How to Optimize a Shopify Website for SEO [2024]
Do you know 95% of Shopify stores fail to survive in the competitive market?
Read this blog post to find ways how to optimize a Shopify website for SEO to be one of those 5% successful Shopify store owners. ✨
There are many reasons for the high failure rate of Shopify stores; poor SEO & marketing is the most common. Organic traffic is one of the highly profitable marketing channels with a high return on investment value. To drive more organic traffic to your Shopify store, you need to optimize it for SEO. ✅
Let’s shed some light on how to improve SEO on Shopify stores.
Important sections of this post
Essentials for Shopify SEO
Before we begin with the main stuff, let’s look at some essentials you need for Shopify SEO.
Shopify Paid Plan
First, you need to upgrade your store to a paid Shopify plan. The paid plan unlocks all the features of the platform, some of which are crucial for Shopify website optimization. It includes features such as custom domains, redirects, sitemaps, and other essential Shopify SEO settings. Furthermore, it is essential to upgrade your store to prevent deletion of your store after the trial period expires.
Custom Domain
The next thing you need to set up your Shopify store for SEO is a custom domain. An SEO-friendly domain name related to your industry can give you a competitive edge. Generally, the second-level domain (or the domain phrase) is the name of your business. It is followed by the top-level domain (TLD), which is the last part of the domain. Read this article to learn more about domain SEO for Shopify.
Integration with Google Analytics & Google Search Console
Google Analytics 4 & Search Console are free tools offered by Google. They offer detailed insights into the site’s performance on Google and user behavior. These two tools are pre-requisite for your Shopify SEO and can help you measure the performance of your SEO efforts and make data-driven decisions.
Related Reads: Add Google Search Console to Shopify
Social Media Presence
Although not directly, your business’s presence on social media platforms is essential to improve SEO on Shopify store. Creating your accounts on various social media platforms can help you establish social trust, amplify your content reach, and have an edge in local SEO.
Other Essential Tools
Apart from the things mentioned above, you also require the following extra tools to carry out search engine optimization with ease:
How to Do SEO for Shopify Website?
The definition of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has remained the same since its origin in the mid-90s, but not the techniques involved in the process. It is an ever-evolving science of persuading search engines and satisfying users.
It is not a one-time effort; you need to optimize your Shopify store consistently. I will explain all the important points for Shopify website optimization for SEO. Your quest for ‘How to do SEO on Shopify’ ends with the following points:
- Optimize Site Structure
- Add Structured Data
- Perform Keyword Research
- Leverage Content For SEO
- Optimize Title & Meta Description
- Build Quality Backlinks
- Enhance Website Performance
- Install Shopify SEO Apps
- Run Regular Website Audits
Before you start optimizing your store for SEO, I advise you to fix these common Shopify SEO issues.
Optimize Site Structure
Your online store must follow a clear site structure that helps search engines like Google better understand the important pages. Thanks to the built-in features of Shopify that follow the best practices of site structure with a logical hierarchy of categories.
Listed below are some actionable tips to optimize the Shopify site structure for SEO::
- Make sure that all important pages are on the navigation menu with relevant titles.
- Follow a consistent URL structure for all the web pages and products.
- Keep the click-depth of money pages < 3 that is not farther than 1 or 2 clicks from the homepage.
- Group similar content & posts and put them under a single category.
- Use tags for posts to make it easy for users to discover pages on your website.
- Build contextual internal links to important pages of your Shopify store.
You can learn more about optimizing Shopify structure for SEO through the official resources.
Add Structured Data
Google is highly intelligent, but it is still a machine that works on algorithms. It can not differentiate a product page from other types of content unless we provide extra information.
That extra piece of information is called Structured Data or Schema Markup. This helps Google better understand the web page and generate Google rich snippets. Adding Structured data to your site is one of the ways to optimize a Shopify website for SEO.
Three types of schema markups are supported by Google: RDFa, Microdata, and JSON-LD. Out of which, JSON-LD is the most commonly used data type for schema markup.
You can do that manually or install Shopify apps to add schema markup to your store. The manual method is explained below in brief:
- Sign in to your Shopify admin panel, and go to Online store>Themes>Action>Edit Code.
- Generate a schema code relevant to the web page or product and insert that into the head section of the page.
- After saving, test the web page using Google’s Rich Results Test to ensure that you’ve incorporated the schema properly.
Well, manually writing structured data is not ideal as it can be both time-consuming and prone to human errors. Therefore, it is advisable to use any Schema generator tool or Shopify app that automates the schema markup generation and insertion.
Perform Keyword Research
SEO is an inbound form of marketing. Therefore, it is essential to understand the terms or search queries your audience is searching on Google. This is keyword research.
Performing keyword research helps you find the right terms to use in your web pages and content to attract relevant traffic. There are many ways to do that.
You can start the research with Google by searching the topic and gathering relevant queries from the related searches and Google’s autocomplete suggestions.
Furthermore, you can take help from tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, and Keywords Everywhere to find other useful information such as monthly volume and ranking difficulty.
But this isn’t enough.
You may also need to categorize the keywords based on the searcher’s intent and choose the right keywords suitable for the content you’re optimizing. Mainly, the keywords are of four types based on the user intent:
- Informational
- Navigational
- Transactional
- Commercial
Keywords with transactional and commercial intent are well-suited for the product and service pages. In the same way, queries with informational intent for the resources pages and navigational intent for the home page.
Optimize the content for SEO by naturally including the keywords at important places such as URL slug, title, meta description, body, and ALT tags. But do not overoptimize!
Leverage Content For Shopify SEO
The content of your Shopify web pages is at the apex when we talk about on-page SEO optimization. It consists of all the visual & text elements on the web page that inform, enlighten, and convince the visitors.
Publish content targeting the audience at multiple stages of the conversion funnel. You can target the high purchase intent keywords in the money pages and create blog posts to cover the informational queries for the audience at the upper part of the marketing funnel.
Cover helpful blog topics and solve real-life problems faced by your customers. Talk to your existing customers about their problems to create helpful blog posts. Gather data from popular online forums and communities related to your industry to find trending topics. You can also find the top-performing pages of your competitors using tools such as SpyFu for blog topic generation.
Ensure using enticing visuals and compelling text content for the product pages covering the key terms. Ensure the content is skimmable and easy to understand for the customers. Some useful tips for content SEO:
- Follow a proper/logical structure of headings on the web pages ✅
- Do not target the same keyword for multiple web pages to avoid self-competition ❌
- Use a blend of media with text content not to make web pages too boring to read ✅
- Prevent using the same content for multiple pages to avoid duplicate content issues ❌
- Interlink useful and important pages on your Shopify store from other pages with keywords in the anchor text ✅
- Refrain from using AI tools to generate content or publish spun content ❌
- Regularly audit and update your website content to keep it afresh ✅
Your website content represents your brand. Keep it that way.
Furthermore, you can repurpose your website content, such as blog posts for social media posts, and increase your reach.
Optimize Title & Meta Description
Search engine crawlers such as Google use the metadata of web pages to understand them better.
Generally, the title & meta description are displayed on the search engine ranking pages (SERPs) and are the first elements of the web page that the users encounter. Not direct ranking factors but well-crafted and optimized metadata of web pages can help increase the click-through rates on the SERPs.
Best practices for writing SEO-friendly titles and meta descriptions for Shopify:
- Include your targeted keyword in the titles & meta descriptions.
- Use power words in the page titles to increase CTR.
- Keep the title length between 50 and 60 characters and the meta description length between 50 and 160 characters. You can use a SERP Simulator to write better metadata.
- Include a clear call-to-action in the meta descriptions.
- Keep each meta description unique.
You can also take help from tools such as CoSchedule’s headline analyzer to write better headlines.
Build Quality Backlinks
Backlinks are highly important ranking factors for websites, which act as voting signals from other websites. Building quality backlinks from domains relevant to your Shopify store can help you rank higher on Google if you’ve nailed the on-page SEO.
You can build quality backlinks to your website and strengthen the off-page aspect of your website by using the following techniques:
- Competitor Link Analysis – Use tools such as Ahrefs backlink checker to analyze your competitor’s backlink profile and find link-building opportunities.
- Become an Expert Source – Submit expert quotes on platforms such as HARO, Help a B2B Writer, Qwoted, and Terkel to get quality backlinks from reputed sources.
- Guest Post on Other Sites – Become a guest author on other websites related to your niche and post content with links to your website. You can also use Google Search Operators to find guest posting opportunities.
- Perform Broken Link Building – Reach out to the authors of web pages containing broken links to replace them with links to your website.
- Reclaim Unlinked Brand Mentions – Regularly monitor your online brand mentions and reach out to the authors of web pages containing your unlinked brand mentions to add a link.
Enhance Website Performance
There is no doubt in saying that website performance is an important Google ranking factor. According to Google, the probability of website visitors bouncing increases by 123% as the loading time increases from 1 to 10 seconds. Furthermore, Google also considers metrics known as Core Web Vitals to measure the user experience of the web pages on desktop and mobile devices. From the SEO POV, ensuring that the website scores well in these metrics on all device types with different screen sizes is essential.
You can measure your website performance using tools such as Google’s Core Web Vitals assessment. It will also provide you with some actionable tips for improvement.
Some of the effective ways to improve your Shopify store’s performance for SEO are:
- Uninstall unnecessary apps.
- Use a responsive, fast-loading, and SEO-friendly Shopify theme.
- Compress images and reduce their size.
- Minify CSS & JS.
If you are not a technical person, you may also need help from a Shopify developer to improve your online store from the technical SEO aspects.
Install Shopify SEO Apps
Shopify apps extend the platform’s functionalities and make it easier for you to perform SEO operations. There are hundreds of paid and free Shopify SEO apps that you can use to optimize your store for better rankings. Listed below are some useful Shopify SEO Apps:
You don’t need to install all of these SEO apps; try them out one-by-one and use the Shopify app that you find useful for your store.
Run Regular Website Audits
Search Engine Optimization is more like playing hide & seek, where you need to constantly find and fix the areas of improvement on your website. Apart from the steps mentioned above, it is crucial to run regular website SEO audits to find and fix SEO issues.
You can use website audit tools and crawlers such as SEO Spider by Screaming Frog to find crawling and technical issues. Some important aspects of Shopify SEO audit are:
- Core web vitals score.
- Non-HTTPS pages.
- Web pages with duplicate content.
- Duplicate, missing, or improper title & meta descriptions.
- Redundant JS & CSS.
- Unoptimized images with large file sizes.
- UI/UX of pages with a low conversion rate.
- Interlinking of important pages.
- Backlink analysis of your online store.
You can also follow the Shopify SEO checklist prepared by our professionals to ensure that you miss nothing important while optimizing your Shopify store. Likewise you can optimize your store by Shopify dynamic pricing Implementation to change the price of products according to the demand and supply.
Take Help From Shopify SEO Experts
Optimizing your Shopify store for better search engine rankings is not a one-time process; it is a long-term journey. A journey that never ends. There are many things to look at while performing Shopify SEO. Hopefully, this post will help you how to optimize a Shopify website for SEO. 🚀
If you are still less confident, you can seek assistance from our Shopify SEO experts.
Want to boost organic traffic to your Shopify store? Make your store search engine-friendly using our Shopify SEO services.
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