SEO Tips For Shopify

Shopify is one of the most widely used e-commerce websites on the internet. The platform hosts 1.7 million different merchants, which showcases how beloved it is within the e-commerce community.

With its various options for customisation and optimisation, the platform is extremely effective at helping its users improve the audience reach of their stores while finding a dedicated customer base. This is partly due to how Shopify gives its users the tools to build professional and trustworthy online shops.

However, perhaps the most significant factor for its popularity is how the platform makes it very easy for its sellers to optimise their SEO.

Optimisation is crucial when selling products as an e-commerce business. With well over a million stores hosted on this platform alone, it means that there are over 1 million potential competitors, making it pretty challenging to stand out and be seen.

Good SEO practices push stores higher up in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), increasing page views. Without basic SEO, your store will be so low in the result pages that it will likely never get any organic trafficOrganic search traffic (sometimes called natural or unpaid search) is the traffic that's driven to a website because of unpaid placement on a search engine results page., the primary source for e-commerce businesses.

Technical SEO for Shopify is critical to the success of your online store. Although the platform makes it easy for users to optimise their pages, it’s not an automatic process. You’re going to have to be thinking about SEO every time you add a new product.

Benefits of Shopify

There’s a reason why so many online merchants have chosen Shopify to be their host platform of choice, and that’s because it has an array of fantastic benefits.

Due to its great flexibility, the platform allows its users to create unique and bespoke e-commerce websites that can fit their specific brand. Users can choose from a set of impressive templates and then edit them to build a site that they’re happy with, without the need to learn complicated code. The software makes it super easy to alter things and build an online presence that looks professional, making it more accessible for people to enter the world of e-commerce.

Shopify is also an extremely secure platform that users trust. Customers will be more willing to shop on a website hosted on that platform than they would on an independently built domain. It also offers various payment options, offering more convenience for the customers.

However, perhaps the most significant benefit of the platform is that it has many fantastic SEO features that can help take your website to the next level.

For example, the platform makes it simple to add technical SEO for Shopify, like metadataPut simply, metadata is data that describes data. It’s a labelling system designed to help machines and humans understand what is contained within a packet of data. and schema, to your content, boosting the performance of your products on Google. On other platforms, you’ll have to add these within the code, but within Shopify, none of that is necessary.

You can also download plugins that can add extra functionality to your website, including plugins that can help you significantly improve your Shopify SEO. Still, before you use these advanced features, you must know the basics of good Shopify SEO.

Essential SEO Tips for Shopify

Before you start working on the more complicated SEO methods, it’s imperative that you lay the proper foundations to build your SEO efforts. Here’s a list of some of the essential SEO tips for Shopify. Without doing these, you’ll struggle to find much success:

Have a paid membership

You need to have a paid membership on Shopify to be able to sell effectively. If you’re using a free trial version, Shopify will deny search engines from indexing your website. Without being indexed by the likes of Google, your website will not appear on search results. So, if you’re serious about having a Shopify store, get on the paid plan before you do anything else.

Use a custom domain

Having a custom domain will make your e-commerce store appear more professional, trustworthy, and ultimately more appealing. People will be far more inclined to visit a website with the domain www.onlinestore.com than they would www.onlinestore.myshopify.com. Having the ‘myshopify’ tag makes your website look amateurish and doesn’t leave a good first impression, so connecting your own custom domain is always best.

Ensure security

The security of your e-commerce store is a ranking factor, so to make sure that you’re not harming your SEO, ensure that SSL encryption is enabled. Shopify should provide this by default; just double-check that it’s on!

Optimise for mobile

The majority of people use a mobile or portable device to access the internet and buy products. If your website isn’t working correctly on a mobile, you’re pushing away countless potential customers. Check how well optimised your website is for mobile by testing it on Google’s mobile-friendly tester.

Connect Your E-commerce Site to Google Resources

There are a few Google tools that you should use and connect your Shopify account to. Firstly, it’s important to set up Google Analytics. Doing so can help track your website visitors and provide you with valuable insights to help improve your SEO in the future. You should also connect your store to the Google Search Console. This will show you what keywords your website is ranking for, helping you identify keywords to target in the future. You should also create a sitemapA site map is a list of pages on your site and their relative importance. Use sitemaps to make it easier for visitors to find what they're looking for, and to ensure that search engines can find all the information they need. and submit this to the Google Search Console. A sitemap gives Google clear instructions on what pages to index, strengthening your SEO. Shopify creates an XML sitemap automatically for you, making it easier to submit.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO refers to all the techniques you can implement within the content of your website. They’re far easier to implement for many and don’t require much technical knowledge to perform.

Here’s a look at some of the main on-page SEO tips for Shopify you need to do:

KeywordKeywords are the words and phrases that potential customers might search for to find your business. Optimisation

Keyword optimisation is one of the foundational SEO techniques when on-page is concerned. The keywords you target determine which result pages your products, categories, and even homepage will appear on, so you must put some thought into this.

The keyword you’re targeting must appear within the title tag, product description, and naturally throughout the page when adding a new product. The tricky thing is determining which keywords to utilise.

A free way to do this would be to search on Google a word that describes your page. If the ranking pages are similar to your e-commerce store, you can look at their title tags to see if there are any recurring phrases that you can use as a keyword.

Additionally, a more data-driven way to find your keywords is to use a piece of software like Ahrefs Keywords Explorer. With this software, you can search for keywords and get vital information like how often that term is searched, how competitive the result pages are, and better-related alternatives.

Once you have the right keywords and add them to your pages in a natural way, you will see your products start to climb the rankings.

Create Unique Descriptions

Descriptions of your products are important, both for Google and also for your customers. This is where more information is obtained about what you’re selling, so writing unique product descriptions is an excellent way to entice people to buy your products.

Furthermore, far too many brands have the exact identical copy for their product descriptions if they’re selling the same item, usually copied from the manufacturer’s website. To help you differentiate yourself and create a more defined brand voice, taking the time to write fun, informative, and critically bespoke product descriptions can be enough to help your brand stand out from the crowd.

Add Alt Text

The images of your products give your customers the biggest insight into what the product is. However, for Google, your images provide no additional content, making them pointless – unless you add alt text to it.

Alt text is a way to describe to search engines what your images are, helping them better understand the product and what your page is about, which strengthens your SEO in a big way.

A good alt text description can also help your images to rank on Google Image Search, which can boost visibility further. When adding alt text, do not just add keywords and adjectives and nothing else. You should write descriptive copy that is in context with the content on the rest of the page.

Alt text is also a simple way to make your website more accessible, as visually impaired users who might be using text-to-speech software will be able to use the alt text to better understand your product.

If you’re missing a lot of alt text from your already live images and products after running a site audit, you can use the plugin Smart SEO. This is believed to be the best SEO plugin for Shopify, to fix them all in bulk, saving you a lot of time in the process.

Link buildingLink building is a process of acquiring links pointing to your website. These links are obtained by creating content, participating in social media or commenting on other blogs.

Getting linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. from other websites to your products and pages builds website authority, making your brand more trustworthy and making it more likely that Google will rank your e-commerce store. A link to one of your pages is almost a virtual recommendation that your site is good, so it’s worth seeking out as many backlinks as you can.

The problem is that generating good backlinks can be challenging and involves a lot of hard work and outreach. When building backlinks, you want to get them from high-authority websites that are related to the niche of products you sell. To find them, you can search for websites that are already linking your competitors. If they’re interested in linking to their products, then they may have an interest in linking with you.

Furthermore, some websites and influencers might already be talking about your e-commerce store but just haven’t linked to you. You can search for these via the web app Mention. Mention alerts you every time someone uses your brand name. With this information, you can contact the source and ask to convert that mention into a full link, which can help boost your SEO.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO for Shopify are things that you can do to the backend of your website to really help its SEO and ensure that it performs well. Some of this technical SEO can be tough to do properly for the inexperienced, so it might be worth considering SEO Consulting to ensure quality implementation.

Thankfully, some technical tasks are pretty simple to do. Some technical SEO things you should be doing on your Shopify website includes:

Creating a good site structure

A good website structure makes your website easier to navigate for your users, helping them find the products and pages they want quickly and easily. It can also help Google better understand your site, further boosting its ranking.

A good website structure is all about creating a hierarchy. You want your main categories at the top of your hierarchy, followed by potential subcategories, and then your products.

To create categories on Shopify, you’ll need to create collections, which you can do on your products tab. When adding a product that fits into this new collection, make sure to add it to the collection before you make it go live. After that, to ensure that these collections can be found easily, go to your navigation settings and add these collections to your main menu.

Improving page loading speed

How fast your page loads will affect your ranking. If your page takes a long time to load everything properly, that’s a poor user experience, and Google especially will penalise you for that.

That’s why it’s vital to do what you can to improve your page loading speed and get it as quick as possible. This can be tough, though, as improving page loading speed involves optimising images and code and might all be too technical for an inexperienced person to handle.

Thankfully, there are many awesome plugins available on the Shopify App Store that can improve your page speed automatically. One of the best SEO plugin for Shopify is the Page Speed Optimiser by Booster Apps. This app will work in the background to optimise images and compress code to make your website more responsive.

Adding Schema Markup

Pages that have rich results always seem to perform better on Google. Rich results refer to pages that appear at the top of Google with extra information, such as star ratings, an instant look at the price, and more things like that.

To improve the SEO of your e-commerce website, you can obtain rich results by using Schema Markup. Doing so provides Google with more structured data so that it better understands the context of your data.

On other platforms, adding schema can be a bit tough and requires some basic coding. However, with Shopify, you can add product markup easily by just filling in certain details, while Shopify does the rest automatically. Elements you can add this way include the price, reviews, how much of the product is in stock, and more. This can enhance your product listing and, in turn, your SEO performance.

Conclusion

For the most part, optimising your SEO on Shopify is very similar to what you would do for any other type of business website. Much like on other domains, the content you produce is crucial and needs to be unique, keyword optimised, and have backlinks. However, the more technical solutions like adding schema and creating a proper site structure are more unique.

There is always more to do within SEO, and these tips and solutions are not the be-all and end-all. However, what these tips will do is ensure that you’re not falling short of the fundamentals, enabling your Shopify store to remain competitive in the future and eventually thrive.