Shopify has long been considered “good for SEO” because it has a lot of features that facilitate optimizations, for instance on-page and technical SEO.
But what are some things you can actually do right now (and in the near short term) to increase rankings?
Here are some basic Shopify SEO optimizations you can make fairly quickly in order to improve your store’s optimization.
Caveat: You Need to Do Keyword Research First
Before you can make any Shopify SEO optimizations, you need to find some keywords for which you want to improve your website’s organic rankings.
For that you’ll need a tool like SEMRush, which allows a few free trial searches per day. You won’t be able to run an agency in that manner but for some basic SEO optimizations it’ll work just fine.
Log in, click on the Keyword Overview tab and search up a few keywords that seem relevant to what your business sells.
Ignore the keywords that have high difficulty and low volume scores. If the volume is above 100 and the difficulty below 30, you’re good to go for it.
Update Your Page Titles and Headers
Truthfully the entire post could be about optimizing page titles and headers alone. This is the single most impactful Shopify SEO optimization you can make, all things being equal.
Take some of your target keywords, and refresh some of the headers and titles on your target URLs with them.
Just making this optimization and waiting a few days for Google to re-crawl those pages and update rankings should yield greater impressions.
Refresh Your Product Page Copy with a Line or Two That Contains a Target Keyword
Even if you just insert your target keywords in your product page copy, most of the time it’ll result in ranking increases.
But the truth is this could be seen as keyword stuffing. A better tactic is to think about some questions you’ve heard about the products recently, and answer those questions preemptively in the page copy in such a manner that the answer includes some of your target keywords.
Or, you can just write a new description that contains those keywords, the effect will be the same as long as the description is informative and not fluff.
Compress Any New Images That You Upload
A better technique is to go back and systematically remove your large image files, then compress and re-upload them. But that is a lot of work.
Rather, before you add any new images to your product pages, run them through a compressor.
This is a big aspect of technical SEO, as speed is a direct ranking factor that Google (and presumably other search engines) use to assign rankings.
Add Alt Text to Images
When you add new images to your website, add some alt text to them. You don’t have to go overboard with it, truthfully you could just add the keywords themselves in the Alt field.
This won’t add a big boost to your overall rankings, but it will improve your bottom line optimization score and increase the chances that your images will show up in the image results.
Find and Remove Broken Links
Go into Google Analytics, through the Engagement tab. Then go to “Pages and Screens” and filter through “Page Path and Screen Class” for “404” or “Page Not Found.”
Whatever shows up is a broken link, so you need to either remove the page or update it, as well as all internal links that go to that page.
Getting Started with Shopify SEO
While this SEO checklist is easy enough to follow, some Shopify admins either don’t have the digital marketing savvy or the time to make them. That’s why some work with a Shopify SEO agency that can help them rank higher. Do your homework and partner with an agency that goes beyond meta descriptions, one that will build links and write blog posts for your Shopify store to buoy you up in the search results. A Shopify app store plug-in will only get you so far – so start looking for a strategic partner today.
