
You’ve created a Shopify site that you’re proud of. It’s live, it’s out there, but no one else seems to be finding your website. No visitors means no customers and no sales.
When you check your site’s dashboard and check your website stats, you see a few spikes where visitors have dropped by. Or worse, it’s a flat line.
Getting a website live and then waiting for people to come is poor business. You need to market it. Once you do, people will come.
What can help to get customers landing on your website? Content and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
Content and SEO allows you to talk about your products and make sure people can learn about and discover your products online. Once your site’s ranking, sales will soon follow.
Table of Contents
Do Shopify websites have good SEO?
Yes, they do! As ecommerce platforms go, Shopify is one of the most Google-friendly. So don’t worry, no need to switch content management system for better ecommerce SEO.
Shopify also encourages site owners to use SEO, and their help centre contains simple guides on using SEO best practices on their platform.
But this support won’t make your website rank highly or automatically convert visitors into customers.
Shopify websites are capable of having good SEO, but you still need to put in the time and effort required for it.
Why invest time and money into your Shopify’s SEO?
Spending time and money on SEO can achieve results like:
- Getting your content and product in front of the right people who are searching online
- Higher website ranking on Google results, which means customers see your site first and they don’t have to scroll to find you
- Better visibility for your products from customers who already want to buy
- Organic traffic you didn’t have to pay to attract, meaning you make an even bigger profit off of your SEO efforts
For a Shopify website owner – competing against 2.5 million live sites on the same platform alone – achieving results like these will be invaluable to your business’ future.
How to maximise and improve your Shopify pages’ SEO
A well optimised Shopify website = more customers and sales.
The basic SEO practices to get your website ranking are as follows:
- Research the best keywords that are relevant to your products to match search terms
- Create enjoyable/helpful content around these keywords to assure customers they’re in the right place
- Make your Shopify site mobile-friendly, as around 80% of traffic comes from mobile devices
- Collect reviews from satisfied customers to show other potential customers you’re a good choice
But these aren’t the only things you can do to make your Shopify site stand out.
If you want to know what SEO methods work best for Shopify, we’ve broken them down into actionable tips below.
Avoid the common mistake made by other Shopify website owners: Duplicate content
When you open up your Shopify site, you can add product pages and sort them into collections to make them easy to navigate through. This is great for creating a cohesive product log and ensuring customers can make their way through your website with just a few clicks.
Shopify, however, has a pretty nasty habit of duplicating these pages once they’ve been sorted into collections. It does this by creating another link to the page with a slightly different URL that reflects its place in the collection.
Duplicate content is not good for SEO. It can make your website look less authoritative which harms how highly you’ll be able to rank. Similarly, your sitemap will end up a complete mess and take a lot more time to index correctly.
So, how can you prevent duplicate content?
- Add a canonical tag – this will tell Google which page is the original and the only one that should be indexed
- Set up a redirect to send users back to the original page after clicking on a duplicate link
- Create unique content where you can
Tell search bots which pages are OK for crawling to prevent duplicate content
Duplicated content can be harmful to new websites. That’s where a robots.txt.liquid file can be helpful.
Now this might sound a little techy and complicated, but we’ll walk you through it.
When you put content online, Google uses bots to ‘crawl’ it, which allows the search engine algorithm to match your website to user search terms. It’s Google’s way of quickly adapting to new content and putting it in the right place.
A robots.txt.liquid file is the guidebook Google will use to crawl your site. If you’re using duplicate pages on your website, this file will keep these unimportant pages from being crawled multiple times.
It won’t block them entirely, but it will prevent your site from being overwhelmed by bots, which may slow it down, cause it to load improperly, and be a waste of time that could otherwise be used on pages that will actually help you rank!
Fortunately for every Shopify site owner, each store comes with a robots.txt.liquid file prebuilt for SEO. Phew!
But if you want to take more control over what Google sees on your website, you can edit this file to deny crawlers or block specific bots.
Check out Shopify’s guidance for editing your robots.txt.liquid file.
Use keywords relevant to shoppers
Keywords are important to understanding what your customers search to find the products you are selling.
Once you have a bank of relevant keywords, you can then use the same terms and phrases on your Shopify website. They’ll help you to know what content to write, and most importantly, what content your customers are searching for online.
The goal is to find a good mix of keywords. Terms that people are searching for because they want to buy something (transactional intent keywords) – and long-tail keywords, which are more specific searches (longer searches, usually questions).
We recommend reliable tools like Google Keyword Planner (which is free), Ahrefs or Semrush if you need to do keyword research.
Create actionable page titles
Page titles are one of the best structural elements for maximising your Shopify’s SEO.
Not only are they one of the first things Google will notice about your content, but they also immediately let a visitor know what they’re looking at.
Important and the most relevant keywords go in the titles. This makes them actionable and lets the user know what to expect when they land on your website.
Don’t stuff a load of keywords into the title, or the rest of the page. You can be penalised for this by search engines (and you won’t rank), and it will be irrelevant to both the algorithm and the user.
Website content is more than just words. You need to structure each page to guide the user down to the action you want them to take. Page titles are a good start and your page headers will follow up.
Check how fast your site loads
Page load speed is an important ranking factor; Google wants the most customer-friendly sites to be at the top.
Most customers won’t wait more than 3 seconds for a page to load, so any website that takes longer than this is less likely to reach the top of the results page.
You can prevent load speed issues on Shopify in a few ways:
- Choose an optimised store theme that won’t slow down your website’s performance
- Keep image sizes to the smallest possible – even though Shopify automatically applies image optimisation to any uploads, it’s best to double check
- Turn off unnecessary apps and try to use as few as possible
Arrange your navigation menu clearly
Easy navigation is an essential part of providing a smooth customer experience. That’s essential to your SEO efforts, as customer experience, or user experience (UX), is another critical ranking factor.
Without a clear and simple navigation menu at the top of the page, customers won’t be able to quickly and easily find what they’re looking for.
Easy navigation menus also improve mobile experience and ensure cohesive, quality UX across all devices.
Use the Shopify store builder to create a straightforward menu that customers can come back to whenever they need to head somewhere new. Create some category headers, pop your collection subheadings under them, and then link to your separate product pages under these.
Allow users to track their journey through a collection with breadcrumbs and then add a search feature to let them instantly find specific products and navigation through your site becomes second nature!
Include ALT text on images
If your website is image heavy – as most Shopify stores are – you can use alternative text (alt text) to provide context to your images. These images can then be crawled like the rest of your content.
However, don’t fill your ALT text with keywords and call it a day. Keep them short and simple and describe the image closely.
Submit your sitemap to help Google index your pages according to priority
Sitemaps detail your website’s structure according to page hierarchy. They’re a helpful tool that Google can use to find out what pages are on your site and which deserve to be crawled and indexed. This will help accurately rank pages according to their importance.
Every Shopify website has a sitemap file auto generated for them. Manually submitting yours to the Google Search Console will prompt Google to crawl your website, which will help whenever you make changes to your sitemap, such as adding new pages or removing duplicate versions.
Use a blog to publish SEO content
It’s not just your site’s structure and meta text that can be optimised for website ranking. If you publish blog content as well, you’ll provide another great SEO boost to your Shopify site.
Google loves a website that creates content with the aim of uplifting user experience and will rank it higher on the results page over time. A blog is the perfect place to publish this kind of content.
And seeing as Shopify has its own blogging engine and every Shopify storefront comes with a blog already built in, there’s no reason not to!
Whilst you’re here, here are some blogging best practices that work well for ecommerce SEO.
Apply the same SEO rules to your blog content as you do for the rest of your website
- Write original content that incorporates your target keywords without stuffing
- Use headers to structure your content and make it easy to read
- Internally link to your product pages so customers can easily find what you’re talking about
- Prevent the page from slowing down by only using select images or videos
Don’t publish for the sake of it! Make your content stand out through authority and originality
If you think creating blog posts is a matter of typing up something, throwing in one of your products, and then hitting publish, you couldn’t be more wrong.
Content that’s been created just for the sake of it is boring, unoriginal, and has no inherent value. People just aren’t going to click on it – they’ve got no reason to!
Never rush out your blog content. Develop your idea, take time writing it, target your tone and style as closely as possible, structure the post to make sure it flows well, link relevant products within the content, and include a call to action that makes sense.
Post on social media
Promote your products and Shopify website across social media. And if you have a blog, you can use the content you create there on your social media too.
People forget that social media posts (posts, videos, reels, TikToks) and pages can also be indexed in search engines. That way your website can rank, but so too can your social media posts and profiles.
FAQs about Shopify & SEO
Is Shopify as good as WordPress or Wix?
Whilst WordPress and Wix can be used to build ecommerce websites, Shopify specialises in ecommerce. It’s an incredibly adaptable ecommerce builder that anyone can use. If your main requirement is to build a safe and easy to use ecommerce portal, we recommend signing up for a Shopify store.
Can you use SEO plugins on Shopify?
Shopify allows for a whole host of plugins. If you’ve used WordPress or Wix in the past, you’ll be able to install many of the same plugins, such as Yoast SEO.
How long does it take Google to index Shopify site changes?
After making changes to your Shopify site, it can take up to 72 hours for Google to index the new content. This is an automatic process, so don’t worry about your changes going unnoticed.
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