This is why having a Shopify SEO analysis done is extremely beneficial to your online store. You can improve your rankings by running an SEO analysis on your store’s structure, content, and technical aspects.
Our Shopify SEO audit report enables you to identify the main issues that require action, from pages loading slowly to missing or duplicate meta descriptions.
For a comprehensive Shopify SEO analysis, ensure you’re using keywords properly and that product pages are well-optimized. That means finding appropriate keywords to target and implementing them strategically into your content.
You have the user experience in mind, wanting to improve site speed and eliminate broken links as part of your site health initiative. Here’s what you need to know to run your own Shopify SEO analysis like a pro.
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What is Shopify SEO Analysis?
We thoroughly examine your Shopify store, determining how well it’s set up to rank in search engine result pages (SERPS). This procedure is referred to as Shopify SEO analysis. It’s like giving your store a checkup. This is invaluable for anyone looking to improve their visibility on search engines such as Google.
This analysis equips us to identify what could be improved within your site. If you need to make improvements, think of it as a chance to improve your shop’s visibility. The end goal is to get more of the right people finding you online.
In a world where Shopify stores are loading 1.8x faster than the competition, you’re already halfway there when it comes to user experience. Ultimately, you don’t want Google to penalize your store for being confusing and unhelpful. Google has a new system they’re rolling out to determine how user-friendly your site is.
It’s called Core Web Vitals. The easiest way to improve Core Web Vitals for your online store is by getting a good ecommerce platform to manage content delivery. The purpose of Shopify SEO analysis is to get your store to rank higher in search results.
When your site ranks higher, a greater number of the most qualified visitors reach your store. This is extremely significant since nearly 28% of all clicks are directed towards the very first result on Google. We check for common issues such as duplicate content, where the same content appears on multiple pages.
Search engines hate this too, since they don’t know which page they should show users. Relevant, useful, and entertaining content on your site will hook your visitors and have them coming back for more. That longer dwell time could do wonders for your organic ranking.
To put it simply, Shopify SEO analysis is critically important for your business’s success, allowing you to effectively compete with others in your space online.
Why Conduct a Shopify SEO Audit?
A Shopify SEO audit identifies and addresses the SEO issues that hold back your search engine visibility. Consider it a virtual spring cleaning for your ecommerce storefront.
Beyond identifying crucial issues with your SEO performance, an SEO audit uncovers exciting opportunities to set your website apart and wow your visitors. It provides valuable information that allows you to form a data-driven SEO strategy.
In short, an SEO audit helps you make sure your e-commerce site is in line with the best practices of search engines.
Improve Search Engine Visibility
SEO audits help you identify areas where you can gain visibility for keywords that qualify as highly relevant. Fixing technical SEO issues helps ensure that your site is easy to crawl and index.
The more you optimize your content, the more likely you are to rise through the search result ranks. As your search engine visibility improves, you attract more potential customers to your online store.
Find out where you can improve your site to move higher up search results pages. Improve title tags, meta description, and internal linking structure.
Enhance User Experience
US site speed optimization enhances user experience and engagement on your site and lowers bounce rates. A clear web architecture makes it easy for visitors to your online store to find their way around your Shopify site.
Mobile-friendliness is also crucial. You want to make sure your mobile visitors are getting the best experience possible. Considering mobile sales are expected to reach $710.4 billion by 2025, having a mobile-friendly site is key.
Not only will this improve your user experience with higher conversion rates, but it will also keep your customers happier overall. You can use it to find and repair technical issues, like broken links and redirects.
Increase Organic Traffic
When optimized correctly, the keyword searchers you want most—those that are most likely to buy- get added to your online store. Creating quality content is essential to increasing your organic search traffic and engagement.
Better search engine rankings mean more organic traffic. The more organic traffic you get, the more leads and sales your e-commerce business will generate.
Get a grip on your customers’ search intent. Answer more complex queries with in-depth top funnel content that educates, such as an FAQ page for users searching for solutions.
Boost Conversion Rates
Great product descriptions make customers more likely to convert. Concise messaging and clear calls-to-action will help lead users closer to making a purchase.
Showcasing social proof with customer reviews and testimonials boosts your conversions. When it comes to checkout, a smooth process helps lead shoppers through their transactions.
Get a feel for your customers’ purchase intent. Develop informative, helpful content that draws them further down the funnel and closer to finishing their purchase with actionable CTAs, such as “Buy Today” or “Shop Now.
How to Run a Shopify SEO Analysis Like a Pro
That’s why running a Shopify SEO analysis is key to ensuring your store gets the visibility it deserves. We’ll run a full SEO analysis of your site. This will allow us to identify areas that require improvement and make sure that it is aligned with search engine best practices.
By following these steps, you’ll be able to turn your findings into effective strategies that will help you rank in search results.
1. Set Up Essential SEO Tools
Start by adding Google Search Console to monitor your website’s performance and identify the errors you need to fix. Register and verify your domain, so that Google will trust that you’re the owner of the website.
Then track your analysis efforts. Next, go into Google Analytics to see how website traffic, user behavior, and conversion rates have been affected. Additionally, check out some more SEO tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Moz to assist with your keyword research and competitor analysis.
Lastly, look into Shopify SEO-friendly apps such as SEOAnt to assist you with on-page optimization and fixing technical SEO issues.
2. Verify Site Indexing Status
Check if your Shopify site is properly indexed in Google using the “site:” search operator. Then submit the XML sitemap to Google Search Console to help all your pages be crawled and indexed.
Learn how to identify and fix them all here. Indexing Issues 5.15 Which indexability errors/warnings are reported in your Google Search Console? Make sure none of your key pages are being disallowed in the robots.txt or set to noindex.
Employ tools such as Screaming Frog to identify and fix any crawl errors on your site to enhance your site’s crawlability and indexing potential.
3. Analyze Site Architecture & URLs
Reassess your concrete site structure to make sure it’s as logical and user-friendly as possible. Make sure your URLs are as clean, short, and descriptive as possible when it comes to what’s found on the page.
Address all broken links or redirect chains that worsen user experience and crawlability. Adopt a standardized URL format for all pages on your Shopify website.
4. Perform Keyword Research
Find the most applicable keywords with good search volumes that your potential customers are using to discover your products. Start with keyword research and use tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs, or Google Keyword Planner to come up with keyword ideas.
Further, check your competitor’s keyword rankings to find valuable keywords you can target. Optimize for long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords can help you attract more specific searches and bring in highly-targeted traffic.
Use keyword research tools such as Moz, Ahrefs, or Semrush. Find out what keywords, phrases, and terms your ideal customers are entering into search engines.
Technical SEO Audit for Shopify
A technical SEO audit helps find and fix technical problems that might hurt how well your Shopify store shows up in search results. This is important because it can improve your website’s crawling and indexing by search engines.
On top of that, it increases your page speed. When you take care of technical SEO, you make sure your site is healthy overall, which can boost your search engine rankings.
Check Mobile Friendliness
Sixty-seven percent of internet users prefer browsing on mobile. So, it’s important to make sure that your site is doing great on mobile devices. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool will allow you to check how well your Shopify site is set up for mobile users.
Test to see that your site scales properly across screen sizes and devices. Perform mobile optimization on your images and content. If any issues are detected by Google Search Console related to mobile usability, address them immediately.
Improve Page Speed Performance
No wonder page speed has become one of the primary factors for a good user experience and SEO. Utilize Google’s PageSpeed Insights to test both mobile and desktop page speed, and get recommendations on how to speed it up.
Image optimization is crucial. Compress your images to improve site loading speed. Leverage browser caching and reduce HTTP requests to further improve page load speeds.
A content delivery network (CDN) solution can work wonders as well, by distributing your content on a variety of servers. TinyIMG is one such page speed optimization app.
Fix Broken Links
Google doesn’t like broken links because they have a negative effect on user experience and SEO. Run a website crawler such as Screaming Frog or Sitebulb to identify any broken links that may exist on your site.
Correct broken internal links by either changing the URL they’re pointing to or deleting the link altogether. Redirect them to relevant pages on your Shopify site, or the homepage if there’s no other solution.
Monitor your broken links on a consistent basis to keep your site easy to navigate. Look for 3xx codes. Navigate to the Bulk Export tab. Next, go to Response Codes > Client Error > 3xx Inlinks in Screaming Frog.
Submit XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is another way of guiding search engines through your site and showing them its structure. Find your XML sitemap file (usually at www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml) and submit it to Google Search Console.
This ensures that all your important pages are crawled and indexed. Make sure to regenerate the sitemap every time you add new pages or modify existing ones. Ensure your sitemap is properly formatted and error-free.
Review Robots.txt File
Your robots.txt file governs what search engines can and can’t crawl. Make sure they don’t block your important pages. Find your robots.txt file (usually at www.yoursite.com/robots.txt) and make sure it’s not blocking important pages.
Additionally, use it to stop the crawling of duplicate content or low-value pages. You can test your robots.txt file using Google Search Console’s robots.txt Tester tool.
Implement HTTPS
You may have heard, Google takes HTTPS into account when ranking websites. To ensure your Shopify site is secure, check that it’s configured to use HTTPS, which encrypts your customers’ data.
Redirect any HTTP traffic over to HTTPS and update any internal linking, as well as any external linking, to point to URLs that include HTTPS. Ensure your SSL certificate is valid and installed correctly.
Address Duplicate Content Issues
Duplicate content can be a real pain, especially when it comes to SEO. Utilize a website crawler or other SEO tool to help you identify duplicate content issues.
With canonical tags, let search engines know which version of a page they should be ranking. Eliminate or consolidate redundant material to create a fresh piece.
Avoid copying manufacturer description duplicate content for product pages. There are additional filters you need to look at, too. Here in Screaming Frog, you would visit Canonicals > Missing and Canonicals > Non-indexable.
Content SEO Audit for Shopify
A content SEO audit examines the quality, relevance, and optimization of your on-site content. If you’re looking to earn and retain the most valuable shoppers, content SEO is an essential ingredient in your recipe for success.
We’re discussing readability, keyword targeting, topic clustering, and content formats. When you get your content right, search engines recognize this, and more people discover your site.
Evaluate Content Readability
Use a readability tool to see how readable your content is. Make it easy for people to read your writing, because if you bore them, they won’t stay to learn more.
Quick Tip #4: Format all content for readability. Utilize short paragraphs, bullet points and headings to make reading simple on the eyes. Avoid jargon or other technical language that could lead to misunderstandings.
Optimize Collection Pages
Ensure that every collection page has a distinct description from the others, using relevant keywords. Pay special attention to the title tag and meta description of your collection pages.
… and don’t forget to provide a unique, quality image to represent each collection! Ensure your collection pages are user-friendly.
So collection pages aren’t just about keywords. Most e-commerce sites – 20-30% – lose this potential by not having optimized category pages.
Leverage Long-Tail Keywords
Discover those more granular keywords that have high user intent. Incorporate these long-tail keywords into your product pages, how-tos, blog content, and more.
Solve your customers’ pain points and answer their questions. Target long-tail keywords to attract quality traffic to your Shopify store.
Encourage Customer Reviews
Create a system to gather and display customer reviews prominently on your product pages. Encourage customers to review products once purchased.
Make it a habit to respond to every review, including the negative ones—not just the good reviews. Leverage customer feedback to refine product descriptions and the overall shopping experience.
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Diversify Content Formats
Use a wide variety of content formats, including articles, videos, infographics, and podcasts. Mix things up with these styles to attract various audiences and maintain their attention.
Repurpose underperforming content into new formats, and share your content across social media, email, and search engine campaigns.
Off-Page SEO Audit for Shopify
Off-page SEO is all about what you do outside of your website to increase your rankings in search engines. It’s incredibly important for establishing your brand’s authority and trustworthiness in the eyes of customers. The better your off-page SEO presence, the more visible you are and the more organic traffic you earn.
Things to check are your link profile, unlinked brand mentions, and your activity on social media. Tools such as MozBar, Screaming Frog, and Keyword.io will help you carry out your off-page SEO audit. Shopify SEO expert Kyle Risley suggests conducting an e-commerce SEO audit every year or twice a year if your budget allows.
Analyze Backlink Profile
Either with tools such as Ahrefs or SEMrush, see what your site looks like regarding your backlink profile. Earn quality backlinks from authoritative websites. Remove any toxic or spammy backlinks that may be harming your rankings.
Monitor your new backlinks and be sure to defend yourself against any kind of negative SEO blitzing.
Reclaim Brand Mentions
Keep track of your brand mentions across the web with tools such as Google Alerts or Mention. Find sites that have referenced your brand and not linked to your Shopify site. From there, reach out to them and politely ask them to include a link.
Give gratitude to the sites that refer to your brand and provide a link. Leverage these organic mentions to cultivate positive Discord relationships with influencers and your potential customers.
Secure Press Mentions
Reach out to journalists and bloggers in the e-commerce space to earn press coverage. Provide them with exclusive information. Attend industry events and conferences to meet real media folks.
Develop a digital press kit that includes details about your brand, product offerings, and who your target audience is.
Guest Posting Opportunities
Compile a list of relevant blogs and sites within the e-commerce niche that accept guest posts. Pitch guest post ideas that would be useful and engaging to your readers.
Make sure that you include a link back to your Shopify site either in your author bio or within the body of the post. Share your guest posts on social media.
User Experience (UX) Audit for SEO
A user experience (UX) audit reviews how easy it is for visitors to use your website and how satisfied they are with their visit. Search engines value websites that offer a great UX, so UX is important for SEO. Improving UX can increase how long people stay on your site, decrease bounce rates, boost user satisfaction, and help your search engine rankings.
UX audits help review your site’s UX aspects like how easy it is to navigate, how well it works on mobile devices, and how fast it loads. These are crucial components that can make or break a visitor’s interest. It’s essential to put yourself in the shoes of the user and understand what questions they have about a product and the information they need.
Analyze Site Navigation
Provide intuitive site navigation that’s easy to follow and logically structured. Follow it with a logical hierarchy of categories and subcategories.
Add breadcrumb navigation. This ensures users are aware of their location within your site architecture. Conduct usability testing on the primary user navigation to identify any issues early.
Improve Site Search Functionality
Your site search should ideally not only have a high degree of precision, but also provide the most relevant results. Save time and search engine real estate by using autocomplete suggestions to guide users to their goal.
Monitor site search queries to find out which products and keywords are trending. Relevant, compelling product descriptions and titles can help you rank well in search, so get optimizing.
Optimize for Mobile Users
Make sure your site automatically resizes and optimizes for various devices. Having a mobile-friendly site ensures you have the best shot at snagging a bigger piece of the rapidly growing e-commerce pie.
Sales figures are expected to hit a staggering $710.4 billion by 2025. Use responsive design, and optimize images and content with mobile in mind. Implement a responsive or mobile-first design.
Perform usability testing on a variety of mobile devices to ensure UX is top-notch.
Ensure Fast Loading Times
Run your page speed through Google’s PageSpeed Insights to see your current speed and instructions on how to improve page speed. Optimize image files, enable browser caching, and minify HTTP requests to create a seamless onboarding experience that keeps your audience engaged.
Use a content delivery network (CDN) to deliver your content from the server closest to the user’s device to reduce loading time. Perhaps you have a standalone page speed optimization app.
Monitor and Track Your Progress
Finally, it’s important to monitor and track the progress of any SEO you’re doing. With a watchful eye to measure and track your SEO progress, you’ll have a clear view of what is working and what isn’t. Creating SEO reporting dashboards helps you keep an eye on your most important KPIs.
This level of visibility provides the ability to course correct and change strategy in real time, as necessary. Armed with data-driven insights at your fingertips, you can optimize your SEO campaigns accordingly to align more closely with these goals.
Set Up SEO Reporting Dashboards
Begin by building out dashboards for SEO reporting in Google Analytics and Google Search Console. You can start by scanning the site for SEO improvements with tools like SEOmator’s free SEO audit tool.
Next, monitor key performance indicators such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, conversion rates, and bounce rates. Customize these dashboards to fit your specific SEO objectives. Set up recurring reports to monitor your progress and catch patterns.
Track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Choose which KPIs are most relevant to your company’s goals. Monitor and track your progress. Track keywords, organic traffic, bounce rate, conversion rate, and your overall SEO score.
Determine ambitious targets for each KPI and track progress toward those targets. Out of this data, you can identify where you need to do better and continuously optimize your SEO efforts.
Analyze Brand vs. Non-Brand Traffic
Break your organic traffic down into two groups. Pay attention to brand traffic – searches that include your brand name – vs non-brand traffic – searches that do not contain your brand name.
Break it down and consider how each piece does on its own. Monitor to find opportunities to increase branded search and increase overall brand traffic. Further, make sure to play up non-brand keywords to capture new customers who aren’t familiar with your brand yet.
Regularly Review and Adjust Strategy
Set aside time regularly to review your SEO performance data. Catch downstream unintended consequences and monitor for trends and patterns in the data.
Tweak your SEO plan continually according to your data and as search engines change their algorithms. Monitor and track your progress continuously.
Test various SEO tactics to find out what works best and adapt accordingly to maximize your results. Ahrefs allows you to track your website’s ranking and progress compared to your competitors.
Conclusion
You now know the basic steps to thoroughly analyze your Shopify store for hidden SEO wins. In part one I walked you through analyzing the tech side, your content, and how other sites link to you. In addition to advice on site SEO, I provided recommendations for ensuring your visitors have a pleasant shopping experience.
SEO is not a one-time project. You need to continuously audit your site and monitor your performance. In doing so, you identify and resolve issues quickly. You learn what maximizes performance, and you stay ahead of the competition with your store sitting atop search results.
Identify the areas you need to improve on. What awaits you? Better rankings mean more customers—and more potential to scale your shop.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Shopify SEO Analysis?
Shopify SEO analysis entails studying the SEO performance of your online store. It helps you find out what you can improve to increase your website’s visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) such as Google. As a result, you’ll gain more organic traffic and, in turn, more potential customers.
Why is a Shopify SEO Audit Important?
A regular Shopify SEO audit is the best way to find technical errors, content gaps, and off-page opportunities. Once these fixable issues are addressed, users experience an improved website search ranking, more qualified traffic, and ultimately more sales. Consider it a re-tuning of your store to get the optimal performance out of it.
How often should I conduct a Shopify SEO audit?
Best practice is to run a comprehensive Shopify SEO audit twice a year, at a minimum. Make it a habit to monitor your site’s performance using Google Analytics and Google Search console as your new best friends. This helps you spot and fix issues as they arise, saving you valuable time and resources.
What’s the difference between Technical, Content, and Off-Page SEO?
Technical SEO is all about your website’s underlying infrastructure, such as site speed and mobile-friendliness. Content SEO means optimizing your product descriptions and blog posts. Off-page SEO involves activities like link building and social media promotion. Each one plays an equally important role in your overall SEO success.
What are some key elements of a good User Experience (UX) for SEO?
All of these aspects contribute to a positive UX — fast load times, intuitive navigation, mobile-friendly design, and clear calls to action. When you create a more enjoyable experience on your site for users, they end up spending more time with you. This encourages them to view multiple pages and eventually turn into paying customers. Google rewards sites that provide an excellent user experience (UX).
How do I track the success of my Shopify SEO efforts?
Run regular reports using Google Analytics to keep an eye on your organic traffic, bounce rate and conversion rates. Google Search Console is essential for tracking keyword rankings and spotting technical SEO issues. Keep a close eye on these metrics to see what’s working and what you need to improve.
What tools can help with a Shopify SEO Analysis?
There are a variety of tools that can help you conduct your Shopify SEO analysis, such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, SEMrush, Ahrefs and Moz. These tools can tell you a lot about keyword rankings, website traffic, backlinks, and technical SEO issues.
Selecting toolsSelect whatever tools fit your budget and workflow.
