Are you looking to improve your SEO for Shopify? If so, you’re in the right place. In this Shopify SEO guide, we will discuss how to optimize your site for maximum search engine visibility. We will cover everything from site structure and User-Experience to keyword research and image optimization.
Plus, as a bonus, we’ll give you a few tips on how to drive qualified traffic and boost sales for your Shopify store with content marketing & blogging. Let’s get started!
Shopify is a great platform for online stores of all sizes. However, as we all experienced with Facebook’s decline in advertising effectiveness, in order to get the most out of your Shopify store, you need to optimize your site for SEO. This means optimizing your titles, descriptions, images, and other elements that influence how your site ranks in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Table Of Contents
- Neccessary Free Tools To Start Optimizing
- Site Structure & User Experience (UX)
- Keywords & eCommerce Keyword Research
- Product Description Optimization
- Slug Optimization
- Image Optimization
- Image Alt Text
- Product Page Optimization
- Schema Markup
- Content Marketing
- Link Building
- The Top SEO Shopify Apps
Free Google Tools That You Need For SEO
The first step is to make sure you have both Google Analytics and Google Search console. Registering your site with Google Search Console and Google Analytics is a must for all website owners who want to be serious about search engine optimization.
By doing so, you are telling the world that this particular webpage exists — which will help it rank higher in SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). Google Analytics and Google Search Console are two of the most important tools for Shopify SEO. They provide you with vital information about your site’s traffic and performance on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Google Search Console
GSC is important for SEO because it provides you with information about your site’s visibility in Google search results. It tells you how often your site appears in search results, what queries caused your site to appear, and how much traffic your site is receiving from Google searches.
This information can help you to identify which keywords are working well for you and which ones need improvement. It can also help you to identify any potential issues with your site that may be impacting its visibility in Google search results.
Google Analytics
GA is vital for SEO because first off, it’s free, but more importantly, it provides you with information about your site’s traffic sources, time on page, bounce rates, and which pages your users are visiting. You can also set up GA eCommerce to track ‘add to carts’, purchases & so much more.
Site Structure & User Experience (UX)
To kick things off, we’re going to start with Site structure and User Experience (UX). The reason for this is because, at the end of the day, Google isn’t buying your products, your customers are, and with that, ensuring that your Shopify store meets their needs, is most important.
The first thing you should do is optimize the site structure for SEO purposes. This means creating a simple navigation system that is easy for users to navigate. Users are the lifeblood of any digital product, and UX design ensures they have a smooth experience on your Shopify store.
With so much time spent online nowadays, it is essential to ensure that users can navigate easily with little frustration. This helps the user not only to find what you’re selling, but also who you are, and any other pertinent details about your store. The better the UX, the more likely people are to stay on your site and make purchases.
Creating a great user experience (UX) is essential for any Shopify store. After all, if your site is difficult to navigate or looks bad on different devices, users will be less likely to stay on your site and make a purchase.
Shopify Navigation
Making sure your site is easy to navigate is really important for the customer experience. This means having a clear menu that shows them where they are and where they can go.
- Limited Options: When it comes to navigation, the essentials are what shoppers want. A good site design should condense your entire store so that users can view relevant products without being overwhelmed by a large selection or clicking too many links in order to find exactly where you’re going with this!
- Menu Links: The navigation bar should be clear and concise so that it can lead the user to their desired destination with ease. It is important for these labels to have descriptive copy, as well as being in distinct categories, in order not to leave any room for confusion about where the user is going to land.
- Collections Pages: Shopify collections pages are pages on your store that allow you to group products together. Believe it or not, collection pages are some of the most important pages on your store to ensure effective UX. You can create collections pages to group products by topic, style, or any other criteria that you choose. This can be a useful tool for shoppers who are looking for specific types of products. It can also help you to organize your store and make it easier for users to find what they are looking for.
Site-Speed Optimization
Site-speed optimization is one of the most important aspects of SEO. If your site is slow, users will be less likely to stay on your site and make a purchase. There are several ways you can optimize your site speed for a Shopify store.
According to SEMRush, “If your site loads in 2.9 seconds, it is faster than approximately 50% of the web. if your site loads in 1.7 seconds, it is faster than approximately 75% of the web. if your site loads in 0.8 seconds, it is faster than approximately 94% of the web.”
One way to optimize your site speed is to use a cache plugin. A cache plugin speeds up your site by saving a copy of your pages and files so that they can be accessed more quickly. Another way to optimize your site speed is to compress your images to 100KB or less. Compressing your images reduces their file size, which speeds up the loading time of your pages.
If you’re not sure about what your site speed is, we like to rely heavily on GTMetrix.com, as we’ve found the Shopify site speed tool is rather unreliable.
Another option to speed up your site is to leverage browser caching. Shopify should already be configuring your site’s internal resources to cache by default. This means that you will have some of the content such as images, JavaScript, and CSS stored locally within users’ browsers which they can then access faster from one visit rather than having all new downloads each time someone views this same resource in their browse session—saving lots of bandwidth!
Keywords & eCommerce Keyword Research:
When you are optimizing your site for SEO, one of the most important things to do is research keywords and find out which ones people are searching for on Google. To do this, you have two options: You can either use a free tool like Google’s Keyword Planner or utilize tools such as SEMRush, aHrefs, or Moz.
Once you have determined which keywords to target, you will need to make sure that your site’s titles and descriptions are optimized for those keywords. You can also use them in your content to help improve your ranking in SERPs.
Product Description Optimization
When writing a product description, it’s important to include keywords that potential customers might be searching for on Google. This will help your product rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). When you’re writing your product descriptions, try to use lists & make sure that your descriptions are a minimum of 200 words.
When it comes to performing keyword research for an eCommerce store, there are a few different methods you can use. In this section, we will discuss three of the most popular methods: using Google’s Keyword Planner, signing up for tools such as SEMRush, aHrefs, or Moz, and using competitor analysis. For more information, you can visit our eCommerce Keyword Research Guide.
Method 1: Using Google’s Keyword Planner
To use Google’s Keyword Planner, you first need to create a campaign. Once you have created your campaign, you can then start performing keyword research by entering a keyword or phrase into the “Get Ideas” box.
Google will then show you a list of related keywords along with their average monthly search volume. You can then add these keywords to your store and track their performance over time with Google Search Console.
Method 2: Utilizing Tools Such as SEMRush, aHrefs, or Moz
Another popular method for keyword research is using tools such as SEMRush, aHrefs, or Moz. These tools allow you to see which keywords your competitors target and how they rank in SERPs. You can also use these tools to find new keywords to target. From there, you’ll be able to set up specific projects that incorporate your store, the keywords you’ve selected & a backlink analysis for you’re link-building efforts.
Method 3: Competitor Analysis
The final method for conducting keyword research is by using competitor analysis. This involves studying your top competitors’ websites and seeing which keywords they are targeting and how they rank in search engines. You can then steal their best ideas and implement them on your own site.
Once you have targeted a few keywords, it is important to make sure that your site’s titles and descriptions are optimized for those keywords. You can also use them in your content to help improve your ranking in SERPs.
Slug Optimization
The slug is the part of the URL that comes after the domain name. It is important to optimize your slugs for SEO purposes because they are one of the factors that Google uses to determine how relevant a page is to a particular keyword. To optimize your slugs, you should include your target keyword as close to the beginning as possible and make sure it is included in the title of the page as well.
By using friendly and easy-to-read URL slugs, both search engines, as well as visitors, will be able to understand what is on a given page. It’s like having a name tag for each of your stores’ pages!
Image Optimization For Your Shopify Store
Images play an important role when it comes to your eCommerce store because we need to be able to display what people are there to buy! But, let’s be honest, we all know how important it is to have amazing images on our eCommerce stores. However, images can also take up a lot of space so it’s important not only to choose the right size but also to optimize them for speed by compressing their file sizes as much as possible without losing quality.
Reduce The File Size
Compression is the process of reducing file sizes for faster transfer, and storage. There are two ways to reduce your image sizes: Lossless compression which does not remove any data from images but instead reduces their size so they take up less room on your site. Lossy compression is where you potentially lose quality but can choose between quality modes such as “lower” settings that preserve more color accuracy than higher-quality options while still achieving reasonable savings in filesize.
Going back to the site speed conversation, image compression definitely plays into site speed, which as we described, is another factor that influences how well your site ranks in search results pages (SERPs).
Image Alt Text
Adding alt text to your images is a great way to improve your site’s SEO. Not only does it help you rank higher in SERPs, but it also helps your visitors understand what is on the page if your image doesn’t load properly. By using keywords in your alt text, you can help improve your ranking even further.
Make sure to use descriptive alt text for all of your images and don’t forget to include your target keyword whenever possible.
Product Page Optimization & Title Optimization
Product pages are one of the most important parts of any eCommerce website because they are what people will see when they click on a product listing from the Google search results page (SERP). To make sure these listings stand out from others, it is important to optimize them for both SEO purposes as well as ease-of-use. A great way to do this is using header tags correctly and writing meta descriptions that summarize what visitors will find when clicking through to your site from Google.
Using Header Tags Correctly
The header tags are what appear at the top of a web page and they usually include your site’s name or logo as well as some other information about your products or collections. With Shopify, you can choose from a variety of pre-fashioned headings like the title for your store and pages. The default tag is already set by Shopify as your H1, but you may also add H2 through H6 tags to indicate different sections within an article or page on Shopify.
These should be used correctly so that search engines know where each section begins & ends but also so that users can quickly find what they’re looking for on your various pages. Essentially, header tags are generally used in a similar fashion as beginning paragraphs to identify what the next section of the body copy will be about.
Schema-Markup For Shopify Stores
Structured data, or schema markup, is a code that you can add to your website’s HTML to help search engines understand the content on your pages. This code tells Google what the title of your page is, what the description is, what the author is, and other important information about the page.
Adding schema markup to your site can help improve your ranking in search results pages (SERPs) and increase click-through rates (CTRs). It can also help you stand out from the competition by adding rich snippets to your product pages. Rich snippets are HTML tags that you can add to your product pages to help improve their visibility in search results pages (SERPs).
They allow you to add extra information about your products, such as star ratings, prices, and availability. This can help encourage people to click through to your site from Google rather than someone else’s.
Content Marketing
So, we’ve talked about on-page SEO a lot so far, but what about driving qualified traffic to your store? Well. content marketing is one of the most effective ways to attract traffic to your website. By creating high-quality content that is relevant to your target audience, you can not only increase visits from organic search but also generate more sales by capturing your reader’s information & getting them to subscribe to your email blast.
The benefits of an eCommerce Blog are widely overlooked by many online retailers. Not only can it drive more than conversions, but a blog is also key in building trust and loyalty with potential future customers. If you’re looking for a more in-depth blog about creating an effective eCommerce content marketing strategy, check out this article.
An effective eCommerce blogging strategy will help build brand awareness while attracting new visitors that could eventually become loyal shoppers – all without breaking any sweat!
Believe it or not, one of the most important benefits of blogging for an eCommerce store is the ability to generate more traffic from organic searches. By creating high-quality content that is relevant to your target audience, you can write long-form content that will rank on Google.
Generally, we find content marketing to be very crucial for our Shopify clients, as we’re able to write blogs to people who our client’s products are aimed towards. With that, we’re identifying various topics that the buyer personas are searching for, writing extremely long-form content that ranks on the first page of Google, and driving highly-qualified FREE traffic to the Shopify website.
You don’t want to just post your blog articles on your own. Your blogs should be included in a wider content marketing strategy so that your marketing plan is not just dedicated to blogs, but rather enhances the overall marketing strategy with increased social media content & email marketing initiatives. The goal is to have your content working together to drive traffic from all platforms for a true omnichannel marketing campaign.
Link Building For eCommerce
Last but not least, link building! Link building is the process of acquiring links from other websites to your own. When search engines crawl the web, they look at the links between websites to determine the ranking of each page. The more high-quality links that you have pointing to your website, the higher your website will rank in search engine results pages (SERPs).
There are a number of ways that you can go about acquiring links for your eCommerce store, including link-building tactics such as content marketing, guest posting, directory submissions, and social media outreach.
One of the most effective ways to build high-quality links for your eCommerce store is by guest posting on high-authority websites. Guest posting is the process of writing a blog post for another website and including a link back to your own website. Not only will this help you build high-quality links, but it will also help you increase traffic and exposure for your brand.
Another great way to build high-quality links for your eCommerce store is by submitting your website to online directories. Online directories are websites that allow businesses to list their website or business in a directory of related websites. There are a number of different online directories that you can submit your eCommerce store to, including Google My Business, Bing Places for Business, and Yelp.
Social media outreach is another great way to build high-quality links for your eCommerce store. By reaching out to other businesses on social media and collaborating on content projects, you can form relationships with other business owners which will help you acquire high-quality links for your website.
To sum it up, link building is one of the most effective ways to drive more traffic and exposure to your eCommerce store. By implementing a variety of different link-building tactics, you can build high-quality backlinks that will help increase your search engine rankings and drive more sales. For more information about how link building can help grow your store, check out our 14 benefits of link building for eCommerce.
The Best SEO Shopify Apps To Use:
So, that’s a lot of work to optimize your Shopify store for SEO, so we felt it necessary to include some of our favorite SEO apps for Shopify. There are a lot of apps out there that will help you optimize your site for SEO purposes, but we wanted to bring you our favorites. These tools can be used for free or paid depending on what features you want to use them with.
Avada SEO Suite
If you’re looking for an all-in-one SEO solution for your Shopify store, then you should definitely check out AVADA SEO Suite. AVADA is a powerful SEO tool that can help you optimize your site for maximum visibility in search engines. It comes with…
- Image optimization
- Auto-add Google structure data (rich snippets)
- Meta Tags Optimization
- SEO Analysis
- Google Search Console Integration
- Weekly Email Report
Plug-In SEO
Coming in at number 2, Plug-In SEO is a free app that teaches you the top ways to improve your Shopify stores’ rankings in Google with a seamless process to optimize, fix broken links & add Schema & Alt Text. The information below is a breakdown of exactly what this app helps with.
- Structured Data/JSON-LD Schema Markup aka. Rich Snippets
- Templates to edit meta titles & descriptions in bulk
- Fix Headings, Image ALT tags, Filenames
- Detect & fix broken links/404 pages
- Google Search Console (Webmaster Tool) integration
- Keyword Tool & Suggestions
- SEO For product, collection, home & blog pages
- Periodic SEO health check report
- Supports Multilingual/Non-English Language SEO
- Constantly updated as Search Engines change
SEO Expert Pro ‑ All in One
With SEO Expert Pro, you can find your store’s on page issues and fix them inside the app itself. With a simple link checker tool to remove broken links, an image alt tool, and a rich snippets tool, as well!
What SEO Expert Pro Includes…
- Output Site for SEO Issues: SEO Expert Pro permits you to discover your store’s on-page SEO issues and fix them inside the application itself. Fix broken connections by broken connection checker.
- SEO Image Tool – Image Alt: SEO Image Tool permits you to refresh the alt text of all item pictures in a single tick. Aides in driving rush hour gridlock from Google Image search.
- Json LD Rich Data Snippet Tool: It empowers Json Ld on your store to send information to Google in an organized arrangement that brings about higher SEO rankings.
- Update Meta title & description tags
- Speed Test
- Mobile Compatibility Tester
Yoast SEO For Shopify
Yoast SEO’s new Shopify app comes in at $29 per month, which is definitely more than the previous two. Yoast SEO will analyze your content, product pages, collections pages & blogs to show you where and how to improve. The colored bullets provide a quick overview of what needs improvement in order for the text, images, or video clips included within them to rank higher on Google
What Yoast SEO for Shopify Includes…
- Optimize for keywords, related keywords, keyphrases & synonyms
- Improve Readability on all your store’s pages
- Improve product content
- Schema markup
- Alt Text
- 24/7 Service
SEO is definitely a lot of work but trust us when we tell you, it is well worth it in the long term. In summary, you can follow these tips to help optimize your Shopify store:
- Optimize your website structure
- Compress your images & add alt text
- Use header tags correctly
- Add schema markup to your HTML code
- Create high-quality content that is relevant to your target audience
- Generate sales from organic search.
- Build high-quality links to your store
In conclusion, optimizing a Shopify store for SEO can be a lot of work but it is definitely worth it in the long run. By following these tips, you will improve your site’s ranking on search results pages (SERPs).
