SEO is a long-term commitment game that needs to be played with consistency. Hence, when played early from Day-1 of starting your eCommerce store, you will experience what compounded organic growth looks like.
But getting started with the Shopify SEO of your store can be overwhelming, especially when you have a small team with no in-house expertise. Whether you’re a newbie or seasoned Shopify Entrepreneur, this Shopify SEO checklist will help you sail through the complexities of optimizing your store to rank higher, in a simplified manner.
We will be focusing on using the best Shopify SEO practices and built-in SEO features that Shopify provides to transform your target audience into regular customers.
Make a list of target keywords for Shopify SEO
Keyword placement plays a very vital role in ranking through SEO as when someone looks for a product on search engines of your Shopify search bar app, there are certain keywords for which a product ranks. Hence, you need to be very creative and do thorough research on the appropriate keywords that are being searched constantly by your customers before inserting them into your Shopify store.
- We suggest you use the Google Keyword Planner for finding the trending keywords that have a high volume and less competition with relevant alternatives.
- If you use a Shopify Search App Plugin enabled with advanced AI analytics (like sparq.ai), you can find the keywords your customers are searching the most for within your eCommerce store. This will help you prioritize your store’s offerings and content focus.
- Shopify allows you to add keywords in the meta tags and title tags. For doing so, you need to run through your store page and open “Search Engine Listing Preview”. Here you will find a section where you can write and alter your page title, meta description, and URL.
We are also listing steps for finding the perfect keywords through the Google keyword planner:
- Login to your google ads account
- Click on the ‘tools’ icon at the top right of your screen
- Click ‘keyword planner’ and two keyword tools will pop up
- Choose your desired tool and filter the search results
- Select the relevant keywords with the highest volume
List out all the relevant keywords and prepare a content calendar accordingly. This takes us to the next most essential step after selecting the suitable keywords - optimization.
Optimize your Shopify page
There are many hacks that Shopify provides you like features that you can implement to optimize your Shopify SEO. Some of the crucial Shopify SEO tips are mentioned below:
Alter your URL - Make sure to optimize your URL according to your products. Avoid using repetitive words in your URL because that will make the intent of your Shopify store look confusing. It is suggested to include the target query keywords in your URL for the customer to understand your product better.
Write to the point meta descriptions - Try to write Meta descriptions that clearly justify the properties and quality of the item that you want to generate revenue through. You also need to take care of the word length while writing descriptions as the maximum length that Shopify provides is 320 characters.
Make the headers appropriate - Although Shopify has a built-in feature that automatically allows you to begin with H1, you must take care of the indentation and header placement, as that makes the content look decent and presentable.
Mobile-friendliness of Shopify website - One of the most crucial factors that affect your Shopify SEO is mobile usability. The interface might differ but it should not be completely alien from the desktop version of the website.
Site-speed - Shopify has a moderate speed in comparison to other e-commerce stores but the site can often lag in speed. To resolve this issue, you must consider compressing the images that you upload to the store, deleting unnecessary Shopify search apps for smooth crawling, and running videos that have a lesser load.
Publish a blog for Shopify SEO
This step will help you attract organic traffic to your Shopify Store. Shopify allows you to create a blog for your eCommerce store that could focus on the essential information about your products, educate your audience about your industry and generate visibility among your potential customers.
You should use the keywords that you listed in the first step of the Shopify SEO checklist and build your content calendar based on the keyword volume and competition. Ensure you focus on not more than 5 themes so that there is clarity in your blog’s motive to existing.
Focus on Link Building
This Shopify SEO tip is often overlooked, but it serves a great role in improving your Shopify SEO. The first and most crucial type of linking that assists Shopify SEO is internal linking. You should link the relevant products in your current meta description, blog, and search pages that would make your site structure robust.
Apart from that, you will also need the support of backlinks for establishing your Shopify store as a trustable source. When other blogs and websites recommend your product on their platform, there are high possibilities that your website will gain credibility and eventually rank higher. Here are some other methods to obtain fo-follow links:
- Conduct PR campaigns by featuring PR articles about your brand with reputed publications
- Submit guest blogs with relevant communities, newsletters, and publications
- List your brand in various directories relevant to your industry
- Get your blogs featured in other blog posts as a reference
The more referring links you have, the more domain authority you will build. This is a gradual process when performed consistently, can improve your brand perception.
Limit usage of plugins and Integrations
Using multiple third-party plugins and API Integrations can slow down your site due to compatibility issues or misalignment in code. It is advisable to perform integrations with trusted third-party sources who have tested their plugins/integrations with multiple Shopify themes and use cases.
- Unnecessary bad scripts make your website heavy, leading to slow page load speeds
- Google terms complicated web pages with multiple redirects to external pages as spammy
- Conduct periodic site audits to find out empty 404 redirects and regular performance tests for plugin and integrated APIs
You must also consider choosing to partner with the plugins that have good support available for easy troubleshooting.
Bonus Shopify SEO Tip
Additionally, you can include the well-optimized Shopify search bar apps for a smooth run as when your pages and keywords are well aligned, it makes the crawling easier and efficient. Search pages form an important link for your products and your customer’s intent - hence ensuring its linking will strengthen your Shopify SEO efforts.
At sparq.ai, we provide you with an end-to-end search experience solution that can help you determine what your customers are searching for within your ecosystem with its AI-powered insights. Using the knowledge, you can optimize your search pages, link relevant products and determine keywords to focus on. Contact us and check out the search app in action - View Demo
Way forward
The Shopify SEO checklist discussed in this article is basic, yet includes mandatory steps to be taken to get started with your Shopify SEO. Consistently implementing them will improve your domain authority and eventual rankings of your products by search engines.
