What Shopify SEO Actually Covers

Shopify SEO is the work of making your store’s pages understandable and attractive to search engines: descriptive titles and meta descriptions, a clean URL structure, proper heading tags, compressed images with real alt text, a submitted sitemap and fast loading pages.

Shopify handles part of this for you, and the rest is down to how you fill in the fields it gives you. The nine points below cover the ones that move results for most stores.

1. Optimize your page titles and meta descriptions

These are the snippets of text that appear below your page’s title in search results. Make sure they accurately reflect the content of the page and include relevant keywords. Shopify allows you to edit these for individual pages from the “Online Store” section of your admin dashboard.

2. Use a sitemap

A sitemap is a file that lists all the pages on your website. It helps search engines understand the structure of your site and find all of your pages more easily. Shopify automatically generates a sitemap for your store, which you can find by going to yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. More about the sitemap.

3. Optimize your images

Use descriptive, keyword-rich file names for your images and compress them to speed up page load times. On Shopify, you can use apps such as Crush.pics or TinyIMG to compress your images,

4. Use Header tags

The H1 tag is used to signal the main title of your page, while H2, H3, and so on, signal subtitles or sections. Use these tags to help search engines understand the structure of your content. In Shopify, you can set these headers in your theme’s template files or by using apps like SEO Manager.

5. Use apps from the Shopify App store

There are many apps available on the Shopify App store that can help you optimize your store for search engines. Some popular options include SEO Image Optimizer, SEO Manager, and SEO Ultimate.

6. Optimize your URLs

Use descriptive, keyword-rich URLs that accurately reflect the content of the page. On Shopify, you can set your URLs in the “Online Store” section of your admin dashboard.

7. Build Backlinks

The backlinks are the links that point to your website, the more backlinks you have pointing to your site, the more authoritative your site becomes. To build backlinks, you can use social media, online directories, or even partnerships with other websites.

8. Page Speed Optimization

Another important aspect of SEO is website performance, particularly page load times. Search engines take page load times into account when ranking pages, so it’s important to ensure that your store loads quickly for both customers and search engines.

  1. One way to optimize your store’s load times is to use a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN stores copies of your site’s files on servers located around the world, so that when a user requests a page, the files are delivered from a server that is geographically closest to them. Shopify offers a built-in CDN, which you can enable from the “Settings” section of your admin dashboard.
  2. Another way to optimize page load times is by compressing your images. Large image files can take a long time to load, which can negatively impact your store’s performance. As we mentioned before, you can use apps like Crush.pics or TinylMG to compress your images.
  3. We also have a separate page with more in-depth tips on website performance optimization.

9. Content Marketing

In addition to optimizing the performance of your store, another way to improve your SEO results is by publishing blog content regularly. Useful articles give visitors a reason to arrive from search terms your product pages will never rank for, and they demonstrate expertise in your niche.

Two things decide whether that effort pays off: each article needs a clear question it answers, and it needs to link to the product or collection pages it supports. Without those internal links the article sits on its own and passes nothing on to the pages that earn money. If you would rather have this built into your store than managed by hand, that is part of what our Shopify work covers.

Conclusion

In conclusion, by following the above tips and using the right tools and apps, you can optimize your Shopify store for search engines and improve its performance. Regularly publishing blog content and focusing on website performance are key elements of a successful SEO strategy. Remember, SEO takes time and effort, but it’s worth it in the long run to help your store get found by customers online.

Key takeaways

  • Write titles and meta descriptions per page instead of leaving Shopify’s defaults in place.
  • Use one H1 per page and keep H2 and H3 in a logical order below it.
  • Submit your sitemap once, then use it to find crawl errors rather than as a one-off task.
  • Page speed and SEO are the same project once a store reaches a few hundred products.

Read next: how to find and use your Shopify sitemap, how to cut page load times, or the tools we recommend for day-to-day store management.

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Lars Henning

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