Losing over 50% of my sales in organic SEO in the Shopify App Store

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 results with the orange rating stars and number of reviews.

Recently Shopify updated how reviews are shown for each app. As a consequence of this update, there are now errors in the structured data which means that apps are no longer showing their reviews in the search results.

So searching for one of my apps looks like this.

Rather plain right?

At first I thought this was something minor that Shopify would fix, but then I checked the number of installs via organic search from before vs. now.

Installs (purchases) are down 58% from before the change.

Nothing else changed on the page. In fact, things should be better because I’ve started to market the app and collect even more reviews.

Let’s take this back to your store.

Imagine losing 58% of your sales from your organic SEO. That’s the impact (improper) structured data can have.

Or if you don’t have structured data at all, that’s traffic and sales you could be missing out on.

If you want an automatic structured data installer, JSON-LD for SEO might be able help you out.

(And if you install JSON-LD for SEO, you’ll help prop up my weakened organic SEO)