E-commerce is becoming a staple in people’s shopping habits, with an expected 20.8% share of all retail market in 2023. Shopify is a highly recommended e-commerce platform where you can build an online store and sell products. Famous for being quick and easy, Shopify can be customized to your own requirements.
Considering 87% of shoppers research online before making a purchase, you’ll want to use all tools available to make your store stand out in the seemingly infinite number of shops. SEO practices and tips are the most bullet-proof way to improve your Shopify store and drive more organic traffic to your website.
Shopify offers built-in SEO features, which don’t require coding experience and allow you the freedom to customize and work on SEO from the beginning. You can edit the page titles, meta descriptions, image alt tags, etc. In addition to that, Shopify provides a top-notch CDN (Content Delivery Network) powered by Fastly for good loading speed.
However, there are some SEO drawbacks in Shopify, such as duplicate content and forced URL structure, which you’ll have to fix yourself.
With approximately 4.4 million sites in Shopify, you’ll have to compete with a wide array of stores and outrank them in search engines, for which SEO features are more than helpful.
SEO can be intimidating if you’re unfamiliar with it; however, applying these SEO tips to your Shopify Store will improve the search engine ranking, increase sales, and drive traffic. Here are some tips to help your Shopify Store.
Duplicate content is when the content of one page matches the content of another page in your store, creating a duplicate. This issue can confuse search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others, negatively impacting search engine rankings.
It is important to know how Shopify can create duplicate content in order to fix this issue. Shopify can create duplicate content by:
To learn how to fix duplicate pages, check tip #5 on canonical tags.
Though often overlooked, optimizing Shopify page titles and meta descriptions is an important element in improving search engine ranking. They should include keywords related to the page content, which help search engines distinguish what your page is about, thus improving your rank.
When creating page titles and meta descriptions, you’ll want them to be SEO-friendly but unique to your taste and niche. Keep in mind that you should include keywords but not overstuff them, be descriptive but concise, and match the search intent. You’ll also want to watch out for the target word count, which should be 30-60 words for page titles, and for meta descriptions, 155-160 words.
Search engines like Google don’t look only at the text but at images too. Images let the search engine know what your site is about and rank you higher on the “image” tab, which is done by adding keyword-rich image tags that describe the images truthfully.
Adding alt tags to your images also helps: if, for some reason, your images don’t show, the visitor will know what you wanted to show. Tags are also helpful for text-to-speech tools used by differently-abled people. This will ensure your site is accessible to a larger audience and will improve your ranking.
Your store’s home page is the center of your site and gives the first impression of what your store is about. Once you’ve ensured you have an organized site structure, you should start linking your product page from the home page. Through this, you’ll ensure that all visitors can navigate your shop and find the most important product pages easily, thus spending more time there.
As mentioned above, Shopify has duplicate content issues; to avoid this, you can use canonical tags and domain canonicalization.
Canonical tags are HTML link elements, with the attribute rel=”canonical”. When adding canonical tags to your URLs, you help search engines distinguish which pages you want to appear on search results and which are duplicates. They also simplify the tracking metrics for a single product when there are a variety of URLs.
To help search engines determine which URL is the right one, you should redirect all versions of the URL to the same domain, which is referred to as canonicalization. To fix this in your Shopify store, you can go to Online Store > Domains, and lastly, Redirect all traffic to this domain.
Shopify has a built-in feature that automatically generates a sitemap.xml file to your store, which you’ll need to submit to Google Search Console. While Google can analyze the site by itself, through the Google Search Console, you’ll be able to optimize your site faster.
You find your sitemap at: yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
The sitemap file will tell search engines which pages from your website to index regularly and help you rank better. Therefore, you should organize your content (collections and product pages) well.
Backlinks are vouchers from other reputable sources that point to your URL. To create backlinks, you have to approach other websites to share and link your content, allowing you to connect with people with similar interests. Building high-quality backlinks proves to search engines that you provide relevant content; therefore, your site should rank higher in search results.
As an e-commerce store, you’ll want to keep an eye on products no longer in stock or discontinued. You should redirect these now irrelevant URLs to a new page in your site, usually referred to as 301 redirects.
When removing the pages of no longer relevant content from your store, remember not to delete the pages without creating redirection to a similar page for search engines so that you can pass along authority from the old URL to the new one.
On Shopify, a product page features a single product, whereas a collection page shows products of the same category. Building links to collection pages helps with your ranking on Google, as collection pages show up better on search results. Therefore, it would be more rewarding to focus your resources on ranking collection pages rather than product pages, which can become a dead end.
Ranking a collection versus a product page also helps customers see your entire inventory for specific categories and gives them more options to choose from, which in turn can result in more sales.
Blogging is a tried and true method of increasing your store’s visibility on search engines. Shopify provides an out-of-the-box blogging feature, which you can find by navigating to Online Store >> Blog posts.
If you want to drive organic traffic and gain loyal customers, create a blog that best aligns with your niche and is clear on what you have to offer. Remember to consistently add high-quality content as search engines routinely direct users to frequent websites, and it helps search engines determine which subject your site has authority in.
Shopify is a good e-commerce platform, allowing you to customize and optimize your site through SEO features. In this article, you’ve found that there are multiple ways to implement SEO practices in your Shopify Store and drive organic traffic to your site. You can start with the basics and work your way up. And while it may take some time, investing your time and energy will yield satisfying results.
If you want to read more about Shopify SEO, we recommend the following:
Co-Founder & SEO Director
Granit is the Head of Search at Manaferra and the team’s guide to understanding SEO’s complexity and simplicity.
Granit is the Head of Search at Manaferra and the team’s guide to understanding SEO’s complexity and simplicity.
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