We currently use Shopify Dawn theme and have been working to improve our SEO. We are continuing to receive errors from Semrush and our Rich Results Test for ‘Structured Data Items are invalid’. EX: Missing field ‘image, author’, Invalid datetime value for ‘datepublished’ and missing a timezone. When we post a blog all of these are filled out. Does the dawn theme have structured data built in to the theme or does this need to be customized? Also, any advice on if this actually plays an important role in our SEO would be helpful!
Dawn theme does include basic structured data, but it’s not always complete or optimized for rich results, which is why you’re seeing errors. Shopify’s default blog schema might be missing key fields like image, author, and properly formatted datePublished.
To fix this, you’ll likely need to customize your theme’s schema markup in the article.liquid file. Adding missing fields can improve how search engines understand your content, but structured data alone won’t boost rankings—it mainly helps with rich snippets.
Have you already tried adding custom schema, or do you need help tweaking it? Also, what errors are showing up the most in your reports?
I would not say it is vital but could help. imo any SEO improvements ou can accomplish you do. I am curious if the values are missing or if the author and date published fields are not there at all.
You’re likely on an old version of Dawn. The latest version of Dawn will provide everything except for the Author URL. Of course if you don’t have an image, that won’t show, but everything else would.
It’s important for SEO. So either update your theme or use an app that can provide the correct structured data for you.
With that said, SEMRush tends to report false errors because their tooling is out of date so I never trust their structured data reporting. Run your blog post through a Rich Results Test and that will tell you what Google cares about.
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Hi @Carly25
I agree with one piece of feedback from CedarJovan here who responded to you before, “Shopify Dawn theme includes basic structured data, but it is not completed and optimized properly for Google rich results”. The issues you received from Semrush and Rich Results Test recently are related to non-standard Structure data contents from the Shopify end, and they do not meet the demand of Google. If you would like to fix these issues permanently, I suggest you consider optimizing the structure data content directly from the Shopify backend with the help of developers, or you can disable them with the help of the Shopify Support Team and find another external APP to do the structure data directly, which can do some help here.
If you consider finding another external APP to do the structure data, please allow me to introduce SEOAnt APP here. It contains one feature called Google Structured Data - Snippets and it is designed based on the standard JSON LD structure data pattern accepted by Google. You can set up structured data very conveniently with One-Click only. What’s more, SEOAnt provides a Google Rich Result Test tool to check and validate if the structured data works well or not, so that you can get all the feedback in detail and properly. You can feel free to click here to install and give it a try if you are interested, and I’m very willing to help you optimize your website structure data contents in a better way. A 30% coupon SEOAnt 30% Jeffery for first two months and a 7-Day Free Trial is shared here for your reference. Hope your website has a better performance in SEO with SEOAnt’s help, thank you!
