Summary: eCommerce business is gaining traction with simple and effective solutions by Shopify to setting up your online business. However, you need to achieve a high rank on search engines to increase sales. Let’s find out how to do it with this ultimate Shopify SEO strategy guide.

You must have heard of Shopify, the powerful platform for eCommerce businesses! It has created quite a buzz. And today, it’s one of the leading platforms for businesses going digital. Now, that’s a great reason to consider Shopify as the perfect platform to take your business online.

However, your store will also need to have a great SERP (Search Engine Result Page) position. This will make it stand out among the competition. The Shopify store setup with premium theme is a great step towards achieving it.

We will find out about the best practices to find out the features available on Shopify, improve your store’s SEO, and the various ways to achieve higher SERP.

What is SEO on Shopify and Why is It Needed for Your Store?

What is SEO on Shopify and Why is It Needed for Your Store

Simply having a Shopify store will not get you business right away. Your store needs to be optimized for the search engines. So, let’s first take a look at the various steps through which your Shopify store’s SEO can be improved.

SEO of your Shopify store is the process of optimizing enabling search engines to easily find the content. You must have planned on preparing your online store to easily reach your target consumers. To achieve that you need to perform a few optimizations of your store. That’s what is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It’s not a lot of tedious work, but mostly about common sense! Let’s dig a little deeper.

Optimizing your Shopify store will involve three key aspects:

  • Technical optimization – This will include UI, UX, indexing, and crawling of your website
  • On-page optimization – This involves implementation of the right keywords (search terms), optimizing content, adding alt tags, and optimizing meta details
  • Off-page optimization – This involves acquiring high-quality backlinks, optimizing off-page content like blogs, articles, press releases, etc., and improving site authority.

These aren’t that difficult to achieve if you know what your target audience is searching for online.

Now, here are a few advantages to SEO optimization for Shopify to help you rank higher in search results ensuring more people see your products.

  • Enables potential customers to find your website easily, thus accomplishing trust and credibility
  • It attracts targeted traffic, making sure visitors end up purchasing from your site.
  • Get you at the forefront of your ideal audience by allowing you to target keywords.

Next, let’s find out the Shopify features to enhance visibility and get more traffic and leads. This eventually gets converted into potential customers.

Shopify Features Supporting SEO Practices

Shopify brings in a host of built-in SEO features such as,

  • URL optimization
  • SSL certification
  • Canonical tags
  • automatic sitemaps and XML sitemaps
  • meta tags support
  • ability to edit your store’s URL structure.
  • 301 redirects
  • mobile friendly
  • auto-generated robot txt file used in giving instructions to the web spiders
  • structured data

Apart from these, Shopify also comes with an app store fully loaded with useful Shopify apps. They take care of important SEO aspects, such as keyword research, link building, and analytics. Also, the Shopify blog offers extensive details about optimizing your site for better search engine ranking. Alongside, Shopify store development with a custom theme provides flexibility and scalability. This caters to your business’s needs and growth well.

There are standard methods to improve the search engine ranking of your Shopify store. Read on to get deeper into the basics.

Top Methods to Improve Your Shopify Store’s Search Engine Rankings

Top Methods to Improve Your Shopify Store’s Search Engine Rankings

Below are the strategies to improve Shopify’s store visibility on Google and other search engines.

1. Optimize Your Keyword Selection

Research the right keywords based on your target audience’s interests, location, demographics, and buying trends. You will require the right mix of short-tail and long-tail keywords.

LSI keywords integration can improve your Shopify store’s visibility further. And, you will need to prepare a list of targeted keywords for individual pages and products. So, during content optimization using the keywords, here are a few things to take note of:

  • Relevance of the keywords in terms of your products and target audience
  • Competition for each keyword
  • Ability to ensure conversion

Here are some tools you can use for your keyword research,

  • Ahrefs
  • Ubersuggest
  • Google Search Console

2. No Duplicate Content

Duplicate content severely hampers any website’s ranking. It’s a serious issue for eCommerce stores as well. To start with, each page needs to have its unique content, including the product listings. Sometimes, you might face issues due to the same product listing under multiple categories. In such instances, simply use canonicalization. Adding Rel=’canonical’ to the header will tell the search engine to treat the page as if it were a copy of another specified page.

Performing a thorough audit will help you identify issues of duplicate content. The most dependable tools to trace duplicate content are as follows,

  • Siteliner
  • Semrush (for domain duplication)
  • Screaming Frog

3. Optimizing Metadata

Metadata tends to be one of the crucial factors in improving SEO for Shopify. More better your metadata is optimized, the more is the chance for your Shopify store to rise higher on the search engine result page and eventually generate more organic traffic.

Here are a few crucial facts to remember while optimizing your metadata,

  • Clear and Concise Titles and Description
  • Relevant Use of Keywords
  • Using Actionable Meta Descriptions
  • Using Meta Descriptions of 50-160 Characters

When Shopify Metatags are ready to be edited or added, go to Shopify admin, and find the ‘Products and online stores’ menu. Go to ‘all products’, select the item to optimize, and fill out the description.

4. Creating Commendable User Experience (UX)

Building the perfect user experience is of prime importance for any online store. Positive UX helps in keeping the navigation easier.

If you’re running an online store, a fair portion of your attention should be towards creating user experience (UX). If this part is neglected then you might end up losing customers and hurting your business eventually. Good site navigation enables your visitors on various devices to view your pages properly. In Shopify store development with custom themes, fast-loading themes ensure that visitors stay longer and explore more products. This increases the likelihood of conversions.

To maintain ease of navigation, the following measures can be taken,

  • Implement drop-down menus to help customers narrow down their options.
  • Keep menus clear and easy to understand.
  • Use breadcrumbs effectively to display the user’s path across the site. It starts from the home page and moves towards the product page.
  • Put up a search bar so that customers can easily find what they’re looking for

5. Ensure Your Pages Load Quickly

The website needs to load quickly and efficiently so that people feel satisfied. In this fast-paced world, everyone looks for limited waste of time and effort. As per a research report from Portent,

86% of pages measured by Portent load within five seconds or less. So, ultra-fast sites loading within one second have 2.5 higher conversion rates than sites taking five seconds.

Enable your pages to load quickly, even on slower connections, take the following effective measures,

  • Optimizing your images
  • Opting for a reliable web host with high speeds.
  • Keeping your website’s code clean and well-organized.
  • Implementing minimal HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code on the site.
  • Disabling all apps and theme features that may slow down your site

6. Make Full Use of the Shopify Blog Function

Blogs are extremely powerful in driving the right traffic to any website. The Shopify Blog allows you to improve your store’s on-page SEO and increase traffic to your store. Here are a few ways to achieve it:

  • Use visually appealing images and videos.
  • Use keywords URLs, titles, and descriptions for your blog post
  • Use informative and engaging content in the blog
  • Use social media to your advantage by promoting your blogs across all social media platforms.

7. Leverage the SEO Tools

There are a host of free and paid SEO tools that you can use to check and improve your Shopify store’s searchability. These tools will allow you to review your store’s performance, and find gaps that you need to take care of. These help you easily optimize the on-page SEO. Some free and widely used tools are:

  • MozBar
  • Binge Webmaster
  • Google Analytics
  • Google Search Console
  • Google Keywords Planner
  • Yoast SEO

You will find plenty of other tools as well to optimize your Shopify store.

If you are following these strategies, then the search engine rankings of your Shopify store will improve for sure. However, here are a few more effective tips to enhance Shopify SEO.

Effective Tips & Tricks for Improving Shopify SEO

  • Create quality content and make sure that all of the pages on your website/blogs are well-written and informative.
  • Use a Shopify review app to build authority
  • Find out the e best Shopify theme for SEO
  • Opt for features that ensure mobile friendliness, compatibility, clear navigation, speed, and customization.
  • Ensure your website comes up on local search. Also, get the pages get indexed without error by verifying your business with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster.
  • Edit your robots.txt.liquid.
  • Optimize your site structure for search engines.
  • Submit your sitemap autogenerated by Shopify as a sitemap.xml file. This serves as the root directory of your Shopify domain store.
  • Use descriptive file names for images to add accessibility to your site and give Google more context for them.
  • Place internal links to relevant pages strategically

Take Away

The way people use search engines will keep evolving but the search practice will never go out of fashion. The SEO strategies need to be updated per the trends in the search engine mechanism. Some such as maintaining clear image descriptions and pages, having websites load at a faster rate, and creating impactful and informative content remain constant for a long time.

If you’re looking for efficient support, don’t hesitate to contact CartCoders. Hire a Shopify SEO expert or a dedicated Shopify developer to redesign your store or set up your Shopify store with a premium theme. They will formulate effective marketing strategies to take your business to the next level. Get in touch today!

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Shopify Store