Best SEO Practices for Shopify?

[AJ_Demers]

What is the best way to optimize the pages and product listings? I'm always seeing articles online about using keywords X number of times, mentioning the location in the keywords, etc. The only problem is, it seems like every SEO person I've read articles by has a different opinion about keyword usage, geotagging, etc. Is there one standard that works best for Shopify? Thanks for any suggestions.

[John-Smith]

Hey, I suggest referring a book. learn the basics from the book, not from those SEO person. If you refer too many SEO persons, you will be confused because everyone's point of view and explaining method will be different. So refer a book which can help you to learn the basics.

learn what is SEO?

On page SEO and its activities

Off page SEO and its activities.

It will surely help you. Let me know if I can help you more 🙂

[Rockpapercopy]

Hi AJ,

The most important things is to optimize your meta title and meta description [Google snippet] for each product. When it comes to the number of keywords, of their definite placement, Google doesn't release any official guidelines - therefore each SEO person's tips are the "guestimates". However, according to Matt Cutts, previous Google employee, the best practice is to place one of your keywords in the title, one in the H tag, and one within the first 100 words on the page - as higher on the page as possible. You can also add internal links, link tags, and image alt tags, but only if you feel more confident with SEO and know how to optimize them correctly. That's the basic you need to SEO optimize your product/page. You can delve into more technical nitty-gritty stuff when you feel more confident SEO optimizing your website, but I wouldn't worry about it at this stage. 

[AJ_Demers]

Thank you both 🙂

[Answerbase]

There are plenty of articles about SEO in general and even Shopify has an SEO checklist, I'll highlight a few areas that you can help yourself on the SEO front for your Shopify store.

Create Unique Product Descriptions

If you're selling products that other stores are also selling, then you want to make sure your product descriptions are:

1. Engaging: Draw they into why they want to buy the product...speak to their emotions and draw them into the purchase
2. Unique: Brush up on the manufacturer descriptions that you're given and make sure they're recognized as being unique content.
3. Informative & Clear: Make sure you're touching on the points that customers are actually searching for and interested in, to ensure you're matching keywords that they'd search for on Google.

Descriptions are a great way to put your product expertise to work to benefit you on the SEO front.

Product Question & Answer Content

Engage your audience by installing a Shopify product question and answer app within your product page.  This helps with a couple things:

1. It will show the most popular Q&A threads relevant to your product, giving Google some original content to read.
2. It will give you insights on what information your customers are interested in knowing about the product, and therefor will help you continue to revise your product descriptions for SEO as well.

Another benefit of this is it will also convert more customers.  Answerbase (a product Q&A solution) has seen that up to 75% of product questions convert to a new sale....so you get the conversions upfront and then the SEO benefits to follow.

Product Reviews

If you're already generating conversions and sales, ensure that you're getting product reviews and that will also generate valuable content which is unique and original to your site.   This gives Google (and other search engines) quality unique content to read and pull up in relevant searches of other customers that are similar to your current customers.

The above methods will give you plenty of work to do regarding SEO and should create an ongoing process to better refine that moving forward.   You create a great product description, you answer product questions....that helps with SEO...and then as you track the engagement of the questions and reviews moving forward....you revise the description again based on actual demand and customers that have converted.   Nice little process to ensure you have unique content on your page that is useful.

[Josh_Uebergang]

Hi @AJ_Demers 

It is a very broad question that shouldn't be answered in one reply. As a result, I'll point you to one Shopify SEO guide I wrote with 101 tips, most of which are best practices. Any questions, I'll do my best to answer them.