Do you want your Shopify store to rank higher in search results and attract more customers? If so, our detailed guide to Shopify SEO includes actionable tips and strategies to help you achieve this.
You’ve created a stunning Shopify store with incredible products. But you can’t wait for customers to come across it. To attract visitors to your online store and generate those all-important sales, you must rank high in search results.
This is where SEO comes in.
While Shopify includes some SEO features, there are proven strategies to optimize your Shopify store and increase visibility. Some are simple on-page tweaks, while others are long-term strategies that must be implemented gradually.
What is Shopify SEO
The primary goal of Shopify SEO is to ensure that your online store is found when a search term is entered into a search engine. The goal is to rank your website as high as possible in search engine results pages so that you have the best chance of receiving click-throughs.
To accomplish this, you must optimise your store so that search engines understand what your store is about and believe it is the best result for the search.
Here’s some good news:
Shopify stores come with built-in SEO, so the basics are already taken care of, which includes:
- To prevent duplicate pages from appearing in search results, pages are marked with auto-generated canonical tags.
- Your website’s robots.txt and sitemap.xml files are automatically generated by Shopify.
- Your theme generates title tags that include your store’s name and important details.
- When you click the ‘create a URL redirect for’ box, URL redirects for product or collection page URLs are generated automatically.
However, this is by no means in-depth SEO.
To increase your chances of ranking in search results, make sure you check all of the Shopify SEO boxes.
Why Shopify SEO Matters
According to Google, 51% of customers use Google to research a product before making an online purchase.
If you want to grow your Shopify store, you must get in front of these ready-to-buy customers when they are searching for your specific products.
Here’s why Shopify SEO is important for stores.
- Shopify SEO improves the long-term visibility of your store.
- It allows you to reach customers who are actively looking to purchase your products.
- It increases quality traffic to your website, which leads to higher conversion rates.
- Long-term, SEO for Shopify allows you to grow your business in a sustainable manner.
Now, without further ado, let’s get started with our Shopify SEO guide.
1. Optimising Site Structure
Having a good site architecture is critical for SEO success. When it comes to Shopify site architecture, we’re talking about how you organize the content on your website, such as pages and posts.
For example, think about when you visit a website and the content is sloppy. The way it is organized and linked doesn’t make sense.
You’re not gonna spend any time on this website, right?
Alternatively, when your site’s layout is SEO-friendly and organized, your structure gets simple to navigate and flows smoothly. Visitors spend more time browsing your website, which directly affects your search rankings. A simple Shopify site architecture also allows search engines to crawl the content and pages, which helps them rank your site.
Now the question is, how to optimise your website’s structure for search engines?
Shopify comes with its own organized hierarchy of content categories, an easy-to-understand URL structure, and pages without iframes (which Google advises against using unless necessary).
The key to optimising your site structure is to focus on your customers and meet their requirements. Nearly 40% of people will abandon a website if the content or layout is too confusing. Choose a logical SEO-friendly site layout in which your homepage is just a few clicks away from products.
For example:
Home > Category Pages > Product Pages
This formation helps with navigation optimisation, meaning visitors can easily navigate through your website, which additionally helps Google to index your URLs.
2. URL Structure Optimization
Every page on your store has its unique URL slug. Now it’s your duty to make sure it’s optimized for SEO. Your slug is basically a summary of what your page is about. On top of that, it’s also considered a small but important ranking factor for search engines.
The best approach is to keep your URL short and easy to read. And make sure to include your target keyword whenever possible. Here’s a quick example.
Bad structure:
https://www.yourstore.com/category/item-5012
Good structure:
https://www.yourstore.com/category/girls-running-shoes
3. Improving User Experience
SEO and user experience are connected. Your SEO performance will automatically improve if your store offers a good user experience.
More importantly, a bad user experience will lose potential customers. Nobody wants to spend time on a badly designed, slow, clunky, and difficult-to-navigate website.
To make it easier for you, consider user experience (UX) as user engagement. The only question you need to ask yourself is: Is your store designed to engage users and keep them on it for longer?
Here are some important points you can take to enhance your Shopify user experience:
- Choose a responsive design to ensure your Shopify store works smoothly on all devices.
- Create easy-to-use and simple menu options to understand and help customers narrow their choices. Easy navigation is a key component of a great user experience. More than half (61.5%) of all visitors abandon websites that have poor navigation.
- Use breadcrumbs to show users where they’ve been on the site.
- Add a quick search bar to your store so visitors can easily find what they want.
- Increase your page loading time. Site speed improvement is an important UX factor that impacts SEO.
4. Mobile Optimisation and Responsive Design
Is your store mobile-friendly? A mobile-friendly and responsive store design significantly improves your user experience and ranking. If Google finds your pages loading slowly or if your store isn’t mobile responsive, it’s less likely to recommend your website in its results.
People want to shop online using their mobile devices. Today, mobile phones account for more than 70% of retail website visits worldwide, with mobile ecommerce revenue expected to reach $728.28 billion by 2025.
The good news is that almost all themes in the Shopify Theme Library are responsive and mobile-friendly. To double-check your store’s mobile optimisation score, you can use Semrush’s website checker tool or Google Search Console to measure mobile usability.
5. Building High-Quality Backlinks
Backlinks are hyperlinks that other websites point to your site. When you have a strong backlink profile with a good number of links, search engines will recognize that you are worth linking to. They view every good backlink as evidence that you have a high-quality and trustworthy site, which can help you rank higher.
However, it’s not about any backlinks. You have to make sure the backlinks your site gets are from relevant, high-quality, and reputable websites. Backlinks have always been important in SEO, but Google prioritizes the quality of the links over quantity. You can have 100 irrelevant, bad backlinks and still fail in search results. But, only 10 good-quality backlinks can turn the tables for you.
In simple words, value quality over quantity.
6. Schema Plus for Shopify SEO
Schema markup is highly important and beneficial for ecommerce stores. However, that can be challenging for normal store owners. Well, you can bypass manual schema implementation with Schema Plus for SEO.
Schema Plus for SEO was developed by ex-Google engineers and provides seamless implementation for structured data. Save the hassle and let the app do the work. It has an intuitive user interface, which makes it easy to use.
Conclusion
With all of the tactics and tools we’ve provided in this Shopify SEO guide, you’ll have everything you need to get started on your SEO strategy. Remember, SEO isn’t a one-time strategy. SEO changes almost daily, so you must stay up to date on the latest algorithm updates and constantly measure and improve your store’s ranking to ensure it remains high.
