Let’s admit it: Shopify is one of the most used eCommerce CMS platforms out there with millions of businesses using it. However, only a few manage to improve their Shopify ranking using SEO.
Using SEO for Shopify can be a deadly tool in boosting your eCommerce performance on the web. Once used, it can dramatically help you rank for top positions in SERPs and help you get more traffic and leads.
To make it simpler, we’ve curated some of the best Shopify SEO tips for you. Using these will help you improve SEO on Shopify.
Ready to boost your search engine rankings? Use the Shopify SEO checklist below:
This is your first key step to Shopify SEO success.
Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are two indexing tools owned by the world’s most important search engines: Google and Bing.
Having your website registered on Google and Bing will let them know about your presence and result in an instant crawl of the pages on your Shopify store.
It’s a minor but crucial step you should take before proceeding further with anything else when optimizing your Shopify store.
Make sure you register both www and non-www domain versions of your website.
A ‘sitemap’ or a ‘site structure’ is a file that contains a list of all the webpages of your Shopify site. It’s an XML file that tells search engines what pages to crawl and index on your website.
From an SEO point of view, optimizing your sitemap is a key to ranking in search engines and must never be avoided. A well-structured site helps your customers easily navigate through pages, thus increasing their dwell time on your store.
Shopify, by default, creates a sitemap for you where it is stored in the root directory of the website. For example, MyShopifyStore.com/sitemap.xml
You can then submit your sitemap file to Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools.
To upload your sitemap on Google Search Console:
Doing so will make it easier for search engines to crawl your store.
Keywords drive SEO and that should always be your rule of thumb when doing SEO for Shopify stores.
Without the right set of keywords, you’ll have a hard time ranking your store and its content in search engines.
When searching for relevant keywords, make sure you target those that people are actually searching for.
Try to pick keywords with high intent. These keywords have higher chances of conversions as they call for a customer need that requires immediate solving.
For example: “Buy medium-sized full-sleeve pink women t-shirt” is a long-tail keyword that tells you exactly what the customer’s intention is and they might be looking for.
Another thing to keep in mind when doing keyword research is looking for low difficulty keywords with good search volume.
You can also use specialized keyword research tools like Ahrefs, Keywords Everywhere, or Answer The Public to look up keywords for your products.
For anyone proficient in SEO will know how important metadata is for successfully ranking in search engines. It’s that key information that tells search engines what the page is about and what visitors can expect once they land.
For every Shopify regular and Collections page, make sure you write solid SEO-optimized URLs, titles, and meta descriptions.
The effective way to do that is to incorporate highly-ranked keywords in your store’s title and description without making it sound stuffed or redundant.
Also, when writing your descriptions keep them short and crisp. They shouldn’t exceed the desired character limit.
Another way to take your Shopify SEO further is by also optimizing the images on your store. Adding alt tags has shown to impact search rankings so make sure you don’t skip it.
You can do that including appropriate Alt-tags and adding relevant keywords.
When adding alt-tags remember to keep them short and unique. The aim of alt tags is to help crawlers understand what the image is all about so try to keep it simple.
Also, when adding keywords in alt text do so in a way that they sound natural. Unnecessary stuffing of keywords might result in a red flag from Google and can hurt your rankings.
Writing content is, hands down, an excellent way to improve SEO on Shopify.
In most cases, business owners on Shopify don’t create engaging content and shift their focus on writing descriptions instead. While that’s a good thing it reduces your chances of ranking organically as product description content doesn’t necessarily rank higher in search engines.
On the other hand, high-quality content like blogs, articles, and guides rank much higher in search engines, attract more traffic from visitors, and thus drive chances of making more sales.
On top of that, high-quality content also brings plenty of backlinks to your store which further straightens your store’s authority on the web.
As you can tell, good content is the cornerstone if you want to spike the website rankings and traffic of your Shopify store.
Takeaway: Write insanely good content that will make people share it across the web.
Backlinks, like content, are a great way to drive rankings, authority, and sales for your Shopify business.
A link back from a high authority website gives search engines a signal about the overall usefulness of your website. It’s like getting an exclusive reference that results in a boost in rankings (Great if you want to surpass competitors in search results.)
There are plenty of ways you can build backlinks. The most common and effective way is through posting regular and guest blogs.
You can use one or both techniques together to build backlinks around your store.
When guest blogging, always target websites with a domain rating higher than your own. A backlink from such websites is always better than from a website with domain authority lesser than you.
Believe it or not, the time taken to load your Shopify page can positively or negatively impact your rankings.
This is why it’s always a good idea to optimize the loading speed of your webpages so search engines give it a preference over other pages.
Thankfully, there are a few ways you can optimize the speed of your Shopify pages so that they load faster.
Doing SEO for Shopify doesn’t have to be a difficult task. However, as SEO is dynamic in nature, using outdated strategies from yesteryear won’t help you rank.
That’s why partnering with a dedicated SEO expert specialized in Shopify is always a good idea. These can be a single individual or a group of people that have immense knowledge and technical expertise in SEO.
Best of all Shopify SEO experts, unlike generic marketers, use professional tools and strategies to help businesses rank their Shopify business.
Thus by reaching out to such professionals, you can save yourself plenty of legwork and time to focus on more important tasks for your business.
And guess what, you don’t have to look for one.
We are a digital marketing agency that specializes in SEO services for Shopify and eCommerce websites. We have helped plenty of businesses drive SEO success and can help you generate plenty of leads, traffic, and sales.
Get in touch with us and we’ll help you out!
