Shopify SEO: Whether you’re presenting a new product, making a web presence for your retail location, or starting a dropshipping business. When you’re trying to sell something online, then you’ve got a big challenge on your hands. How do you get people to come to your online store? People who find your online store using search engines are typically looking for things that are similar to yours, so they are more likely to make a purchase. You may use SEO to boost your store’s search engine ranking and make it easier for shoppers to find your products.
At Go Fish Digital, we have noticed that more and more of our customers are adopting the Shopify platform. While we thought initially it was just a coincidence. But we can see that the data indicates a different story. Over the years, the Shopify platform has progressively grown in popularity. CMS usage has more than doubled since October 2017, according to BuiltWith usage data.
Shopify is currently used by 4.24 percent of the top 10,000 websites and 3.02 percent of the top 100,000. We wanted to share our process for typical SEO adjustments with our customers because we’ve worked with a lot of Shopify stores. The following post should walk you through some of the most typical changes we make to a Shopify store.
SEO overview
Many people start looking for something on the Internet with search engines like Google or Bing. These search engines are designed to use different types of information from websites to produce an ordered list of results for a particular search query. Search engines determine which websites are most appropriate to the search query and then display the results in order of relevance. Many factors can make your online store appear higher in search results.
- The number of unpaid natural or social links pointing to your store from other websites.
- Website authority is based on engagement and other factors.
- The age of your domain name.
- Website structure and content optimized for search engines.
When you’re new to online sales, it can be hard to do much about the first three factors. It takes time to build a reputation for your brand and connect other sites to yours. You can plan for the long term in your content strategy. In the short term, the easiest way to drive more traffic to your online store is to optimize your content so that a search engine will recognize it as relevant to queries related to your products. This is what we understand by SEO. You can analyze the search engine optimization of your online store using apps in the Shopify App Store.
What is Shopify SEO?
Shopify SEO is a set of SEO tweaks that are unique to the Shopify platform. While Shopify stores come with some helpful things for SEO, like blogs and the ability to redirect, they can also create SEO issues like duplicate content. Here are some of the most common Shopify SEO recommendations.
- Delete duplicate URLs from internal linking architecture.
- Delete duplicate paginated URLs.
- Create blog content for keywords with informational intent.
- Add Product, Article, and BreadcrumbList structured data.
- Determine how to handle product variant pages.
- Compress images using the crush. pics Shopify SEO App.
- Just delete unneeded Shopify apps.
We will go into how we manage each of these recommendations below.
Duplicate Content
In terms of SEO, duplicate content is the top priority issue that Shopify has made. Duplicate content occurs when there is duplicate or similar content on two different URLs. This creates problems for search engines because they may not be able to determine which of the two pages should be the canonical version. In addition to this, many times the link signals are split between pages. We’ve seen Shopify create duplicate content in many different ways. The first is Duplicate Product Pages and the second is Duplicate Collection Pages via Pagination.
Duplicate Product Pages
This issue is caused by Shopify’s product pages. Shopify stores provide two distinct URL paths for their /products/ pages by default.
- Canonical URL path: /products/
- Non-canonical URL path: /collections/.*/products/
This requires setting up Shopify accounts by making sure that all /collections/are.*/products/pages include a canonical tag for the associated /products/page. Note how the URL of the address differs from the “Authenticated” field.
While this certainly helps Google consolidate duplicate content, a more dangerous problem arises when you look at the internal linking structure. By default, Shopify will link to the non-genuine version of all of your product pages.
Additionally, we’ve also seen links to non-canonical versions of Shopify URLs appear when websites use “swatch” internal links that point to other color variants.
Thus, Shopify by default builds the architecture of your entire site around non-canonical links. This creates a high-priority SEO problem because the website is sending conflicting signals to Google.
- “Here are the pages we internally link to the most often”
- “However, the pages we link to the most often are not the URLs we want to be ranking in Google. Please index these other URLs with a few internal links”
While canonical tags are generally respected, remember that Google treats these as pointers rather than instructions. This means that it is up to Google to decide whether the content is duplicated. Each time these pages are crawled. We prefer not to leave it to chance, especially when it comes to large amounts of material.
Adjusting The Internal Linking Structure
Luckily, there’s a relatively easy fix for this. We have been able to work with our dev team to adjust the code in the product. grid-item. liquid file. Following those steps will redirect the archive page of your Shopify site to the canonical /product/ URL.
Duplicate Collections Pages
In addition, we have noticed a lot of Shopify sites that generate duplicate content due to the site’s pagination. In particular, a duplicate of the first archive page in a given series is made. This is because if you are on a paged URL in a series, the link to the first page will include “?page=1”.
However, it will nearly always be a duplicate page. The content of a URL with “?page=1” is usually still the same as the original non-parameterized URL. We suggest that a designer modify the internal linking structure so that the first paged result points to the legitimate page.
Product Variant Pages
This is essentially an extension of Shopify’s duplicate content from earlier, we felt it deserved its section because it isn’t necessarily an SEO issue. It’s fairly uncommon to find Shopify stores having many product URLs for the same product, each with a little change. In this scenario, duplicate material can pose issues because the original product is often the same, but just a tiny attribute, for example, color changes. This means that many pages with the same or similar product data and images can exist. Here’s an example of a variant creating multiple pages: https://recordit.co/x6YRPkCDqG.
If left alone, this will result in another instance of duplicate content. Although, The SEO of the variation URL is not an issue. These URLs can be useful to some sites because they allow you to have indexable pages that can be adjusted for extremely particular circumstances. Whether or not these are beneficial varies depending on the site. There are a few crucial questions to consider.
- Do your customers conduct searches based on different phrases?
- Do you have the help to develop unique content for each of your product variations?
- Is this information distinct enough to stand alone?
If your Shopify store has product types, it’s worth immediately assessing whether or not these pages should exist at a different URL. If they absolutely must, you should generate distinct content for each of them and optimize it for that specific target term.
Crawling And Indexing
We discovered a few SEO factors that are specific to Shopify in terms of crawling and indexing after evaluating several Shopify stores. We felt it would be a good idea to share this with folks that apply to Shopify because it is typically an important component of eCommerce SEO.
Robots.Txt File
Shopify provides a robots.txt file for your store by default, with pre-written “Disallow” commands. We’ve found that most store owners can get by with Shopify’s default robots.txt rules. An example of Shopify’s default robots.txt rules may be seen here. Shopify will not allow the crawling of the following portions of the site.
- Admin area
- Checkout
- Orders
- Shopping cart
- Internal search
- Policies page
However, as Shopify stores become larger and more customized, it is more likely that you will need to adjust the robots.txt file. Fortunately, starting June 2021, Shopify now lets you update the robots.txt file.
To edit the Shopify robots.txt file, store owners must make robots.txt.liquid file and then create custom rules to specify any changes. To create a robots.txt.liquid file, store owners can follow these steps.
- Go to your Shopify admin section and log in.
- Go to Online Store > Themes in the left sidebar.
- Select Actions > Edit the code
- Select the “Add a new template” link under “Templates.”
- Choose “robots.txt” from the leftmost dropdown.
- Select “Create template” from the drop-down menu.
This should generate the robots.txt.liquid file for Shopify. Then, using the Liquid code, you may add rules to your robots.txt.liquid file. Fortunately, adding this code isn’t difficult, and Shopify’s official guide does a wonderful job of explaining how to accomplish so. Following these steps should give you more control over how your Shopify site’s URLs are indexed.
Sitemap.Xml
Shopify will produce a Sitemap.xml index file at the URL address “domain.com/sitemap.xml” by default. The Sitemap.xml index file in Shopify will automatically create links to child sitemaps that include URLs for the following page types.
- Product Pages (sitemap_products_1.xml)
- Collection Pages (sitemap_collections_1.xml)
- Blog Posts (sitemap_blogs_1.xml)
- Marketing Pages (sitemap_pages_1.xml)
This sitemap.xml file will dynamically update as new pages are added or removed from the site. In general, the Shopify sitemap.xml is ready to use out of the box and does not require modification.
One thing to keep in mind is that any published pages will be included in the sitemap.xml file. The most typical issue we encounter is that legacy pages that have been published but are no longer linked to the site are still included in the sitemap.xml file. It’s important crawling your sitemap.xml to see if there are any examples of published pages that are included in the sitemap but aren’t necessary for search engines to crawl.
Adding The “Noindex” Tag
While you can’t change robots.txt, Shopify lets you add a “noindex” tag. By adding the following code to your theme. liquid file, you can exclude a specific page from the index.
{% if the template contains ‘search’ %}
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>
{% endif %}
As well, if you want to exclude an entire template, you can use this code:
{% if handle contains ‘page-handle-you-want-to-exclude’ %}
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>
{% endif %}
Redirects
Shopify allows you to use out-of-the-box redirects, which is fantastic. It can use to consolidate old and expired pages or any other content that is no longer available. You can do this by visiting:
- Online stores
- Guidance
- URL redirect
The most important thing to remember is that you must delete a page before you can apply a redirect on Shopify. This implies you’ll want to be sure you’re not planning to use the page again in the future. We recommend using the “Rewind Backup” software to make this process less unpleasant.
Log Files
Shopify does not permit you to access log files instantly via the site. This has been confirmed by Shopify Support.
Structured Data
Product Structured Data
Overall, Shopify does a great job with structured data. Many Shopify themes should have “product” markup out-of-the-box that provides important information to Google like your product name, description, price, and more. This is probably the top priority structured data on any e-commerce site. , so it’s great that many themes do this for you.
Shopify sites can also benefit from expanding product structured data to archive pages. This involves adding product structured data to define each product link on the product listing page. The good folks at Distilled recommend including this structured data on category pages.
Article Structured Data
You must also utilize “articles” structured data if you use Shopify’s blog capabilities. This is an excellent schema type for informing Google that your blog’s material is more editorial. “Paragraph” appears to be Google’s favorite of all the informational content formats, as it is mentioned in their official documentation. On the other hand, A “blog posting” schema is another sort of structured data that you can include in your Shopify blog.
BreadcrumbList Structured Data
One addition that we regularly add to Shopify sites is breadcrumb internal links with breadcrumb list structured data. We believe that breadcrumbs are important for any e-commerce site, as they provide users with easy-to-use internal links that point to where they are within the website’s hierarchy. Also, these breadcrumbs can help Google understand the structure of the website better. We generally suggest adding site breadcrumbs to Shopify sites and marking them with Breadcrumb List structured data to help Google better understand those internal links.
Implementing Structured Data On Shopify
If you have a developer on hand and wish to implement structured data, it’s a good idea to add structured data types to the above. This guarantees that certain schema items will appear on your site at all times.
If your development resources are relatively restricted, we believe Schema App Total Schema Markup is a perfect alternative. Structured data types such as products and blog posting formats will be included on the appropriate site pages. It will also have an offer catalog schema to identify each product on a category page. Their service is also excellent, as their crew assists you with any technical challenges you may encounter.
Improving Shopify Site Speed
One of the most common complaints about Shopify is its poor loading times. In comparison to other e-commerce systems, however, Shopify performs admirably. Out of the box, to give you a solid performance foundation, Shopify Fastly leverages CDN and browser caching. We’ve benchmarked the average speed statistic of 400+ Shopify sites in the past. The average performance metrics for the Shopify sites in our dataset.
- 3.8 seconds for the first contentful paint.
- 22.1 seconds of interactive time.
- 4.41 MB total page size.
- 2.1 MB in total image assets.
- Request number: 171.
The below-given following are some of the things we usually suggest our clients do to improve their performance.
- With the lazy library, you may lazy load pictures.
- Crush. pics app compresses images automatically.
- Remove any Shopify apps that are not being used.
- On high-priority sites, manually resize and compress huge images.
- Google Tag Manager should use to migrate tracking code.
Keyword Research
Searching for keywords for Shopify stores is comparable to searching for keywords for other e-commerce stores. Keywords can be generated in a variety of ways, here are given some ways.
- Google AdWords keyword data can export. Track and improve the ones that bring in the most money for the website.
- Look for keywords in AdWords with a high conversion rate. Even if the volume is minimal, a high conversion rate implies that this keyword is highly transactional.
- In Google Search Console, look up the keywords for which the site now receives clicks and impressions.
- Using Moz’s Keyword Explorer, research your high-priority keywords and come up with new suggestions.
- Using tools like Ahrefs, track out your competition. You can use the “Content Gap” report to uncover keyword opportunities where your competitors’ sites rank but yours do not.
- You can use merge words to automatically generate a huge number of keyword variations if you have keywords that utilize the same modifier.
Keyword Optimization
Shopify, like Yoast SEO, lets you customize key elements like the title tag, meta description, and URL. Use your goal keywords in these elements wherever possible.
All you have to do to change these elements is go to the page you want to change and scroll down to “Search Engine List Preview.”
Adding Content To Product Pages
If you decide that each product will index, then make sure that the content on each page is unique. It’s possible that your Shopify products won’t have any exclusive on-page material at first. This is a common problem on the Shopify site when the same description is used across multiple products or no description is provided. If you combine product descriptions with on-page best practices, your products will have the best chance of ranking in SERPs.
However, we recognize that creating original content for each product you offer takes effort. In the past, while working with clients, we’ve used a methodical approach to deciding which goods to adapt first. We like to use the “Sales by Product” report since it can help you select which items to start adding content to first. This report may be found under Analytics > Dashboard > Top Products by Units Sold.
We can rapidly discover some of the most important pages in the store to optimize for if we take this strategy. We can then begin producing material for each product with the help of a copywriter. Remember that your product descriptions should always create with the user in mind. Writing about the product characteristics that people are most interested in will help your site improve both conversions and SEO.
Shopify Blog
Although Shopify includes the opportunity to build a blog, we frequently notice this feature missing from many Shopify sites. This makes sense because the primary purpose of an eCommerce site is to generate income, hence the initial site design is product-focused. However, we live in a time when ranking product pages on Google is becoming increasingly difficult. For example, the screenshot below shows the top 3 organic results for the term cloth diaper.
Even though many people feel this is primarily a transactional question, Google ranks two articles and a product listing page in the top three results. This is just one example of a growing trend in which Google is prioritizing informational material over transactional content. If you have a Shopify store or an eCommerce site, we recommend that you follow some of the following steps.
- Identify your top high-priority keywords.
- Manually execute Google query for each
- Pay attention to what type of content Google is ranking on the first page. Is this most informative, transactional, or a mix of both?
- If you are looking primarily for mixed or informational content, evaluate your content to see if you have any content that matches the intent of the user. If so, then improve the quality and optimize.
- And, if you don’t have content, then think about making a new blog around informative topics, which fulfill the user’s needs.
For example, one of our customers wants to rank for the CRM software keyword, which is a very highly competitive keyword. We discovered that Google was largely ranking informational pages on What is CRM software? when we looked at the SERPs. Since they only had one product page that highlighted their specific CRM, we suggested that customers create a more informative page that talks about what CRM software is in general and the benefits it offers. After building and optimizing the page, we soon saw a significant increase in organic traffic credits to Ally Mickler.
Shopify Apps
Shopify offers those apps, which are similar to WordPress plugins in that they allow you to add advanced functionality to your store without having to edit the code directly. Although, unlike WordPress, the vast majority of Shopify apps are paid. For this, a one-time or monthly fee will need.
Shopify Apps For SEO
Here are some Shopify apps that can help improve your Shopify store SEO.
- Crush. pics App: crush. pics is an excellent automatic way to compress large images of files because many sites have large images based.
- Schema App Total Schema Markup: This app is used to add custom structure data when you did not get a Shopify Developer.
- Smart SEO App: Smart SEO app is an app, which can add meta tags, alt tags, and JSON-LD.
- Yotpo Reviews App: With this app, you can add product reviews to your site, which allows your content to seem in the SERPs with rich review stars.
- Rewind Backup App: With this app, you can create backups of your site. and it is excellent to implement before making development changes or adding redirects.
Is The Yoast SEO Plugin Available For Shopify?
Yes, till January 2022, the Yoast SEO plugin is available on Shopify. Then you can find the Yoast SEO plugin here.
Limiting Your Shopify Apps
Like WordPress plugins, Shopify apps will add extra code to your Shopify store, which means huge numbers of applications could slow down your Shopify store. Because so many apps focus on improving conversions, Shopify sites are particularly prone to bloat. Additional JavaScript and CSS files are frequently included in these apps, slowing page load times. You should check those apps regularly and eliminate those apps that don’t bring value or aren’t being used by the site.
With Shopify SEO, You Can Stand Out From The Crowd
Shopify is a fantastic platform for those entrepreneurs that want to take their business online. Shopify is simple to use, easy to set up, and offers multiple ways to drive traffic and generate revenue. But, even the best Shopify site or store, will not be successful on its own. You’ll need to put in some effort To maximize your optimization chances and build a dedicated following that keeps your business going.
Fortunately, Shopify’s built-in abilities, together with the SEO tools and troubleshooting guidance in this post, can assist you in developing an excellent Shopify SEO strategy. If you use these tactics then you’ll raise your store’s visibility, convert prospects to customers, and boost sales for complete eCommerce success.
Moving Forward
As the popularity of Shopify continues to grow. Then, it will become increasingly crucial to comprehend the SEO implications of the platform. Hopefully, this post has provided you with the best information about Shopify SEO. You can also check out our Shopify SEO Services, if you want to Shopify Services then contact us:
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