Shopify SEO (2022) — Simple Guide to Ranking, 12-Step Process
Hey there, it’s Matt from Style Factory,
the go-to site for ecommerce reviews and advice. In this Shopify SEO guide, I’m going to
walk you through the key steps you need to take to make sure your store ranks highly
in search results. So stay tuned to the end to get all our tips
on how to increase your Shopify’s store’s organic traffic and sales.
But before I get going, just a quick reminder
to subscribe to our channel and click the notifications bell. This means you won’t miss out on any of
our Shopify content going forward. Right, let’s start with something that's
quick and easy to do, but also very important — telling search engines that your site
exists. One — register your site with Google Search
Console and Bing Webmaster tools. Registering a site with Google Search Console
and Bing Webmaster Tools is a key starting point for Shopify SEO. By registering your site with these services,
you’re telling Google and Bing about your website and helping it to get indexed faster. Once you’ve registered your site with these
services, you then need to submit a sitemap to them.
Helpfully, Shopify generates a sitemap
automatically for you — it’s simply yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. In both Search Console and Bing Webmaster
Tools you can submit this sitemap URL by going to your site’s dashboard, and then clicking
‘sitemaps.’ Two — ensure your Shopify store is loading
quickly. Search engines give fast sites preference
over slower ones. To ensure that your Shopify store loads as
quickly as possible, remove any Shopify apps that you don’t need, avoid using a large
number of web fonts on your site, use image compression tools like Tiny Png to reduce
the size of your store’s pictures, keep use of external scripts on your store to a
minimum. Three — do your keyword research. A key part of improving your Shopify store's
search rankings is to ensure that your store’s pages 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: the keywords that people are using when looking for sites
or products like yours, the volume of searches for those keywords, how difficult it is to
rank for each keyword. When you have these three pieces of information,
you can identify ‘sweet spots’ – keywords that are popular enough to generate a reasonable
amount of traffic, without being so popular that there are lots of other sites already
dominating search results for them.
Getting this data involves using dedicated
keyword research tools like Ahrefs or Semrush. These let you find out how popular your preferred
keywords are, and how difficult it will be to rank for them. You’ll find links to more information about
Ahrefs and Semrush in the video description. Four — get your page and product titles
right. One of the most important elements of a web
page is its title. Search engines treat it as a key piece of
information when categorizing your content, and your title shows up as the largest component
of a search result. You should ensure that your Shopify page and
blog post titles are never vague in nature, and always start with your target keyword. To edit your home page title in Shopify, click
Online Store > Preferences in your store’s dashboard. Then, use the box provided to enter your home
page title. To edit other page titles, just navigate to
your page, post or product in your Shopify dashboard. Then, scroll down to the bottom of its settings
and click the ‘Edit website SEO’ link on the search engine listing preview.
You’ll then be able to edit your title. Five — use headings properly. Instead of using bold text to break up the
text for your Shopify pages or products, always apply Heading 1s, 2s, 3s and so on to do so. This will make it much easier for search engines
to index your content accurately, and wil alsol make it more accessible to any of your
store visitors who have a visual impairment and use screen readers. Six — use engaging meta descriptions. Meta descriptions are the summaries of web
pages that appear under page titles in search results. Although Google says that they aren’t a
ranking factor, a well-written meta description can encourage more clickthroughs to your website. And because the clickthrough rate of a search
result IS considered a ranking factor, it’s important to get meta descriptions right. Your meta description for your Shopify products
and pages should: be short (120 to 156 characters in length is best), be accurate, include your
target keywords. To edit your home page's meta description
in Shopify, click Online Store > Preferences and enter it into the ‘homepage meta description’
box provided.
To edit a meta description for other types
of pages, locate your page, post or product in your Shopify dashboard 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. Seven — ensure your product titles and descriptions
are unique. A common way of speeding up the process of
adding products to a Shopify store involves using the 'Duplicate product' option. While this is a quick way to add a new product
to your store, it can lead to a lot of similar or even entirely duplicated product titles
and descriptions being created. This is something that search engines algorithms
don’t like, so always try to make your product titles and descriptions as unique as you can. Eight — optimize your alt text and image
names. Search engines don’t just examine the words
on your Shopify store when indexing it — they factor in its images too.
To do this, they look at two bits of data
associated with your pictures: ‘alt text’ and file names. To add alt text to images on Shopify pages
or posts, navigate to your page / post, locate the relevant picture and double click on it. You’ll then see a box appear containing
an alt text field. Enter your alt text in here, making sure that
it contains any necessary target keywords — while still making sense to those using
screen readers. To add alt text to product images, navigate
to your product in your Shopify dashboard, then click on the relevant product image. Click the 'Alt Text' option to the right of
the image to add your alt text. As for optimizing file names, changing them
is not particularly easy in Shopify — so it’s best to optimize your file names 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. If you do have to change an image file name
after you’ve uploaded it to Shopify, you’ll need to delete your existing image and re-upload
a version that contains your focus keywords in its file name. Nine — 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 a red guitar
on your store, it would be better to use a URL slug of red-guitar for the relevant product
page instead of something long and complicated. To edit a 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, enter your URL into the 'URL and handle'
box.
If you are changing an existing 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 the URLs of pages that aren't
currently performing well in search results is usually fine — but if you’re thinking
about changing the URL of a page that IS already ranking highly, it’s often best to take
an ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix’ it approach. Changing the URL of a popular page can also
affect its 'social proof', because it will reset the stats displayed on your social shares
counter for that page to zero. Ten — add rich snippets to your products
and pages Rich snippets are pieces of 'structured data'
that can be added to your content to help search engines and users understand what a
page is about. Rich snippets provide additional information
about the content of a product, page or post — for example, star ratings, author or prices.
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 a link to a resource to help
you with this in the video description. The second approach is to use a rich snippets
app — there are lots of these available from the Shopify app store. Eleven — use your Shopify blog to drive
traffic. Sites that feature in-depth, informative blog
posts on topics that people are interested in tend to perform much better in search results
than those that don’t. Shopify comes with a really good blogging
tool, so make sure you make the most of it — you should aim to regularly post high-quality
posts about key topics in your product niche. You can learn more about how to blog effectively
in the Style Factory guide to increasing blog traffic. You’ll find a link to this in the video
description. Twelve — build backlinks to your store. Backlinks are links from another site to yours,
and they are a really 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 backlinks you
have to the products and pages on your Shopify store have, the better they’ll rank in search
results. To get backlinks, you usually have to ‘reach
out’ to other site owners in your niche and persuade them to link to your content.
This can be hard — but it’s easier to
do if the content you’ve created on your store is really strong. 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 swap schemes can be risky too. And that’s it: 12 key tips to help you improve
your Shopify SEO. I hope you’ve found this video useful, but
if you’re interested in learning even more about how to boost your rankings, check out
the free Style Factory SEO toolkit. This contains a host of useful resources including
downloadable cheatsheets and extended free trials of popular SEO apps, and you’ll find
a link to it in the video description. To get more SEO content from Style Factory
in future, remember to like this video, subscribe to our channel and hit the notifications bell.
Finally, if you have any questions about Shopify
SEO, just leave them in a comment below this video. We read them all and will do our best to help..
