer Insights customer emailed me a great question that every shop should think about: What do you see is the best way to increase the first repeat purchase rate? The first repeat purchase rate is the most critical because what happens there determines if a customer will only be a one-time customer or … Read more

Andrew emailed me the other day asking about Google’s Structured Data Highlighter tool and JSON-LD for SEO: Does this mean I won’t need to use the "Data Highlighter" tool to optimize Search Appearance with Google? Google’s Data Highlighter tool is a way to select parts of the pages and mark them up as structured data. … Read more

In a few hours from now the solar eclipse will be visible from my house. I’m just outside the totality but it wasn’t worth dealing with the crowds of people to drive someplace that was. A lot of companies have jumped on this event and created marketing campaigns around it. That’s great. Hopefully those campaigns … Read more

This past Monday I got an email that started off a chain of events this week. Subject: JSON-LD for SEO errors In that email a new customer, Chris (hi Chris), mentioned that he was seeing an error when testing his structured data. I get a lot of these reports due to themes having messed up … Read more

Recently a JSON-LD for SEO customer emailed me asking why she wasn’t seeing many Rich Snippets on her products. After a bit of research, I found our her standard process was to sell a product and then remove it from her Shopify store. Not mark it as out of stock, actually delete it. If this … Read more

Kudobuzz is one of the top review apps in the Shopify app store with its ability to pull in reviews from various sources like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Yelp. Now JSON-LD for SEO integrates with Kudobuzz to export your product reviews into Google, allowing you to get the highly-converting review Rich Snippets. This integration is … Read more

Google provides a lot of options for Shopify merchants to advertise their products. Unfortunately, the this can get confusing especially if you only wanted to buy basic ads for your Shopify products. Google Shopping, Google Merchant Center, Adwords, Product Listing Ads, Sponsored Ads, data feeds, microdata, JSON-LD… oh my. The jargon goes on and on. … Read more

Recently I finished a feature for JSON-LD for SEO which will let it automatically update the JSON-LD code snippet for every store with it installed. It was a complex task but by having it in place, it opened up a lot of possibilities for the app and customers. One opportunity that I took advantage of … Read more

A customer asked: How often does Google crawl my site? Do I need to have them recrawl whenever I change a product? Google will crawl your site automatically once they see it’s live and not passworded. Whenever they crawl a site, they’ll look at every new page they find linked to. If you aren’t seeing … Read more

The other week I was creating Repeat Customer Metric Reviews for three clients. This reminded me of an important time in every customer’s life cycle. The step between a customer’s first and second order. This happens between a new customer’s first completed order and a second they haven’t made yet, and it’s a critical critical … Read more

I got this question from a customer about JSON-LD for SEO: Does this app work with my theme …? That’s a great question because quite a few apps in the Shopify App Store are only tested with a handful of themes and end up breaking on other themes. For JSON-LD for SEO, most themes should … Read more

Before you can add Structured Data to your Shopify store, you’re confronted with several decisions. The one which will have the largest cost impact is: Which format should you use? Microdata? RDFa? JSON-LD? Both microdata and RDFa require you to add your structured data directly on your HTML elements. This means that the HTML element … Read more

While in Las Vegas I noticed how many different games and slot machines there were. There’s a huge variety ranging from current movies, classic themes like westerns, all the way to obscure genres like 90s TV shows. There was quite literally a game for everyone. A friend of mine joked that soon all of the … Read more

When someone is browsing your store there are two important important conversion actions you want them to take. Add a product to the cart Sign up for your email list or other method to keep in touch with you Everything else on your store should be designed to improve the chances of someone doing one … Read more

Getting product reviews and getting them into Google can be a huge conversion booster. That’s why I’m trying to integrate JSON-LD for SEO into as many review apps as possible. One downside to this is the paradox of choice. With so many integrations, which product reviews app should you choose? That’s why when Bob wrote … Read more

Reviewing your store while pretending to be a customer is a quick way to spot weaknesses in your buying funnel. But a common problem is that you know too much. You already know what to search for to find a product. You already know how much shipping will cost. You already know what will happen … Read more

One question I’ve gotten about Sticky has been, Why is it shown on both the desktop and mobile? That’s a good question, especially because there are some apps and premium themes that show a sticky add to cart button on mobile only. The reason is simple: a good user experience should benefit all shoppers. For … Read more

Customer lifetime value (CLTV or LTV) is a good metric to watch. Unlike the average order value, CLTV takes into account your customers’ repeat orders. Usually when your store’s overall CLTV goes up, good things are happening. In my experience with repeat customer funnels, there’s another great metric: repeat purchase rate (RPR). Repeat purchase rate … Read more

I’m training for my 3rd 50k race now. It’s a 24-week process with 4-6 weeks to get started with. Easily half a year commitment for one’s race. A few weeks ago I was pushing myself on my long run trying to go further and faster. I finished fine and then did my regular Sunday run … Read more

JSON-LD for SEO adds a little over a dozen fields for every product in your store. Many of them are dynamic depending on what product data you’ve entered into Shopify. Here’s a list of what might be added. Brand sku description url name image itemCondition aggregateRatings (reviews) Each product variant also includes an Offer set … Read more

My regular hours are from 9am to 5pm US Pacific time every weekday. I do take time off for US holidays and now and then for vacations. The best way to reach me at any time is by emailing the Shopify support address (shopify at this domain). That will help me keep track of your … Read more

As part of JSON-LD for SEO I get asked a lot of Shopify SEO questions, mostly around the idea of getting more traffic to your Shopify store. SEO is a pretty large topic and there are thousands of different things you can do. Here’s a short guide that you can use as a starting point … Read more

Portland got hit pretty hard by snow and ice this winter. One problem was that the temperatures kept fluctuating so we had sheets of ice covering everything. The other day I got this in the mail What is really interesting about this is the copy and the timing. Specifically this part: Symptoms can be delayed … Read more

As part of JSON-LD for SEO I review the structured data from a lot of themes. Many themes have poorly designed structured data which results in Google ignoring it completely, which prevents the store from ever getting Rich Snippets. The number #1 problem I see? Product prices formatted incorrectly. Product prices are such a key … Read more

Earlier I was talking with a subscriber about SEO. We were trying to figure out what approaches would make the most sense for a site that is converting very well (10%+) but isn’t getting enough traffic. Keyword tools were sharpened. Googles were consulted. Backlinks were reported. We found a few things that could help but … Read more

Last week I started experimenting with Facebook ads for JSON-LD for SEO. The app page does a great job of converting customers so I wanted to see if I could buy some traffic for it. I set the ad campaign to run for a week with a fixed budget. First I wanted to test some … Read more

On February 28th Amazon’s S3 service (cloud storage) had a major outage which took down many parts of the internet for about four hours. Outages happen and it’s part of doing business online but Amazon’s was interesting because of what caused it. From the write up of the outage, Unfortunately, one of the inputs to … Read more

Product reviews and the Rich Snippets that come with them are one of the most powerful Rich Snippets you can get for your Shopify store. To further expand JSON-LD for SEO’s usefulness, I’ve added support for Stamped.io product reviews to JSON-LD for SEO’s product snippet. This integration is automatic once you’ve installed Stamped.io’s Product Reviews … Read more

Many Shopify themes already support "Microdata" markup that provides the same sort of information that the JSON-LD for SEO application does – things like product information, prices, etc. You can check to see what sort of information your theme is currently providing to search engines like Google by testing your product URLs with Google’s Structured … Read more

One of the big advantages of JSON-LD for SEO is that is can provide structured information to Google about your brand or company. This is most often used by the search engine by showing the Knowledge Graph Card in results like this: JSON-LD for SEO tries its best to provide all possible information about your … Read more

One of the big advantages of JSON-LD for SEO is that is can provide structured information to Google indicating how customers can perform a search on your site. This means Google may choose to display your brand’s search results with a Sitelinks Searchbox like this: JSON-LD for SEO will setup the structured data for your … Read more

One really interesting analysis that you can perform is to find out which products your repeat customers are buying. This is different from just your most popular products. You want to look only at your repeat customers. If your store sells a durable good that requires a consumable, like a Keurig coffee maker, it’s going … Read more

I recently got to see the impact of structured data on sales. Or rather, the negative impact when structured data goes wrong. The Shopify App Store includes reviews for each app and it adds those reviews along with the structured data to each page. This is what let Shopify apps appear in the Google search … Read more

I’ve been doing some work with Facebook ads recently. When setting up my last set of ads I wanted to try three different images to see which one would work: An image of my app banner. An image representing the concepts of my app. A dog wearing a blanket robe. Yes. To advertise my Shopify … Read more

The other day my spouse got a letter reminding her about her annual vision examination. Dear SPOUSE, This is a friendly reminder to schedule your annual comprehensive vision examination. Our records indicate your last examination was at least one year ago. […news about the company…] Dr. Vision The letter was a nice reminder but as … Read more

When I help JSON-LD for SEO customers I have to quickly search for all of their rich snippets. An easy way I found to do this is to use Google’s site scope with your store url. For example if your store is at example.com you’d search for site:example.com. You’ll get back all of the pages … Read more

One lesson I’ve learned as a consultant is to prequalify potential clients before I invest a lot of time with them. There are specific things I’ve noticed in my best clients that I look for with new clients. If someone doesn’t have these qualities or fail the qualification in another way, I gracefully decline working … Read more

I was talking with a friend yesterday and he was asking if I was already doing A/B testing on my sites. I told him that’s the wrong thing to do and A/B testing won’t help me at the stage I’m at. The problem is, A/B testing won’t tell you anything without enough traffic. Sure, it … Read more

Often I’m asked why someone’s store is showing up in Google with different text from what they setup in Shopify for the product. Google doesn’t actually show exactly what your page or product description is in their search results. Rather, Google is showing what they think is the best representation of the page. This means … Read more

The other day I got an email from someone whose email list I’m subscribed to. The subject line looked like: Fwd: bonus business workshop (regularly $495) Since I forward emails from clients and business contacts regularly, I opened it up to see what it was about. I wasn’t aware of any business workshop I missed. … Read more

A few years ago we used to live close to a local coffee shop. Not a big corporate one or even a franchise. It was one where the owner was at the counter half the time. We’d go about once a week and each time the owner or her two employees would great us. It … Read more

Food carts are a big thing in Portland. They’re like miniature restaurants, usually staffed by the owner or their family. The other weekday my wife was off of work so we decided to walk down to our favorite one for lunch. We had a nice conversation along the way, even though it was about twenty … Read more

One common question I get from new JSON-LD for SEO customers is, How long until my store’s rich snippets show up in Google? They want to hear a simple answer like "a few days" or "72 hours" but it’s not that simple. Like anything worth doing, it can take a long time. SEO has the … Read more

A few years ago I decided to do something nice for a customer after wrapping up a major project. Instead of just sending them a thank you email, I decided to send them a small gift. Brownies. Gooey, chocolate brownies. I had a recommendation for an ecommerce store to use, ordered a box, and shipped … Read more

This week I’ve been drowning in emails. In a good way. About a year ago I shifted my content marketing to focus more on Shopify. I’ve always done a lot of writing and emailing. Those strategies have always paid off for me. But it takes time before they accelerate to a noticeable level. Now, a … Read more

When you dive into the world of structured data, there’s a lot to take in and it’s easy to become overwhelmed. Part of the reason is because structured data is much bigger than just SEO. It’s just that SEO is such a valuable part that it overshadows the other uses for ecommerce stores. Today I … Read more

A question that comes up frequently when I’m talking about my app JSON-LD for SEO is, Why can’t I just use the structured data that comes in my theme? You can use your theme’s microdata but you’re risking a lot. The number one support question I get is "why does Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool … Read more

My daughter started talking at a young age. Now that she’s four, she never stops talking. Yesterday morning she was eating her breakfast as usual. chomp chomp chomp Mommy, are you going to send emails at work today? chomp chomp chomp I’m wearing long sleeves because it’s cold. But then she started to talk more … Read more

What do Marie Curie, Dr. Frankenstein, and Wile E. Coyote all share? Experimentation Marie Curie performed experiments with Radium. Dr Frankenstein performed experiments with corpses. And Wile E. Coyote performed experiments with… well, let’s just say ACME technology. Each of them weren’t sure of success. Failure was always sitting there, ready to strike. But they … Read more

A customer made a big boo-boo last week. She contacted me asking why JSON-LD for SEO wasn’t working for her store. I started with what I normally do. I opened her site in one tab and Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool in another tab. That’s when I noticed that her entire store was passworded. The … Read more

Ecommerce has broken a lot of rules in the retail industry, but some things never change, like the value of a great first impression. Too often, online store owners are so slammed with the day-to-day details of their business that they forget that improving new customers’ first visit to their website translates into significant sales. … Read more

Once you’ve setup your Shopify store’s JSON-LD, you’re probably wondering when your store will show up differently in the search results. How long this takes is vague and cloaked in mystery. This is mostly because it depends on how much trust your site has but also because Google doesn’t want people to game the search … Read more

Seeing how other Shopify stores are doing is a great way to spot improvements in your own store. Today I have the metrics for a store from Repeat Customer Insights that I’d like to walk through an analysis of because it represents one common situation I see with stores. The Metrics Looking at the analysis … Read more

Seeing how other Shopify stores are doing is a great way to spot improvements in your own store. Today I have the metrics for a store from Repeat Customer Insights that I’d like to walk through an analysis of because it represents on common situation I see with stores. The Metrics Looking at the analysis … Read more

JSON-LD for SEO has some advanced features that can be enabled using metafields. Metafields act as extended data in Shopify but they aren’t shown anywhere to administrators. Recommended tools Instead you will need to use either the Shopify API, a Shopify App, or another tool to create and update metafields. Below are a list of … Read more

Knowing how much your repeat customers purchase over time is knowing a very powerful metric. The more repeat customers spend and the higher the likelihood of them making a repeat purchase (your Repeat Purchase Rate), the more you can spend to acquire and get repeat orders. That means you can out-bid competitors in paid advertising, … Read more

I acquired the JSON-LD for SEO Shopify app from the previous developer, Gavin. JSON-LD for SEO will continue to work just as it was under Gavin. If you need help or have a question about the app or anything Shopify, you can reach me by email at shopify at this domain. Eric Davis Little Stream … Read more

When your Shopify store has a large drop-off in its repeat purchase rate, that means your most loyal customers aren’t coming back. Which sucks, because of the time and money you’ve invested in them to acquire and keep them is now gone. In order to keep those customers around, you need to first diagnose where … Read more

When your Shopify store has a large drop-off in its Average Order Value, that means your loyal customers are spending less and less with each purchase. That sucks because the major benefit of having loyal customers is that they spend more and more with each visit, and pay back any acquisition costs. Before you can … Read more

Drip’s Shopify integration uses events to know what’s going on in Shopify. When a customer makes a purchase, Drip sees that event and can then trigger your marketing automation rules. It’s important to know which events are supported so you can plan your store’s integration. I’ve included the full list below showing the Shopify event … Read more

As a Shopify store, you can use Shopify’s reports to calculate your repeat sales percentage but it takes time to do it all the time, especially if you want to watch it over the calendar year. Repeat Customer Insights now includes the Repeat Sales metric Now Repeat Customer Insights includes the Repeat Sales percentage metric … Read more

Shopify’s public and private app definitions can be confusing and result in questions like this that I got from a reader: We want to integrate with Shopify to bring in orders. I looked into this a while back and it appeared the best / maybe only way to do this would be via a public … Read more

Standard marketing strategy leads you to believe that the #1 game in business growth is attracting new customers to discover your store. Find better and flashier ways to grab consumers’ attention, and profits will keep rolling in. That’s a really expensive way to do business. How expensive? Forbes did a great piece on this issue, … Read more

With Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and other winter holidays approaching, many Shopify stores are getting ready to handle the increase in traffic and sales. Shopify themselves are probably tuning up their code and servers to make sure all of their stores perform well. Even with all of that tuning, many Shopify stores are going to … Read more

Keeping your Shopify app’s data synchronized with Shopify’s API can be confusing at first. Fortunately there are two different options you can pick from. 1. Scheduled cronjobs to pull data An easy way to synchronize your data with Shopify is to make the API calls you need and save the resulting objects into your local … Read more

Last time I introduced you to the RFM analysis as a way to combine three simple segments into one powerful segment. Now you’re going to learn what happens when you’re able to perform an RFM analysis on your customers. You’ve already seen how to combine the Recency and Frequency segments but a full RFM analysis … Read more

Getting to know your customers when you have an ecommerce store can be difficult. Your Shopify store can collect tons of data on them (or is it megabytes of data…) but much of that data is useless. What you want, is to learn more about your customers so that you can optimize you store for … Read more

Last time we looked at one simple way to segment your customers, by Recency. The problem with Recency is that you have to be careful marketing buy messages to them because they recently bought from you. But if you wait too long to market to them, they’ll age out (leave) the Recency segment. So you … Read more

Working with clients since 2007 I’ve been able to try out different ways of working to ensure you get the best results possible. This has resulted in doing week-long development cycles for clients. But I realized that it’s not very clear what this includes so I’m going to describe a typical week to you here. … Read more

When your Shopify store isn’t getting many orders from repeat customers, the problem can be difficult to fix. One suggestion I give to store owners is to reach out to repeat customers and try to start a conversation with them. By starting a conversation you’re able to talk to your customers and can discover why … Read more

Server Security: The High Cost of Cheap Shared Hosts When you’re building your Shopify site, there are dozens of choices can add up to a site that functions flawlessly or one that needs to be rescued regularly. As you consider your options in choosing cloud hosting, I want to do everything in my power to … Read more

You’ve made the leap. After months (or years!) of field testing apps from the Shopify App Store, you’ve decided it’s time that you need a custom app built just for your store. Congratulations! No more wrestling with clumsy workflows. Say goodbye to ugly data transfers that waste more time than they save. Say hello to … Read more

The process of optimizing your store for retention isn’t just one big A-to-Z task you complete once and check off. It’s a regular set of smaller processes where you perform experiments to try and improve different parts a little bit at a time. Combined, they all lead to significant improvements. One set of improvements that … Read more

Today we’re going to talk about how your repeat purchase rate is an excellent measure of your future success. Repeat purchase rate shows you how loyal your customer base is. The more customers who come back and buy two, three, or even ten times, the more valuable each customer is. With a high repeat purchase … Read more

Your ecommerce store’s Average Order Value (AOV) is one of the key metrics you want to keep track of. Average Order Value shows how much each customers spends in an order, on average (hence the name). It’s useful metric to know because you can use it to make sure that you’re acquiring customers at a … Read more

What can you do when you and your Shopify App Store app are deep in like, but not deep in love? Do you break up and find someone new, or stick it out for the long haul? I get a lot of clients asking me how to deal with an app that performed faithfully for … Read more

With any customer retention process, you might have ran into a problem with Shopify. Before you can start any kind of customer retention, you first need to know who your repeat customers are. Shopify is great at keeping track of customer data, but it doesn’t make it easy to find them. Especially when an order … Read more

In order to retain your repeat customers you need to treat them differently and not just as a transaction. They’re a person who is giving your business an opportunity to serve. That probably sounds vague and wishy-washy but you know what I mean. How is that going to be used to give you something actionable? … Read more

So your Shopify app has launched, you’re getting customers, and life is good. That is, until you get that email from Honeybadger that there was a Ruby exception in your app. No big deal… until 15 seconds later you get a third, and a fourth, and a fifth. I’ve seen and heard this scenario play … Read more

One disadvantage of building Shopify apps is that by default only Shopify maintains the list of your app’s customers. That means you don’t really have a good way of knowing who they are or communicating with them. Unless, of course, you maintain your own customer database along with Shopify. Your own Shopify customer database Once … Read more

If you’re looking for a solid, smooth tech fix to improve the functionality of your Shopify store, research on apps can leave you in uncharted waters. Hundreds of developers have created a huge selection of apps that can help you manage merchandise, content, reports, social media, customers and more — all automatically. Even if you … Read more

One question that comes up often is: How do you install a private Shopify app? The thing is, you don’t actually install private Shopify apps. Since they are restricted to only one store, you don’t have to go through the installation process. This confusion happens because public and unlisted Shopify apps are installed. If you’ve … Read more

The e-commerce era has been a boon for hard-working entrepreneurs. Instead of being confined to physical stores and a geographically limited customer base, shops and customers can be located anywhere in the world and still do a brisk business. Online businesses have completely taken off, thanks to online tools like Shopify that reduce the number … Read more

Your store is thriving, business is rolling along, but you’re feeling a little constrained by the functionalities on Shopify. Most options are mostly all right, but you keep wondering if there are a few tweaks that can ease your workload and improve your customers’ experience. You’ve probably toyed with the idea of hosting a private … Read more

Top Shopify merchants, no matter what size, have the same problem locking in their success. Even if they’re making a decent profit, they are always under a lot of pressure to keep tabs on merchandise at every single stage of the sales process. Unfortunately, Shopify doesn’t make this task very easy. Using their standard procedures, … Read more

Content marketing and blogging have both become a very low-cost way to attract customers. A steady blogging process can build an audience of customers over time, smoothing out many seasonal peaks and valleys. You have a few options you can use to start blogging with your Shopify store. 1. The built-in Shopify blog First, you … Read more

If you’re running an e-commerce store that needs to be online 24/7 and you are self-hosting, you need to look carefully to make sure your servers are truly serving you. Most small stores are trying to save money by self-hosting, and that’s probably the smartest financial move for young companies. However, it’s easy to miss … Read more

A healthy Rails application is an asset that will benefit your organization for years to come – an unhealthy one, on the other hand, will be a weight you and your team will have to bear every day. Why application health is important A Rails application’s health is important for a number of reasons. 1. … Read more

All software projects can run into performance problems, including Rails projects. There are two common situations that cause Rails projects to run into performance problems. 1. Popularity An application becomes more popular than expected. This unplanned additional popularity puts stress on the system and can cause failures. Very often the failures are in a few … Read more

When reviewing a software consultant one of the big questions that’s on your mind is “Are they good enough?” What do you need But before you can answer that, you need to know what you actually need and want from them. Hiring a developer to build your first version of your product will have different … Read more

So you’re ready to start your project. You know what you want built. You have the time in your schedule to have it built. And you have an idea of who will build it. But after talking with a few software consultants, you’ve gotten a bit of a sticker shock. High demand On one had, … Read more

The first step to working with you is what I call my New Client Consultation. This is a 30 minute phone call where we talk about the project and your business. I want to find out if I can help you and if it looks like there will be a good fit between us. After … Read more

Over the years I’ve worked with a variety of clients. Different industries. Different businesses. Different business models. Of them, I’ve found some common criteria that makes the relationship work best. A good relationship is important for both you and me. Communication becomes easier. Less mistakes are made. And overall, the project is just better. My … Read more

It’s time to hire a software consultant, but where do you look? Do you look only in your local network of contacts? Or do you look for anyone in your city? In your state? Country? Worldwide? Local bias There has always be a bias for buying, consuming, and hiring locally. The main reason for this … Read more