Here’s what you need to know to improve your Shopify store performance with smart SEO.

• To increase your chances of being found on search engines, focus on getting your website optimized first. Target the most relevant search terms that your customers are converting with. Here’s how to target the right keywords and drive tons of organic traffic to your Shopify store. This will greatly increase your likelihood of turning those visitors into paying customers!
• To get off on the right SEO foundation, be sure to configure Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Submitting your sitemap to search engines and installing Google Analytics will help track visitor interactions and improve your store’s performance.
• Take full control of your keyword strategy to find success. Begin with extensive keyword research, competitive keyword analysis, and keyword mapping to buyer intent. Knowing this would help you better target your dream Shopify audience and attract qualified leads for your business.
• To do some basic SEO improvements, start by writing better title tags and meta descriptions. Make sure to simplify your URLs and enhance your image alt text to maximize your SEO potential. Beyond that, you need to take advantage of structured data markup to help search engines better understand your content and create an effective content strategy.
• To address Shopify-specific SEO challenges, you’ll need to overcome platform-specific hurdles first. Tip #4—Walk the line between SEO and UX on your product pages and measure the impact of SEO apps on performance. This will allow you to prioritize optimizing your store for these unique SEO factors.
• To optimize store speed and mobile use, I suggest you boost site speed significantly, ensure total mobile responsiveness, and improve your Core Web Vitals score. Increase brand awareness through off-page SEO and reverse engineer competitor backlink profiles. Earn quality guest posts and reclaim unlinked brand mentions to add quality links and increase your visibility.

To truly take advantage of SEO to boost Shopify store performance, stay focused on the fundamentals. I’ve guided clients to increases in keyword ranking positions and an increase in organic traffic returning to their online stores.

You’ll improve your site’s discoverability when you create unique product descriptions and start focusing on long-tail keywords. I make sure to use on-page SEO techniques like meta descriptions and header tags.

Here are some technical elements that help search engines understand what your pages are about. I develop strong, persuasive content. Rich, engaging, informative content helps drive visitors further down the sales funnel, showing people exactly what makes your products special.

Why SEO Matters for Shopify

It can very well be the determining factor between the success or failure of your Shopify store. It helps increase your Shopify store’s visibility and rankings in search engines like Google. Here are 10 ways that you can improve your store’s performance through SEO.

It’s inbound marketing, meaning you pull in customers who are already searching for what you sell. SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate, far superior to the 1.7% for outbound leads. Combined, this makes SEO one of the most efficient channels for reaching high-intent customers.

Understand Search Engine Visibility

SEO effectively increases the visibility of your store to searchers on Google and other search engines. Then, when your ideal customer looks up the product you offer, Google will show your Shopify store high up in their search results. This is because your products/services align perfectly with what they’re looking for.

After all, the more visible you are, the more customers will discover your products. SEO can help you rank high on search engines for the most relevant search terms. For instance, say you sell handmade jewelry—focusing on keywords such as “one-of-a-kind handmade necklaces” will lead to the most qualified potential buyers.

Drive Targeted Organic Traffic

SEO brings purposeful customers to your Shopify store. Once cultivated, organic traffic usually leads to more sales and revenue. You bring in buyers with high commercial intent.

Maximize your potential with keyword research. Second, it guides you to get your content in front of the right people. Want to sell organic coffee to bring in all the sharp-eyed coffee connoisseurs! Use long, descriptive keywords, “fair trade organic coffee bean,s” to call attention to quality.

Build Long-Term Store Authority

SEO establishes long-term credibility for your Shopify store, making it essential for your overall site performance. Authority helps you rank higher and maintain that position, earning ongoing traffic. By producing quality content, you can position your Shopify store as a trusted resource, particularly through content marketing that educates consumers on the benefits of organic skincare.

Utilizing Google Search Console provides valuable SEO advice by offering insights into your website’s ranking in Google search results, which is crucial for optimizing your Shopify store. This tool helps you track search performance and understand what search queries lead customers to sites like yours.

Remember, 93% of all online experiences start with a search engine. This underscores the importance of a solid SEO strategy, as it enables you to learn which popular search terms are being used to find relevant products, ultimately guiding your content creation and SEO tasks.

Lay the Essential SEO Foundation

Before you go all in on advanced, you need to lay the groundwork for SEO success with your Shopify store. Our attention is on getting your essential webmaster tools established, your sitemap submitted, your website analytics installed, and your search engine indexing verified.

You’ll hear from SEO software experts on what tools you need to make your workflow more efficient. These foundational steps lay the groundwork to make sure your Shopify store is as easily discoverable, crawlable, and indexable by search engines as possible.

Set Up Key Webmaster Tools

From there, we utilize Google Search Console to monitor fluctuations in organic traffic and identify potential problems. We can track how many people discover you through Google and which keywords they’re using.

Of course, Bing Webmaster Tools assists with adding your Shopify store to the Bing crawler, giving your store more reach on the web. These additional tools significantly improve your chance of being indexed and ultimately found in search.

Once we identify technical issues, we address them quickly, ensuring your site always remains in top health.

Submit Your Store Sitemap

Shopify automatically creates a sitemap for you. Find it at www.yourstore.com/sitemap.xml.

Filing your sitemap means that when we submit your sitemap to search engines, it saves them time crawling your store. We keep your sitemap fresh and dynamic, ensuring search engines are always equipped with the most current details of your products.

Install Website Analytics Tracking

We install Google Analytics so we can track user behavior on your Shopify store. These insights inform our SEO and marketing strategies.

We keep an eye on all important metrics, including traffic sources, lead conversion rates, and bounce rates. Analytics shows us where we need to improve user experience and drive more sales.

Verify Search Engine Indexing

Use “site:yourdomain.com” in Google to check if your pages are indexed. If there are other indexing problems, we identify and resolve those as well.

Without indexing, there can be no visibility in search engines. For new and updated pages, we request that Google index them immediately.

Consider Helpful SEO Software

Some of the paid SEO tools we use are Moz, Ahrefs, Semrush, and KeySearch.co. We use free tools such as Surfer SEO Chrome plug-in, Keyword.io, Screaming Frog, MozBar, and Google Ads Keyword Planner.

SEO tools help us do keyword research and understand what our competitors are focusing on. They encourage us to find and fix problems on our site.

We choose the best SEO tools to support your Shopify store’s unique priorities.

Master Shopify Keyword Strategy

Keyword research is one of the most important aspects of SEO. It puts you in front of potential customers when they are ready to buy what you sell. Keep in mind that 68% of all online experiences begin with a search engine.

It’s extremely important to make sure that people can find your products in search engine result pages (SERPs, or Google results pages). Follow our tips, and you’ll help your store stand out in search results with a powerful keyword strategy.

Conduct Effective Keyword Research

Utilize a tool such as Moz, Ahrefs, or Semrush to identify keywords that will be authoritative. These tools are instrumental in helping you identify what prospective customers are searching for when they seek out products similar to yours.

Find keywords that have a lot of searches, but not much competition. Going after long-tail keywords is crucial, too. These are long-tail phrases that give focus to niche searches.

Let keyword research inform your content development and page optimization.

Analyze Competitor Keyword Use

Plug in your competitors’ URLs into your favorite SEO tools to find out which keywords they are ranking for. Know what they do well and what they miss the mark with on keyword targeting.

Identify your competitors’ keyword gaps that you can take advantage of. This analysis will allow you to have a more productive keyword strategy of your own.

Map Keywords to Buyer Intent

Determine the intent behind keywords: are people looking for information, navigation, or to make a purchase? Organize keywords by the appropriate content type, such as blog post, product page, or landing page.

Develop written and visual content that answers this search intent. This maximizes conversion rate by getting in front of the searches that have the highest intent.

Target Your Ideal Shopify Audience

Understand the keywords your potential customers are searching for. You can use tools like SparkToro to identify where your customers are online.

Develop a keyword strategy so you can develop content that truly speaks to your ideal customer. Targeting the right keyword strategy is key to getting qualified, high-intent leads to your store.

Implement Core SEO Enhancement Strategies

On-page SEO is crucial to improving the visibility and performance of your Shopify store. The good news is that when you prioritize the right SEO enhancement features, you can improve your website’s chances of ranking well in search results. This means optimizing the title tags, meta descriptions, URLs, and image alt text.

This includes appropriately implementing structured data, including schema markup, so that search engines have a better understanding of the content on your site.

1. Optimize On-Page Elements Now

For starters, paying attention to on-page SEO factors, like heading tags, title tags, meta descriptions, URLs, and image alt text, is important. This means that keyword placement within these elements should be strategic.

For instance, convincing title tags and meta descriptions often lead to high click-through rates. As a final note, make sure these elements are appealing and appropriate to your audience.

2. Craft Compelling Title Tags

Try to keep your title tags no longer than 60 characters, with your primary keywords at the front. Your title tags need to be specific and descriptive, giving the user a clear idea of what each page is about.

Create unique title tags for each page. This simple, effective strategy will not only increase your click-through rate, but it will help you rank better in search engines.

3. Write Engaging Meta Descriptions

Keep meta descriptions around 155-160 characters and plan to work your target keywords into them. After well-written meta descriptions should tell users why they should click your link.

Equally important is ensuring you have a unique and relevant meta description for every page. Optimize these descriptions with core SEO keyword enhancement strategies to improve click-through rates and search engine rankings.

4. Create SEO-Friendly URLs

Make your URLs short and human-friendly, including keywords you want to target. Do NOT use characters like ‘smart quotes’, em dash, etc. Readability is key.

Use hyphens to separate words. Build your Shopify store for a better URL structure. For example, the more descriptive, hyphen-separated URLs, such as /collections/organic-skincare, would make more sense.

5. Write Descriptive Image Alt Text

Alt text gives context to search engines so they know what’s in your image. As a general rule for all images, use descriptive and keyword-rich alt text.

Add target keywords naturally, but just where they make sense. Doing this, in addition to benefiting SEO, gives people using assistive technology a better experience and can boost the overall UX.

More than 50 percent of consumers with a disability have difficulty accessing content and products online.

Address Unique Shopify SEO Hurdles

Shopify is a great platform to use when you’re getting your online store off the ground. Get ready to address some unusual SEO hurdles in the process. It’s important to understand these hurdles so you can improve your store’s visibility and attract more customers.

Moving the needle on these challenges means knowing how to optimize your product pages, prevent duplicate content, and pick beneficial SEO apps.

Navigate Platform-Specific Challenges

Some common SEO issues, like duplicate content or URL structure, are felt differently on Shopify. When you cannot prevent duplicate content due to the nature of dynamic pages, implement canonical URLs to inform Google where to focus its attention.

Additionally, use the noindex and nofollow tags to indicate to Google that it should not index certain pages. We’ll cover a lot of ground here, from leveraging Shopify’s built-in SEO features to addressing unique Shopify SEO hurdles.

Besides Shopify’s built-in features, you can leverage third-party Shopify apps to improve your SEO as well, but pick wisely. Follow these techniques and consistently update yourself with developments on the Shopify platform and general SEO strategies to ensure your store remains visible and competitive in search results.

Balance Product Page SEO and UX

Sure, optimizing product pages for search engines is critical, but not at the expense of the user experience. Write unique, keyword-rich, succinct product descriptions. Research from Moz found that the majority of meta descriptions get truncated at the 155-160 character range.

Create powerful images and videos. Use rich media to capture your product’s beauty. Consumer concerns can go a long way toward helping customers find the right product in the safest, simplest manner possible.

It’s a best practice to ensure your deepest collection pages have links from, at the very least, your most important pages. If you notice one product or two that seem to be doing well, link those as well. Implement schema markup to make it easier for Google to understand your website content and show features like customer reviews and star ratings.

Evaluate SEO App Performance Impact

SEO Apps are great, but they can be a detriment to your site. Page speed is important. Evaluate how SEO apps affect site speed and performance.

Search engines – especially Google – prefer websites that have a cumulative layout shift (CLS) well under 0.1. Pay close attention to any SEO apps you choose and test their effects on performance.

Utilize Google Search Console to monitor any potential crawling errors or broken links. Now, set app settings to reap the most SEO rewards. Providing the right Core Web Vitals experience for your e-commerce store starts with having a robust online platform to deliver content securely and efficiently.

Optimize Store Speed and Mobile Use

Both site speed and mobile-friendliness are incredibly important factors to overall search engine ranking, which has a direct impact on how much traffic your store receives. A site that loads quickly and works well on mobile devices has better visitor retention. In turn, search engines such as Google will reward your ranking.

Join us as we walk you through getting your store fast, mobile-friendly, and Core Web Vitals approved.

Boost Site Speed Significantly

If you want maximum benefit for your site speed, there are a handful of things you should focus on doing. To start, speed up your images. Aim for image file sizes no larger than 200 KB. In addition, implement lazy loading, so images don’t download until they appear on the user’s screen.

We’ve gotten amazing results implementing the lazysizes library for our clients.

Do avoid browser caching… WAIT, WHAT!? Every time someone lands on your site, their browser caches information. In turn, the next time they return, your site is many times faster.

Reduce HTTP requests. Reduce the number of files your site has to load to improve webpage load speeds. Content Delivery Networks, or CDNs for short, are another great way to speed up your site. A CDN stores your site’s content on servers all over the world, so it loads faster for people no matter where they are.

Selecting a quality hosting provider with a focus on its speed and reliability is important, too. Don’t forget, test and monitor your site speed on a regular basis to ensure your site is operating like a well-oiled machine.

Having too many apps or third-party codes will negatively affect your Shopify store’s speed, so try to minimize those. Just one GIF on a page can significantly impact its size. One GIF asset alone can make up 2.8 MB.

Ensure Total Mobile Responsiveness

All Shopify themes are mobile responsive, so ensure you optimize your store to display and operate seamlessly on smaller screens. Having a fully responsive store theme is non-negotiable.

Ensure that you test your store on multiple mobile devices to determine what it looks like and how well it functions. Use mobile-optimized images and content, ensure a checkout page is responsive to every size of screen, including a mobile device.

With mobile payment options such as Apple Pay and Google Wallet, your mobile checkout experience can be streamlined. Make them large enough to minimize mistakes (i.e., use buttons that are easy to tap on mobile screens). A tappable mobile button needs to be a minimum of 48px, with 32px of padding around it.

Improve Core Web Vitals Score

Core Web Vitals are important for search engine rankings. Learn how to prioritize improving Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

Run your site through Google PageSpeed Insights to identify where you can make the most impactful changes. Optimize Store Speed and Mobile Use. Figure out which optimizations will have the biggest impact on your Core Web Vitals and prioritize accordingly.

So check in frequently and work toward increasing your score.

Expand Reach with Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO expands your Shopify store’s reach outside of your website. It’s the process of establishing your brand’s authority and trustworthiness throughout the web. To ensure you’re ranking for the right search intent, conduct competitive backlink analysis and acquire guest posts.

Further, generate press mentions for your business, and recover unlinked brand mentions.

Analyze Competitor Backlink Profiles

With SEO tools like Ahrefs or Semrush, you can easily check which websites link to your competitors. Keep an eye on quality backlinks from authoritative sites that you can set your sights on.

Understanding your competitors’ backlink strategies helps you create a better plan for your store. Then take those insights to plan your backlink acquisition strategy.

Secure Quality Guest Posts

Identify appropriate websites within your niche that accept guest contributions. Pitch them compelling ideas that will provide value to their audience.

Create valuable how-to guidelines and make sure you link to your Shopify store.

Earn Valuable Press Mentions

Build a contact list of journalists and media outlets that report within and about your industry. Develop a press pitch that explains why your Shopify store is the most interesting, relevant, or unique news story out there.

Develop a press kit that outlines the Who/What/Where/When of your store, and start cultivating relationships with local and national journalists.

Reclaim Unlinked Brand Mentions

Look for any mentions of your brand name around the web that don’t have a link back to your store. To track when your brand is mentioned, set up Google Alerts.

Contact the site owners and request that they link to you. This helps you leverage those mentions into valuable backlinks. It may take a few weeks to a few months before you truly start seeing results, especially when considering how competitive your industry is.

Optimize Local Presence for Stores

Provide complete and consistent information, business hours, and add in photos. Claim your business listings on web directories such as Yelp.

In addition, prompt happy customers to write reviews on Google and other relevant review platforms. These both help improve visibility to local customers searching nearby.

Manage Online Directory Listings

Find and create your business listings on popular online directories. Ensure that your business name, address, and phone number are accurate and uniformly formatted in every directory.

Utilize these directories to give your business a boost in local search engine results, while managing your online reputation.

Refine Ecommerce Specific SEO

For e-commerce stores especially, go beyond the basics and consider the more specialized e-commerce specific SEO tactics. Search engine optimization is one of the best ways to bring in new customers because they are already looking for what you have to offer.

Ready for this one—35% of all online traffic comes from organic search! This traffic is important, too, making up 33% of an online store’s revenue. Keeping your site’s content relevant and engaging encourages visitors to stick around longer, which can boost your search engine rankings.

Enhance Product Descriptions Carefully

After your titles, your product descriptions are usually a customer’s first genuine feel for what you’re selling, so this is your shot to get them right.

Create meaningful, persuasive descriptions that use those keywords and more in an organic way. The keywords your customers would search for. Include as much information as possible, anticipating questions they might have and addressing any hesitations.

Think of your description as a sales pitch in text form, optimizing not just for search engines, but for turning visitors into buyers.

Encourage and Display Customer Reviews

Provide easy options for customers to review products directly on your Shopify storefront. Every time you receive a review, reply to it, regardless of whether it has been left by a satisfied or unhappy customer.

It proves that you’re paying attention, and that is invaluable. Showing customer reviews up front and center on your product pages is a key job to get right.

Social proof through customer reviews establishes trust and proves to potential buyers that previous customers have enjoyed their purchase.

Use High-Resolution Product Visuals

In a visual platform like Instagram, high-quality images and videos are a necessity to beautify your products. Whatever you do, optimize these visuals to ensure your site loads lightning speed, especially on mobile.

Include alt text to summarize every image. Search engines can’t know what the ID picture is, so giving alt text gets search engines that useful details.

High-quality product imagery will go a long way towards increasing conversions and sales.

Measure Your Shopify SEO Success

To measure the success of your SEO strategy, the most essential thing is tracking the right data through effective SEO tools. If you want to measure success, that means tracking specific metrics and using that data to make adjustments to your strategy. Create dashboards to get an at-a-glance view of your SEO success and measure your ROI to understand the full effect of your efforts.

Track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

It’s important to follow your key performance indicators. Watch as your organic traffic starts to grow! It’s the total number of visitors finding your store via search engines.

Further, monitor your keyword rankings to know what position your pages rank for specific keywords in SERPs. Keep an eye on your conversion rates, tracking how many of your site visitors end up purchasing from you.

In addition to tracking your SEO success, measure the revenue generated from organic search. Establish specific goals for each of these areas, and track your progress regularly.

If you are falling short of your goals, this gives you an indication of where you should direct your SEO improvement efforts. By tracking these select KPIs on a consistent basis, you’ll be able to identify trends and make proactive changes to keep your store generating maximum sales.

Configure Custom SEO Dashboards

Leverage tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console to create customized dashboards and reports. Use these dashboards to get a better understanding of your Shopify SEO performance.

Google Search Console provides insights about your site’s position in Google search results. You can look at which pages rank for which search queries, as well as what search terms drive traffic to your store.

Google Tag Manager allows you to manage all of your website’s tracking code in one convenient location. Ensure you’re measuring the metrics that are most important to your business.

Finally, circulate your dashboards among your team members to ensure everyone in your organization is up to date and on the same page.

Calculate SEO Return on Investment

To determine the ROI of your SEO, you first need to total what you’re spending on SEO. From there, measure the revenue you receive directly from organic traffic.

ROI can be calculated by taking your total revenue and dividing it by your total costs. This back-of-the-envelope calculation gives you the ammunition to prove your SEO efforts are worth it and steer your future investments.

In our example, each one-second improvement in site speed equals +$ 8,000 in revenue for this website. Google PageSpeed Insights is Google’s site speed testing tool.

Conclusion

You’re armed and ready with the knowledge to improve your Shopify store’s performance with SEO. By now, you’ve figured out how to optimize your store, what keywords to target, and how to address basic SEO issues. You’re aware that SEO is the best way to ensure your store is faster and more mobile-friendly.

I took you through earning backlinks from other websites, optimizing your product pages, and lastly, you want to measure success and find out what’s successful. These are the steps to break down to keep you attracting more customers and scaling your business.

Are you prepared to watch your Shopify store start rising through the search rankings on Google? Begin implementing these Shopify SEO tips today. Then watch your traffic and sales grow!

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is SEO important for my Shopify store?

SEO increases your Shopify store’s online presence in search engine results pages, making it essential for an effective SEO strategy. This results in higher organic traffic, warm leads, and of course, more sales, contributing to the overall success of your ecommerce site.

How do I find the right keywords for my Shopify products?

• Begin with a list of words and phrases that your customers would use to look for your products.
• Use keyword research tools such as Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs to find relevant, high-volume, low-competition keywords.
• Analyze the keywords of your competitors for inspiration.

What are some core SEO enhancements I can make to my Shopify store?

Utilize appropriate keywords for your product titles and descriptions to enhance your SEO strategy. Write descriptive image alt text to make technical SEO work effectively for you. Establish a good site structure with user-friendly navigation and create valuable content that relates to your products.

What are some common SEO problems specific to Shopify?

One of the top contributors to duplicate content issues in e-commerce sites is product variations. Pagination can also quickly create crawlability issues, affecting technical SEO. Shopify’s default URL structure may be incompatible with search optimization. Addressing these challenges requires a solid SEO strategy and technical expertise.

How can I improve my Shopify store’s speed?

To enhance site performance, it’s crucial to optimize image sizes by compressing them without compromising quality. Additionally, installing a lightweight Shopify theme and utilizing caching can save resources. By minimizing your CSS and JavaScript files, you can improve the loading of websites, leading to better usability and higher rankings in search engine results pages.