SEO Checklist: How To Rank Your Shopify Store?

By Charlie

12 Feb 2022

Looking for a Shopify SEO guide to increase your Shopify store traffic and sales?

Nothing leaves new website owners in perplexing understanding and strategising search engine optimisation, despite having all the tools and platforms for digital marketing at their disposal. It is not an undeniable fact that most of them rely on tool platforms like Google for their everyday needs but most people still are clueless about indexing the websites and ranking them- especially during the initial point.

Just because you made it, it doesn’t mean the traffic is going to come to you. It might’ve worked before everything was too precise, but attracting customers requires more than just a built website in today’s algorithm and update. Yes, it’s critical to select an e-commerce digital marketing platform that suits your needs, but what happens once you’ve constructed your site and opened it for business? What strategy will you use to reach out to potential customers? How would you persuade them to shop with you rather than your competitor?

Search engine rankings largely determine how easily shoppers can locate your Shopify store. It is estimated to get more visitors if your Shopify store ranks higher in the search rankings; thus resulting in increased sales.

So, the question arises, how does one improve their rankings? How a Search engine will help me in this?

The answer is “search engine optimisation” (SEO)

Is Shopify SEO-Friendly?

Although Shopify includes a number of SEO-friendly tools for one to explore, there’s still a lot more you can do to boost your search engine rankings. Though keywords are vital in SEO, it takes more than merely sprinkling keywords throughout your content to get your site to rank better.

We’ll coach you through 5 essential stages to master SEO for your Shopify store and rank top in 2022 in this Shopify SEO guide:

Optimise the Structure of Your Shopify Store
Enhance the User Interface
Get the required tool
Find the Best Keywords to Use as a Target
Boost the Performance of Your Shopify Product Pages

Let’s get started…

Step 1: Improve the structure of your Shopify site.

The way your content is categorised and arranged on your page is critical to SEO success. When customers can discover what they’re searching for quickly and simply, they’re more likely to stay on your site longer and view more pages, which can benefit your search engine rankings.

But, How do I make my website more user-friendly?

Simplify. Don’t use a lot of categories and subcategories. Search engines can explore and rank your products more efficiently if your site has a more straightforward structure.

The following is an example of a simple, SEO-friendly site structure:

Your products are only a few clicks away from your homepage, as shown in the diagram, making it easy for customers to find what they’re looking for and for search engines to scan the site.

Using one of these formats, you can easily organise your content using Shopify:

Homepage
Followed by Category Pages
And then Product Pages
Homepage
Then, Category Pages
With Sub-Category and Product Pages

Always keep in mind that your website should be designed with customers in mind.

You also need to have an About page and a Contact us page for your site, in addition to product and category pages. Don’t skip these pages because they tell shoppers and search engines that you’re credible and trustworthy.

Finally, on your page, provide a search box. Is it going to assist with Shopify SEO? Not in a direct way. However, it will help visitors find what they’re looking for, which is a crucial component of eCommerce SEO, so you can profit from the traffic you already have.

Step 2: Enhance the User Interface

Let’s look at some strategies to improve your site’s user experience, which can help you rank higher in search results.

Enhance the Performance of Your Website

It’s all about usability when it comes to website speed. Visitors will not be frustrated if your website is simple to use and everything rushes. This implies they’ll be more inclined to stay on your website longer.

You can increase the speed of your Shopify store by:

Use a mobile-friendly,
Quick-loading theme and smaller,
Optimised pictures
Exit the Shopify apps when not in use
Avoid sliders for smooth functioning

Make Your Website Responsive

Your Shopify stores will look fantastic on any platform, including desktops, tablets, and smartphones, thanks to responsive design. Responsive themes may substantially enhance the user experience and retain people on your Shopify site for more extended periods. Because Google uses time-on-page as a metric for determining a site’s worth, having a simple site to navigate and read can help you rank higher. As a result of enhanced rankings and usability, visitors return, and conversions grow. For an e-commerce site, this is fantastic.

It’s critical to ensure that your Shopify store is mobile-friendly, as buyers increasingly use their smartphones to make purchases.

Step 3: Set up the Required Tools

Create a Google Analytics account.

If you haven’t yet installed Google Analytics on your website, we strongly advise you to do so. It’s a web analytics solution that meticulously records and reports website traffic.

The question is, “What exactly is Google Analytics, and how does it work?” – Understanding Account Structure in Google Analytics.

You can learn the following things with Google Analytics:

Conversion rates and the total number of conversions
How much money do you make from SEO?
What pages are the most valuable?

Create a Google Search Console account

Google Search Console is another excellent SEO Shopify tool to use. Google Search Console is a free Google service that allows webmasters to track, maintain, and troubleshoot their site’s presence in Google search results.

With this, it lays out helpful information about your site’s Google Search traffic, performance, and problems.

Consider the following scenario:

Which search terms and keywords drive visitors to your Shopify site?
The SERP click-through rate of your page (search engines results page)
What happened to your keyword ranking over time?

Google Search Console can also aid you with technical SEO activities like:

Adding sitemaps and specific URLs to Google for indexing and crawling
Detecting problems on your site and being notified about them
Errors in the robot.txt file are being investigated
Using your Search Console account, submit your sitemap to Google

A Shopify sitemap file is a list of your website’s pages generated automatically for all Shopify sites. Google and other search engines use sitemap files to index your website. It’s where you tell people about your pages, movies, and other assets.

Owners of Shopify stores may find their sitemaps at [www.yourstore.com/sitemap.xml].

Using Google Search Console, look for any crawling issues on your website

Google and other platforms index the website with bots which then crawl the website and its pages. When search engine bots attempt but fail to reach a page on your site, this is a crawling mistake. If you are notified of any inaccuracies, correct them right away.

Step 4: Conduct SEO keyword research for e-Commerce

Keyword research is an essential SEO tactic that entails discovering standard terms and phrases that people search in search engines.

Learn the Fundamentals of Keyword Research for Shopify SEO

This is one of the most critical aspects of the Shopify SEO checklist. Keyword research, when done right, may help you plan your content strategy, make product decisions, and boost Shopify SEO.

To study keyword research basics, you must first grasp three crucial concepts:

Search volume
Keyword difficulty
The intent of the search

The average number of times individuals looked for a particular query on search engines each month is known as search volume.

You may leverage keyword search volumes to your advantage:

To figure out which new products to introduce,
To determine the most appropriate keyword to target.

If you’re selling men’s shirts, for example, and you notice that people are looking for a white shirt specifically, you should consider stocking it. You should optimise for certain keywords that consumers are searching for if you already sell white shirts. As a result, your product will appear in Google search results.

Keyword difficulty is a measure that indicates how tough it is to rank for a certain keyword in search results.

By determining the difficulty of your keywords, you can decide if it’s worth investing your time and money in optimising an organic page for that keyword or bidding on that phrase in a Google Ads campaign.

It will be challenging to rank for high-difficulty keywords if you run a small-scale eCommerce Shopify store.

It’s ideal to use a keyword research tool to find keywords that you can rank for.
Long-tail keywords that are relevant to your industry are good.
The fundamental objective of searching for a given query in search engines is called search intent.

When performing a query, users frequently look for a specific type of answer or resource.

Check for the search purpose of a keyword before putting any effort into it. For example, looking for “pizza recipe” versus “takeout pizza” has a very different search purpose.

Do you have any blog, product, or navigational pages? Plan your keyword approach after conducting an extensive study to achieve a higher ranking.

The four different search intent categories are as follows:

Informational
Navigational
Commercial
Transactional

In Shopify, where do SEO keywords go?

In Shopify, SEO keywords are used in four different places:

Meta descriptions
ALT tags
Titles of pages
The content of a page’s body

For a good SEO Shopify and keyword strategy, keep the keyword tools handy.

You shouldn’t rely exclusively on Google Keyword Planner when it comes to keyword research for search results.
The majority of SEOs now use third-party keyword research tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush.

You can use keyword tools to:

Examine the top pages, keywords, and content gaps of your competition.
Find keywords that are connected, as well as search volumes, search suggestions, and keyword difficulty.
Check a website’s authority, backlinks, broken links, and competitor’s search results among other things.

Make a map of your keywords and type of content.

Each page on your site, including blog articles, the homepage, product pages, and categories, can rank for various keywords that serve different roles in your sales funnel.

The search volume for top-of-the-funnel keywords is often higher, but the commercial intent is lower.

Although the number of middle-of-the-funnel keywords is lower than upper-funnel keywords, users searching for these keywords have already progressed through the sales cycle.
Products, brands, and sellers have frequently searched terms.
The search volume for bottom-of-the-funnel keywords is minimal, but they have a significant commercial value. Users look for these terms when they want to shop.

Optimise Your Shopify Stores Content

Any Shopify SEO checklist should include on-page optimisation, which tells search engines what your content is about and helps you rank higher.

Optimising Meta descriptions and titles in Shopify

The most potent on-page SEO factors are still title tags and meta tags.
A title tag is what consumers see on search engine results pages (SERPs), and it indicates the title of a given website.
On each page, use only one H1 tag. H1 tags are commonly used as the page’s headline and frequently include keywords.

H1 tags are used by default in Shopify page titles. As a result, don’t use H1 tags anywhere else on the page.

Make sure your titles are less than 60 characters long so that they appear in full on SERP.
Google displays the first 50-60 characters of most page names.
This is why your primary keyword should appear near the start of your page title.

You can improve your page names and meta descriptions by doing the following:

Keywords should be included in the title and meta description.
Using important and click-driven words leads people to click.
Usage of numbers, full stops, commas and brackets are all examples of punctuation.
Including a date in the title is a good idea.
Ensure that your page names are engaging.
You can update a page’s title and meta description by scrolling down to “Edit Website SEO” on your Shopify site.
A meta description is the sample text that appears down below the page title in search engine results.
A better meta description can help you rank higher by increasing your CTR.
Your meta descriptions should be no more than 155 characters long. Google frequently chops out longer meta descriptions.

PS: It’s essential to keep in mind that you shouldn’t modify the URL of a page currently receiving traffic and has links pointing to it. It may hurt the ranking and traffic.

Increase Engagement by Optimising Your Pages

Many SEOs believe Google has begun to use engagement metrics to judge the relevancy of a website displayed in search results.

You can write extensive descriptions on your product pages to optimise your pages for increased engagement in eCommerce.
Provide relevant product links.
Use high-resolution product photos and videos whenever possible.

Step 5: Boosting your SEO efforts with other marketing channels

So now you have a basic understanding of your Shopify SEO checklist. However, one must use additional marketing channels like email marketing and social media as your SEO efforts.

What’s the best way to attract links to your Shopify stores? Here are some pointers:

Links to Suppliers and Manufacturers

If you sell products created or supplied by well-known companies, they may have a policy that only authorised sellers are given a link. Send them an email to see if they’ll link to your Shopify stores.

Voices from the Industry and Influencers

To develop both links and content, reach out to industry leaders and influencers for interviews.

You’ll be moving up the search results rankings in no time if you follow each of the five stages in our Shopify SEO tutorial. Your SEO Shopify store gradually climbs the ladder towards the first page but it will ask for your patience and dedication to get to the first rank for a Shopify store. The same goes with an eCommerce Shopify store.

The search engine supports the results which are perfectly optimised with the updates and instructions. Hence try to optimize your Shopify apps or stores accordingly. Check the Google core updates while optimising your Shopify apps or store. It will eventually help you in better ranking and make you understand the Google algorithm as well. Best of luck with your optimisation for your Shopify apps and stores.

Your perfectly optimized Shopify store for search engines goes here!