Improving the SEO of a Shopify Store

There are numerous articles out there on the internet stating tactics for improving the SEO of your website. But just like astrological predictions, not everything might be relatable to you.

There are various eCommerce platforms and every single online store, apart from having a different platform base, is also unique. Be in terms of goals, content, audience, location, etc.

So, not all those hundreds and thousands of strategies might work for your store.

Here, we’ll list down just a few of them especially for Shopify store owners. Moreover, these strategies are evaluated from the Shopify store’s inbuilt features only. Which means no paid tools are required!

SEO at a glance

People go to a search engine like Google in search for anything they need. Google uses a variety of information from different websites to create a ranked list of results(SERP) for a particular search query. Google or any other search engine determine which websites are most likely to be relevant to the search query entered by the customer, and then displays the results as per their relevance.

Let’s dig more into this:

Many factors can make your online store appear above in search results:

• Optimized content & structure of your website.
• The older the domain, the better.
• Authority of your website based on engagement with the audience. To be precise, reviews, ratings & comments.
• Non-paid or non-social media links pointing to your website from other websites.

So, if you are new to the eCommerce world, forget about the bottom three points. These last three come with age. Let’s just focus on the content & design/structure optimization.

Finding Keywords!

Think like a customer. Think about what you’ll search on Google if you’ll be looking for a certain product. 
Now, add these keywords to your content like page/product titles, descriptions, and image alt text.

NOTE: Make sure that the keywords are relevant otherwise Google can put you down for misleading too!

Just to let it out, Shopify takes care of some SEO automatically. Moreover, gives you the privilege to do as much as you can to build a strong SEO like:

• Adding/Editing tags, meta descriptions, and URLs for blog posts, products, and collections.
• Add/Edit the ALT image text.

Keywords

It’s important to know your targeted audience in order to make your store specific.

For example, you deal with garments, specifically shirts and you have a lot of audiences/customers from Mexico. Then, the possibility is that people search for terms like ‘affordable shirt to buy in Mexico‘.

Now, to appear in the search result for this query, your products & collections must include tags & meta descriptions including keywords: ‘affordable shirt‘ & ‘Mexico‘.

Use tools like Ubersuggest to find specific keywords according to the location of your store to target the right audience.

Another hack: Google the keyword, look for the ‘Searches related’ section at the bottom of the page. Here, you’ll have related search keywords for the term you searched.

I am repeating it again, the keywords should be relatable, readable, and natural. Customers won’t click links with random keywords. Moreover, search engines ignore websites that don’t use readable keywords.

Adding Keywords to your Shopify Store

There are four places where you can add keywords on your Shopify store to improve SEO:

• ALT text to images
• Title
• Meta description
• Tags

Image Alt Text

Alt text or an alternative text is added to the images that you upload on your website. This is because search engines can’t read images, they can only read the text. Adding alt text to images lets the search engine describe the image.
Alt-text is also an important accessibility feature for people who have visual impairments.

So, while describing the image you can include keywords related to the product or your website.

In your Shopify store, you can add alt text to product images, collection images & blog post images.

Product Images

• From Shopify admin, visit Products > All products.
• Click the product with the image that you want to edit.

Collection Images

• From Shopify admin, visit Products > Collections.
• Click the collection with the image that you want to edit.
• Tap on the image to add alt text.

Blog Post Featured Image

• From Shopify Admin, visit Online Store > Blog Posts
• Click the collection with the image that you want to edit.
• Tap on the image to add alt text.

Title & Meta description

The title tag and meta description are two of the most important elements of SEO. 

Title:

• Use less than 70 characters.
• It should be unique, readable, relatable & descriptive.
• Must include targeted keywords of your online store products, collections & blog post.

Meta description:

• Must include 320 characters or fewer.
• Concise, must include keywords & use plain & direct language.

The following things can be edited by visiting the product, collection or blog post’s ‘Search engine listing preview‘ section.

Set a title and description for your online store

1. From your Shopify admin, go to Online Store > Preferences.
2. Enter a title and meta description for your store.

Tags

Tags might not impact the SEO to a great level but it keeps the products, collections & blog posts organized.

In another view, if you use tags on your product page or link to your tagged collections pages they might impact SEO. If your Shopify theme displays the product tags on the product description page, they can become page content that Google will read.

Add tags by visiting the product, collection or blog post’s pages.

Optimizing Website Navigation

The website navigation structure needs to be self-explanatory, clean-cut & easy-to-operate. Don’t let your website be a complex maze with no directions. This will create a confusing and unpleasant user-experience, making them leave your website asap.

With Shopify online store, you don’t need to worry about your site structure, because Shopify has built-in search engine optimization to make sure that search engines can easily find all of your websites.

According to Shopify, these are the SEO practices that are automatically followed for your Shopify online store:

• Content follows a logical hierarchy of categories.
• Pages don’t use iframes.
• URLs use standard characters and simple, readable structure.

Moreover, you can do a few things from your end to optimize the navigation for search engines.

Here are a few tips to optimize the pages of your store:

NOTE: Pages shouldn’t be more than 3 clicks away from the home page, wherever possible.

• Adding heading & text to each section added on your home pages’ theme with targeted keywords. Do this by visiting Shopify Admin > Online Store > Customize. Click on the section you want to edit, make changes & save.

• Every menu added to your store should contain a title, description & website SEO. Edit this by visiting Shopify admin > Online Store > Pages. Click on the page you want to edit, make changes & save.

Apart from all this, I have previously written an article with 4 techniques that you can use to optimize the online store structure in general. Do check it out: Optimizing Website Navigation.

Need Help?

You can drop your query at shopify@webkul.com or raise a ticket at Webkul UV Desk.

Until next time. 👋