A short guide on Shopify SEO

Every eCommerce website requires a professional approach in SEO to succeed in the promotion of a website and ensure the constant flow of customers. For the merchants who use Shopify as the primary platform, SEO configuration is relatively simple and does not require high technical proficiency. In this regard, we will cover the fundamentals of Shopify SEO and other tools that can help with this.

Content and meta tags

The original content is the key to making the website showing higher in the search results. The search engine is sensitive to the copied (plagiarized) content and does not push it higher. Make sure that all the pages with the original descriptions of products and other information do not match similar descriptions from other websites. Preferably, even the product descriptions that the manufacturers provide should be rewritten to create unique content. In this way, Google will recognize that your website provides original and unique content on the search requests.

Then, the crucial part in making pages on your website searchable and unique is to identify the popular keywords that are associated with the page and products. These keywords will be used to write two important meta fields for the homepage — title and meta description.

• Meta title is displayed when a customer sees your website, and this title appears as the clickable link to the homepage. The title cannot exceed 70 characters.
• Meta description is shown under the link to the store and should provide information for the customers about the site it represents. The description cannot exceed 320 characters.

These meta tags can be filled from the dashboard of your website. An example is in the picture below.

How To Build SEO Through Keywords || Shopify Help Center

Another important eCommerce SEO aspect is the ALT tag for images which is used by the engine to recognize the content of an image. The text on an image should also be unique and provide a precise description of the image. These tags make a crucial difference in understanding the content, putting it in the image search results, and eventually leading to your website.

Shopify SEO configurations

With the more technical settings for configuring SEO, a merchant has to have particular proficiency with web and marketing tools. Or a dedicated specialist can take care of configuring robots.txt file, robots.txt file, and other settings. 

• Firstly, robots.txt file is responsible for providing the search engine bots with the pages which can be used for the search results and which do not. While editing this file, you can include and exclude the URLs, allow crawl-delay, and block specific crawlers. More detailed instruction on how this file can be edited in the liquid theme template is in the Shopify documentation. 
• Secondly, you need to create a Google Search Console account for your store to upload sitemap.xml there. This file includes all the links of your store, and search engines use this file for the indexation of the pages. The system automatically generates this file in the directory of the Shopify shop’s domain, for instance: domainname.com/sitemap.xml. After submitting this file to Google Search Console, the search engine can crawl your website and rank it in the search results.

Another important step is the canonization of the pages and domains that can be found in search results. To make the one canonical path, on the dashboard, select the Domain section, choose the main domain and select a checkmark in the field “redirect all traffic to this domain.”

Lastly, it is important to set up the redirection links in order to avoid 301 errors when customers click on inactive pages from the search results. In this way, a visitor will be redirected to an active page of your website instead of not getting anywhere and facing the error screen. There is a chance that a customer will continue browsing your website instead of leaving it immediately. To set up redirects, click on the Navigation and choose to add redirect URLs; add inactive URLs and active URLs to which old ones will be redirected. 

Shopify SEO apps

Besides the built-in SEO settings, a merchant can install different tools from the big selection of applications in the Shopify app store; there are free and paid tools that can help a Shopify store to rank higher in search results. For instance, product reviews apps like Judge.me provide the option for the customer to leave feedback on the products. It increases the trust in the shop and boosts search ranking by adding stars on Google. In addition, the popular application Plug In SEO provides the tools for search optimization and points out the areas which have to be improved for better ranking. Consequently, one may mention image optimization as a crucial part of better SEO rankings. With optimized for faster loading images, search engines move your website higher because it considers how fast a site performs. Ava SEO Image Optimizer is a great application that not only deals with image optimization but also offers other tools to improve the loading time and SEO performance of a site. 

Conclusions

Mastering SEO with Shopify is relatively simple because the platform provides access to the most common settings and has detailed documentation with a description of each step. The built-in settings and integrations would allow you to make the basic and most important efforts in optimizing your store for better search rankings. Nevertheless, the addition of an SEO application for Shopify can improve the chances of a store appearing higher in the search results even more by implementing the best practices and providing optimization tools.