Shopify SEO: How to Do It the Right Way?

You've landed on this page while looking for ways to do your Shopify SEO better, most likely from Google or Bing. You came for answers and the search engine pointed you to the place where you can find them — our blog post.

That's basically how it works — you offer a solution and the search engines pair your solution with the searchers' query. But it's not really that easy. For your page to get lots of clicks you have to be at the top of SERP. Getting there requires more than just setting up a website and relying on the default Shopify features.

Here you'll find all you need to know about Shopify SEO — the things you need to optimize to generate more organic traffic and get indexed by Google faster. While it seems tedious, you don't need any prior experience with SEO.

But let's begin with the SEO basics.

Shopify SEO Basics

Before you start improving your Shopify SEO you must know how your website is doing and whether it's indexed at all. For that, you need a couple of free tools.

Create a Google Search Console

Google Search Console (GSC) is a cornerstone of your store SEO. It's a place where you can monitor your website search performance and track indexing issues as they appear.

However, most importantly, it's the first communication you have with Google since that's where you submit your website XML sitemap.

Sitemap is an XML file will all your website links that helps Google discover and crawl your pages. So the first step is to set up the Google Search Console and submit a sitemap to it.

Create a Google Analytics account

Once people land on your store, it's Google Analytics 4 (GA4) that's responsible for tracking the performance. But not just traffic. It allows you to track the product, checkout, related product performance and users behaviour.

Shopify automatically triggers some vital eCommerce events. All you need to do is just set up the GA4 property and add it to Shopify.

Check if your website is indexed

To make any SEO changes, you have to make sure your website is indexed. The easiest way to do that is through the site search (site:domainname.com). If nothing pops up, your website is not indexed yet.

However, if you don't get indexed after a while, check the GSC. It provides feedback on the indexing process and issues. You'll find some insights there.

Shopify SEO Checklist

After your website is successfully indexed by Google and other search engines, you can start optimizing your Shopify SEO for better results. This includes technical, and on-page and off-page optimizations.

You can cover most of them on your own, while others might require some technical assistance.

Use a logical website structure

The way you organize your website (through internal links) benefits not only customers but search crawlers too. The relationship between your pages should be clear for both.

Add your most important pages, like products, collections and subcollections available through the top menu. This helps people to understand your store hierarchy better and create a more logical connection between different pages.

Additionally, make sure all pages have at least one internal link leading to them. Otherwise, they'll become orphans and hard to find.

Customize your URL

By default, Shopify assigns a random number for your domain name. While it doesn't have a direct impact on your SEO ranking it makes it hard to understand and remember for visitors.

Just navigate to Settings > Domain and hit the Change to a new myshopify.com domain button to add a brand name to your domain. Or you can also buy a domain name right from here (Buy a new domain).

Besides, you must set a primary domain, in case you have several different domains like:

• domainname.com
• www.domainname.com
• domainname.myshopify.com

Use structured data

Schema markup structures data on a page in a certain way and makes it appear in search results (SERP). Structured data creates rich snippets like availability, price, reviews and others that appear in your search listing.

This increases the click-through rates and makes you stand out from the other results in the search.

Although there is a certain technical curve to set up structured data, Shopify adds it out of the box for its free themes. The same usually goes with all custom Shopify themes. But you need to verify that with your theme provider.

Improve website speed

Website loading speed is a known ranking factor. You could optimize every little detail for SEO but still fall behind your competition just because your website is not fast enough. Don't ignore that.

Use the Google PageSpeed insight to learn what is slowing you down and act on it.

• Autid your theme — choose a theme that doesn't come with unnecessary bloat
• Use the right image formats — Shopify prefers PNG and JPG (it converts them to the WebP format automatically)
• Compress images — try reducing the image size before uploading them to Shopify
• Use lazy loading — load images gradually (instead of all at once) to reduce the delays
• Optimize your code — "clean" your CSS, JS and HTML files of unnecessary elements to speed up the loading

Make sure your store is mobile-friendly

If your website is not fast or mobile-optimized your website ranking is in grave danger. Google employs the mobile-first approach to indexing. So make sure you comply.

While all Shopify themes are mobile-friendly, you should always check how your store looks on mobile using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool.

Moving back to the speed optimization point, your theme might contain unnecessary elements on mobile. Use Google PageSpeed Insights to determine how well the mobile version performs.

Fix broken links

To rank your website in search, search bots need to crawl your pages first. If they try to reach a page that's no longer active, they fail to crawl it and can't discover all the links potentially available there.

This slows down the crawling and interferes with the indexing process, The search bot now needs to find another route to discover the links on that "dead" page.

Fix the 404 pages regularly if you don't want your Shopify SEO to suffer from this. Google Search Console provides all the details on the crawling issues.

Create an internal links strategy

Internal linking is not only about pasting links to some anchor text across a website. It's about creating a logical connection between relevant topics and creating a topic authority Google's going to notice.

It might seem irrelevant compared to creating content and promoting a product. But when done properly internal linking can improve your Shopify SEO strategy significantly and help you rank better.

Create topic clusters by linking between products, blog posts, collections and vice versa. Make people browse your website longer to signal to Google that you have relevant content.

Additionally, pay attention to the anchor text (clickable text over a link). It signals to the search crawlers what keywords a page should be ranked for. So it's best to add links to proper keywords.

Avoid duplicate content

Google strives to provide the best possible results for its users. That's why it values original content so highly and penalizes duplicate content. But it's not only about having manufacturer content posted on your Shopify store.

You can have a product added to multiple collections or different product variants having similar content. The best way to solve that is to use rel="canonical" or canonical tags. They "mark" the main version of the page, telling Google which one it should rank.

The good news is, that Shopify generates canonical tags for products, collections and blog posts automatically. So you don't have to dive deep into code.

Find relevant keywords

At the beginning of the article, we talked about you offering a solution and Google matching it with the searcher's query. Google does that based on the target keywords you optimize your page with.

However, to do that you need to consider several things:

• Keyword difficulty — how hard it is to rank for a keyword in the top 10 results on a scale from 0% to 100%.
• Search volume — how many monthly searches a keyword has.
• Keyword intent — the purpose behind each keyword (navigational, informational, transactional).

Use tools like Ahrefs and Serpstat to do your keyword research and map your content. Think about the words people might use to discover your products and use that to create different content types.

Optimize your headings

Having big chunks of text on the page doesn't equal ranking higher. It might seem that it allows you to use more keywords. But the result could be quite the opposite.

That's why it's important to break content down into sections using the H tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) It makes your content more readable for both users and search crawlers.

But don't overdo it:

• Use your target keyword in the H tags to help search crawlers understand what your content is about.
• Don't stuff your H tags with keywords unless you want to appear spammy.
• Keep your H1 and title tags similar or the same.

Create a blog

Once you map the keywords you want to rank for, start a blog to drive more targeted traffic. While the intent will mostly be informational, you can still drive customers.

That's the magic of using the right keywords — you create blog posts about something your potential customers are concerned with and add related products to them. So, even though people don't land on your product page, they still discover your products.

The goal is to be genuinely helpful since that's how you gain people's trust and loyalty. And if people trust you they are more willing to buy from you.

Create compelling meta tags

Have you noticed that some results in search instantly drive attention and some stay in the shadows? That's because of the meta tags.

If you get listed in the top 5 results, you have a higher chance of getting more clicks if you optimize your title and description. They are the call to action that encourages people to choose you among other results. These two should have a special place in your Shopify SEO strategy.

Here are some tips on the best meta titles and descriptions:

• Keep the meta title within 60 characters or less and the meta description — 160 or less.
• Add your target keyword in both the meta title and description (close to the beginning).
• Use "action" words like check out, visit, buy now, etc.
• Mention customer benefits and product characteristics to provide more information directly in the search.

Optimize product and collection pages

Google doesn't care if someone buys from you or not. It only cares to provide relevant information to its' users. The more optimized your page is for a target keyword and the longer users stay on that page after clicking through the more relevant it appears. And that's what influences the conversions.

Sounds easier than it actually is? True, but not impossible.

• Use target keywords in the product and collection titles.
• Break down the descriptions into paragraphs and use semantically related keywords there.
• Use high-quality images for products and collections.
• Add structured data for these pages.
• Don't forget about including internal links in the descriptions.
• Use breadcrumbs.
• Add related products to a product page.

Customize URL slugs

You should always keep your URLs short and simple so they are easier to read for both, search engines and people. Besides, your store URLs should always be descriptive.

Avoid using the filler words. Optimize your URLs with keywords instead to help search engines understand what a page is about.

But don't overdo it with the keyword stuffing. You already know Google doesn't like it.

The final advice is to always use hyphens instead of underscores and spaces in the URLs.

Optimize images

Search crawlers don't read your page content the same as people. They read all the contents on the page, including images. That's why it's important to write proper alt text for them, preferably using a keyword.

Alt text plays an important role in Shopify SEO image optimization since it makes your images appear in the Google image search.

Besides, it helps the visually impaired people to understand your page content when the alt text is read to them.

Don't forget about image loading speed. But we've talked about it in the speed optimization section.

Do the link-building

People clicking through to your pages from search is not the only way for Google to determine if your website is relevant. It analyses external links too. In particular — the number, relevancy and quality of those links.

Having multiple quality backlinks signals to search engines that you're a reputable source. So, it ranks you higher.

Although you can just rely on people to naturally share your products, collections or blog posts on their website, it doesn't happen that often. You usually have to build those links using multiple ways:

• Analyse your competitors' backlink profiles — see who links to them and think of ways to get backlinks from those websites.
• Write guest posts — publish a valuable piece of content on reputable websites with a few backlinks to you.
• Reclaim brand mentions — see who mentioned your brand without a link and ask them for a backlink.

SEO Optimization: What's Next?

Optimizing Shopify for SEO seems like a lot of work, as you can see from this Shopify SEO checklist. But don't let that intimidate you.

The technical side is usually covered only once. The rest of the on- and off-page optimizations are an ongoing project.

Just keep providing value and put your customers first. Use different Shopify apps to help you on your journey and Google will rank you higher as long as you provide relevant information.