How can I improve my website's search engine ranking?

[Bikram_Roy]

What is the best way to boost the search engine rank of Shopify website?

[LeoEcom]

Your ranking position depends on factors like your country, your industry, the current authority of your website, the quality of your content, your competitors, and more... there are over 1,200 ranking factors in Google.

First, you need to:
- install and configure the Google search console and Google analytics.
-friendly Products title & URL Description
-Optimization of Heading Tags (H1, H2, H3. . )
- eliminate errors on the site
-publishing your site in other sources
and more

[Gamerseo]

Seo is a really big topic and can't be explained in one post. You need to start training in this topic. For starters, check out our blog. Maybe you will find interesting information for yourself there.

[ReturnPrime]

Shopify SEO is a set of  SEO adjustments that are unique to the Shopify platform. While Shopify stores come with some useful things for SEO, such as a blog and the ability to redirect, it can also create SEO issues such as duplicate content. 

Some of the most common Shopify SEO recommendations are:

1. Remove duplicate URLs from internal linking architecture

2. Remove duplicate paginated URLs

3. Create blog content for keywords with informational intent

4. Add “Product,” “Article,” & “BreadcrumbList” structured data

5. Determine how to handle product variant pages

6. Compress images using crush.pics

7. Remove unnecessary Shopify apps

We’ll go into how we handle each of these recommendations below:

Duplicate content

In terms of SEO, duplicate content is the highest priority issue we’ve seen created by Shopify. Duplicate content occurs when either duplicate or similar content exists on two separate URLs. This creates issues for search engines as they might not be able to determine which of the two pages should be the canonical version. On top of this, often times link signals are split between the pages.

We’ve seen Shopify create duplicate content in several different ways:

1. Duplicate product pages

2. Duplicate collections pages through pagination

Duplicate product pages

Shopify creates this issue within their product pages. By default, Shopify stores allow their /products/ pages to render at two different URL paths:

• Canonical URL path: /products/

• Non-canonical URL path: /collections/.*/products/

Shopify accounts for this by ensuring that all /collections/.*/products/ pages include a canonical tag to the associated /products/ page. Notice how the URL in the address differs from the “canonical” field:

While this certainly helps Google consolidate the duplicate content, a more alarming issue occurs when you look at the internal linking structure. By default, Shopify will link to the non-canonical version of all of your product pages.

As well, we’ve also seen Shopify link to the non-canonical versions of URLs when websites utilize “swatch” internal links that point to other color variants.

Thus, Shopify creates your entire site architecture around non-canonical links by default. This creates a high-priority SEO issue because the website is sending Google conflicting signals:

1. “Here are the pages we internally link to the most often”

2. “However, the pages we link to the most often are not the URLs we actually want to be ranking in Google. Please index these other URLs with few internal links”

While canonical tags are usually respected, remember Google does treat these as hints instead of directives. This means that you’re relying on Google to make a judgement about whether or not the content is duplicate each time that it crawls these pages. We prefer not to leave this up to chance, especially when dealing with content at scale.

Adjusting internal linking structure

Fortunately, there is a relatively easy fix for this. We’ve been able to work with our dev team to adjust the code in the product.grid-item.liquid file. Following those instructions will allow your Shopify site’s collections pages to point to the canonical /product/ URLs.

Duplicate collections pages

As well, we’ve seen many Shopify sites that create duplicate content through the site’s pagination. More specifically, a duplicate is created of the first collections page in a particular series. This is because once you're on a paginated URL in a series, the link to the first page will contain “?page=1”:

However, this will almost always be a duplicate page. A URL with “?page=1” will almost always contain the same content as the original non-parameterized URL. Once again, we recommend having a developer adjust the internal linking structure so that the first paginated result points to the canonical page.

Product variant pages

While this is technically an extension of Shopify’s duplicate content from above, we thought this warranted its own section because this isn’t necessarily always an SEO issue.

It’s not uncommon to see Shopify stores where multiple product URLs are created for the same product with slight variations. In this case, this can create duplicate content issues as often times the core product is the same, but only a slight attribute (color for instance) changes. This means that multiple pages can exist with duplicate/similar product descriptions and images. Here is an example of duplicate pages created by a variant: https://recordit.co/x6YRPkCDqG

If left alone, this once again creates an instance of duplicate content. However, variant URLs do not have to be an SEO issue. In fact, some sites could benefit from these URLs as they allow you to have indexable pages that could be optimized for very specific terms. Whether or not these are beneficial is going to differ on every site. Some key questions to ask yourself are:

• Do your customers perform queries based on variant phrases?

• Do you have the resources to create unique content for all of your product variants?

• Is this content unique enough to stand on its own?

For a more in-depth guide, Jenny Halasz wrote a great article on determining the best course of action for product variations. If your Shopify store contains product variants, than it’s worth determining early on whether or not these pages should exist at a separate URL. If they should, then you should create unique content for every one and optimize each for that variant’s target keywords.

Crawling and indexing

After analyzing quite a few Shopify stores, we’ve found some SEO items that are unique to Shopify when it comes to crawling and indexing. Since this is very often an important component of e-commerce SEO, we thought it would be good to share the ones that apply to Shopify.

Robots.txt file

By default, Shopify creates a robots.txt file for your store with quite a few prewritten “Disallow” commands. We find that in most cases, Shopify’s default robots.txt rules are good enough for most store owners. You can see an example of Shopify’s default robots.txt rules here:

Here are some sections of the site that Shopify will disallow crawling in:

• Admin area

• Checkout

• Orders

• Shopping cart

• Internal search

• Policies page

However, as Shopify stores get bigger and more customized, there’s a greater chance that you might need to adjust the robots.txt file. Fortunately, as of June 2021, Shopify now let’s you update the robots.txt file. 

In order to edit the Shopify robots.txt file, store owners must create a robots.txt.liquid file and then create custom rules to specify any changes.

[BlogPilot]

Hi Bikram!

One great way to boost SEO is through consistent, high-quality SEO-optimized blog posts. This lets search engines know that your website is active and provides a lot of great content for their crawlers to index.

Blog Pilot automates this whole process for you, creating and posting optimized content to your blog once per week! Once you set it, you can move on to other activities and let Blog Pilot's AI handle the rest.  🙂

https://apps.shopify.com/blog-pilot

Happy to answer any other questions about blogging and SEO you may have. You can reply to this thread or shoot us a message directly!

[SEOKart]

Hello Bikram_Roy,

Well, there are many ways in which you can boost the search engine rank of the Shopify website. Let me list some of the effective SEO practices.

1. Keyword Research 

It is the core and mostly the first step of SEO. Keywords are the words/phrases used by people to carry out research on search engines. Thus, identifying the keywords used by the people who intend to find the content as published on your website, and incorporating them into your website shall help your website to rank better whenever that keyword is used.

I recommend you first identify the intent of your target audience and then research the relevant keywords for your website, which can help you to target the right set of audiences for your website.

2. Submit ‘XML’ sitemap to Google Search Console

While search engine crawlers are becoming more advanced, the ‘XML’ sitemap helps the crawlers to easily navigate through the website and index all the pages of your website. Thus, search engine crawlers shall prioritize your website in the indexing process, which can improve the rank of your website on SERP.

3. On-Page Optimization

• Carry out an SEO Audit of your website to identify and fix the issues related to SEO factors on your website.
• Optimize the website’s site structure and ensure consistency in H1, H2, H3, etc. headings, which can allow the users to easily scan and skim through the webpage.
• Add keywords in the title tag, meta description, and URL.
• Optimize images: You can compress their file size, which reduces the loading time of the images. You can also add the alt text, which allows the crawlers to understand the context of the image, as they can’t see the image. Also, the users can understand the image’s context, if it takes too long to load.
• Assess the website for broken links and fix them by redirecting the traffic to the right location.
• Optimize URLs by adding the keyword in the URL and reducing its length, which makes it easy for the users to share the URL.

4. Focus on creating high-quality content

There is a high chance of getting backlinks if you create high-quality content, which improves brand awareness on digital platforms and helps you get a better ranking on SERP.

5. Improve your website’s page speed

Users as well as search engine crawlers prefer websites with good speed; thus, optimizing the speed of your website can help you rank better on SERP. You can improve the website’s speed with the help of the following:

• Reducing the number of redirects
• Implementing AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) for mobile devices.
• Using light-weight Shopify themes
• Compressing images’ file size
• Implementing lazy loading for advertisements
• Remove unused JavaScript.

All the best!

Leesha

SEOKart

[SEOProStaff]

Hi @Bikram_Roy ,

Boosting your Shopify website's search engine rank involves several key strategies. Firstly, ensure your website's technical SEO is in top shape; this includes optimizing your site's structure, improving load times, and ensuring mobile responsiveness. Next, focus on on-page SEO by optimizing your product titles, descriptions, and images with relevant keywords. Content marketing, particularly through blogging, can significantly drive organic traffic. Lastly, building quality backlinks from reputable sites will enhance your site's authority.

SEOPro can be immensely helpful in this process. It offers a comprehensive SEO audit to identify and prioritize fixes for issues like missing keywords, short titles, and insufficient product descriptions. With bulk optimization tools, you can efficiently update SEO elements across your store, saving time and ensuring consistency. SEOPro also provides tailored recommendations to optimize each product and collection page for the best SEO performance.

Full disclosure: We are the developer of this app.

[SEOProStaff]

Hi @Bikram_Roy ,

Boosting your Shopify store's search engine rank involves several key strategies: optimizing site structure and content, enhancing user experience, and building high-quality backlinks. Start with thorough keyword research to understand what your potential customers are searching for. Then, optimize your product pages and blog content with these keywords in mind. Ensure your site is mobile-friendly and has fast loading times to improve user experience.

SEOPro can significantly aid in this process. It helps identify and fix SEO issues, optimizes your content for search engines, and can apply improvements in bulk, saving you time. While focusing on both your Shopify products and collections, SEOPro ensures each page is fully optimized for the best possible search engine visibility.

Full disclosure: We are the developer of this app.

[SEOAnt-Zoey]

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[SEOAnt-Zoey]

The best ways to improve your Shopify website's search engine rankings (SEO) include the following strategies:

1. Keyword Research and Optimization:
- Keyword Research: use tools (e.g. Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, SEMrush) to find relevant, highly searched keywords.
- Page Optimization: Use keywords reasonably in the page title, meta description, title tags (H1, H2, etc.), product descriptions, and URLs.

2. high quality content:
- Blog posts: write valuable blog posts covering topics related to your products.
- Product descriptions: Make sure product descriptions are detailed, attractive, and include relevant keywords.
- User-generated content: Encourage customers to leave reviews and ratings, which not only provides social proof, but also adds to the uniqueness of the page content.

3. Optimize page load speed:
- Compress images: use a tool（eg SEOAnt-AI SEO） to compress images to minimize load times.

4. mobile-friendliness:
- Ensure that the website has a good user experience on mobile devices, as search engines are increasingly focusing on mobile-friendliness.

5. internal link structure:
- Internal links: create internal links between articles and product pages to improve the structure and navigability of the site.
- Sitemap: create and submit a sitemap to search engines to help them better crawl and index site content.

6. external links (backlinks):
- Obtain high quality backlinks: Obtain high quality backlinks by cooperating with related websites, writing guest posts, issuing press releases, and so on.
- Avoid spam links: Avoid low-quality, irrelevant backlinks to avoid being penalized by search engines.

7. Use structured data markup:
- Schema markup: Use structured data markup (e.g. Schema.org) to provide search engines with more information about the product, which may be richly displayed in search results (e.g. star ratings, price, stock status, etc.).

8. monitor and analyze regularly:
- Use analytics tools: e.g. Google Analytics, Google Search Console, to regularly monitor website traffic, ranking changes and adjust SEO strategies based on the data.

Through these strategies, you can effectively improve the ranking of Shopify website in search engines and attract more natural traffic.