Shopify SEO: A Guide On Optimising Visibility For Your Online Store

Shopify SEO is a topic that has grown rapidly in alignment with the major rise over the past decade of its e-commerce platform, Shopify. We have put together an easy to understand guide of the ins and outs around the topic that will help your online Shopify story achieve optimum visibility by boosting your organic rankings.

What is Shopify?

Shopify is a cloud-based, ‘all-in-one’ e-commerce platform that lets users build and run an online store. It provides online store owners with e-commerce features covering all aspects of running an online business, including transaction gateways, email marketing & more.

Why should we care about Shopify?

Shopify is one of the fastest growing e-commerce platforms over the past decade. With almost 4 million sites built through the platform to date, it possesses 10% of the global e-commerce market. Shopify is present in over 175 countries worldwide. While over half of its current operations take place in the US, it has been fast growing across many European countries, with the UK being its second largest market. Usage of the platform has more than doubled in the last five years and shows no signs of slowing down. SEOs would be wise to adapt and learn the ins and outs of the e-commerce platform as more and more businesses are set up using Shopify.

What is Shopify SEO?

Shopify SEO is the process of optimizing a Shopify website to perform better in search engine results. It focuses on helping e-commerce retailers utilising the Shopify CMS gain visibility through organic traffic.

5 valuable SEO tips to optimize your Shopify Store:

• Make use of Shopify’s Blog tool

Shopify now gives options for you to build out blog pages for your online stores. This approach allows you to gain higher visibility across your product categories by targeting more primary and secondary keywords that your audience are searching for. You can also create a strong internal linking profile for your website that will give your product and category pages more authority for business-specific keywords.

The tool makes it incredibly easy to create and post blogs. Taking this approach not only increases visibility but also allows you to engage more with your potential customers by building out helpful user informational pages.

Follow Shopify’s blog guidance to create new blog pages for your online store.

• Add context to your main product pages

As with other e-commerce sites, it’s important to optimize your main product pages for targeted keywords that can rank for more queries. This helps add more context to Google to distinguish the difference between your store’s main pages. Take the example below where the product specifications are clear with product keywords being mentioned in the copy:

• Add structured data to key landing pages

You can easily implement structured data around Shopify websites to help your store achieve further visibility in Search Results.

We recommended implementing two kinds of structured data as a starting point. The first is adding breadcrumb internal links with BreadcrumbList structured data. This is vital structured data to e-commerce sites, as they provide users with easy-to-use internal links that indicate where they’re at within a website’s hierarchy. See how this looks on a product page below:

Find out more about how to implement BreadcrumbList structured data.

Another type we recommend is “Article” structured data for your blog pages.

This schema lets Google know that your blog content is more editorial. Of all informational content schema, “Article” seems to be the one that Google prefers, according to their official documentation. 

If a Dev resource is not available, it is recommended to use Schema App Total Schema Markup for Shopify sites.

• Be wary of your Site’s Speed

If you are using several Shopify apps across your site, it’s important not to forget the impact this can have on site speed. These apps often inject additional code onto your site. Adding a large number of apps containing JS & CSS files can hurt page load times.

These apps will add more JavaScript and CSS files which can hurt page load times. Regularly audit the apps you’re using & remove any that are not adding value or being utilized by the site. Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to audit the speed of your site.

• Shopify will help with Robots.txt & Sitemaps

A great feature of using Shopify is it creates a robots.txt file for your store with prewritten “Disallow” commands. In most cases, Shopify’s default robots.txt rules are suitable for the majority of store owners.

As your store expands with new product offerings, Shopify allows you to modify your Robots.txt file. You will need to create a robots.txt.liquid file and then create custom rules to specify changes.

Another great feature of Shopify is that it generates a sitemap.xml index file at the URL path “domain.com/sitemap.xml”. Shopify sitemap.xml index file will automatically create links to specific sitemaps that contain URLs of the following types of pages:

1. Product Pages (sitemap_products_1.xml)
2. Collection Pages (sitemap_collections_1.xml)
3. Blog Posts (sitemap_blogs_1.xml)
4. Marketing Pages (sitemap_pages_1.xml)

Sitemap.xml file automatically updates as new pages are added/removed from the site. So there is no need to worry about adding new pages to your website’s XML sitemap.

Are you looking to maximise your SEO strategy? Get in touch with our team!