Over a million businesses use Shopify today, spanning 175 countries and contributing $319 billion globally. Unlike many companies whose growth has been stifled by the pandemic, Shopify has thrived during the COVID era and is quickly becoming the most preferred eCommerce platform, accounting for nearly 11% of the total eCommerce market share.
Given the sheer number of Shopify stores in the eCommerce space, it is crucial that you know how to do SEO on Shopify. Although the platform includes several SEO-friendly features out of the box, there is much more that can be done in terms of driving traffic to your SEO site. This Shopify SEO guide will tell you how to set up SEO on Shopify with tips that focus on leveraging best practices both in SEO and Shopify.
Visitors will stay on your site if it’s easy to navigate and everything moves quickly. That’s why it's critical to ensure that, when thinking about how to improve SEO, Shopify’s site speed is sufficient to keep your online store accessible and user-friendly.
You can use Google PageSpeed Insights to analyze the mobile and desktop performance of your website and make adjustments to boost SEO on Shopify. PageSpeed Insights generates your PageSpeed score and provides recommendations to make your website faster. Considering how to set up SEO on Shopify, the following suggestions are frequently made:
Considering how to improve SEO, Shopify recommends unique and engaging product descriptions. You may add variants to each product to avoid duplicate content. It’s also important to remove all instances of duplicate content in general. Keep this in mind when doing SEO for Shopify store pages.
If duplicate products are unavoidable, use the rel=canonical tag on the product you want to take precedence over others. Don't just delete a product when it becomes obsolete or when you switch to a different stock. This will cause issues with SEO on Shopify. Instead, make sure to set up 404 redirects for all deleted products and, if possible, link to the most similar live product.
When you research how to optimize SEO on Shopify, you will come across many Shopify SEO tips that primarily focus on keywords. The best way to start is to create a list of the main topics that your market cares about and that are closely tied to your product. You can also find inspiration from buyer personas, forums related to your products, and social media hashtags.
Any Shopify SEO guide will most likely tell you to use keyword research tools. These tools can help you come up with ideas but it's best to narrow keywords down to target topics that would drive your customers to click on your Shopify search engine listing.
Once you have a list of keywords that will boost SEO for Shopify store pages, you can start implementing them by optimizing the URLs and meta descriptions of your category and product pages. To do this, simply navigate to a collection or product page and click on ‘Edit website SEO’ in the Shopify search engine listing preview.
Here are some more tips on how to optimize Shopify meta descriptions and URLs:
Guidelines pertaining to SEO and Shopify encourage image compression to improve page speed and user experience. You can use apps like Crush.pics to compress images before you upload them on Shopify. Furthermore, you can make the most of your site images by adding alt text.
Alt text (alternative text) describes images and helps Google understand the image subject matter so it can show up on Google image search and improve your SEO on Shopify. To add alt text to images in Shopify, click on the ellipsis that will appear after you upload an image then click 'Edit alt text'. Make sure that the image is compressed before you upload it.
When you think about how to do SEO for Shopify, you might overlook the importance of backlinking. Keep in mind that backlinking is an essential SEO practice. When doing SEO for Shopify, you can use backlinks to stand out in the highly saturated network. Professional eCommerce SEO services always include backlinking as part of a comprehensive SEO strategy.
One way to get backlinks is to see who is currently linking to your competitors' homepages by using Backlink Analytics tools. To improve SEO on Shopify, find high authority sites that link to your competitors. Visit their pages and send outreach emails to form partnerships and boost your SEO for Shopify.
Content marketing is a good general practice if you're thinking of how to optimize SEO on Shopify. Content can mean anything from blog post articles to images, infographics, videos, and so on. Among the many options, blogging will not affect your page speed significantly. Moreover, it gives you more opportunities to use your keywords.
Here's how to how to SEO Shopify blog pages:
Shopify Collection allows you to present your products more attractively and communicate to users what kinds of products they will find. For this reason, it's important to choose extremely specific, hyper-targeted keywords for collection names and edit the ones that might obscure what users will find on the collection page.
SEO for Shopify collection pages revolves around using names that incorporate hyper-targeted keywords. These clear and specific names will also reflect on the product pages listed in the collection and assist your product pages in turning up for general searches. Don't use too many collections as this will clutter up the main navigation and dilute SEO authority.
Open up the Google Merchant Center and click the gear icon that’s in the top right corner. Click “Business Information,” then “Website.” From there, you can either click the “Add an HTML tag” option or upload an HTML file to your website.
There are several strategies to get customers on your Shopify account, such as SEO optimization and content marketing. You can also opt to write guest posts for other blogs within your niche and look into influencer marketing.
Yes, changing your Shopify theme may affect your SEO. While your Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics will stay the same, a new theme could affect other factors such as loading speed and overall user experience.
Shopify has a marketing page that you can use to create campaigns for business promotions. That said, a truly successful marketing campaign is one that goes outside of Shopify pages and integrates things like social media, customer outreach, and SEO.
There are several reasons why your Shopify store may not be appearing on Google. One key reason is that your site may be too new, which means it hasn’t been indexed by Google. Submitting your sitemap to Google Search Console may remedy this.
The key to a fully-optimized Shopify store is to use targeted keywords, create unique content, and boost user experience by optimizing page speed for desktop and mobile. The tips in this Shopify SEO guide will help you stand out against the competition in a sea of over a million eCommerce businesses that use Shopify.
However, it's important to continue researching about eCommerce SEO to keep up with the trends. For instance, eCommerce is swiftly moving to a mobile-first frontier and so mobile SEO optimization is now just as important when thinking about how to do SEO on Shopify.
Schedule a free consultation with Bliss drive today to see how you can bring your Shopify to Google’s front page.
