A Guide To Shopify SEO

[chrismlong63]

Hello everyone! 

Recently, I put together a guide on SEO for Shopify site owners that want to improve their sales from organic traffic. This guide should be helpful for both beginners and advanced users. I'm a Senior SEO Manager that works with a good number of Shopify eCommerce sites so I'm familiar with the platform. 

Here are some key things to consider if you're looking to improve the SEO of your Shopify site:

• Perform keyword research to determine what users are searching to connect with your products. This is generally the first step in any SEO endeavor. 
• For keyword research, start with your AdWords data. Export your Adwords revenue data from Google Analytics and identify the most profitable keywords for your site. Track those keywords. If you want to get more sophisticated, you can use tools like Power BI to match up ranking and conversion data to see where you're generating revenue but not ranking as well in the search engines. 
• If you're not using AdWords, you can still use Google's Keyword Planner to find keyword ideas based around the products that you offer. 
• Track your keywords using a rank tracking tool. There are plenty out there such as Moz, AHREFs, and STAT. 
• Use Shopify's "Search engine listing preview" to optimize the title tag of your category and product pages. Incorporate the keywords you found in your keyword research. You should really be doing this for all product and category pages. 
• Build out your product and category pages. Perform a few searches for your primary keywords and look at similar sites that are ranking in the top 3. Is your content as useful/helpful? If not, determine ways you can improve your product and category pages so they are. 
• Try to build links to your Shopify store. The more links you have from quality sites, the better your site will rank in the long run. This is a great beginner's guide to link building. 
• Often times, category pages point to non-canonical pages. This means that your internal links will be pointing to pages that can't rank in the search engines. If you have a developer, talk to them about this issue. 
• Use the "Product" structured data type on key product pages. This highlights key information about your product to Google
• Shopify does not currently allow you to edit the robots.txt or log files. 
• If you have a large number of images, you can use Crush.pics to compress them at scale. This helps speed up your store. 
• Utilize a blog. Even though you might have an eCommerce store and want to drive traffic to product and category pages, Google is ranking more and more informational content. If you're seeing a lot of informational articles ("The 7 Best Keyboards") ranking well for your keywords, you might need to create more editorial to stand a better chance of ranking. 

Hope this if helpful for you guys! You can read the entire article here for more things I wasn't able to cover in this post: https://moz.com/blog/shopify-seo

[Josh_Uebergang]

Good piece Chris. Well done.

[AndrewWalters]

Nice post!

One thing I would add: SEO is such a huge topic, and it can take so long to get it working, that it's a good idea to make it an ongoing project rather than a 1-day hackathon 🙂

It'd be good to make sure they have everything listed, then prioritized, so they can create an organized, concerted effort to constantly improve SEO.

Last, I created a video app, and while looking up stats recently, I was surprised to find it can help quite a bit with SEO. Because Google really likes video content right now, it tends to increase organic traffic by 157%, and a website is 53x more likely to reach the front page of Google results if it includes a video!

[LForward1]

I liked the guide. Keep up the good work.

[jasonavada]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the information and resources you provided. There's no doubt about the importance of ranking higher than your competitors on Google, it's a must for every online business. if you don't have a strong SEO strategy, you'll lose your brand impression, traffic, and sales. We wrote an article about e-commerce SEO too, give it a read and you won't regret.

If there is anything else I can help you with, please let me know, I'm happy to help!

[sophiawils59]

Hey @chrismlong63, Thanks for sharing such a great post!!

[Trevor]

Hello!

Just a quick update about the robot.txt file that was referenced in this post. As of today, June 21st, 2021, we have launched the ability to edit the robot.txt file to give merchants more control over the information that is crawled by search engines. You can learn more about how to edit your robot.txt file through our community post here. 

If you have any questions about the new feature, please do not hesitate to create a new post under our "Techincal QA" board.