Shopify SEO Optimization: Bring Organic Traffic To Your Store

Recently, we all have seen high growth in the biggest e-commerce CMS called, Shopify.

We can clearly see how the platform has shown growth throughout the years. You can see the usage of the Shopify CMS has doubled since October 2017. 

With this much competition, this could be very difficult for business owners to stay in the competition. 

However, SEO can always help. 

Below are given some Shopify SEO optimization tips to help you stay ahead of the competition. 

Shopify SEO Optimization 

SEO plays an important role in how users are going to find your website. However, SEO relies on keywords but there are a lot of other things that you can do on your website for higher rankings. 

Some of them are given below:

Setup The Recommended Tools 

Before we even get started with applying SEO strategy to your Shopify store for shopify SEO optimization, it is important to set up a process for tracking the outcomes.  

Here’s the detailed guide to starting a Shopify store.

1. Setup Google Search Console 

You can submit the sitemap of your Shopify Website to Google. It is naturally created with all Shopify stores.  The sitemaps show Google and other search engines how organized your website is. 

You can check your Shopify Store sitemaps through:

www.yourstore.com/sitemap.xml

You can even check the crawling errors on your Shopify website. The crawling and indexing is a continuous process happening through Google bots. 

But the errors occur when the Google bot tries to reach any page or website but fails to do so. 

With GSC, you can find out any crawling error and fix it so that Google may crawl and index your website. You will get an alert notification from Google Search Console. 

2. Setup Google Analytics 

Google Analytics shows how the users are behaving on your website. You can get a report for user experience from Google Analytics and fix errors if you find some. Which is, of course, an important element for shopify SEO optimization. 

Google Analytics is extremely important to get reports for user flow and make your website user-friendly as much as possible.

Shopify SEO Optimization – Site Structure 

Do you know optimization of the site structure has a direct impact on your Shopify SEO success?

It gives a positive impact on your website when users are easily able to Optimize to find the product they are looking for. Don’t confuse your users for the product he is searching for. 

Users tend to spend more time on your website when they find things they were looking for. 

Make your site easier to navigate. 

Don’t make too many categories and sub-categories or it will confuse the user. 

Keep a simple and SEO-friendly site structure like this:

See the diagram above. It is very simplified and easy to navigate. The main products are just 1 click away from the homepage, making it easy and fast for users to make a purchase and search engines to crawl your site. 

Always keep your website organized like:

Homepage » Category Pages » Product Pages

Homepage » Category Pages » Sub-Category Page » Product Pages

Always optimize your site for your users first and then for search engine bots. 

Along with the site structure, always, add “About Us” and “Contact us” pages. Why? because such pages let the search engines know that you are a trustworthy and credible source. 

And, finally include a “Search Bar” on your website.

Reason? It enhances the user experience. Users will be able to get the desired product only by typing some words rather justice clicking and clicking on page after page.

It’s the most important part of eCommerce optimization.

Make money from the traffic you have. 

Enhance The User Experience 

Now, let’s see a few ways you can improve the user experience on your website which are also ranking factors and important elements for shopify SEO optimization. 

Mainly There Are Two Factors That Enhance The User Experience:

1. Site speed (which we are gonna talk about later) 

2. Responsive design

First, let’s discuss responsive design. 

Here the responsive design means, your Shopify store will look appealing on any website, no matter if it is, mobile, tablet, or desktop. 

Responsive designs can improve the user experience to the next level. Of course, sites that are easy to navigate and have good responsive design can enhance the rankings in SERP. Google gives priority to those websites. 

Not only this, but also you will have repeated visitors and increased conversion rates. 

And above all, make sure your website performs well on mobile phones as, in the USA, 63% of searches on Google are carried through mobile phones. 

Find Right Keyword To Target 

Well, Shopify SEO Optimization is just incomplete without keywords. There is no base for SEO without keyword research. 

But, the question is how are going to find the right keywords so that customers come and find your Shopify store? 

No worries, we have an ultimate solution for that. 

There is no need to use some fancy tools first. Just make a list of topics that your customer might be interested in. 

Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and then analyze things. 

Here’s how you can find inspiration for keywords.

• Create a buyer persona 
• Engage in forums to check what your target audience is searching for. 
• Check out the Instagram hashtags related to your product. 

And, the best platform to find keywords is, Google keyword planner. 

You can simply put a keyword, select the location that you want to target, and the tool will provide you with a list of variations of keywords that you wish to target. 

It is that easy. The best part? The tool is absolutely free of cost provided by Google itself. 

Along with that, here is the list of some keyword research tools. 

Optimize Your Shopify Products Pages

The next step is to optimize your product pages. At this point, you must have a list of keywords that you are going to put to optimize your product pages. 

You must start with your homepage, top-selling products, and other best-selling product pages. 

Start with the product pages with the most searched keywords. 

1. Optimize The Title Tags Of Categories

You have got an idea about what pages you are going to optimize for Shopify SEO. Now, let’s see how it is going to be done. 

Check out below, this is how your keyword should be injected. 

Keyword 1 – Shop for Keyword 2 – Store Name

Unicorn T-shirts – Shop for Unicorn T-shirts Online – The Store

2. Optimize Meta Title and Meta Description For The Product

When writing Metatags for your Shopify Store, make sure you are using SEO with marketing copy. The keyword should be there naturally. Don’t add keywords forcefully and make them sound awkward.  

Along with the metatags, the alt text also must be optimized as per SEO. 

And at last, work on your “out of stock” pages. 

Build Links For The Rankings Of Your Store 

Backlinks are one of the ranking factors for SEO. you just cannot simply avoid it. Backlinks are a way to tell search engines that the website is trustworthy. It is an Off page SEO technique to make the website rank higher. 

Here are the tips to build backlinks for Shopify SEO optimization. 

1. Broken Link Building 

This could be a little time taking, but an effective way to build links for your website. Find broken links for products similar to those you offer. Once you find it, reach out to the owner show them the broken link and ask them to link to your site instead.  

There is a high chance that the other party will definitely give you the link because it can hurt their SEO and rankings. Once you get the link, it is a win-win situation for both parties. 

2. Guest Posting 

Guest posting is also a way to get backlinks to your site. You just have to find sites that are open to guest post and has the same niche as yours. 

As the name suggests, guest posting is like, writing a blog for another website as a guest and get a backlink in return for that. 

Simple!!! 

Create nice, unplagiarized, and unique content for another website, and that’s how the chances are higher that they will accept your blog for their website and give you a backlink. 

3. Mentions 

You might have been mentioned on some websites, but without a backlink, you can simply reach them and ask them to give you a backlink since they have mentioned you. 

There are lots of tools out there, that will provide you with data for that. 

4. HARO (Help A Reporter Out) 

I have personally used this platform for link-building, and believe me when I say, I got the expected results. 

In this, platform, you will have to log in as a source, and journalists will ask you questions. If they like your answer they will mention you on their website and give you a backlink. 

Want to know the best part? The platform is free to use.

Get Higher Rankings With Content Marketing & Blogs 

So, till now everything has come to its place. Now, let’s talk about content marketing & blogs for your site. 

Users come to your website when they see you have content worth reading. Make sure it leaves imprints on their heart and brain. 

You might be thinking, product description is enough content for Shopify SEO optimization. But that’s not true. 

You must write a blog to attract more and more customers to your website. There are many eCommerce business owners who write blogs to get more traffic to their websites and make them make a purchase through them. 

And the best part about that? You have a high chance of getting backlinks from other websites too. 

Read More: Step-by-Step Content Creation Guide [Writing to Publishing Content Successfully]

Work On The Technical Aspect Of Your Website 

After working on all the aspects of On-page, there comes a place for the Technical aspect of the website. 

Let’s discuss them in detail:

1. Get Rid Of Duplicate Product Pages 

Duplicate content issue is a high-priority issue with Shopify SEO. This issue occurs when similar contents are there in different URLs. 

This makes the search engine crawlers confused about which page should be ranked and which should be the canonical version. 

Let’s discuss it in the context of Shopify. It could have duplicate product pages. 

Shopify businesses support two distinct URL routes to produce their /products/ pages:

Canonical URL path: /products/

Non-canonical URL path: /collections/.*/products/

2. Fix The Crawling And Indexing Issues 

There could be issues like, Crawling and indexing to your Shopify store website. Since it is a very important component, you must know how to fix such issues. 

So, let’s read further: 

1. Robots.txt File

Shopify creates Robots.txt files, and most of the time, they are not good enough for most of the Shopify store owners. 

Here is the Shopify default Robots.txt file:

Shopify will definitely stop crawling in sections like

• Admin area

• Checkout

• Orders

• Shopping cart

• Internal search

• Policies page

Here’s how you can create a robots.txt.liquid file:

• Access your Shopify admin account.

• Go to Online Store > Themes in the column on the left.

• Choose “Actions” > “Edit code”

• Select the “Add a new template” option under “Templates.”

• Select “robots.txt” from the dropdown menu located on the left.

• Select “Create template”

You must have your own robots.txt.liquid file to add rules by adding liquid codes. And, the best part? The code is not very difficult to add. 

2. Sitemap.Xml

Shopify will also create its own sitemaps by default at the URL path “domain.com/sitemap.xml”. 

Here, it will create links to child sitemaps that have URLs of the following page types:

• Product Pages (sitemap_products_1.xml)

• Collection Pages (sitemap_collections_1.xml)

• Blog Posts (sitemap_blogs_1.xml)

• Marketing Pages (sitemap_pages_1.xml)

Shopify Structured Data

1. Product Structured Data

Here is one thing that you need to accept is, Shopify is not good with structured data. The Shopify theme should contain product markup data such as product name, price, description, etc.

This is the highest-priority structured data that you must have on your eCommerce site. To specify each specific product link on a product listing page entails providing the Product structured data.

These structured data should be included on category pages:

2. Article Structured Data

If you are using Shopify’s blog functionality, you must use, “Article Structured Data”. Of all the “Schemas” that you have, the “Article” schema is Google’s prefer first. 

3. Implementing Structured Data On Shopify

The aforementioned structured data types might be useful to include if you wish to integrate structured data and have a developer on hand. By doing this, you can be guaranteed that your site will always have these schema pieces.

Improve The Speed Of Your Shopify Store

Many Shopify owners complain that Shopify is very slow to use. However, we all know Shopify performs very well. Utilizing the Fastly CDN and browser caching, Shopify provides you with a strong performance base. 

Here are the practices you can apply on your Shopify website to improve the website:

• Implement lazy loading 
• Compress image sizes 
• Use fewer Shopify apps 
• Migrate tracking codes to GTM(Google Tag Manager)

Conclusion 

I have described the whole process for Shopify website optimization. And of course, the reason to optimize the Shopify website is to get more customers and conversions from it. 

And, obviously, what’s the point of SEO optimization of Shopify if it doesn’t bring you traffic and conversions?

However, you will be able to implement Shopify Optimization to your website with the tactics given above. s

And…  if you feel any need for assistance, you can simply book our 30-Minute Strategy session. 

FAQs 

1. How can I make a Shopify store rank highly in search results?

The answer is simple, optimize your Shopify website to get ranked higher. You need to take some steps that are given above to make it higher. 

2. How do I update SEO on Shopify?

Go to Online Store in your Shopify admin and choose Preferences. Following these Shopify SEO recommended practices, enter a Title and Meta Description for your store, then click Save.

3. Should each store owner edit SEO on Shopify?

Working on Shopify SEO is a good idea, especially if you want your Shopify store to appear on Google. However, each Shopify store owner’s unique objectives will determine the precise appearance and volume of measures taken.