SEO Guidelines for Your Shopify Website

At qwiqode, we understand that your online store is the source of your livelihood. Hence, generating more organic traffic must be your priority.

But what can you do to drive organic traffic and increase the sales of your Shopify store? Start by stepping up your SEO game!

SEO or Search Engine Optimization best practices help you gross the highest ROI among any other marketing techniques. Sure, you can benefit from paid ads as it is a quicker win, but SEO is crucial for the long haul. It may be a demanding marathon, requiring consistent efforts to get you started, but once you start ranking, you can just sit back and appreciate the incoming traffic with no recurring expenditure.

Mastering Shopify SEO is crucial, for it helps you get to the first-page position in search engine results pages. But between the ever-evolving search engine algorithms and cutthroat industry competition, it can be challenging for you to get the hang of eCommerce SEO. So, where do you start?

This article will quickly walk you through the very basics of Shopify SEO, i.e., the SEO optimization best practices, so you can start seeing results as quick as possible.

Google Search Console

Telling Google that your website exists is the starting point of your Shopify SEO. GSC or Google Search Console helps your site get indexed much faster and gives you plenty of tools to review the pages that are indexed, and the overall performance, impressions and clicks of your site pages. Upon registering with this service, you must submit a sitemap that can be generated automatically on Shopify. This helps you view your site as Google sees it and make necessary improvements when required.

Google Analytics

Another service that you must set up is Google Analytics, a free tool that helps you monitor your website’s performance and tweak your campaigns as and when needed. It is a robust strategy that offers myriad tracking possibilities and brings your SEO to the next level.

Site Speed

Search engines like Google are more likely to prefer websites that load faster than slower ones. So you must ensure that your website pages load as quickly as possible. How can you do that? Remove any apps you do not need, use as few web fonts as possible, always compress your images and ensure that you’re not loading oversized images, and keep external scripts to a minimum.

Keyword Search

Your Shopify store’s website pages and product descriptions must contain relevant keywords for which your audience is searching. So, perform thorough keyword research and use the ones that are popular and can generate a reasonable amount of traffic. But make sure other sites aren’t dominating the search results for the keywords you are trying to rank for. It is always best to determine the keywords your audience is looking for, how popular those are, search volumes, and the difficulty for each of those to rank.

Titles

Getting the title of your pages and products right is a critical element of perfecting the SEO of your Shopify website. The page title we’re referring to is the title that appears in the browser and not the title you see on the page itself (covered in the next section). The page title is a crucial piece of information for search engines to categorize your content correctly. So, the titles of your pages and products must never be vague and always include and must start with the target keyword.

In Shopify, you can edit these in the admin - at the bottom of each page or product, under the section titled “Search engine listing preview” (there’s a link ‘Edit website SEO’ to the right of it). Keep in mind that these cannot be longer than 70 characters.

Headings

Headings are another critical component of your content to help level up your SEO game. Each heading provides different information but eventually relates to the main topic. Using H1, H2, and H3 header tags makes a world of difference to your online store, and search engines find it easier to index your pages accurately.

Mastering the art of creating fantastic header tags can also help you with your conversions. H1 tags are particularly useful for making bold headlines on pages, whereas H2 and H3 are more beneficial for blog subheadings.

Although these headings might not have a massive impact alone, these definitely have perks. Besides, your visitors also find it useful, especially those with visual impairment, as you highlight essential parts of the page.

Meta Descriptions

The meta description of a page is its summary that appears under the title in SERPs. Brief and concretely written meta descriptions can increase your Click-Through Rate, improving your Google ranking. Besides, these descriptions must be accurate, unique, not be more than 160 characters, and include the focus keyword.

Image Alt Tags

When indexing website pages, search engines do not just evaluate the text you add to your website; they also value the information associated with your product images. For this reason, it is important to name your files carefully before uploading and then add the Alt Text. When entering this data, make sure you also incorporate the focus keyword mindfully.

URLs

Use short, SEO-friendly, easy-to-understand URLs instead of something long and/or complicated. But be very careful when modifying the URLs of existing pages. Those URLs that aren’t performing well might benefit from this approach. But URLs that are doing well, ranking high, and aren’t broken do not require any changes, or it can affect the page’s social proof and even reset its performance statistics.

Rich Snippets

A snippet is a piece of additional information, such as star ratings, author name, or product price, that helps your visitors understand your posts. This extra data also provides better insights to search engines when indexing your Shopify site and pages. Rich snippets help boost the Click-Through Rate and make your SERPs look more attractive while demanding less paid ad expenditure. You can use a snippet app from the Shopify app store to help you create rich snippets and enhance the content, but some themes already have this built-in.

Blog

Blogging for your eCommerce store is an incredibly unique SEO tactic. While it might seem like a second priority for many, blogging often proves invaluable for building trust and confidence among your target and potential audience around your brand and its offerings. So, you should absolutely use your in-built Shopify blogging platform to drive better traffic.

Feature informative, in-depth, high-quality, and engaging blog posts to entice readers to your website. Use the right keywords, as these are more likely to generate revenue for your store. But make sure you aim to post regularly and revolve around key topics in your niche for more promising results. This will ultimately help escalate the position of your site in SERPs.

Link Building

Link building or backlinks add to the authority of your website. Backlinks are the links generated from other websites directed towards yours. These are an important part of your Shopify website SEO, indicating the quality of the page or website. So, the more backlinks you have to your products and website pages, the better they rank in search results. But Google values the number as well as the quality and relevance of your links to judge the trustworthiness of the site.

So, to gain quality backlinks, you have to reach out to other sites yourself and persuade them to link to your content. The process is easy if your content is interesting, relevant to your niche, and fits their readership. Furthermore, targeting respected .com, .gov, and .edu sites prove far more valuable.

SEO is key for growth

So much more goes into improving your Shopify SEO – the list is virtually endless. But, enriching the SEO of your Shopify website begins with laying the building blocks of the website accurately. Everything rounds up to creating a professional website that stands out from the crowd and reaches out to relevant customers. Taking the foundational steps correctly sets you up for success on the right path.

Our pre-built Shopify sections take a lot of this into account as well. Check out the sections we offer.

If you need expert assistance in setting up your eCommerce website, qwiqode is at your service. We have been in the industry for over 17 years. We can effectively help get your SEO-Friendly online store up and running with Shopify.