Rise through the search engines with Shopify SEO
A strong online presence is more important than ever for businesses in 2024. Ecommerce has grown significantly since 2019, with a report from eMarketer showing global ecommerce sales hit $5.5 trillion by the end of 2022.
There are solutions designed to help businesses grow their digital presence, such as Shopify. Shopify is a multinational ecommerce platform that allows businesses to create and customise their own ecommerce store so they can start selling to their customers online. This subscription-based platform is available to merchants of all sizes in 175 countries around the world, and provides all the tools needed to build and manage an ecommerce website.
With the online space now more competitive than ever, one of the most effective ways to get your Shopify ecommerce website ahead of the competition is through implementing search engine optimisation (SEO). SEO is a vital tactic which helps to grow your ecommerce website through increased prominence on search engine results pages, helping to drive awareness and new sales.
Performing SEO involves optimising your Shopify store to ensure search engines can recognise the content and keywords your products are targeting. This gives your brand the opportunity to promote its best products to a wider audience by appearing more regularly and prominently in organic search. This allows you to drive high-quality traffic to your website for free, from search engines like Google and Bing.
Whether you are a small merchant or a tier one business using Shopify, having an SEO strategy in place will give your brand the chance to boost revenue, earn customer loyalty and grow its overall digital presence. No matter if your brand is big or small, SEO is a priority for all ecommerce websites in order to succeed against your competitors and ensure your store ranks highly in Google. What’s more, SEO doesn’t require a large budget as the platform is used to generate traffic organically.
Chapters
Part 1: Understanding the Shopify Platform
Part 2: Get Your Shopify Store on Google
Part 3: Make Sure Google Can Crawl Your Website
Part 4: Canonicalisation on Shopify
Part 5: Shopify Content Optimisation
Part 6: Google Shopping Explained
Part 9: SEO Tracking on Shopify
Part 11: External SEO Tools for Shopify
Part 1: Understanding the Shopify Platform
There are some nuances on Shopify which affect SEO that you need to know about. Understanding some of Shopify’s limitations will make it easier for you to implement strong SEO on your store:
URL Structure
All Shopify websites use the same URL folder structure with every page located in a defined subdirectory. You can control the URL handle, but each of your pages will have to exist inside one of the following:
- /collections/
- /products/
- /pages/
- /blogs/
This means you have limited flexibility in how your URLs are structured. Some might argue this is an SEO weakness, but it shouldn’t be. So long as your store has an organised information architecture and uses effective internal linking, bots will be able to understand your store structure.
Tag Pages
Tag pages are created to help you filter a main collection of your products as this can help narrow down what your customers are searching for. However, once you add tags to your collection, there is no option to optimise these pages such as adding unique content. Below are tag page url examples.
- /collections/womens-shirts
- /collections/womens-shirts/long-sleeve
- /collections/womens-shirts/short-sleeve
- /collections/womens-shirts/sleeveless
Some Shopify Stores Wrap the Logo In an H1 Tag
Some legacy Shopify themes will auto generate a h1 tag around your logo on your homepage. This usually causes an error message to show on the Plug in SEO app. This isn’t ideal for SEO as your store homepage h1 should be an actual text heading that’s related to the type of keywords you want the homepage to rank for. To fix this issue, you’ll need to optimise the theme code for your Shopify store or change the heading yourself using a Shopify SEO app.
Subcollections
On Shopify a subcollection is a nested collection, within a primary collection. Subcollections use unique URLs where the subcollection name is appended onto the end of the URL.
For example:
- Collection = domain.com/collections/shoes
- Subcollection = domain.com/collections/shoes/red-shoes
Shopify subcollections will inherit the primary content from their parent collection. This can include the title tag, meta description, h1 and collection description text. This creates some SEO problems because the subcollections are so similar to their parent collection. Subcollections dilute the SEO value of their parent collection because they are near identical pages and will compete against each other on the SERPs (search engine results pages).
Our recommendation is to avoid using Shopify subcollections at all. If you do, we suggest adding a meta robots noindex tag to your subcollections. This will prevent search engines from crawling them and avoid any related SEO issues.
If there are specific subcollection topics that you want to make indexable to search engines, we recommend creating standalone collections for them. This way you’ll have complete control over their content and can fully optimise them.
Product Variants
When you first set up your Shopify store, you will be limited to only a certain number of product variants so you won’t be able to add additional variants to your product. This is a common issue that is also known as the ‘99 limit problem’.
What are product variants? As an example, a store might sell hats with two options: size and colour. The size option has three values: small, medium, and large. The colour option has two values: red and black. One specific variant from these options would be a small, red hat.
On the Shopify Plus plan, there is another limitation for merchants with over 50,000 variants - it will only allow up to 1,000 variants per day to be added - if that is not adequate then the account will need to be upgraded.
There is also a restriction with the number of variables you can have per product listing. The maximum limit of variable types per listing is 3.
Robots.txt File
The robots.txt is a file that sits in the root of your website. It contains a list of directives that outline which parts of your site bots aren’t allowed to crawl. All Shopify stores use a default robots.txt that is well optimised to prevent bots from crawling URL types which are known to have no SEO value. Up until 2021, Shopify didn’t allow merchants to edit the Robots.txt file. This was a major pain point for lots of Shopify users.
Since then Shopify has enabled merchants to have more control over their Robots.txt file so that you can customise it to your needs. This gives merchants a lot more flexibility to control how bots crawl their stores.
We recommend you visit the official documentation for more information on how to edit the robots.txt on Shopify.
Bonus tip: the default Shopify robots.txt file restricts access to any collection or blog URL that contains a + symbol. Be sure to not include + symbols in your collection or blog URLs as they won’t be crawled by search engines.
Part 2: Get Your Shopify Store on Google
The first part of SEO is to make sure search engines know about your website and pages. To do this for your Shopify store you need to submit an XML sitemap to Google via Google Search Console. This will tell Google’s crawler ‘Googlebot’ (also known as the spider) to discover, crawl and index the URLs within this sitemap.
Setting Up Search Console For Your Shopify Store
Search Console is a free tool offered by Google that allows you to monitor, maintain and fix errors for your Shopify store. Search Console helps you understand and improve how Google sees your site.
If you haven’t already you’ll need to set up a Search Console account and verify your Shopify store. There are a variety of ways to do this; the two most common ways for Shopify stores are via DNS or HTML tag. Search Console provides step-by-step processes of how to verify all of their methods.
What is An XML Sitemap?
An XML sitemap is a file that lists a website's important pages, making sure Google can find and crawl them all.
On Shopify stores the XML sitemap is generated automatically and can be accessed by adding /sitemap.xml to your site’s domain, for example:
This file contains all the pages that we want Google to index. It’s a quick and easy way to help Google discover your pages. Google will revisit the XML sitemap frequently to look for new pages.
How To Upload Your XML Sitemap in Search Console:
1 Login into your Search Console property via https://search.google.com/search-console
2 Go to the ‘sitemap’ section which is situated underneath the ‘index’ section.
3 Add your Shopify store domain with /sitemap.xml appended at the end as mentioned above and then submit this sitemap. Google will then begin to crawl your sitemap and index your URLs.
Part 3: Make Sure Google Can Crawl Your Website
It is important that you make it as easy as possible for search engines to crawl your Shopify Store. If there are barriers that make it difficult to crawl a website, it becomes harder for Google to discover and index new pages. Pages that are difficult to reach will also be deemed as ‘less important’. This will affect how much authority these pages carry on the search engine results pages.
Google’s systems crawl billions of pages every day. This process is server intensive and expensive for them. The more pages and resources their systems crawl, the greater the cost to Google. This process costs Google billions of dollars.
Google doesn’t want to crawl URLs that waste server resources. Likewise Google doesn’t want to overload your server by crawling too heavily. This is why it’s important to know that most websites have a “crawl budget”. Crawl budget is a finite amount of resources Google will allocate to crawling any website.
A key part of any SEO strategy is to make sure that Google can crawl your entire site and discover all your important pages. You also want to prevent Google from wasting crawl budget on ‘low-value’ pages.
Signs Of Poor Crawlability
The main signs of poor crawlability within your Shopify store are:
- A high number of URLs in the Search Console Excluded report. This suggests that Google is crawling lots of low value content
- Internal links on your store that go to non-canonical pages
- Not having a sitemap submitted to Google
- A high number of 404 error pages or 301 internal redirect pages reported in crawl logs of the site
- Low quality URLs linked to from the site or included in the XML sitemap
Information Architecture
Think of information architecture as the overall structure of your website. All the pages that exist and the links between them form your information architecture. When search engines crawl your store, they use your information architecture to understand what pages are most important.
In an optimum information architecture, every page on the site is reachable within 3 clicks from the homepage.
Hub & Spoke for Optimum Architecture
For an optimum information architecture for your Shopify store, consider adapting the Hub and Spoke approach. A Hub and Spoke structure is an information architecture tactic used to organise large complex websites. It involves creating hub pages which are optimised around core, top-level themes. The hub pages link out to closely related pages (the spokes).
This organises pages into logical groupings which are clearly signposted, and easily navigable for both visitors and search engines.
The image below is a simple visualisation of how a hub and spoke structure looks.
A hub-and-spoke approach works well on ecommerce websites like Shopify that contain lots of different products and collections. It organises the store into a logical structure that provides an easy click path to all pages.
Part 4: Canonicalisation on Shopify
An important factor that affects how Google indexes your website is canonicalisation.
Canonicalisation is a term used to describe how a website can tell Google which pages should and should not be indexed. The purpose of canonicalisation is to discourage search engines from indexing low-value or duplicate content.
The canonical tag exists within the HTML of a page and tells Google if that page, or an alternative page should be indexed.
It looks like this:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://.[DOMAIN]/" />The href attribute in the tag contains the canonical URL. When Google crawls a page and discovers a canonical tag, all SEO signals should be applied to the URL in the canonical tag.
A common issue we often come across on Shopify websites is where collection pages link to non-canonical product URLs.This can cause both crawlability and index issues for your store.
For example, this is the structure of a canonical Shopify product URL:
https://[DOMAIN]/products/{{ Product Name }}The same product can be viewed on different URLs by accessing a product page via a collection page. When you take this route, the collection name will be inserted into the URL.
https://[DOMAIN]/collections/{{ Collection Name}}/products/{{ Product Name }The default Shopify behaviour is to make the second version canonicalise to the first. However, links to products from collections should always use the canonical product URL.
Google will use internal links as a hint as to what pages should and should not be indexed. By linking to non-canonical product URLs, search engines interpret that these non-canonical URLs have some importance and therefore should be indexed, which could cause indexation issues.
Part 5: Shopify Content Optimisation
Content optimisation is fundamental to SEO on Shopify stores, as this helps to signal to Google what your website is about. Ensuring your site has good quality and relevant information related to your target keywords is effective for improving your organic rankings. Google values websites which offer useful content to users. When it comes to ecommerce sites on Shopify, having optimised content for your products is essential for getting those top positions in search engines and increases the chances of users finding your products. To create useful content for your Shopify site, it needs to be user friendly, engaging and relevant to your brand, products and audience.
5a: Homepage Optimisation
As the first page that browsing shoppers often come across, the homepage should be thought of as an ecommerce store’s online storefront. This means that the homepage needs to be designed with customers in mind, using the brand colours, font and layout to ensure users can proceed through the website and purchase with ease.
However, in order for visitors to find your storefront, it first needs to be presented to them in the results pages. And this is where homepage optimisation comes in.
The homepage needs to have all of the SEO essential elements in place, such as H-tags and relevant meta descriptions, but there are also other things to consider.
Optimising the Homepage Meta Data
Your meta title should describe your business as a whole, and also include the company name, while staying within the 60 character limit. Just think: ‘what do we do, and who are we?’ - that is all the information that you need.
Alongside the meta title is the meta description. Avoid keyword stuffing and provide a clear description of your services or products. Don’t forget that for those coming through the search engine, the meta data is the first thing they will see, so your homepage meta data needs to be short, snappy and relevant to your brand.
Create Structure Through Headings and Layout
Create an easy-to-navigate structure which sets the precedence for the rest of the website and conveys your brand's message. Firstly the technical bit: ensure you have H-tags in place, in the correct order.
H1 tags should appear towards the top of the page and contain the keywords or phrases that you want your homepage to rank for. For example, beauty websites may use keyphrases such as “Sustainable Beauty Brand” in their H1 tag.
Further down the homepage you could implement H2 tags for product collections, or as sub-headings. This structure makes it easier to navigate for humans and search engines alike.
In addition to H-tags, you can also create structure through positioning of sections, calls to action (CTAs) and internal links. The link structure of a website provides Google with a clear indication of what your website is about, with links towards the top of the page being given more consideration. When setting out the structure of your website, include key CTAs towards the top of the page, and include notable pages in the navigation bar. Less important links can feature further down the page or in the footer.
Create a Balance Between Rich-Media and Performance
Large images and videos are often essential when it comes to selling your products, especially when your products are highly visual. However, larger images and videos can have a direct impact on page speed and performance. This can be corrected using the correct image formats and sizes. Google's core web vitals are now (and have been since 2021) used as a ranking factor and a large aspect of this is performance and page speed. Luckily google offers insight and tips on how to ensure your site is performing to its standards.
Ensuring that images are served in next gen formats such as WEBP can help to reduce image load speed and ultimately improve homepage performance. Additionally ensuring that large hero banners are serving images that are the correct dimensions for their container, and that they are optimised in terms of size can also assist. There are plenty of free programmes which you can use to reduce image size.
More Visual Elements? More Content? Or Is Less More?
Creating a successful homepage is all about balancing images and written content, and colour to white space. While large images which showcase products is important, it is also key to juxtapose this with written content which helps search engines and site visitors understand what your site is about. Images used should complement the text, and ensure your homepage has harmony between media and content choices.
What is Your Website About?
It is imperative that it is clear what your website is all about as soon as someone lands on your homepage. This is best conveyed through homepage content - copy, imagery and video - to sell your brand, story, values and USPs.
A small section of content which introduces customers to these elements can be a great way to engage your audience whilst also letting Google understand your site. The content can also contain all-important internal links to help guide visitors to essential sections of the website such as best-selling products, delivery and information pages, and more.
Demonstrate Trustworthiness Through UGC & Awards
Displaying positive customer reviews can help build a trustworthy brand. Statistics show that 91% of 18-34 year olds trust reviews as much as recommendations. As well as having these on site, reviews can also be featured on the SERPs. While there is no exact science for having your reviews appear in the SERPs, having them on your site gives the algorithm the chance to display them. Why is this useful? Having reviews or star ratings in the SERPs can increase click-through-rate and organic traffic to your site.
Awards or certifications on your homepage can also improve the trustworthiness of your website. It demonstrates legitimacy and shows potential customers that your product or service is of an award-winning standard. While people are much more used to online shopping these days, most are still (rightly) sceptical about giving out details online, therefore to encourage customers to buy from you it is essential to create a “safe-space”.
Final thoughts: top tips for homepage optimisation:
- Ensure the page is technically sound: make sure that your homepage has a meta title, meta description and all images have suitable alt text.
- Use H-tags and page layout to determine a hierarchical structure: use the H1, H2, H3 tags to create a definitive structure for search engines.
- Ensure links are positioned correctly: include the most important links towards the top of the page; those found in the footer carry less weight and can be seen as less valuable.
- Put performance first: make sure that all rich-media is optimised for web and mobile devices, including changing the format and file size.
- Create a clear homepage which is easy to navigate: create a clear balance between copy and media to provide a clean website which is easy for users.
- Give a website description which includes keywords and phrases: avoid “keyword stuffing” in your homepage content but include copy which accurately describes your brand, ethics and USPs in fewer than 500 words.
- Show your trustworthiness with UGC: provide a list of reviews and a social media feed which shows your products in real life, painting yourself as a legitimate website which customers will want to purchase from.
5b: Collection Pages
Ecommerce websites should include a short description on collection pages, along with compelling metadata (metadata consists of a page title and meta description for every page, and helps search engines understand the purpose of the collection, differentiate it from other pages, and help determine how it ranks in the results pages).
It is best to avoid duplication of content across pages - optimised content on collection pages should be unique and not follow the “boilerplate” text. Besides helping your SEO rankings, this practice also makes your site more valuable for users by providing them with tailored information about your product offering.
Subcollections
Subcollections are often created on Shopify stores when a filter is applied to a collection page to drill down further into a more defined category for the user. Whilst subcollections do have a valid purpose on Shopify stores, they can also cause SEO issues.
As Shopify does not allow editing of content on subcollections, this means each subcollection has the same content as the parent collection. This causes duplicate content across the site and contributes to “index bloat”.
Therefore it is important that subcollections are ‘not-indexable’ on Shopify stores. This means they will still be available for users, but they won't be in Google’s index and therefore won't contribute to any ranking loss or improvement.
To make subcollection ‘not-indexable’ you need to add what’s called a meta robots noindex tag into the HTML
on URLs we don’t want to be indexed. Below is an example of this:<head>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
</head>5c: Product Pages
Getting your product pages right on Shopify makes a significant difference to your conversion rate and website traffic, but it can be a challenge. A good product page has to be user-friendly, mobile-responsive and deliver all of the information the user needs to convince them to buy your product or service.
To make sure your Shopify store performs well in search engines, you’ll need to focus on product page optimisation. This means improving the quality of your Shopify store product content to help boost your keyword rankings and enable users to navigate your ecommerce site more efficiently.
Product page optimisation is one of the major Shopify SEO elements and it can be done in many different ways. To help you get started with improving your Shopify product pages, this next section explains all of the best product page optimisation practices for SEO.
Take a look at these top strategies!
Clear Call-To-Action
Every product page needs to feature a clear call-to-action (CTA) to help improve conversions.
Using a bold call-to-action colour with direct messaging is very effective for driving product sales. Your copy could be something like ‘Buy now’, ‘Add to basket’ or ‘Order here’.
Also, including target keywords in the call-to-action helps search engines understand the product you are selling.
Your CTA needs to be prominent, highly visible and easy to access on all your product pages. It should also lead to a simple purchase process. CTAs often redirect users to their shopping cart or sometimes display a pop-up cart for an instant checkout. There should be the option to purchase either as a guest, or returning customer.
The CTA must stand out against the rest of the content and capture the user's attention as soon as they arrive on the page.
Powerful Product Images
A successful product page must use high quality product photography to make it more appealing and engaging for the user. Include images of your product in different styles and from various angles to allow users to connect with the product and make an informed decision.
Using a mix of close-ups and in-context shots will help showcase the important parts of your products so that they are easier to sell to customers. By incorporating great product photos to your product pages, you will be able to enhance the visual aspect of your organic search listings and ensure your brand is perceived in the best light.
Here are some ways you can maximise the impact of your product images to improve your Shopify SEO:
- Use a white background on your images
- Provide an image zoom option
- Compress your image file sizes for quicker loading
- Include the most relevant images
- Keep your images up to date
- Allow users to click images
- Add text to some of your images
- Optimise your image metadata
Create a Balance Between Rich-Media and Performance
Large images and videos are often essential when it comes to selling your products, especially when your products are highly visual. However, larger images and videos can have a direct impact on page speed and performance. This can be corrected using the correct image formats and sizes. Google's core web vitals are now (and have been since 2021) used as a ranking factor and a large aspect of this is performance and page speed. Luckily Google offers insight and tips on how to ensure your site is performing to its standards.
Ensuring that images are served in next gen formats such as WEBP can help to reduce image load speed and ultimately improve homepage performance. Additionally ensuring that large hero banners are serving images that are the correct dimensions for their container, and that they are optimised in terms of size can also assist. There are plenty of free programmes which you can use to reduce image size.
Refine your Product Page Metadata
Another tip for optimising your product pages is to refine your metadata. Metadata contains important information for search engines, like keywords, product names and product sizes. You can find metadata in the form of tags, titles, descriptions and at the backend of your images.
To ensure your metadata fits in the search engine results page properly, there is a set of SEO recommendations to follow when you optimise your metadata. Here are the steps to help you:
Product Page Titles
Creating your product page title is really important and encourages potential customers to visit your website. Google’s maximum pixel allowance is 512 so you shouldn’t go above this limit (this is between 50 and 60 characters). An effective product page title should highlight the product's name but it must use the terms with the right search intent to match your audience. It is also great to use your target keywords within the beginning of your title, then to finish off with your brand name at the end. For inspiration, you can check out what your competitors are doing with their product page titles.
Product Meta Descriptions
On the other hand, your product page needs to have a strong meta description but it must stay within Google’s maximum pixel allowance for meta descriptions which is 920 (in terms of characters, this is around 160). Be sure to feature unique and compelling content, relevant to your product, that is going to capture attention. The aim of the meta description is to summarise the product and to promote your brand’s authority. Make the description sound inviting, interesting and give users a next step by adding in a CTA. It is also good if you can fit in some of your target keywords too.
TIP: There is a really useful tool called ‘Google SERP Snippet Optimisation’ which is a simulator for creating metadata and generates a virtual search result example for you. Be sure to use this when optimising or creating new metadata in the future.
Product Image Metadata
It’s also worth mentioning that your product images will need their metadata optimised. A product image should have metadata in the form of alt tags, title tags and file names. These are essential for SEO as they provide context to Google which helps you to rank for the appropriate keywords. Alt tags help to describe the images to users who are visually impaired and require screen readers.
User-Friendly Design
When it comes to making a Shopify product page, one of the key elements is design. A product page should consist of multiple elements to make sure that it is user-friendly and optimised for SEO in the following ways:
Header Contents
Inside your product page header, there should be clear contact information for the user, saving them having to leave to visit the contact page. This is usually added with a short call to action such as ‘call today’, ‘order now’ or ‘chat with us’. It is also recommended to insert your social media links and a shopping cart icon to encourage the user to spend more time on your website or to learn more about your brand.
Breadcrumb Navigation
The breadcrumb navigation is the top row section above your product detail. It provides information about the page the user is currently viewing and also contains the list of higher level page links above that one the user is on.
A breadcrumb navigation is in the form of a small text path, usually at the higher end of the product page and gives the user an idea of their location on a website. It also gives the user the option to navigate back to a previous page. To optimise your breadcrumb navigation, you should decide the trail you want and to ensure it follows the structure of your store, keeping the core pages at the start.
Product Name/Title
Giving your product an engaging name is a great way to attract customers and to increase sales. You can also optimise your product name by enlarging the font and making it bold. Make sure the product name title is accurate and matches the item clearly.
Images and Videos
To enhance your product, display an image gallery and showcase your products in multiple angles and shots. This allows the user to engage with your product more and offers an appealing visual feature. Aim to include a combination of high resolution and zoomed in photos which show a 360 degree view of the product.
You should also consider adding videos to your product page as this will give your users a more insightful guide to your product. Video is becoming a highly popular tool in the digital world and really helps customers understand your product. It also helps to add creativity to the product page. You can add a variety of video types, such as reviews, how it works, showcase ad, traditional ad or an entertaining video.
Product Detail
Make your product page informative and creative to ensure your users’ needs are met. Share as much detail about your product as possible and try to cover all of the questions your customer may have.
When highlighting the key features of your product, make sure it is big and bold so that it’s the first thing your users see. This includes making the product price easily visible by using strong colours that contrast with the main product description. Educating your audience is essential for building new conversions and growing brand loyalty.
Main Product Description Copy
When it comes to creating the main product description, you’ll need to ensure the copy is in a clear formatting so that it doesn’t pull in the wrong font style. Focus on making your product description bold with clear headings, colours, bullet points and lots of whitespace so that it attracts users to read it.
If you want to highlight product features, it is best to add them into a separate section on the page to enhance their visibility, such as putting a different coloured background and enlarging the text.
Create Engaging Content
To give your product page more chances of appearing in the search results, it is important that the content you create is engaging and educational. In this case, you will need a high quality and valuable product page description that covers all of the information your user is going to be looking for. To make an exceptional product description, it needs to cover:
- Product introduction
- Top benefits of your product
- Unique features of your product
- Care or Assembly Instructions
There are so many more mobile optimization tips for Shopify product pages but we have covered the most important ones to help give you a head start.
To check the performance of your Shopify product page on mobile, use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Tester. This will advise you with the mobile responsiveness of your product page.
Find Relevant Keywords to Target
To best optimise your product description for SEO, it is vital to do your keyword research first. Keywords are a massive part of ecommerce sites and act as a shortcut to summarise what your pages are about. They are useful in a webpage’s metadata as it helps to quickly signal to search engines the queries your pages should be appearing for.
Researching your target keywords gives you a stronger understanding of the terminology your potential consumers use to find the products you are selling, and what type of content your product pages should be focusing on.
Keyword research can be done using many different SEO tools, but we recommend using Ahrefs or SEMrush. Also, by doing a competitor analysis, you can get ideas of what keywords your competition is targeting which will be useful to get ahead of them when optimising your content.
When doing your research, you will need to focus on finding the most relevant and high volume search terms related to your product or service, as this will help you achieve the best rankings.
Make a list of primary keywords and secondary keywords. This is a useful way to target different keyword variants in your content and to increase the level of rankings for your page, leading to more visibility for your Shopify site.
Additionally, try to find some long-tail and short-tail keywords that you can use.This will help to grow your keyword rankings for that product or service. Long-tail keywords are simply queries that contain just three or more keywords, for example ‘pink gaming PC setup’ and ‘giant garden family games’. These are usually searched by those who are further along in the information gathering process which means they lead to higher conversion rates. Short tail keywords are the opposite, only including 1-3 words and are broad phrases used to target more specific topics which means they have a higher search volume. An example of a short-tail keyword would be something like ‘handbags’.
Structured Data
Another SEO tip for optimising your Shopify product page is to consider adding schema (also known as ‘Structured Data’). This is simply a layer of code that lives within the HTML to give search engines more context. It also helps users to discover more about the product.
Structured data is mostly important for ecommerce websites as it provides search engines with specific properties associated with each product. This includes the price tag, reviews, name, description and more.
Fortunately, you can get structured data from Shopify apps. The highly recommended app for this is called ‘Schema App Total Schema Markup’. Once installed, this app groups the higher priority pages from your site and adds the structured data to them, ensuring that it meets Google Merchant Center guidelines to boost your organic shopping listing ads. It also gives your page a chance to rank in the rich results in the search engines.
By using structured data within your product page on Shopify, there is a higher likelihood that search engines will pull out those specific elements and feature them on the results page. These ‘rich snippets’ which mainly focus on a product’s star rating, price, number of reviews etc. If you are able to appear in a rich snippet result, this will boost your click-through-rate and drive more traffic to your product page.
Frequently Asked Questions
We recommend featuring frequently asked questions about your product or service to help resolve your users’ queries or concerns. A good way to discover the most trending questions is by using a tool called Answer The Public. Alternatively Ahrefs and SEMrush offer a filter on their keyword research feature which allows you to separate question type queries.
Adding FAQs to your content is a great way to target relevant question terms around your product or service, so you can rank higher in the search results. It also allows you to showcase your brand’s expertise by offering good responses which will build more trust from potential customers.
Highlight Important Information
When writing your product content, you’ll need to make it easy for users to discover the most important information related to your product or service. This typically covers the following topics:
- Shipping and return
- Weights and dimensions
- Product code
- Materials or ingredients
- Care and maintenance instructions
This specific detail about your product is vital for improving your organic search listings and targeting search engine result page features, as well as offers a useful educational section that will benefit your user-journey.
Highlight Key Product Features And USPs
Promote your product’s best selling points with a highlighted section of key product features. This content should always stand out against the rest so the user can find it easily. A good way to structure your key features is to put them into a bulleted list for clarity.
Using The Right Tone of Voice
Whenever you write product descriptions it is really important to use a consistent tone of voice that matches your brand. The content you write must have the right tone, language and include relevant phrases to make it recognisable to your audience. You also need to keep the content unique and interesting to read, to avoid any duplication. As mentioned, duplicate content is poor SEO practice and can cause your website penalties.
Content Structure and Styling
Keep content clear, in short paragraphs and make use of white space to avoid clutter. A good tip is to use subheadings and bullet lists to help break up your content.
Another key component of product page content are H-tags. This stands for ‘heading tags’ and they rank from H1 to H6, with the most important (normally the title) being H1. They can help make your content more readable and improve the SEO of the page. Implemented naturally, these are also great ways to place your target keywords.
To keep your content consistent for SEO, all of your content needs to be one simple font and one colour. Adopt a basic structure that is replicated throughout your product page so that is easy to scan.
Functionality
To encourage more users to convert on your Shopify website, it is essential to have high quality functionality that makes purchasing products easier. To summarise, functionality in ecommerce refers to the features a website needs which can help increase sales, conversions and ROI. This involves adding elements to your ecommerce store design that allows users to order and pay for products seamlessly, like payment options and methods, real-time sales updates, wish lists, product recommendations, fast website speed and information security.
‘Add To Wish List’ Feature
Providing an ‘Add To Wish List’ or ‘Favourites’ feature is an excellent way to give customers more time to consider the product and means they won’t lose it while browsing the site. The user can also continue searching for similar products if they require extra information before purchasing. It’s an effective way to keep users on your website and to hook them back to purchase the product.
Recommend Additional Products
Offering users additional products that will complement the product they are already thinking of buying is known as ‘upsell’ or ‘cross-sell’ and allows the user to explore other options. You usually find complementary products at the bottom of the product page and this helps to drive more sales, but also can reassure users to invest in the product they’ve already viewed. Typically, these additional products are listed under headings such as ‘Customers also bought’ or ‘You may also be interested in…’.
Easy Checkout System
To speed up the checkout process for users, there are a few ways you can optimise your product page. One method is to reduce the amount of form fields so that they are not too long or complicated for the user as this could lose you a potential customer.
Do not use compulsory or mandatory sign-up forms or registrations prior to payment as this will force users to click off due to the inconvenience. It is more effective to have a ‘Guest Checkout’ system which allows users to purchase a product without creating an account.
Social Media Share Feature
One way to optimise your product page is by setting up a social media sharing feature. This makes it easy for users to promote your product on their social channels which will help drive new traffic to your website. This will also increase the external links to your product page and boost its rankings in organic search results.
Customer Reviews
It’s been discovered that 72% of shoppers will take action only after reading a positive review, according to Search Engine Watch.
Sharing customer reviews is not only a great way to boost engagement, but also gives your customers something to interact with.
In particular, reviews are a great way to enhance your SEO efforts as Google’s algorithm uses product reviews as an integral ranking factor. This means that product pages with more positive reviews will position higher in the search engine results compared to a product page with lower and less quality reviews. Pages with more reviews also have a higher word count, increasing their opportunities to rank well.
Having reviews on your product pages creates more user-generated content which is able to generate more long-tail keyword traffic. Normally in a customer review, it will have specific search terms hidden in the content which other customers are also searching for, so your page is able to appear for wider search queries and be found easier.
Additionally, allowing your customers to share positive product reviews is also good for giving your brand recognition of the keywords your customers use and the feedback can be used to help understand how your products can be improved.
The more positive reviews, the more customer loyalty your brand has, which is important for improving brand credibility, and is another major ranking factor in Google’s algorithm. Search engines focus on recommending the product pages with the most quality reviews and star ratings as this indicates that they are trustworthy and are more likely to be helpful to users.
Main Product Description Copy
One of the most important parts of your product page is the description. Its purpose is to give consumers the information they need to make their purchase. It should cover answers to any questions that consumers may have about your product so they have all the details to make them feel better about buying your product.
Providing an in-depth product description also helps to ensure your page has an adequate word count and gives you more opportunities to target relevant keywords. Using keywords in your product descriptions is a significant part of on-page SEO and helps to make your site more friendly for search engines. By including keywords that match what your customers are looking for in the product description, your site is more likely to be found. You’ll also have the chance to rank higher for terms related to your product, so that you can drive more traffic to your site.
When it comes to adding the main product description, you’ll need to ensure the copy is in a clear formatting so that it doesn’t pull in the wrong font style. Focus on making your product description bold with clear headings, colours, bullet points and lots of white space so that it attracts users. Make sure that the product description clearly describes what the product is, how it works and why it’s worth buying.
If you want to share the product features and benefits, it is best to add them into a separate section on the page to help them stand out. Using a different coloured background and enlarging the text is a useful way to do this.
5d: Blog
Including a blog section on your website can have a positive impact on SEO. Google loves content and a blog where you publish new, relevant, interesting, keyword optimised content regularly is definitely a big tick on the SEO optimisation checklist.
But when it comes to blog optimisation, what is the best way to create content which ranks?
Firstly, there are the technical considerations we’ve already discussed in the ‘Ecommerce Essentials' section, such as H-tags, metadata, and image alt tags. Then there are blog-specific elements.
Keyword Research
When creating any content for your website, you need to know what its objective is: what keywords are you looking to rank for, and what questions are you looking to answer? Make sure the content you’re publishing is relevant to your target audience: content for content's sake isn’t helpful for SEO. Creating content which ranks for keywords you're not targeting, or doesn’t provide information or a useful solution may lead to an increased bounce rate, in which people read your content, don’t find it valuable, and leave your site quickly. This will signal to Google that the content isn’t relevant, making it less likely to rank highly.
But remember to use keywords strategically! Your content should read naturally - stuffing your keywords into every sentence definitely won’t be interesting or readable for any audience. In addition to creating an awkward reading experience, keyword stuffing is a BIG no when it comes to SEO: search engines can spot it and will penalise your website which may mean a decrease in your ranking.
Keep Up With Trends
When it comes to creating blog content it is important to do your research. Social media can be your best friend when it comes to searching for topics relevant to your industry. Looking at what is trending can help you to create content that people are looking for.
Google loves relevant content. This is why it’s important to re-optimise older content to keep your website fresh. A great example of this would be a “What’s Hot in 20XX.'' Although once the turn of the year comes these become quickly outdated, content teams can keep updating these regularly to show Google that the content is still relevant.
Include Internal Links For Customers Looking For More
For some of your customers your blog is their first point of contact. But where do they go from there? This is where internal linking comes in. If you mention a trending product, or a product that can solve an issue that a customer may have, dropping a link to that product can be extremely helpful whilst also improving your internal linking profile. By adding links to products that you’re suggesting, you are streamlining the journey from Google to checkout, something which all customers are looking for.
Include Imagery Which Links to Relevant Products
Featuring product imagery on blogs is a great way to engage customers with your products, provoking an emotional response and encouraging a purchase. So let them know what they are looking at, include links to product imagery and create a smooth process to get them to purchase.
Use Catchy (and Relevant) Titles
Creating a catchy title is probably one of the most important elements of any piece of writing; it’s what draws readers in. Titles which indicate a listicle, like ‘The Top 10…’ or ‘The five best’ are great ways to capture a reader's attention and gain more traffic. BUT, and this is a big one, make sure that the title is relevant to the content underneath. How many times have we been drawn in by clickbait and it turns out the article has absolutely nothing to do with the content. This is a sure fire way to annoy your readers, and also drastically increase your bounce rate. So, create a catchy, snappy title which is directly related to the content within the piece.
Final thoughts: Top Tips for Blog Optimisation:
- Ensure metadata, alt text, and H-tags are all correct: Make sure the technical elements are all in place behind the scenes
- Research keywords and keyphrases: Make sure you use keywords and phrases in your content whilst being wary of keyword stuffing
- Write for your audience: Provide useful information that will benefit your audience
- Keep up to date with current trends: Keep a close eye on industry trends and use a reactive content strategy to ensure your blogs are up-to-date and relevant
- Update existing content to keep it relevant: As well as ensuring new content is keeping up with trends, ensure older content isn’t obsolete by revisiting and re-optimising any outdated blogs with current information
- Link to relevant information and products: Reference your other relevant blogs, or your products, and ensure you link internally to any existing onsite content
- Ensure titles are catchy but relevant: A title needs to draw a reader in, but the content keeps them there. Avoid clickbait titles which don’t match the content - this annoys people and it reduces trust.
Part 6: Google Shopping Explained
Find out how Google Shopping works and learn to use the platform to get the best results.
The Google Shopping tab displays ecommerce product search results. It is a powerful platform which enables ecommerce businesses to visually advertise their products and attract more buyers directly on Google’s search engine results pages.
Up until 2020 the Google Shopping tab was exclusively for paid product ads only. However, with the pandemic affecting the way people shop, Google decided to open up Google Shopping and launched free organic product listings. Google Shopping Ad carousels appear at the top and bottom of the page with free listings in between.
Shopify stores need to make sure their products are visible in the Google Shopping results to maximise their organic visibility. The people who browse through these search results are looking for products. Visitors from the Google Shopping tab will probably be highly qualified with a high degree of purchase intent. This traffic is likely to convert.
How To Set Up Shopify Organic Product Listings On Google Shopping
1) Create A Merchant Center Account
Google Merchant Center connects your Shopify product data to Google Shopping through a product feed. If you already use Google Shopping for paid ads, you will already have a Merchant Center account. However, if not you’ll have to set one up using your Google Account. Here’s Google’s instructions on how to set up a Google Merchant Center account.
2) Create A Google Shopping Feed
A Shopping Feed allows you to get your products listed in Google. It puts your product data in a readable format with the necessary feed attributes for Google Shopping. Once again, if you’re already advertising in Google Shopping you’ll have a Google Shopping Feed but if you don’t have one, you need to set one up. You can connect to your website through a content API or you can use the Dynamic Creative Feed Ops tool.
Part 7: International SEO
International SEO is an important factor for businesses with multiple versions of the same website for different languages or regional audiences. The sites need to be configured in such a way that:
- Google understands the intended audience of each page/site
- Google ranks the correct page/site for the correct region/audience
- Google understands the relationship between different pages/sites. This prevents duplicate content issues
Hreflang
Note: You only need to add Hreflang tags when you have two near-identical pages that serve different language/regional audiences. If there is no alternate version of a page, you don’t need to add hreflang tags.
If your store ships to customers in multiple countries, you need to consider your international SEO strategy.
Hreflang is a mechanism used to help search engines understand the intended audience of a page. It indicates to search engines when there are alternate versions of a page for visitors in different languages/regions.
Hreflang can be implemented in different ways on Shopify, but the most common method on Shopify is to manually add HTML hreflang tags. It is also possible to upload an XML sitemap containing the tags, use Shopify Markets or a third party app, which can handle hreflang tags automatically.
How to Add Hreflang to Shopify
Here are 5 manual and automatic approaches to implementing hreflang on your Shopify store:
1 Shopify Markets (Automatic)
Shopify Markets allows merchants to display their store on an alternate domain, subdomain or subfolder, targeting different language or country combinations.
Shopify will automatically configure hreflang tags across each domain/subdomain/subfolder. Full instructions on how to set up Shopify Markets can be found on Shopify.
2 Metafields (Manual)
Hreflang tags can be added manually into metafields. This can be done using Shopify’s integrated metafields functionality, or with an app such as Custom Fields.
This method isn’t the most straightforward because you will need to set up a custom metafield (which requires a Shopify Expert) and then build out your own hreflang tags, but it is effective for large scale Shopify hreflang management. For an easy way to build your own hreflang tags, we recommend Aleyda Solis’s free hreflang tag generator.
With this approach, you can build your own hreflang tags and then add them directly into the custom field on a page-by-page basis.
To make life easier, if you have the Custom Fields Plus plan, you can import your hreflang tags via a csv upload to streamline this process.
3 Add Hreflang to Shopify Via an App (Automatic)
Some Shopify apps will add hreflang tags to your pages automatically. Translation apps such as Weglot and Langify will automatically generate hreflang tags and add them to your pages.
Whilst these apps can add hreflang tags to your Shopify store automatically, in our experience this isn’t always the best method. The way apps output hreflang tags normally creates lots of validation errors.
4 Add Hreflang Tags To Your theme.liquid File (Manual)
If you have 2 or more stores with identical pages and URL handles (where only the domain is different), then adding valid hreflang tags can be easy. Since the websites are complete clones of each other, you know that for every page on Site A, there is an equivalent on Site B.
Therefore you can edit your theme code to dynamically generate your hreflang tags using the URL path of the page being viewed.
That is what the example liquid code below does:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="{{ canonical_url | replace: shop.domain, 'www.mystore.com' }}" />
<link rel="alternate" href="{{ canonical_url | replace: shop.domain, 'www.mystore.com' }}" hreflang="en-GB" />
<link rel="alternate" href="{{ canonical_url | replace: shop.domain, 'www.us.mystore.com' }}" hreflang="en-US" />The code snippet above can be added into your theme.liquid file.You will need to replace ‘mystore.com’ instances with your actual domain names. When this snippet is in place, your pages will output hreflang tags using the page canonical to construct the URL path.
This method involves editing your website code, so if you choose this approach, we highly recommend you hire a Shopify expert to apply the change for you.
5 Add Hreflang to Shopify Via an XML Sitemap (Manual)
If you have separate Shopify stores for different counties, custom XML sitemaps can be generated to include hreflang tags for each page. For large websites with complicated systems, this can often be the easiest approach to take, and requires no coding. However this will require technical SEO knowledge to manually set up.
We recommend using this XML sitemap generator tool. This tool lets you generate a hreflang sitemap by uploading a csv file that contains your hreflang mappings.
The generated XML sitemap file can then be uploaded to Shopify under ‘Settings > Files’. This process needs to be done for each individual Shopify store.
To get search engines to crawl the custom XML sitemaps we need to do a little ‘hack’. We want to submit the XML sitemap in Search Console, but Shopify will store the XML sitemap on their CDN and not your domain, and therefore the XML URL can’t be submitted. To get around this, create a redirect from a dummy URL on your site to the custom XML URL on Shopify’s CDN. Submit the dummy URL in the Search Console XML Sitemap tool, and Google will follow the redirect and discover the XML sitemap.
Part 8: Shopify Site Speed
One of the most major ranking factors is website speed as this can have a huge impact on the page experience for your visitors. A slow loading website can significantly increase your bounce rate and have an effect on your conversion rate as more users will choose to abandon your site. This is essential for ecommerce sites as a faster site speed can lead to higher revenue and sales. It is recommended that your website loads in 3 seconds or less to ensure users stay on your website.
Core Web Vitals
It is also important to know about the Core Web Vitals Report which is an initiative by Google that focuses on a group of specific metrics to fix poor website user experiences. Core Web Vitals are a huge ranking factor which carefully examines website speed to report your overall page performance. Its aim is to promote more positive browsing experiences for visitors and mobile-friendliness. Getting your website speed on track will ensure your Core Web Vitals report is healthy which will help to improve your keyword rankings.
Here is a short breakdown on each of the Core Web Vital metrics:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
LCP measures loading performance and reports on the render time of the largest image or text block visible on the page. In simple terms, LCP measures how long it takes the largest element on the page to load. To be classified as a ‘Good URL’, the LCP on a page should occur within 2.5 seconds. For ‘Poor URLs’, the LCP is greater than 4 seconds.
First Input Delay (FID)
FID measures how quickly a page becomes interactive. This reports on the time it takes between a user first interacting with the page (i.e. clicking a link) and the website responding to that interaction.
‘Good URLs’ will do this within 100ms and ‘Poor URLs’ will take longer than 300ms
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
CLS measures visual stability as the page loads. A layout shift is any time a visible element changes position to another during load. This usually occurs when slow resources such as images are rendered and then shift the position of other page elements.
CLS measures the sum of all layout shifts that occur during page load. The metric is reported as 0 - 1. Anything up to 0.1 is a ‘Good URL’ and anything above 0.25 is a ‘Poor URL’.
The easiest way to fix CLS is to add explicit width and height attributes to images.
IMAGE
What can slow down your Shopify website?
- Too many sliders
- Bloated website code
- Too many apps
- Theme features
- Too many large images and videos
- Multiple custom fonts
A good Shopify product page needs to load quickly in order to convert users. A slow site speed can frustrate users and cause them to leave your page. Having a fast website has a huge impact on the success of your rankings in organic search, so it is crucial that you fix it. Here are some of the best ways to improve the loading speed of your Shopify product page:
Compress your images - There are many tools available which allow you to compress your image file sizes before uploading. A great one to use is Tiny jpg. An alternative is to use the ‘compress image’ app to minimise the size of your imagery.
Also be sure to specify your image’s specific sizes when uploading by entering the pixel ratio. Luckily Shopify also compresses images automatically so this will offer additional help. In general, it is best to use JPEG images for Shopify as they offer the best resolution at smaller file sizes.
Remove any apps not being used - An effective way to increase your product page speed is to remove any unnecessary apps, as these take up a load of storage space. Also if you notice a lot of code has been added to your theme, it is possible to remove some of it to boost your page speed. Other ways you can optimise your apps for better page speed are:
- Disable any unused app features
- Remove the code from apps which you have already removed
Avoid lots of web fonts - Try to minimise the level of web fonts in your content to allow quicker page loading speed. When you use multiple fonts that do not exist on your computer, the font has to be downloaded before it can be displayed which slows down the loading time of your page.
Avoid image sliders - A slider allows you to show multiple images at a time but if you use too many slides, this will slow down your product page due to the transitions and size of images. Therefore it is recommended to use only 2 or 3 slides for featuring your images or switch to a single featured image.
Google measures your website speed through its software called PageSpeed Insights. This analyses the quality of your website speed and generates a score based on its report. It focuses on your website speed score for both mobile and desktop, providing expert tips and recommendations on how to improve your page loading time. Why not test your product page speed here using the Google PageSpeed Insights tool?
Or, you can also install the Lighthouse Google Chrome Extension for a more in-depth report into your website speed.
Part 9: SEO Tracking on Shopify
To help you track the SEO performance of your Shopify store, you will need to set up Google Analytics and enhanced ecommerce tracking. The feature provides a host of powerful reporting capabilities and enables you to collect valuable insights into the performance of your store.
To install Google Analytics on Shopify you will need to follow these steps:
- Log into your Google Analytics account; go to Admin and then into the ‘Ecommerce Settings’ for the correct view. Then switch on ‘Enable Ecommerce’
- Next go into your Shopify store, find ‘Online Store > Preferences’ and enter your Google Analytics details into the right field
- Be sure to tick the ‘Use Enhanced Ecommerce’ box
Part 10: Shopify SEO Apps
Did you know that Shopify has a bunch of incredible SEO apps to help optimise your store? They cover a broad range of purposes, from increasing your keyword rankings and driving valuable traffic to boosting your website speed. Let’s take a deeper dive into which ones can be the most useful:
SEO Manager
SEO Manager helps you create custom metadata and descriptions and provides useful feedback on how your store is performing in search results. You can also access a whole range of pre-made templates, preview test of your site’s performance and use a mobile integration test feature.
Price: $20 a month
Plug in SEO
Get professional advice on how to improve your Shopify store SEO performance and Google rankings with Plug in SEO which lets you learn how to drive more organic traffic and increase your ecommerce conversions.
Price: Free plan available, with $30 and $50 plans with more features, plus a premium plan at $80 per month
TurboSEO
TurboSEO is a robust SEO Shopify app which adds mark-up to your code to make it easier for search engines to read your Shopify store, extract relevant information and display it in search results.
The mark-up added by TurboSEO allows Google to ‘see’ attributes of your products such as reviews, prices and stock levels. This data can then be presented as rich snippets on Google’s search listings - giving your store more prominence and authority on the listings page and increasing click-through to your store.
Cost: $30 one-time charge
What are the benefits of using Shopify SEO apps?
Shopify SEO apps help to extend the SEO capabilities of your Shopify website. You’ll also be able to analyse your online store’s performance in organic search more effectively.
Additionally, Shopify SEO apps give you the ability to decouple SEO features from the Shopify theme which can be better than having SEO features tied into theme code. Also, Shopify SEO apps give you the chance to experience instant SEO enhancements to your store so you can move higher up the search results even quicker.
- Expert Guidance and Tips
- Advanced Features and Functionality
- Pre-made Templates
- Seamless integration
Part 11: External SEO Tools for Shopify
There are many external SEO tools which can help boost your Shopify store. Here is a quick overview of the ones you should consider using:
SEMrush - A highly useful tool which allows you to complete full website audits, content planning, keyword research, outreach and many more SEO practices. SEMrush provides lots of incredible features for helping you optimise your Shopify site and achieve good organic rankings. It is also possible to integrate SEMrush with your store so you can easily access its tools without leaving your site.
Pro SEMrush Subscription: $199.95 a month
Ahrefs - Similar to SEMrush, Ahrefs is another effective tool for completing SEO tasks more efficiently and offers lots of features for backlink audits, keyword research, competitor analysis and rank tracking. It also provides you with some fantastic SEO guidance and tips designed to help you grow your ecommerce website.
Lite Ahrefs Subscription: $99 a month
Screaming Frog - An advanced SEO site audit tool designed to crawl small to large websites. You can install it to your desktop, enter a website url and it will provide you with valuable data insights for you to analyse. It also has a host of other features and functionalities to help with your ecommerce SEO.
Free version is available with limited features Price per licence: £149 per year - Gives you access to more features
Lead the way in organic search
We hope that you have enjoyed our Shopify SEO Guide 2024 and have found lots of useful information to help take your ecommerce site to the next level. As Shopify continues to grow, it is fundamental that you focus on maximising your store optimisation in order to stand out from the competition. By following each step in our detailed guide, you’ll be flying up the search results in no time!
You can download the entire guide in pdf format by clicking the button below.
For further Shopify SEO support or advice, simply get in touch with us and our friendly team will be more than happy to assist.
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