To rank highly in Google’s competitive organic search results, the content in your store needs to match what people are looking for when they search online.
Optimizing your store to appear at the top of search engine results pages can seem like an overwhelming task, but it follows a set of commonsense principles.
First, it requires you identify which search queries people use to find websites like yours. And second, it makes sure your website gives the best answers to those queries.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to optimizing your Shopify store to receive more organic traffic. Below, you’ll learn how to make improvements across three main areas of SEO:
- Technical SEO: The settings and setup of your website
- On-page SEO: The content on your web pages
- Off-page SEO: Your website’s reputation
Before you start: Shopify SEO essentials
Before diving into technical, on-page, and off-page SEO, take time to set up basic aspects of your Shopify store. Completing these tasks will prepare your website for search optimization.
Purchase a custom domain
Shopify users can build their stores on a myshopify.com subdomain (included with the costs of the plan), which is convenient and cost-efficient. But using a subdomain may limit your ability to build a distinctive brand and optimize your site for search engines. If you can, switch to an SEO-optimized domain with a short, relevant domain name.
You can buy a domain directly from Shopify or a third-party provider. After buying your domain, manage domain settings for your online store from the Domains page in your Shopify admin.
Install Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free platform for tracking and analyzing your website’s traffic.
Learn how to set up Google Analytics for your Shopify store.
Install Google Search Console
Google Search Console provides insights into your website’s ranking in Google search results. Use Search Console to see which of your pages rank for search queries and which search terms are driving traffic to your store.
Here’s how to set up Google Search Console for your Shopify store.
Use a mobile-ready theme
Google assesses your website’s content via a mobile view. To make sure your store is optimized for search, use a responsive store theme (the Dawn theme is a popular option). This means your website automatically adjusts to the user’s device and screen size. Shopify users can access a selection of free and paid responsive themes for their websites.
To make sure your theme is mobile-friendly, use Google’s content auditing tool, Lighthouse.
Make your store public
If you’re still building your Shopify store, you might want to complete construction before unlocking your store to the public and search engine crawlers.
When you’re ready to launch, ensure you adjust the settings of any password-protected pages. Otherwise, search engines won’t be able to see your content and rank your pages.
1. Technical SEO for Shopify stores
Technical SEO refers to under-the-hood changes to your Shopify store to make it more accessible and attractive to search engines like Google.
Technical SEO ensures your web pages load quickly, are visible to search engine crawlers, and are accessible on mobile devices. It also keeps your site organized with a clear page structure, navigation, and informative titles and tags.
Like other types of SEO, there’s a potentially never-ending list of technical adjustments you can make to your website. Covering the fundamentals below, however, will go a long way to making your store search-friendly.
Technical SEO tasks for Shopify store owners:
- Create logical menus and internal links
- Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console
- Optimize your store’s images
Create logical menus and internal links
It’s easy to overlook internal linking, especially in the early days of building your online store. However, organized links are a way to signal to search engines which content from your store is most relevant to users.
A website’s internal links are like votes in a page’s favor. Each link to a page is a vote of confidence for that page’s content. The more links a page receives, the stronger the signal is to search engines that its content is important. Visitors and search engines are likely to gravitate toward your store’s most-linked pages—and away from the least-linked pages.
A simple way to create links that accurately represent the hierarchy of your store’s content is to develop a logical store navigation. Logical menus highlight the key information in your store, so that it can easily be accessed from every page.
Take fitness apparel brand Gymshark. Its primary navigation menu divides products into just two categories: “Women’s” and “Men’s.” Secondary dropdown menus then split these categories into subsections.
Many ecommerce websites order their menu categories by popularity, as Gymshark may have done here.
Gymshark’s categories also match the terms used in online searches. Navigating to Women’s Shorts, for example, you’ll find a third set of categories including Workout Shorts, Women’s Workout Shorts, and other popular search terms.
Apply a similar approach to your store’s navigation bar, menus, and links by dividing your content into clear categories that align with customer searches. Then, order categories by popularity and a product’s prominence within your store.
To make these changes in your Shopify store, first create product pages or edit the titles of your existing products. Tailor product names and page titles to match the most popular relevant Google searches.
Next, create a collection to group product pages together. Again, ensure the collection’s title, description, and URL match what searchers expect to see.
Once you’ve optimized your product titles and created a collection, add the new page to your store’s menu.
Picking a theme that supports breadcrumbs helps underscore the relationship between categories, and makes it easy for visitors to retrace their steps.
Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console
Submitting your sitemap on Google Search Console helps Google efficiently crawl and index your website.
Sitemaps provide search engines with information about your website’s structure and the priority of your pages, helping ensure your most important content is found and considered for ranking.
Shopify automatically creates a sitemap for your store. Locate your sitemap and submit it to Google Search Console by following the instructions in this video:
Once your website has crawled and indexed, respond to any issues that emerge. Find pages in need of optimization by consulting Google Search Console’s indexing report.
Search console will report any pages that don’t correspond to your sitemap and describe the issue, such as a 404 error.
Optimize your store’s images
Search engines also crawl the images in your store. Since images comprise a large part of the average web page’s data, keeping image file sizes small is important for speedy loading and smooth browsing.
Shopify automatically serves images in WebP, an image format developed by Google that provides superior compression, with an average saving of more than 30% in file size over traditional file formats like JPEG and PNG.
For further optimization, use Shopify’s free image resizer to reduce the size of your images without compromising resolution.
Alongside reducing image sizes, consider these additional image optimization tasks:
- Add images to your sitemap. It’s vital to have your images appear on search results, as many people are visual searchers, especially when it comes to products like apparel. Adding images to your sitemap makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index them. (Shopify automatically includes primary product page images in the sitemap.)
- Write alt text for every image. Alternative text appears when a browser can’t properly render an image, or when a user has web accessibility settings enabled. Use plain language to describe each of your store’s images.
- Name your images in plain language. The file name of your image should match a page’s keyword. For example, if your page is about habanero hot sauce, save your image files as “habanero-hot-sauce.jpg.”
2. On-page SEO for Shopify stores
On-page SEO refers to the content you create and publish on your store’s web pages. Search engines assess your content for its relevance, helpfulness, and authority, to serve users with the best answers to their search queries.
Good on-page SEO is therefore about clearly signaling the relevance and authority of your content, while providing helpful responses to common searches.
On-page SEO tasks for Shopify store owners:
Research keywords
Keywords are the core phrases contained within the queries people type into search engines. Keywords and queries often approximate natural speech—a popular search term for the latest iPhone, for example, could be “buy new iPhone.”
Keywords commonly have variants, with longer variations capturing more detailed searches. For example, a long-tail variant of the keyword “men’s shorts” could be “men’s 6-inch inseam shorts.”
Search keywords can also be categorized by intent. Informational keywords seek answers to questions, while transactional search terms seek products, services, or tools.
For SEO purposes, the content on every web page in your store should be designed to target a specific keyword. Whether a page targets a short or long tail, or an informational or transactional phrase, depends on your wider marketing goals.
Taken as a whole, your store’s content should provide relevant, helpful responses to a range of search intents within your area of expertise. Building a broad portfolio of content will establish your website’s reputation with users and search engines, and help you connect with consumers at various stages of the sales funnel:
How to choose keywords
To identify which keywords to target with your content, consider the niches and categories your products fall under. For example, Shopify makes an ecommerce platform, so it makes sense for Shopify’s website content to target keywords that relate to ecommerce sellers.
Use keyword research tools to find popular terms within your niche and gain insights into your SEO competitors.
If your website is new, ranking for popular short-tail keywords may be too difficult. Instead, look for long-tail keywords that match your products, content, and unique selling proposition.
For instance, while it’s difficult for a new clothing website to appear among the top search results for a query such as “Women’s t-shirt,” a newer site may find success by targeting longer-tail variants associated with their product line, such as “Women’s vintage band t-shirt,” or “Women’s hemp t-shirt.”
Cater to search intent
Search engines want to find web pages with the highest likelihood of concluding a searcher’s journey. For Google, the best content warrants no additional searches—a good sign a searcher’s goal has been satisfied.
The motivations behind a user’s search are often described as a user’s search intent. Satisfying the search intent of a high number of users, so they don’t need to click the Back button or make another search, is therefore a primary SEO goal.
The easiest way to understand the search intent behind a query is to study the pages in existing search results. Audit the results pages of your target keywords and note how each of the top-ranked pages answers the search query.
Sometimes, a query’s results page will be uniform, with each result offering similar information. More often, however, results pages contain several types of results, mixing transactional and informational content. This mix of content represents Google’s current best interpretation of the primary intents behind your keywords.
Google’s rich content features, such as “People also ask” and “Related searches” also provide insight into how the search engine is interpreting search intent.
For example, related searches for the keyword “habanero hot sauce” suggest long-tail variations you might choose to address with your product pages or blog posts.
Optimize metadata
Keeping your page’s titles, descriptions, tags, and other metadata organized can help you rank higher in search results.
When writing titles, headings, and descriptions for your store’s web pages, ask yourself, “How can I make it clear to visitors what this page is about?” Other useful questions to hone your metadata include:
- Does this heading clearly explain what is on the page?
- Am I using my target keyword in subheadings?
- Does the page’s URL slug contain its keyword?
- Does the meta description make this page seem click-worthy?
Follow these five tips to help optimize the metadata of your store’s web pages:
1. Build keywords into headings
It’s good practice to include your main keyword in page titles, especially for collection pages and landing pages. For example, The Lip Bar uses “concealer” as a keyword for its collection page, while individual product pages focus on specific shades and functions.
A product named “6:00 Ebony Caffeine Concealer” uses “6:00 Ebony” to indicate the shade, “Caffeine” to describe its function of energizing the skin, and “Concealer” as the product type. Each word in the title helps users and search engines understand the product.
Ensure your page formatting includes only one H1 tag, which should be the title of the page. Subheadings should be nested sequentially (e.g., H2, H3. H2, H3, H4).
For navigational pages like an About Us page or Contact page, use clear and simple titles that reflect the page’s purpose, such as “Contact us”or “How can we help?”
2. Understand the topic behind the keyword and build it into your page
Using keywords effectively is more than just inserting them into your content; it’s about understanding the topic they represent and discussing it comprehensively.
For instance, if optimizing a page for the keyword “habanero hot sauce,” you might start by researching related terms. Google’s autocomplete and related searches may show relevant phrases and topics.
After gathering related terms, evaluate which are relevant to your product. For example, if your hot sauce included unique ingredients like mango or garlic, you would likely benefit from mentioning these. Consider your brand’s identity; if your sauces were flavorful without being extremely spicy, you might avoid terms like “ghost pepper.”
The goal isn’t to use every related keyword, but to incorporate relevant ones that enhance your product and page descriptions.
3. Build your keyword into the URL or slug
A page’s URL is its associated address, often ending in “.com.” Its slug is the part of the URL after the first forward slash. You can customize page slugs even when the main URL is fixed.
Incorporating your keyword into the slug clarifies the page content for users and search engines. However, avoid keyword stuffing, as it doesn’t improve search rankings and can deter clicks.
Consider this example:
- Avoid: https://kindahotsauce.shop/products/hot-sauce-habanero-hot-sauce-mild-sauce-150ml
- Prefer: https://kindahotsauce.shop/products/hot-enough-habanero
4. Build your keyword into the title and meta description
A page’s title and meta description are crucial for communicating the content of your page to both users and search engines. They also play a key role in encouraging clicks from search engine results pages.
Shopify automatically fills these fields with the product or collection name and description, but further customizing them will help you accurately represent your page and entice clicks.
Titles should be short—preferably less than 55 characters. Include your target keyword naturally to aid search indexing.
Meta descriptions should also be kept concise and less than 150 characters. Focus on making your page appealing to potential visitors. While including a keyword can help with rankings, prioritize engaging copy that speaks directly to the customer.
5. Build rich snippets with product details
Rich snippets enhance your search listings by displaying key product details like price, availability, and ratings directly in search results. This not only provides valuable information at a glance but can also increase click-through rates.
Shopify’s free themes automatically include structured data for product pages, which means details like price and stock status are ready to be displayed in SERPs without extra work. However, if you use a third-party or custom theme, you might need to add this functionality yourself.
If you’re comfortable with coding, you can add structured data directly to your theme. Resources from Schema.org and Google can guide you on what data to include.
For those less tech-savvy, schema apps are available on the Shopify App Store.
To check for errors or issues with your structured data, use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.
3. Off-page SEO for Shopify stores
Unlike the two types of SEO above, off-page SEO extends beyond your Shopify store, focusing primarily on building backlinks, which are crucial for improving your site’s ranking. High-quality, relevant backlinks signal to search engines that your site is valuable, enhancing your visibility.
Off-page SEO tasks for Shopify store owners:
Active link building
Active link building is a proactive approach to generate inbound links that point to your website from other reputable sources. By actively seeking out opportunities to get other websites to link to yours, you can significantly boost your site’s authority and search engine rankings.
Try these methods to create a robust link-building plan tailored to your Shopify store’s needs:
PR campaigns
Write and publish press releases to gain media coverage and accompanying backlinks. Target the right publications and provide them with compelling stories about your business.
Skyscraper technique
The much-practiced “Skyscraper” link-building tactic involves Identifying link-worthy content from competitors, creating superior content, and persuading those linking to the original piece to link to yours instead.
Guest blogging
Write posts for other websites to reach new audiences and gain backlinks. Ensure the content you create is genuine and not thinly veiled promotion—or risk your links being ignored by Google.
Unlinked mentions
Monitor mentions of your business using tools like Google Alerts. If you, your store, or your brand is mentioned without a link, reach out to request one.
Passive link building
Passive link building involves everyday activities that naturally enhance your store’s SEO over time. Common passive activities include:
Keeping an active social media presence
Maintain an active and responsive presence on social media. Engage genuinely with customers and participate in conversations to build relationships and encourage links in the form of shares.
Offering superior customer service
Providing exceptional customer support can lead to positive online mentions and referrals. You don’t need to go above and beyond—it’s a matter of doing the little things really well and finding moments to deliver delight.
Engaging with your community
Join online communities relevant to your industry. Participate in discussions, provide valuable insights, and engage with users without overtly promoting your business. Engaging in communities like Reddit, Quora, or niche industry forums where your ideal audience hangs out online can help you build a good reputation and eventually customers.
Creating a noteworthy product
Ultimately, the best way to get people talking about your business online is to have a great product or service that’s worth talking about. Organic word-of-mouth is arguably the most powerful way to boost your link profile and online presence.
Grow your Shopify store with SEO
When customers search for products in your category, you want your store to appear at the top of search results. Achieving this requires understanding and applying SEO principles to your site’s structure and content. Though SEO may seem overwhelming, it becomes more straightforward as you learn and apply its common sense rules.
Investing time in SEO can significantly boost your store’s visibility. Start by familiarizing yourself with the strategies in this post, as well as reviewing your store’s web pages against this SEO checklist. As you tweak pages and explore new keywords, you’ll see gradual improvements. Over time, these efforts will create a powerful cycle that continuously attracts new customers to your business.
Illustration by Rose Wong
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Shopify SEO FAQ
What does SEO stand for in marketing?
SEO is short for search engine optimization. It is a measurable, repeatable process used to send signals to search engines that your pages are worth appearing in Google’s search results.
What is SEM?
Search engine marketing, sometimes called SEM, is where you create relevant content on your website and buy search engine ads to attract your ideal customers through organic and paid search results. You increase traffic by creating new pages or optimizing existing ones.
What is SEO in digital marketing?
SEO marketing is where you aim to increase organic traffic to your website through tweaking pages to improve search engine rankings, creating new content to target keywords, and improving your site so it’s better understood by search engine crawlers.
How do I start SEO?
- Find a keyword which has good search volume.
- Understand the search intent of your keyword.
- Write your page using your keyword research data.
- Optimize your page meta title and description.
- Publish your page.
- Build links to your page and website.
What is the difference between SEO and SEM?
The difference between search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) is that SEO focuses on increasing organic traffic, while SEM includes both increasing organic traffic and running paid ads to increase traffic.
