Will adding structured data get me more traffic

I recently received a fantastic question from a store owner evaluating JSON-LD for SEO to see if it's a fit for them.

Will adding structured data get me a lot more traffic? Should we wait to get results on our first store before adding JSON-LD for SEO on our other stores?

Though I can't quantify "a lot more organic traffic," nor would I ever guarantee results, you can typically expect more traffic and/or higher-quality traffic that converts better.

A lot depends on how much organic and ad traffic you already get (JSON-LD for SEO also helps with Google Merchant Center). It would be surprising to get double your traffic, but based on what I've seen, 1-5% more organic traffic is reasonable. Obviously, not everyone gets that.

I like to look at it on a return on investment (ROI) basis. JSON-LD for SEO costs $399/year so roughly $33/month. If you make $10 per order, then the app only has to get you the traffic for 3.3 orders per month to pay for itself. That's totally reasonable. Even more so if you make more than $10 per order, e.g. if you sell higher-priced products, one order could pay for the entire year of the app.

Or you can look at it from an ad cost basis. How much traffic would $33/month of your ads generate? At $1 per-click (CPC) that's 33 visits. Maybe one buyer if you have a good conversion rate for your ads. Compare that to what a 1-5% boost to your organic traffic would be.

The only downside to having JSON-LD for SEO is the price. It won't hurt your store and there's lots of evidence that shows it would help. I just don't know HOW MUCH it will help, I can only make guesses based on other store's experience.

Not to mention the benefits that structured data has on your paid and free listings on Merchant Center.

A complication is that measuring success is challenging, which is why I can't give a universal answer. The only way to truly check for Rich Results is a manual process which is why I include the service as part of the app subscription. Some tools will report if you have product snippet or merchant listings data on a URL, but when JSON-LD for SEO is installed, all your product URLs have data. Just having data at the URL only qualifies you for Rich Results, Google still has to show them, which isn't guaranteed. So those tools' reports are not really helpful.

What we really care about is whether Google is using that data to influence the way a result looks. And that, no matter how hard we try, is a manual process.

Going back to the original questions from the store, they were also considering adding it to more stores.

While it can be useful to try something and wait to see how it performs before rolling it out everywhere, SEO and structured data can flip that strategy around. The opportunity cost of waiting for your first store to get results, could mean losing out on 2-6 months (?) of results for your other stores. And one of those other stores might outperform your first store because Google is weird and every store has its own performance even if they use all the same tooling.

If it's helpful, here are some examples of what other folks have achieved. These are probably not typical of every customer, but I've tried to get a variety of stores to share their results.

I recommend installing JSON-LD for SEO if Google is coming to your store and you want to make SEO part of your marketing strategy.

And I genuinely believe that all e-commerce stores can benefit from adding structured data to their store.