Shopify SEO — How to Optimize Your Shopify Store

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In this Shopify SEO guide, we walk you through the key steps you need to take to make sure that your store ranks highly in search results. Use the SEO checklist below to gain organic traffic — and increase sales on your store.

Let’s start with something that’s quick and easy to do — but also very important…

1. Make sure you’re using a custom domain name

When you set up a Shopify store, you are by default given a ‘myshopify.com’ domain name — ‘yoursite.myshopify.com’ etc.

However, search engines and their users tend to trust custom domain names more than the standard Shopify ones, and using them can lead to better performance and more clickthroughs in search results.

(A custom domain name would be something like ‘yourstorename.com’ etc.)

So make sure that:

2. Register your Shopify store on Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools

Registering a site with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools is something that all website owners who are serious about search engine optimization should do — regardless of the platform they’ve used to build it.

By registering your Shopify website with these services, you are telling Google and Bing that your store exists — and making sure it gets indexed.

Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools will also give you notifications of any technical issues that that are preventing them from crawling your site properly.

Registering a domain with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools is very easy — but if you need more information on the process, you can check out the below resources:

Once you’ve registered your Shopify website with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, you’ll then need to submit an XML sitemap to both services — this helps both services index your site accurately and quickly.

Helpfully, Shopify generates a sitemap automatically for you — the URL for this on your store is simply www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.

In both Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools you can submit this sitemap this by going to your site’s dashboard, and then clicking ‘sitemaps.’

It’s all pretty straightforward, but if you need more help with it, you can refer to Shopify’s official support video on the topic (see below).

3. Ensure your Shopify store is loading quickly

Page speed is a signal used by search engines to rank websites in search results, with fast-loading sites given preference over slower ones.

(A fast site leads to a better user experience — something that Google’s search algorithms really like and tend to reward).

Now, your options with regard to reducing page speed are a bit limited with Shopify — because rather than being able to buy your own hosting and code your own template, you have to use Shopify’s servers and Shopify templates (which, while perfectly good, don’t give you fine-grain control over the speed with which your site loads).

That said, there are some things you can do to make a Shopify site load as quickly as possible.

Recently, Shopify introduced an ‘online store speed’ report to merchants’ Shopify dashboards; this can be used to check how your store compares to others from a speed perspective.

To access this, go to Analytics > Reports in your Shopify dashboard and then choose the ‘Online store speed’ from the list of available reports that appears.

For more detailed analysis of page speed on your Shopify store, along with some suggestions on how to improve page loading times, you can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.

4. Do your keyword research!

One of the best ways to improve your Shopify store’s search rankings is to ensure that your site content and products contain the keywords that people are actually searching for. To do this, you’ll need to perform keyword research.

Keyword research typically involves getting three key pieces of information:

When you have these three pieces of information, you can usually identify the keywords to optimize your content for — or the kind of content you’ll need to create in the first place.

This is because you have enough data to find a ‘sweet spot’ – keywords that are popular enough to generate a reasonable amount of traffic, without being so popular that there are already lots of other sites dominating search results for them.

Once you’ve got your keyword research sorted, it’s time to look at the more technical things you can do to your Shopify store to make sure that it performs well in searches for your chosen keywords.

5. Get your page and product titles right

One of the most significant elements of a web page is its title. Search engines treat ‘title tags’ as key pieces of information when working out how to categorize and rank your content, and your title itself shows up as the largest component of a search result (as well as at the top of browser windows).

You should ensure that your Shopify page and blog post titles are never vague in nature, and always start with your target keyword (the phrase you want to rank for in search results).

For example, if you ran a business called “Sarah’s Yummy Bakery” that sold white chocolate cakes, you would be better off using a page title that included the phrase ‘white chocolate cakes’ instead — just a more conventional (but less SEO-friendly) ‘Sarah’s Yummy Bakery’.

So, a good page title for the above example would be ‘White Chocolate Cakes — Sarah’s Yummy Bakery.’

In Shopify, there are two different processes for editing page titles: one for your home page, and one for every other type of page. Let’s look at both in turn.

Editing your Shopify home page title

To edit your home page title, you need to click Online Store > Preferences. Then, use the ‘Homepage title’ box in the ‘Title and meta description’ section provided to enter your home page title.

Editing other page titles in Shopify

For other pages, the method you use to edit a page title in Shopify is more or less the same, regardless of whether you’re working with a static page, product or post.

You need to locate your page, post or product in the Shopify dashboard (using the Online Store > Pages and Online Store > Blog posts options for pages and posts or the ‘Products’ tab to access products).

Once you’ve found it, it’s simply a case of scrolling down to the bottom of it and clicking the ‘Edit website SEO’ link in the ‘search engine listing preview’ section.

You’ll then be able to edit the page title using the ‘page title’ field provided.

6. Use headings properly

Ignoring headings is a common mistake made by merchants who build and update their online stores using ecommerce platforms like Shopify.

Instead of applying headings correctly (Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3 etc.) to their text — as a professional developer or webmaster might do — they add bold or capitalized text to break up their content.

This can cause quite a few problems:

Adding headings and subheadings in Shopify is extremely easy: when editing a page or product description, you just highlight a piece of text and then choose your desired heading from the formatting drop down menu.

To do this, just click the formatting icon with the capital ‘A’, as per the screenshot below.

As you can see, headings are numbered 1 to 6 in Shopify.

As you might expect, your Heading 1 (H1) is the most important, because search engines use it — along with the page title — as a primary way of ranking the page. So it should always include, and ideally start with, your target keyword.

It’s a good idea to include a few H2s and H3s containing relevant keywords on your pages and product descriptions too.

7. Use engaging meta descriptions

Meta descriptions (also known as ‘meta tags’) are short summaries of web pages that appear underneath the blue clickable links in a search engine results page.

Although Google says that they aren’t a ranking factor, a well-written meta description can encourage more clickthroughs to your website — thus improving the clickthrough rate (CTR) of a page.

Although there’s a bit of debate about this, the CTR to pages in search results IS believed by many SEO experts to be a ranking factor — so getting meta descriptions right is important (if nothing else, more clicks generally equates to more sales!).

Your meta description for your Shopify products and pages should:

As with page titles, different processes apply depending on whether you want to edit your home page meta description — or the description for any other page.

To edit your home page’s meta description, you’ll need to click Online Store > Preferences and use the ‘homepage meta description’ box provided on the right of the screen to add or change it.

To edit a meta description for other types of pages, you just need to locate your page, post or product and then scroll down to the the ‘Edit website SEO’ link in the search engine listing preview.

You’ll then get the option to edit your meta description — use the meta description field, shown below, to do so.

8. Make your product titles and descriptions unique

A common way of speeding up the process of adding products to a Shopify store is by using the ‘Duplicate product’ option.

Although this is undoubtedly a handy way to add a new product to your store, it can lead to a lot of very similar — or even entirely duplicated — product titles and descriptions being created by accident (or laziness!).

This is something that search engines can get confused by, and it’s not great for your visitors either. Duplicate content can lead to poorer performance in search results, so always try to make your product titles and descriptions as unique as possible.

Tip: use Shopify’s autowrite feature to create product descriptions

If you’re struggling to write product descriptions in Shopify, you could try using its new AI-powered ‘autowrite’ feature.

To generate these, you’ll need to list some of your product’s features and keywords in the product description field and then select a tone of voice for your text; Shopify’s autowriter will then produce a product description for you based on your keywords.

You can ask Shopify to rewrite these automatic descriptions until you arrive at one you are happy with; and if you like, you can make the output more unique by editing the generated text yourself.

9. Optimize your image alt text and file names

Search engine algorithms don’t just look at the words on your Shopify store when indexing it — they factor in its images too.

To do this, they examine two bits of data associated with your pictures:

Let’s look at alt text first.

There are three main reasons why you should add alternative text (known as ‘alt text’ or ‘alt tags’) to your images:

You should aim to add alt text that works for both screen readers and search engines — a description that contains your target keywords but is still perfectly understandable to anybody who is using a screen reader to access your content.

Editing alt text is really easy in Shopify, but the process varies slightly depending on the type of content you’re working on.

Adding alt text to Shopify pages or posts

To add alt text to images on static pages or posts,

You’ll then see a box appear where you can edit various aspects of the image, including alt text.

Adding alt text to Shopify products

To add alt text to product images,

Adding alt text when using Shopify’s drag-and-drop editor

Shopify’s newer themes make use of its Online Store 2.0 (OS 2.0) template format, which features a drag-and-drop editor.

If you’re using this, you can add or edit the alt text of images by opening the OS 2.0 drag and drop editor via Online Store > Themes > Customize, navigating to your page template, selecting your image and then clicking the ‘Edit’ link. You’ll then see an option to edit your alt text (see screenshot below).

Using optimized image file names in Shopify

Changing file names is not always easy to do in Shopify — so it’s usually best to optimize them before you upload them to the platform.

This means ensuring your focus keyword is in the file name, and that the file name is short.

For example, if you were selling a blue toy airplane in your Shopify store, it would be better to give it a file name of ‘blue-toy-airplane.jpg’ instead of something indecipherable like ‘IMG1234567.jpg.’

If you do have to change an image file name after you’ve uploaded it to Shopify, this can be done in two ways.

If the image is on a page template that you’re editing via the Shopify drag and drop editor, it’s a case of selecting the image, clicking the ‘edit’ option and applying a new file name. (This is a pretty straightforward process).

For all other image types, including product images, it’s unfortunately going to be a case of deleting your existing image and replacing it with a re-uploaded version that contains your focus keywords in its file name.

If you have a lot of images in your store, apps like the ‘Bulk Image Edit’ app (available from the Shopify app store) can help speed up this process — but if you have a large number of images to update, using this will involve some costs.

10. Use ‘clean’ URLs

Using ‘clean’, SEO-friendly URLs is something that is encouraged by Google. Clean URLs are short, simple and easy to understand.

For example, if you were selling blue guitars, it would be advisable to use a URL of www.yourdomain.com/blue-guitars rather than www.yourdomain.com/prds/ct/p223.php?ref=14556bluegtr

So, always ensure that your Shopify store’s URLs are as intelligible as possible and include a focus keyword. This will help both search engines and humans understand what your content is about.

To edit a page URL in Shopify, go to the page, product or post you wish to edit, scroll down to the bottom of it and then click ‘Edit Website SEO.’

Then, make your changes in the ‘URL and handle’ box (see screenshot below). If you DO change a Shopify URL, make sure that you tick the ‘create URL redirect’ option.

This prevents users (and Google!) encountering broken links, and lets Google knows that you have changed the URL.

Now, changing URLs of pages that aren’t currently performing well in organic search results is usually fine — but if you are contemplating changing the URL of a page that IS already ranking very highly, you should proceed a bit more carefully.

This is because a high-ranking, high-traffic page is likely to have a lot of backlinks to it, and these won’t count for anything at all if you don’t create a redirect from your old URL to the new one.

(Backlinks are links from other sites to yours).

Changing a URL can also affect the ‘social proof‘ of a page because it will reset the stats displayed on your social shares counter for that page to zero.

So, in an ideal world, it’s good to get the URL structure right at the point at which you create your Shopify page or product, or shortly afterwards.

And, if you do end up changing a page URL on your Shopify store, always check that ‘Create a URL redirect’ box!

11. Add rich snippets to your products and pages

Rich snippets are pieces of ‘structured data’ that can be added to your content to help both searchers and search engines understand what a page is about, and they are an important part of how your website behaves in search results.

Rich snippets feature visual clues about the content of a product, page or post — for example star ratings, author, FAQ, prices, pros and cons etc.

These appear just after the search result’s meta description, as per the example below:

As you can see, rich snippets have been used to enhance the above search result for a restaurant with a star rating, the number of reviews it has received and a meal price range.

Search engines like rich snippets because they provide an additional source of data that can be used to categorize and index content better.

Humans like them because they add more relevance and context to search results (and this can lead to more clickthroughs, which in turn may lead to algorithms surfacing a result more often).

Rich snippets are typically generated through the addition of ‘Schema Markup’ — HTML code featuring tags defined by Schema.org (a collaborative project involving Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Yandex aimed at helping webmasters provide more accurate information to search engines).

There are a couple of ways to add rich snippets to a Shopify store. The first is to manually add some ‘data markup’ code to your Shopify templates (you’ll find some more information about this along with a code example here).

The second approach is to use a rich snippets app — there are tons of these available from the Shopify app store.

What about Google Shopping?

Getting your products onto the Google Shopping tab in search results (pictured below) is another way that you can boost your Shopify store’s visibility in search.

To do this, you’ll need to add the ‘Google & Youtube channel’ app to your Shopify store. This app is available for free.

12. Use the Yoast SEO app

Yoast SEO is a tool that helps you identify tweaks you can make to your content that can help it perform better in search results. Until recently, Yoast was only available to WordPress users, but the good news is that it’s now available to Shopify users too.

Yoast works by scanning your content and outputting a list of actionable tips to help you improve it. It looks at everything from meta description length to keyword density to page readability — and it’s a really handy tool to have in your Shopify SEO toolkit.

Using Yoast for Shopify does involve a fee ($19 per month) but it is usually worth it — particularly if you are planning to drive traffic to your Shopify store via blogging and inbound marketing.

And speaking of blogging…

13. Make full use of your Shopify blog

A lot of Shopify users focus so much on their product catalogs (the images, the descriptions, the keywords used etc.) that they forget a hugely important aspect of SEO — creating great content, usually in the form of blog posts.

Sites that feature in-depth, informative blog posts on topics that people are interested in tend to perform better in search results.

You’ll find some key tips on how to create the sort of engaging content that ranks in our article about increasing blog traffic.

14. Build backlinks to your Shopify store

Backlinks are links from another site to yours, and they constitute a very important part of SEO.

This is because search engines view backlinks as ‘votes’ for the quality of a piece of content. Generally speaking, the more of these ‘votes’ that the products and pages on your store have, the more likely they are to rank highly in search results.

Getting backlinks is one of the most difficult aspects of SEO, but it’s very important to do.

To get backlinks, you typically have to ‘reach out’ to other site owners in your niche and persuade them to link to your content. This can be hard — but is made easier if the content you’ve created is really strong.

(Strong content also tends to attract backlinks without as much outreach too, because people like linking to interesting products or authoritative posts).

One thing that you should generally avoid doing is buying links — search engines are wise to this practice and can penalize your site in search results if they discover evidence of it. Link exchange schemes are technically against Google’s webmaster guidelines too.

15. Increase ‘dwell time’ on your Shopify store

‘Dwell time’ is a phrase that SEO experts use to refer to the length of time a user spends on a website before returning to search results.

There is a general consensus in the SEO community that the longer your dwell time, the more likely your content is to perform well in search results — because it indicates to search engines that it is satisfying user queries.

So, it makes sense to create your Shopify site in a way that retains attention for as long as possible.

Here’s how you can do this:

One thing that’s very important to remember however is not to just put any old content or ‘fluff’ on a page to keep people on it longer.

Whatever you place on it has to provide genuine value to a user.

Get more Shopify SEO resources

The above tips and best practices should definitely help make a difference to the performance of your Shopify store in search results, but there is a lot more that you can do to tackle SEO issues and make your Shopify store rank higher on Google.

If you’re interested in finding out more about the whole topic of search engine optimization, and want to make sure your store performs well in search results, then make sure you download our free SEO toolkit below. We’ll send you all our key resources and guides, keep you up to date with the latest SEO advice and send you tips on how to start a successful business.