Even with lots of quality products for sale, many Shopify store owners struggle to get organic traffic. That’s because there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes to get your site noticed. SEO is one of the most important strategies for achieving high ROI and ecommerce growth, but how do you know where to start?
Improving Shopify SEO isn’t about implementing a bunch of hacks. Instead, it involves consistent, strategic optimisation across all aspects of the site. To find SEO success for your store, it’s time to focus on practical, actionable steps to improve rankings and revenue.
Shopify stores can be strong competitors in search engines. However, the platform alone doesn’t guarantee success. The results come from the right execution.
SEO is a system that includes technical setup, on-page optimisation, content, and authority. To set your Shopify site up for success, you need to focus on all these aspects in your SEO strategies.
For the best results, start with the basics before focusing on small SEO details.
Slow sites that are hard to navigate are unappealing to visitors, and they don’t rank as well as fast, user-friendly sites. Checking your Core Web Vitals can show you which areas of your site’s performance need the most attention. The theme quality, image sizes, scripts, and included apps all play a big role in your site’s speed.
Once you have a fast site, you need to make sure search engines are actually indexing your pages. Allow all important pages, including products, collections, and core articles, to be indexed. Then, avoid indexation for low-value pages like tags and duplicate URLs. That way, search engines can easily determine which pages to prioritise.
Shopify auto-generates a sitemap.xml for all stores, but it’s important to submit it in Google Search Console for faster and more complete crawling. To help guide search engine crawlers, take advantage of robots.txt, which are text files in the website’s root directory that offer instructions to manage crawl traffic.
Structured data is organised code that helps search engines understand content. That way, search engines can display “rich results,” such as ratings, prices, and availability. These aspects enhance search results with visual elements to help them capture the attention of potential customers. To incorporate schema into your Shopify site, you can usually add code to the theme files.
Once your foundations are in place, it’s time to focus on collection pages. These are the most important pages for SEO because they target high-volume, competitive keywords rather than focusing on one product. For example, a collection page could appeal to someone looking for new running shoes rather than focusing on one specific shoe.
On these pages, target broad, high-intent keywords that your audience will likely search. Focus on the product’s category rather than specific product names. Each page should have a collection description, intro content, internal links, and FAQs to help with SEO. Thin, empty product pages are more likely to get overlooked, so make sure it includes lots of relevant content.
Even though collection pages are important for SEO, you can’t ignore your product pages. Every product page should have a unique description to differentiate it from your other pages. Include as many details about the product as possible, including specifications and FAQs. Don’t forget to link internally to other products, optimise your product titles, and write a meta description.
Including user-generated content on the page, such as reviews and social media posts, can add some credibility to your brand to improve the page’s ranking. Plus, it’s a great way to build trust in your site visitors.
Images are more than just visual additions. By using descriptive, keyword-relevant file names and alt text, your images can help with SEO. However, don’t forget to keep file sizes small (but still good quality) to help pages load faster. After all, alt text won’t help if your page won’t load.
With all the above in mind, you can move forward with strengthening your Shopify SEO.
Target keywords that make sense for the page. Informational searches where the user wants to learn about a topic should direct them to blog content while transactional searchers where the user is looking to buy something should lead to product pages and collections. Make sure the blogs on your site directly answer the question or provide the information the person is looking for.
Collections are crucial for SEO, but there are ways to increase their impact. Create buyer’s guides, comparisons, and “best of” articles that link to collections and product pages. This improves the site’s navigation while getting more users to view the collection pages.
When establishing authority, make sure you’re doing so in your specific niche. Comprehensively cover the topic across a variety of articles, including guides, in-depth information, and FAQs, to make your site more credible to search engines.
Once you’ve created content for your Shopify site, don’t forget to link to some of your other pages. Link from blogs to collections to products to help naturally guide search engines through your site’s architecture. Priority pages, such as the homepage, best-selling products, and core collection pages, are the most important to link to.
With product variants, multiple collection URLs, and tagged pages, your site will have some duplicate content, which can confuse search engines. Canonical tags, which are HTML snippets that tell search engines which version of a page is preferred, can help prevent this. If any of the duplicate content isn’t necessary, such as two blogs about the same topic, remove the duplicate.
Apps and themes can certainly add to a Shopify site, but use them strategically. Installing heavy themes or too many apps can slow the site, which can hurt rankings and deter customers. Choose a lightweight, SEO-friendly theme and regularly audit the apps on your site. If there are any unused tools, remove them to help with site performance.
Now that you know everything to focus on for an SEO-friendly Shopify site, you should also be aware of common pitfalls to steer clear of:
Now, to make sure you don’t miss any of the important steps, follow this Shopify SEO checklist:
Websites don’t rank high immediately after implementing SEO strategies. It can take at least 3 to 6 months to see results. You may start to see early wins after making technical fixes or working on collection optimisation, but you won’t see most changes instantly. With optimised content and strong authority, you’ll experience compounding results over time.
Implementing these SEO tactics is important for ecommerce store owners looking for sustainable traffic growth, brands wanting to reduce reliance on paid ads, and stores with scalable product and category structures. If you’ve been looking for ways to grow your site’s traffic without paid marketing, the SEO basics can set your brand up for success.
Shopify SEO is extremely effective with the right techniques. Focus on the high-impact areas first, such as collections, technical health, and duplication issues, for the best results.
To get started, run a quick SEO audit to look at your site’s speed, indexation, collections, and duplicate content. Then, prioritise fixes that directly impact revenue-driving pages. With these adjustments, your Shopify site will gain more organic traffic so you won’t need to rely as heavily on paid ads.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the key to increasing your brand’s visibility in organic search results. This leads many online sellers to wonder if Shopify can rank well on Google, along with what determines those rankings.
The short answer is yes, Shopify can be great for SEO, but the results depend on your Shopify store’s setup, content, and structure. Shopify stores rank competitively in product and category searches, but to be “good for SEO,” brands need to take advantage of the platform’s capabilities and correct implementation.
Brands need to understand the strengths, limitations, and must-do actions of Shopify sites to develop an effective strategy for SEO.
Shopify does a lot of things well for SEO that other platforms don’t. Below are some of Shopify’s SEO strengths.
SEO is more than just putting keywords into your content. You also need to ensure that your site is user-friendly with fast loading speeds. High-quality content can’t reach its full potential if there are technical flaws hurting visibility, which is why Shopify’s performance foundations are a huge plus.
Shopify’s pages have a clean structure, making them easy for search engines to access, analyse, and store in databases. Without indexing, your site won’t appear in Google, so this is a crucial aspect.
Shopify makes it easy to edit title tags, meta descriptions, redirects, sitemap, and robots controls. While these features might seem small, they have a huge impact on SEO. Title tags act as the primary headlines in search results, robots controls tell search engine crawlers what to focus on, and meta descriptions offer essential information to get users to click on your link. Together, all these built-in features are a game-changer for search engine rankings.
Shopify’s software and tools make it easy for users to work on other SEO tasks, including structured data, image optimisation, and internal linking support. The right ecosystem ensures all elements of the shop work together to maximise the website’s visibility and performance.
While Shopify has lots of positives for SEO, every platform has its limitations. Below are some challenges for SEO on Shopify.
Shopify has a rigid URL structure, which includes prefixes like “products,” “collections,” and “blogs.” You can only edit the handle that appears after these prefixes, which limits customisation for SEO. These limitations won’t make a huge impact if the content is highly authoritative with strong internal linking, but for most sites, this matters for general ranking.
Products may exist under multiple pages because of product variants, tags, collections and locations. This makes it difficult for search engines to find the correct page to rank, which hurts visibility. To correct this concern, you can use canonical tags (an HTML specification in the header) to let search engines know which product location is the most authoritative.
Shopify has stricter blogging limits than other content management system (CMS) platforms. There’s a 64KB content size limit per post/page, which can be restricting for content-heavy brands, especially if you’re posting lots of large images per page.
If you don’t manage your Shopify site properly, your shop’s speed could be affected, resulting in less visibility. App bloat occurs when too many installed apps get in the way of the site’s performance and load times. Many of Shopify’s theme customisations can also slow down the page enough to harm SEO.
Now that you know the good and bad of Shopify’s SEO, what actually makes an impact when optimising your shop? The following are the most important aspects to focus on.
Maintaining good site speed and Core Web Vitals sets sites up for success. Poorly coded themes, unoptimised large images, heavy scripts, and excessive apps can hurt a site’s performance, even if all the page’s content is great.
While ensuring the site’s foundations are solid, it’s also crucial to maintain indexation basics. Avoid thin, duplicate pages since those can mess with indexing. Make sure each product page has properly structured data, including standardised, machine-readable code, to help with rich results.
Once you know all the technical aspects of your shop are set up correctly, that’s when you can turn to on-page content. Focus on collection pages as primary SEO landing pages since they connect the homepage and individual products.
For each product page, create unique descriptions, specs, reviews, and frequently asked questions. Incorporate relevant keywords naturally when it makes sense. Don’t forget to optimise your images through image names, alt text, and compression.
Don’t create content just to add more to your site. Create it with purpose. Match your content to user search intent, whether that’s informational or transactional. Any blog content you write should be helpful and support your collection, which can include buyer’s guides, comparisons, and use cases.
Proving that you’re an authoritative source makes it easier for your brand to rank in search engines. Backlinks, brand signals, reviews, and UGC can all increase your brand’s reputation when relevant.
Backlinks aren’t the only important linking for your Shopify site. Don’t forget to link to relevant pages within your site, such as navigation, collections, and blogs, to help Google understand navigation priorities and relevance so it can boost the right pages.
Many approaches can do more harm than good on a Shopify site. Make sure you avoid the following mistakes when setting up your shop:
These practices may seem like the easy routes to take, but they could end up harming your site’s structure, performance, and speed. By avoiding core issues with your site, your products will have a higher chance of ranking.
To confirm that you aren’t missing any important SEO tasks on Shopify, follow this checklist:
Shopify is a great platform SEO-wise for ecommerce-first brands focused on product and category rankings, small-to-medium teams wanting strong fundamentals without heavy engineering, and shops prioritising conversion and usability alongside SEO. If you’re a brand that needs an easy-to-use platform, Shopify can be a beneficial option if you follow the SEO checklist above.
Shopify’s SEO might not be suitable for companies needing complex server-side customisation. Content-heavy publishers, brands needing advanced CMS workflows, large catalogues with complex navigation requirements, and businesses needing full control over URL architecture beyond Shopify’s constraints will typically be better off with another platform.
Shopify is a strong SEO platform when configured properly, so make sure you’re following the strategies that matter. To see your shop’s strengths and areas of improvement, run a quick audit to get a better look at speed, indexation, collection targets, and duplicate content. Then, prioritise fixes that impact revenue-driving pages to set your Shopify SEO up for success.
Search Engine Optimisation, otherwise known as SEO, is a systematic process that allows you to optimise online content for the greatest level of visibility in search engine rankings. There are a variety of different techniques and strategies that make up SEO. The ultimate goal is to increase organic (non-paid) website traffic by appearing prominently in the search engine results pages for keyword phrases that are relevant to your business or industry.
Organic traffic is all of the visitors that come to your website. It could be direct traffic or website traffic that discovers you through search engine queries on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
This type of website traffic is important because it’s cost-effective, sustainable, and delivers high quality leads. It also gives brands an extra measure of credibility and trust, provides an enhanced user experience, and provides businesses with a strong competitive advantage.
In a nutshell, the basics of SEO are as follows:
Keyword Research
Keyword research is critical to a business or brand’s success. It’s used to identify relevant keywords and phrases that customers will use to search for services, products, or info related to your business. SEO specialists use relevant tools including SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Google Keyword Planner to analyze keywords and discover the best options for your niche.
On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO is all about optimizing your website. It includes adding title tags, meta descriptions, headings (H1, H2, H3), content optimisation, URL structure, and internal linking.
Off-Page SEO
This strategy is about optimizing the content on your website to improve search engine rankings. It includes backlinks, social signals, and guest blogging as examples.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is all about improving your website’s performance. It includes optimizing site speed, ensuring the mobile-friendliness, crawlability, and HTTPS security.
Local SEO
With local SEO, we’ll boost your website to show up for relevant phrases in local website searches. We’ll create local citations to make sure your company is listed in local directories. We’ll use Google My Business to make sure your profile appears on Google maps and local search results. And reviews are a great way to encourage happy customers to talk about your business in a positive way online, which proves that your business is trustworthy and it will attract other customers.
Search engines are designed to deliver the most relevant results to user search engine queries. There are three stages that a search engine uses to determine their results, which include crawling, indexing, and ranking.
Crawling consists of spiders and bots discovering new website content by crawling page after page and collecting information. Indexing happens after a page is crawled. The information is stored in an index, which is simply another name for a huge database. Ranking happens when a user searches a particular keyword phrase and the search engine digs through the index to find and deliver the most relevant website content. The factors used to consider the best website content include the keyword phrase, metadata, and page content.
Keywords are important because the search engines use them to deliver the most relevant content to the person typing in the search query. They reflect user intent, which website owners can use to create targeted content, which will lead to better conversion rates and higher engagement. Choosing the best keywords will attract targeted users, which will likely lead to increased organic traffic.
Here are some tips to choose the right keywords for your niche:
On-Page SEO consists of the following optimisation techniques to improve your content for users and the search engines. It includes optimising:
This SEO technique focuses on optimising individual website pages to improve search engine rankings while attracting the most relevant traffic to your website.
High-quality content is a critical component to search engine optimisation and user engagement. Not only will it attract more visitors to your website, but it will help retain them as well. If you craft well thought out content that addresses user needs and answers their most pressing questions, you’ll earn more shares, backlinks and overall authority and rankings. This provides value and a highly satisfying experience which leads to greater website conversions. Overall, high-quality content is the critical component to building greater levels of credibility, trust, and authority.
Optimising these important elements will enhance search engine visibility and create a better user experience. This will drive more traffic to your website.
As far as title tags are concerned, they help search engines understand a webpages topic to create relevance. A well-planned title tag will improve your click through rate by creating an attractive and compelling headline. Title tags are an important signal for web page rankings.
Meta Descriptions, when well-written, provide a summary of the content. This encourages users to click through to your page. When informative, it helps improve user experience by setting expectations. It also contains relevant keywords that could potentially highlight relevance in the search engine results pages.
Optimising headers improves content structure and allows the search engines to better understand the content hierarchy while highlighting the key points of the information. Proper keyword placement within headers will boost rankings and relevance.
There are a number of reasons to improve off-page SEO. These techniques will improve the overall reputation of your website and help build greater authority. The techniques include:
Building backlinks to your webpages is crucial for SEO success. These links act as signals to search engines, which proves that your content is authoritative and credible. Gaining high-quality backlinks from websites with a great reputation will boost your rankings in the search engines, drive referral traffic, and enhance your website’s visibility.
They are a great way for search engines to discover your content and index it more effectively as well. Essentially, backlinks are a vital component to search engine optimisation by attracting targeted traffic while enhancing credibility.
What are social media signals? They consist of likes, shares, and comments on posts on Facebook, X, Instagram, and other platforms. These signals not only drive traffic to your webpages, but they also increase content visibility.
Social signals are not necessarily a direct website ranking factor, but strong engagement will amplify content reach and attract more backlinks, which is definitely of critical importance to SEO.
Lastly, strong social media signals will enhance brand recognition. This may not seem like much, but it indirectly supports higher search engine rankings, so it’s massively important nonetheless.
As far as guest blogging is concerned, this process is critical because it helps to get more brand exposure, traffic, and backlinks to your website and webpages.
Brand exposure is necessary because it increases brand visibility and helps you become a powerhouse authority within your niche.
Driving targeted traffic to your website is obviously a huge benefit to guest blogging. It may not necessarily improve SEO, but it’s still incredibly valuable nonetheless.
But the biggest reason for guest blogging is to gain high-quality backlinks from reputable websites. These links act as signals to boost your search engine rankings while providing your website with even more authority.
The beauty of influencer outreach is that it creates engagement, visibility, and credibility for your brand.
The engagement comes with additional social shares and interactions amongst influencers and their followers. This can indirectly support your SEO efforts.
Visibility comes from expanding your reach, which can increase your broader audience. This visibility could potentially attract more followers, customers, and fans.
The influencer has massive credibility, so by sharing your brand or products they are using their trustworthiness to prove that your brand is also honest and dependable.
The tools that we love of for tracking improving search engine optimisation include the following options:
Each of these tools provide individual benefits including keyword tracking, backlink analysis, keyword research, indexing, performance monitoring, traffic analysis, and further insights.
Google Analytics and Google Search Console are powerful tools in every SEO expert’s arsenal.
This critical tool provides analytic data directly from Google. It allows the user to analyse and track many ways that their website performs.
The key features include:
The benefits of this tool include making data-driven informed decisions to improve user experience and website performance. Enhance optimisation by identifying areas that need improvement while discovering high-performing content. And assess marketing campaign effectiveness by learning your return on investment through ROI measurement.
The main features of this tool include:
The benefits of Google Search Console include improving search performance, enhancing error resolution, offering valuable insight to improve website performance, and providing greater indexing control.
SEMrush is a powerful tool that helps users perform keyword research to discover and analyse the most high-performing keywords. It offers competitive analysis that provides powerful insight into paid search strategies, organic traffic from competitors, and more.
It performs website audits to identify technical SEO issues, helps create an SEO optimized content plan, monitors and assesses backlink quality through analysis, and also offers PPC analysis for optimizing pay per click campaigns.
Ahrefs has similar features including back link analysis, keyword research, site audits, competitor analysis, and more. Some other interesting features include content explorer, which allows users to look at organic traffic, backlinks, and social shares to analyze popular content on the web. And their rank tracking feature helps monitor keyword rankings over time, which then alerts you if there are any significant changes.
Moz is a powerful tool that helps with local SEO, which helps manage and optimize local business listings and also helps with improvements with visibility for local search engines. It provides on-page optimisation recommendations, rag tracking, website crawling, keyword research, and so much more.
The best way to use these tools is to track your website performance while using them and take the appropriate actions to improve your website’s performance.
For example, SEMrush offers a backlink analysis feature. You can use this feature to disavow harmful links while pursuing opportunities for high-quality backlinks.
Take the features most relevant to your situation and use them to the fullest. That’s how you’ll track and improve your website performance.
Search engine optimisation is a critical strategy to gain visibility while attracting more organic traffic to your site. Your web presence will benefit tremendously by engaging in on-page SEO, off-page SEO and other high-quality tactics.
Remember to use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Content to identify areas that need improvement while tracking your performance. Other valuable tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz help website owners gain incredible insights into competitor analysis, website audits, backlink monitoring, and keyword research. These tools will help you refine your search engine optimisation strategy.
Remember, the only way to improve search engine rankings is through consistent effort. So, continue your keyword optimisation, technical SEO, content creation, and backlink building. This will help you improve search engine rankings while driving sustainable organic traffic day after day. Keep optimizing your site and stay up-to-date with the top SEO practices to achieve long-term success. That’s the best way to continue to maintain a strong online presence year after year, so contact us today to get started.
Shopping online is big business and that means if you want a slice of the pie, you will need to have an effective eCommerce website. But what design features and factors make an online shop profitable? Keep reading to find out!
If you had a brick-and-mortar store, you would likely create a display for your best products! The good news is you can also do this online and highlight items that customers are most likely to buy.
The way to do this is to find ways to attract the attention of potential prospects such as creating banners, making the images of your best-selling products larger, or positioning them at the top of the page so they are the first thing a visitor sees. You may also want to highlight them in a contrasting colour so they stand out even more.
Your customers will want to know what they are letting themselves in for with regards to pricing. What this means is you will need to display clear and honest pricing of every product.
If you can show or offer a way to calculate P&P before a customer makes a purchase, even better. Then you can manage their expectations and prevent them from getting a nasty shock later on that may cause them to reconsider their purchase.
SEO or search engine optimisation is a crucial design element for any eCommerce site. Indeed, without effective SEO their potential customers will find it hard to find your business and the products you are offering.
Of course, there are different elements of SEO to factor into the design of your eCommerce site including product descriptions and keywords. Backlinks on the other hand won’t be so relevant because you don’t want to direct your customer away from your site.
Another crucial design feature for any eCommerce site is great quality images. After all, your customer won’t get to see the item IRL, so you will want to provide them with as much information to help them buy in the images you display as possible.
With that in mind, product images need to be in focus and high-res. They also need to be taken against a white background, with the proper lighting, and from a range of angles. Videos can be particularly useful when customers can benefit from seeing a product such as a piece of equipment, or item of clothing being used. If in doubt, choose a professional photographer for your images.
While your brain may be overflowing with information about your products, your customers only want the most important details. To help them find these, make sure that the layout of your shop is clear and easy to navigate by using headings, categories, and lists.
In retail, the customer always comes first and the same applies to any eCommerce store. To that end, prioritising the user of your site’s experience (UX) is crucial to success. This means your site needs to be simple, easy, and fun to use. It also needs to be attractive, and engaging. In particular, linking your site to your social media accounts as a way of promoting feedback on how you can improve can work wonders.
Finally, the last design tip for creating a successful eCommerce website is to ask the following question for every change you make: will it help us make a profit? If the answer is no, then leave things as they are. If the answer is I’m not sure, get in touch with an expert that can help or do some research, while if the answer is yet – go ahead and make your eCommerce site the very best it can be!
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Should I have a blog on my e-commerce website?
The simple answer to this is yes.
Although blogs may be seen as a little old school, they do still provide some really good benefits for your website, especially an e-commerce website.
A blog serves a few purposes:
Having those regularly updated blog posts can really make a difference in the long term and the medium term to the amount of visitors you’re getting to your website and therefore to the amount of sales you’re making from your website. The extra effort of keeping a blog updated on your website will translate to more sales for your business!
The success of almost any business rests on the quality of its marketing efforts – and these days, their online presence can make or break a companies’ ambitions. With ecommerce quickly becoming one of the fastest growing niches, it’s no wonder that tools such as search engines are relied upon more and more as a result.
Working with Google is undoubtedly the most popular way for you to boost views and sales, with good rankings equalling not only more, but better quality traffic; sending the potential for sales through the roof.
Making the most of Google’s potential
SEO is a powerhouse of techniques that work to boost a website in a search engine’s eyes, giving a business the opportunity to enjoy a good standing in both their niche and local area. So, here are some basic tips to ensure the success of these endeavours.
Identify your website and show Google who you are
The first thing to do is to work out who you are and what you are offering – and then build your SEO to suit. After all, if you sell handmade items, make sure to focus on that appeal. Identifying a search phrase for each of your web pages can benefit your site.
Sometimes, a less-obvious keyword can spell the difference between success and failure; especially if it has a good volume of searches each month. Less competitive terms can also hone your website’s ability to get the visitors you really want.
After you have chosen the keyword or search phrase you are targeting for each page, feature these terms in both your Page Title and your URL to maximise impact for search engines. Be sure that every page possesses written content, so that Google understands what your page is really about.
Having a website that only has images can prove to be detrimental, as Google will have no information to work with to assess its niche (and therefore rank your site accordingly).
Make use of essential tools for ranking
When a website is secure, visitors are more likely to trust it, so making use of https can change the way that you are viewed by those who hope to purchase your goods.
Signing up to Google Webmaster Tools can offer you behind the scenes access to check your website for errors and to evaluate the performance – often making it far more tailored to the requirements of search engine algorithms.
Creating a sitemap through this platform can help Google to identify each page individually too, allowing for a more thorough investigation into relevance and quality for ranking.
Making use of Google My Business will enable you to create a business listing that will feature at the top of Googles results when business in your niche and area are searched for – and this can work to propel your website, even if your site doesn’t automatically feature on the first page.
And these are just a small selection of ideas that can help you to maximise the impact of your ecommerce efforts.
Additional ways to boost your ranking
Social networks can transform the way a website is evaluated by search engines, so creating business profiles and pages for all of the major social networks, as well as remaining active on each, can be a great way to enhance your online visibility. It’s also possible to create dedicated shop pages that can link back to your own site via platforms like Facebook.
In addition, having an active blog can make a huge difference to your SEO endeavours – and writing regular posts and sharing them across social networks can maximise reach in a way that is all but unrivalled.
It may be a good idea to write articles and reviews about your products, your business and your efforts to grow; as submitting these for other blogs to publish can add another layer of relevance and reliability for search engines to work with.
As the practices involved in SEO are competitive and ever-evolving, it can be difficult to keep up with all of the above on your own. If you would like help, why not speak to one of our SEO experts today, to ensure that you are getting the most up to date information and latest techniques to help with your initial, ongoing and continued success.
