Shopify is an excellent eCommerce platform for those new to website building. With a vast number of customisable options available – all easy-to-use with no coding experience required – rookie site designers can craft slick, professional online stores with ease. Yet, once they’ve gotten up and running, they’ll soon discover a critical element of building and running a website: the importance of SEO.
If you’re in the same boat, various questions are likely swirling around in your head. ‘Can you do SEO on Shopify?’ ‘Is Shopify bad for SEO campaigns?’ ‘Should I switch to a different website building platform for better SEO performance?’
This guide is here to answer those burning questions!
Can You Do SEO on Shopify?
So, can you do SEO on Shopify? This guide would be short if the answer were ‘no’!
The good news is that, yes, you can do SEO on Shopify. Not just that, but it’s entirely possible for your Shopify website to prosper. After all, plenty of Shopify-based sites can be found on the first page of Google search results – and they didn’t reach that coveted top spot without SEO!
Is Shopify Bad for SEO?
If you’ve already adopted SEO, this is the answer you’re probably dreading the most. However, fear not; Shopify isn’t bad for your SEO efforts – in general.
Shopify has all the basics nailed. There’s a large collection of built-in SEO features and apps, all of which can help your website get ranked on Google. Not just that, but the platform is also deemed one of the best for beginners getting to grips with SEO.
Still, there’s one issue: Shopify is a closed platform. Compared to open platforms, there are fewer customisable options and flexibility. So, if you’re wondering how to change SEO on Shopify, the only changes you can make are internal ones.
How to Add SEO to Shopify
As mentioned, Shopify is one of the most SEO-friendly eCommerce platforms. While many users wonder how to add SEO to Shopify, it’s clear they haven’t looked close enough – the platform supplies SEO features built-in!
With that said, many SEO plugins can be found in the Shopify App Store. So, if you’re seeking how to add SEO to Shopify via a plugin that isn’t already built in, do a quick search on the store for a potential solution. You can find everything from image optimisers to Yoast SEO.
How to Edit Website SEO Shopify Style: Top Tips
You understand how to add SEO to Shopify. Now, it’s time to learn how to do SEO on Shopify on a deeper level. While learning how to edit website SEO Shopify style, you’ll see it isn’t too dissimilar from any other platform. This means if you’ve ever had experience with SEO before, the following guide should be relatively easy to follow.
There’s no need to guess how to set up SEO on Shopify – the following tips will reveal all.
Find and Add Keywords
When discovering how to do SEO Shopify style, you’ll quickly see it has the same foundation as any other platform – which means you need to find the right keywords for your website.
The Shopify App Store features keyword research tools. However, this is a step you can take externally with tools such as Ahrefs and Google Keyword Planner. Whichever route you go down, remember you have to find keywords that are both valuable and relevant to your target audience.
Keyword research is only the first half of this step when finding out how to do SEO in Shopify. You then need to incorporate this collection of keywords intelligently within your website’s content. Headlines, meta descriptions, ALT tags, and a web page’s body of content are all important places for keyword implementation.
Optimise Your Tags
When understanding how to set up SEO on Shopify, it’s important to note that not everything is visible for others to see. A lot of work goes on in the background – as seen with Shopify tags.
Do tags on Shopify help with SEO? While they may not directly help with SEO, they do help categorise your content and organise search results. The result: your website is more structurally sound, visitors are happier, and they stick around for longer. So, do Shopify tags help SEO? Absolutely.
Control What Pages Are Crawled with Robots.txt
When learning how to do SEO Shopify style or otherwise – one realisation is that you don’t have to optimise every page. In fact, there are likely some pages you don’t want search engines to crawl.
As such, when knowing how to do SEO on Shopify in terms of crawl controlling, one tactic involves the robots.txt file. To edit this file on Shopify, you’ll need to use the robots.txt.liquid theme template. With this, you can disallow URLs from being crawled, block specific crawlers, add additional sitemap URLs, and include a crawl delay.
Optimise Website Speed
If you’re curious about how to change SEO on Shopify for the better, one important step is to optimise your website’s speed. Now, Shopify is a well-built platform that carefully considers load speeds – but there are still additional measures you can put in place to improve this aspect of your site.
With this in mind, the following tips detail how to do SEO on Shopify for page speed optimisation:
- Use a lightweight theme: This is one of the most effective site speed solutions when learning how to change SEO on Shopify for better website performance.
- Reduce installed apps: Any guide on how to do SEO in Shopify will mention apps, widgets, and plugins. However, too many can negatively impact your site’s performance.
- Accelerated Mobile Pages: Speaking of apps and how to do SEO on Shopify, Accelerated Mobile Pages technology helps boost your site’s mobile speed.
- Image compression: In any ‘how to edit SEO on Shopify guide, image compression will likely be mentioned. It’s a small but very important part of the speed optimisation puzzle.
Conclusion
When learning how to do SEO Shopify style, you’ll discover it’s largely the same as any other platform. You still perform keyword research, look for backlink opportunities, and produce search-worthy content. Sure, there’s no special formula or secret hacks in terms of how to edit SEO on Shopify. Yet, if you follow the above steps, you’ll be able to improve performance and boost your organic traffic.
Need Help with SEO?
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