You’ve built your Shopify site, and it’s open for business. But when you search for your products on Google, competitors are ranking better in the search results! The famous saying “if you build it, they will come” may have been a good strategy before the digital era but in today’s competitive internet-driven world, it takes a lot more than building an eCommerce store to attract customers.
How can you get your Shopify site to show up in Google search results? The answer is search engine optimization, better known as SEO. Every website can benefit from applying SEO best practices, but we’re going to specifically focus on what you can do in Shopify to improve your ranking.
Site Structure
How you design the layout of your site can have a big effect on how Google crawls it. One of the best ways to optimize your Shopify site structure is to avoid creating too many subcategory levels. Large eCommerce platforms like Amazon have a very deep site structure because they offer so many products across a vast number of shopping categories. For example, to see the product page of an iPhone charger on Amazon requires navigating through five category levels.
Amazon’s Home Page > Electronics > Cell Phones & Accessories > Accessories > Chargers & Power Adaptors > iPhone > Product Page
The structure above logically makes sense, but it’s not necessarily good for the customer’s experience. The less pages your customers have to visit to find the products they’re looking for, the more satisfied they will be with using your site. For example, if you’re running a Shopify site for smartphone accessories, a better structure would be:
Shopify Site Home Page > Chargers & Power Adaptors > iPhone > Product Page
A good rule of thumb is to try to keep a product page no more than three clicks away from the home page.
Breadcrumb Navigation
Breadcrumbs are a secondary navigation tool that usually appear toward the top of each page (except the home page). They visually show customers the path from the home page to the current page they’re on and provide a link to each page along the path to help with navigating the site.
[Insert image of Shopify page with bread crumbs]
Breadcrumb links are not only good for customers, but they’re also helpful in telling Google how your site is structured and provide additional internal links (which are also good for SEO). To add breadcrumb navigation to your Shopify site, you may need to create a Liquid snippet if your theme doesn’t already include this feature as an option.
Sitemap File
A sitemap file is another way for you to show Google your site’s structure. Shopify makes it easy by automatically creating a sitemap.
your-domain-name.com/sitemap.xml
However, you need to do a few more steps in order for Google to recognize the sitemap URL.
- Set up a Google Search Console account and connect your website to it.
- Verify to Google that you’re the owner of the website.
- Submit your sitemap in Google Search Console.
For more details on how to do each of these steps, we suggest visiting our Shopify Sitemap Guide.
Search Bar
One workaround for having a deeper site structure like Amazon is to include a search bar on your site. If the default search bar in your Shopify theme doesn’t look exactly the way you want it to, it’s possible to customize it by editing the theme’s Shopify liquid or paying a Shopify expert to do it for you.
[Insert image of Shopify site with search bar]
Keyword Targeting
Keywords are words and phrases that people type into Google. Google then tries to provide the best answers for those keywords in its search results page. By adding relevant keywords to each of your site’s pages, you’re indicating to Google what your site is about. There is an entire industry of free and subscription SEO tools available to help you find high-quality keywords. We suggest paying for tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush for at least a month to help you with your keyword research.
Once you have researched and identified the keywords that you want to rank for in Google, there are a few places that you should add them to each page.
Meta Titles & H1 Headings
The meta title appears in Google search results and the H1 heading appears at the top of each of your site’s pages. Shopify automatically makes the meta title match the H1 heading that you type into each page, but you can manually edit the meta title if you want it to have different text.
What does “H1” mean? It’s an HTML tag for a page’s section headings that indicates how important the text is to Google. H1 is the most important heading, followed by H2, H3, etc. In Shopify, the page’s title is always an H1 by default. Adding target keywords to your H1 and H2 headings is a classic SEO strategy.
Tips for Titles:
- Try to place the target keyword toward the beginning of the title
- Keep the title less than 60 letters long, otherwise Google might cut off the end of the title with an ellipsis (…) on the search results page.
- The title should sound natural, so don’t stuff it with a bunch of similar keywords or weird phrasing.
- Don’t change your page title very often because it can negatively affect your Google page rank.
- Try to use a different target keyword for each page instead of the same keyword on every page.
- Check out this great SEO resource by Moz for how to structure titles with target keywords.
Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions only show up on the search engine results page; never on your site. They don’t directly affect SEO. However, if you include a target keyword in the description, Google will highlight it with bold text, which can help your description stand out from competitors.
Tips for Meta Descriptions:
- Insert the keyword in the first sentence if possible.
- Keep the description less than 160 letters long.
- Write unique meta descriptions for each page.
Alt Image Text
The Alt Image Text is an HTML tag that helps tell Google what images look like, which is good for SEO. Google’s web crawlers are not able to understand what an image file is, but this tag lets you attach descriptions to your images that Google is able to understand. By inserting a target keyword as part of the alt image text, your images may start showing up in Google Image search results for that keyword.
Shopify makes it easy to add and modify Alt Image Text for each image. Hover the cursor over any image, click on the three dots, and then click “Edit alt text.”
Page Content
Well-written content should be able to naturally include target keywords. For each page, you should focus on one (possibly two) keywords. However, Google may penalize the page’s ranking if the keyword is used too much. Besides the page’s H1, you can also consider adding it a few more times throughout.
- Category page text
- Product description
- Blog article introduction, body, and conclusion
- H2 or H3
Just make sure that it sounds natural and doesn’t negatively affect the customer’s experience on your site.
Essential SEO Apps & Tools
Shopify is known for its simplicity and easy-to-use platform. There are plenty of apps and tools that you can connect to your Shopify account that make it even more manageable and easier for search engine optimization.
Plug in SEO App for Shopify
Cost: Free or monthly subscription
It’s not Shopify’s only SEO app, but over 30,000 Shopify stores use Plug in SEO as their primary tool for simple optimization. It helps you fix issues that likely have a direct impact on search engine ranking by auditing your site, notifying you of potential issues, and providing advice on how to correct them.
The app is available both in a basic free version and a monthly subscription. Overall, the reviews are good, however, some Shopify owners complain that the paid version (currently listed as $20 / month) does not provide enough benefits to justify the monthly cost.
Google Search Console
Cost: Free
Setting up a Google Search Console account and connecting it to your website will let you:
- Submit your Shopify sitemap
- Know which pages Google is crawling.
- Know which pages have crawl errors that prevent Google from showing them in search results.
- Manually submit URLs to notify Google that you want a new page to be crawled.
- See what keywords your website ranks for and the ranking position for each keyword — a great resource for future keyword research!
Google Analytics
Cost: Free
While Search Console provides you with information on how your website performs in Google, Google Analytics focuses on how your customers interact with your website. At the very minimum you can monitor traffic data like bounce rate, page views, and page duration, but you can also do so much more.
It’s also a great tool for tracking performance after implementing SEO changes to your site.
Google My Business
Cost: Free
If your Shopify site is targeting a local community, it’s essential that you set up a Google My Business account, which can provide you with a coveted position in Google’s local listings that appear in search results.
[Insert image of Google local listing search results]
Google PageSpeed Insights
Cost: Free
Page speed is quickly becoming a very important factor for SEO and in order to stay competitive, you need to make sure your website loads quickly! Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a free tool that you can use to help you diagnose issues that are causing your website to load slowly.
Fortunately, Shopify implements a content delivery network (CDN) for all accounts, which greatly helps with load speed for international customers.
Troubleshooting SEO in Shopify
There are many SEO opportunities available that are quite easy to implement, even for first-time Shopify users. However, to implement intermediate and advanced SEO on your Shopify site, there are two places you can turn to.
Shopify Support Forums
Luckily, Shopify has a comprehensive forum with a friendly community where you can ask questions and search for answers to previous questions posted by like-minded Shopify users.
You can probably find an answer to just about anything related to Shopify, from SEO to shipping to accounting and taxes. Their e-commerce marketing thread alone has over 30,000 posts, including website optimization, Google Ads, and much more. So if you have any questions, the Shopify forum most likely has already answered it at some point.
Additionally, Shopify also offers a 24/7 support feature for active accounts.
Shopify SEO Experts
If you found a solution to your SEO question on Shopify’s support forum but don’t know how to implement it, then you may want to consider hiring a Shopify SEO Expert (yes, they exist, and they specialize in optimizing Shopify sites).
In addition to SEO, Shopify offers experts for almost any eCommerce business area you need support with: marketing and sales, branding, content marketing, and development, just to name a few.
There’s a lot of work that goes into creating and optimizing an eCommerce website, and as a business owner, you have to focus on planning the day-to-day operations. Hiring a Shopify SEO expert is an investment that can help free up more time so you can focus on your business while still giving your site a competitive advantage.
What SEO Can and Can’t Do
It’s important to understand that SEO does not guarantee you will rank at the top of Google (for that, you should consider trying Google Ads). What SEO can do is give you an edge over your competitors who haven’t yet optimized their site or optimized it poorly.
Also, SEO takes time. Results may not show up for 3–6 months and sometimes it’s very hard to know exactly which changes caused your site’s traffic to go up or down — this is where tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics can help you keep track of traffic performance.
Shopify SEO Checklist
Even simple SEO can be effective at helping you rank better. If you don’t have much time or money to dedicate to fully optimizing your site, the following list covers the basics that you should start with.
| Site Structure |
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|---|---|
| Keyword Targeting |
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| SEO Apps & Tools |
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Shopify Makes eCommerce SEO Simple
Learning the ins and outs of SEO can be a daunting task in the beginning, but it’s extremely beneficial and highly rewarding because it puts some of the control in your hands. There is no guarantee that SEO will get you to the top of search results for your target keywords, but it will likely put your website in front of more customers’ faces.
Whether you choose to do it all yourself or hire an expert, optimizing your website could very well be essential for your business’s long-term success. Make sure you refer back to our SEO checklist, add to it, upgrade it, and research, research, research! Also, if you’re brand new to the world of SEO, we highly recommend heading over to Moz to read their detailed SEO guide for a better understanding.
