If you need help, contact the premier Shopify SEO agency in Superior, WI, Bear North Digital. We’ve developed a Shopify SEO checklist for a quick route to success. Read on, and then contact us at 715-319-4822 for more information and to get started boosting your site’s traffic.
15 Tips to Improve Your Shopify SEO
1. Custom Website URLs
The first step of your Shopify SEO checklist is to purchase a custom website URL. It’s best to have a memorable URL related to your brand or industry. Product pages should also have custom URLs that match a product description summary.
Your Shopify website should look polished and position you as an industry authority. Website URLs that appear legitimate get more visits. When you appear at the top of Google’s results, you want people to see an enticing URL they want to click.
Trust is a critical factor in whether your website will get traffic. A custom URL that clearly identifies your business makes your Shopify store look professional and garners more clicks. More clicks result in further SEO increases, eventually pushing your site higher and higher in Google search results pages as your website’s URL becomes a well-known path.
If you’re unsure of the perfect domain name, Shopify offers a domain name generator tool that allows you to check each idea’s availability. You can also use it to determine which URL names could generate more SEO increases. Remember that your URL is often the first impression you make on your customers; be sure you’re making a good one.
2. Get Analytics Tools
A crucial step in your Shopify SEO checklist is to have a way to analyze your website’s traffic and other key performance indicators (KPIs). You can better track your products’ future success by analyzing your site and store’s SEO keyword ranking, organic traffic details, customer conversion rate, and more.
These free solutions help you monitor your site and discover ways to improve your business. A Google Analytics account and Google Search Console are excellent free tools to get you started.
Google Analytics offers a full suite of data collection and tracking tools to help you understand how customers interact with your business. Google Search Console helps list your site in search engine results pages. The program will tell you if any errors occur when searching for your pages online.
Don’t forget to purchase a paid Shopify plan to enable your analytics tools further to gather information. With a free trial, your Shopify website is only accessible to a certain point. The paid plan will more than pay for itself in increased business.
3. Create a Marketing Strategy
A marketing strategy is vital to your website’s success. You need a streamlined plan to help you determine what strategic efforts to employ. Your marketing strategy allows you to explore how to utilize each tactic most advantageously for your unique goals.
With a marketing strategy, you can prepare a plan to create brand awareness, target a specific audience demographic, and engage with followers to gain organic traffic.
Without brand awareness, you’ll struggle to get organic traffic and convert leads to sales. With your Shopify content marketing strategy, you can display your business’s value, help customers answer essential questions, and achieve your online traffic goals by connecting your product or service with people who search for relevant content.
Your strategy should define the goals you wish to accomplish and outline how you’ll reach them. You can make your Shopify marketing goals as specific or broad as you wish. Whether you want to reach a particular organic traffic metric or be at the top of the Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) for a specific keyword, you can optimize your marketing strategy for that success.
4. Perform Keyword Research
Before you can optimize content, another step of your Shopify SEO checklist is to perform in-depth keyword research. Determining which keywords are relevant to your Shopify business’s offerings helps those searching for those terms find your website more easily.
You can use keyword research tools, including those that crawl Amazon and eBay, to find high-ranking keywords relevant to your product. Google Search Console provides instrumental insight into keyword issues and those that already perform well on your site. Ahrefs and Surfer SEO have free and paid options, while Moz provides many SEO tools in one package.
It’s best to highlight one main keyword per page on your Shopify site with other secondary and semantic keywords where applicable. You should choose keywords that people frequently search for but aren’t too challenging to rank.
By strategically placing keywords in content, including product descriptions, service pages, and other areas on your Shopify site, you’ll increase your website’s Google SERP rank, connecting you to more likely customers.
5. SEO Optimization
On-page SEO optimization is the core of your Shopify SEO checklist. Optimization ensures that Google’s engine can easily parse your website, increasing the likelihood of a high SERP ranking. You’ll need to optimize several areas of your Shopify website for best results.
Page titles and your site pages’ metadata, individual page URLs, product pages, blog posts, alternative text, and images can all benefit from optimization. Optimizing these aspects of your Shopify site will also help potential visitors learn about your brand and product offerings quickly and easily.
Titles and Metadata
Titles and metadata display the information visitors see in your browser’s tab and Google search results. Google uses this information to determine a page’s relevance to a search query. Be sure only to include one main heading on your page to avoid confusion.
Keeping these character counts low is crucial to ensure Google searches the page correctly. Short titles using your page’s primary keyword are most effective on Shopify. The meta description should also have a shorter character count of 155 characters.
While SEO optimization is essential, your tags should also feature natural language. When inputting page titles and metadata, you can add keywords to tags to describe the product or service without increasing the word count. Including delivery details or shipping information can also help you stand out from other Shopify stores.
URLs
In addition to optimizing your website’s domain, your Shopify SEO checklist should also include optimizing every URL on the site. This includes the slug, the last portion of a website page’s URL. You’ll need to have custom slugs for each page.
The best-performing URL slugs offer a short description of the page’s inclusions. You should use relevant keywords that describe each page and entice visitors to click the link when it appears in Google search results. This process is similar to optimizing your domain’s name with industry and brand-related terms.
Avoid using filler words for custom URLs. Only include the most necessary terms, and be sure to include your main target keyword for the page.
When you edit Shopify metadata, you can view a preview of all necessary information, including each page’s URL. Use this area to determine how to form your page URLs before publishing them.
Product Pages
Product pages should have around 300 words of unique content. To maintain originality, you can include additional elements, like pictures, customer reviews, and more. Avoid plagiarising content from other sources, and hire professional writers if you need SEO-optimized product descriptions.
You can easily optimize product pages using a content optimization tool. These allow you to input desired keywords and help you meet the necessary format for content headings and product images. Some tools have additional capabilities, like determining which keywords are most beneficial to use when describing your products.
When businesses write about their products, they can more clearly help potential customers understand the benefits of using their product over others. Product reviews from legitimate customers are equally instrumental in helping convert potential buyers. You can also add additional content by linking to other related products.
In addition to optimization, product pages should also create engagement. If potential customers have questions about a product, they should have a place to ask them and get answers quickly. Whether you utilize a live chat function or a contact form, your product pages should provide vital information.
Images
An often overlooked part of our Shopify SEO checklist is image optimization. Images contribute to page loading speed and organization. Since Google doesn’t read photos, you need to perform informational optimization to help Google crawl your site’s images more efficiently.
It’s critical to consider image size. Compressed images are significantly smaller than their original versions, but they load faster and take up less space without sacrificing quality. Customers can be impatient, so if your page loads slowly, they’ll go elsewhere.
Try to compress images before uploading them to your Shopify website. Although Shopify doesn’t have a built-in compression tool, you can find third-party desktop software or a free online image compression website.
Image files should have descriptive names that tell Google what type of image to expect. You can also incorporate SEO keywords in image descriptions to further assist the algorithm.
Alternative Text
As previously mentioned, Google can’t read images the same way it reads text. To compensate, you need alt text and tags to help Google include your site’s images in the Google Image search results. These additions can also make your business more accessible, creating more potential leads.
Alternative (alt) text is an asset describing the page’s images and their purposes. The more descriptive the alternative text is, the better. You’ll help your images rank highly in search results, and website visitors with vision problems will be able to understand your site’s imagery despite struggling to see it.
Describe your images’ alt text with natural yet descriptive language. You can use similar names as each file name, but unique descriptions produce the best results regarding optimization. Whether you’re writing alt text or image descriptions, take the opportunity to utilize top-ranking keywords.
Things to avoid include file names and alt text with numbers or content unrelated to the images and products on the site. These can be bland and even confusing.
6. Post Blogs
The easiest way to position your Shopify business as an authority in your industry is to provide accurate, interesting, and valuable information. Blog posts are the perfect way to display your expertise and extensive product range. By doing this, you’ll also encourage customers to engage with your products and hopefully purchase them.
Creating and regularly contributing to a blog will significantly increase your Shopify site’s chances for SEO optimization and ranking highly in the Google SERP. You’ll answer your target audience’s most burning questions while including SEO keywords that push your content to the first page of the Google SERP for your main keyword.
By sharing valuable content, you’ll also build brand awareness. Those who like your content will keep coming back. Additionally, they’ll share your content with others who need to read it.
If you’re looking to increase customer engagement, blog posts also allow you to do this. Enable comment sections on posts in Shopify’s built-in content management system. Encourage customers to share their thoughts through comments versus direct messages so that other potential customers can see what they have to say.
7. Keep All Products Visible
When building a Shopify SEO checklist, many think only of immediate concerns and disregard the future when they’ve succeeded and start selling out of products. The first impulse is to remove sold-out products from a store page to keep things clean and accurate. However, doing so actually works against your Google SERP goals.
When you deactivate a product, you remove it from your site altogether. So, if a customer or Google tries to visit that link, they’ll get a “404–Page not found” error, which Google counts as a strike against your site’s ranking. To avoid sinking in ratings due to broken page links, keep sold-out products on your site, but clearly state that they’ve sold out or push them to the bottom of your catalog.
While Shopify doesn’t natively offer the push-down option, many apps, such as Nada, provide this feature. Whichever you choose, remember that, above all else, you must ensure that every link on your site works.
8. Structure Content and Menus Properly
Whether creating a product page or a blog post in Shopify, it’s necessary to structure the content properly. Long blog posts and product descriptions can be challenging to read. A well-organized page is straightforward for potential customers and helps them quickly find the answers they need or learn about your products’ key features.
Ensure your blog posts have relevant titles, headings, and subheadings. Product pages should also have relevant headings and include the necessary tags and meta descriptions to entice traffic and help pages rank better on Google.
Menus and navigational tools are also essential to your website’s usability. Menus should match your Shopify store’s various pages and give potential customers easy ways to locate what they need, such as search tools.
Navigation should be clear and easy to read while offering adequate organization for your business’s products. You can also include options for providing on-demand assistance from your help and support team.
9. Use Internal and External Links
Using internal links helps both organic traffic and search crawlers, while external links are vital in creating brand awareness. Utilizing both significantly increases your Shopify store’s position in the SERP.
Internal links for related products, other relevant blog posts, and other pages on your Shopify store offer users a fast way to travel across your online property. You can include them in blog posts, product pages, and elsewhere where relevant. Site crawlers have an easier time indexing and searching your website with more internal links.
External links are crucial for link building, the process of establishing relationships with other Shopify stores, blogs, and industry-related websites, writing valuable content for them, and linking back to your own Shopify site. You’ll look like an industry professional by sharing helpful information and reap the benefits of another website’s SEO checklist and strategy.
It’s essential to avoid linking internally to products that are out of stock or have poor page optimization. Highlight the pages ready for new organic traffic.
10. Create Landing Pages
The next step of your Shopify SEO checklist is to create relevant and valuable landing pages for your marketing campaign. Landing pages serve as more specialized alternatives to entire websites.
Many businesses use landing pages to connect customers with products. City-related landing pages target customers in a specific area, while other product landing pages focus on internal linking to encourage new purchases. Businesses with multiple locations can utilize landing pages instead of creating web properties for each office.
Landing pages are unlike blog posts in that their information updates regularly and reaches a more targeted audience. Landing pages should feature content relevant to a subset of the general traffic. While it can take a long time to create landing pages for your business’s service area or each office’s market area, these pages are especially helpful in acquiring organic traffic from certain cities.
11. Utilize Reviews
It’s easy for businesses to provide false information under the guise of authority. User reviews are crucial in displaying your products honestly and accurately. Star ratings and comments from buyers help others gauge your products’ success.
Shopify stores that don’t allow product reviews can look less legitimate. Including user review sections for each product page allows your customers to give their opinion and help future potential buyers decide whether to make a purchase. Your store will appear trustworthy, and customers will have better guidance on product durability, legitimacy, product description accuracy, and more.
Shopify doesn’t automatically include reviews for product pages.
The Shopify Product Reviews application is a crucial addition to your Shopify store. You can download the application and add it to each product page. The application will send relevant product satisfaction information to the Google SERP as buyers review your offerings.
12. Check For Responsiveness and Speed
Responsiveness and speed directly correlate with conversions and Google rankings. Many visitors have limited time in their day to browse your website, and a store that makes navigation difficult sees fewer purchases. People don’t want to stay on a site that doesn’t adapt to their device’s screen or loads slowly.
Your website should be responsive across multiple mobile devices and computers and have fast-loading pages. You can test Shopify site responsiveness and speed on your own devices. Also, consider reaching out to friends or colleagues with different devices to provide info on as many different experiences as possible.
Shopify allows you to monitor your page speed insights from your account. If optimizing your site’s assets doesn’t increase speed or resolve responsiveness issues, consider another theme.
You should select a theme that offers quick loading times to improve responsiveness. Despite the attractive features of themes with animations, many images, and other eye-catching elements, these aspects contribute to slow loading speeds. Simple themes with little to no imagery or animation load fastest, resulting in a better, more responsive user experience.
13. Routine Website Audits
While adding more website pages, backlinks to content from other creators in your blog posts, and new products to your store, you should add regular site audits to your Shopify SEO checklist. Audits help identify problem areas where you can improve SEO optimization, technical SEO, and other SEO-related processes. This vital feedback on your strategy lets you see what’s working and what isn’t.
You can also check your strategy and website’s performance by seeing if your pages appear in the Google SERP when you search for each page’s keyword. Pages that don’t rank may need additional optimization.
When auditing your site, you can analyze metrics of well-performing pages to determine why others aren’t performing as well. Compare page audits to find where you can improve poorly performing pages.
You can use the keyword research tool, Ahrefs, to check your Shopify site for detrimental optimization errors, among other problems. Otherwise, the best way to audit your website is to follow an in-depth checklist like this one.
14. Revise Your Strategy
Shopify SEO doesn’t always provide the best results the first time you employ your marketing and SEO tactics. You’ll need to revise your strategy by monitoring the results of each strategic action. Keep and update tactics that produce good results, and abandon or modify tactics that result in lower traffic or customer engagement.
Regularly monitoring and revising your strategy helps your marketing campaigns and SEO efforts stay fruitful. As Google’s Shopify SEO requirements change, you’ll need to avoid improper practices. Updating your process periodically is necessary to prevent penalizations and maintain the best Shopify SEO practices.
It’s best to stay updated on the latest practices and learn which metrics are most important. By being aware of the best SEO and Shopify practices, you’ll more readily identify advantageous marketing techniques and facilitate more organic traffic.
15. Reach the Top Result
While creating your website around an SEO checklist is incredibly helpful, you’ll also need to rely on user experiences and deeply understand Shopify SEO. Good SEO doesn’t necessarily mean ticking all the checklist boxes. To reach the top of Google’s SERP, it’s most important to provide natural-sounding, valuable content that answers critical questions.
Google doesn’t know what searchers want. Your page should have high-quality information and high-ranking, relevant keywords to combat this issue. With time, your keywords’ effectiveness will change with trends, resulting in less or more SEO success.
Analyzing competitors’ pages is a helpful way to determine how you can improve your Shopify pages’ reach. Whether you need a more responsive site layout or more substantial SEO keywords throughout blog posts, adjusting your strategy can help your Shopify site reach the top.
Consult the Professionals
The Bear North Team is here when you need a comprehensive Shopify SEO checklist and services to match. No matter your Shopify SEO and marketing needs, we have the necessary tools and training to provide you with satisfactory results. We can improve your site’s success and help increase your sales significantly.
We create a streamlined marketing strategy for your business’s Shopify site. Cognizant of your company’s industry and the products you sell, our team will locate the most profitable keywords and employ highly effective digital marketing efforts that improve your site’s SEO score.
The friendly Shopify and digital marketing experts at Bear North Digital have the knowledge and expertise to turn your Shopify website into a success. Our years of experience give us the skills to identify problem areas and craft or revise your strategy accordingly.
No matter your Shopify business’s size, we can help you create brand awareness and make a profit in no time. Read this helpful Google My Business guide, then contact our team at Bear North Digital in Superior, WI. You’ll receive individualized marketing assistance from trustworthy professionals.
Look no further than Bear North Digital for an all-inclusive Shopify SEO checklist to get your site going. Contact us today at 715-319-4822 to get started.