Ultimate Guide to Shopify SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a powerful way to drive traffic to your website. Getting the right SEO strategy in place is essential for any successful business. This article will show you everything you need to do to get your Shopify store ready for SEO. In this article, we’ll cover: Why SEO is important on Shopify, How to optimize your products and pages for SEO, and The basics of link building on Shopify.

What is SEO and why does it matter on Shopify?

Before directly jumping to the point, it is better to have some idea about SEO and why it matters on Shopify. Starting with SEO, a set of practices that are intended to improve the ranking and appearance of a website or web content in the organic search result is known as SEO. Since organic search is the most noticeable way for individuals to find and access online content, a decent SEO procedure is fundamental for enhancing the quality and amount of traffic to your site. Common SEO strategies incorporate creating high-quality content, building backlinks, content with specific keywords, maintaining appropriate keyword ratios, and more.

If we start thinking about broader SEO, then there are two basic types of SEO available that are equally important: On-page SEO and Off-page SEO

• On-page SEO is tied in with building quality content to improve the rankings of your site. This includes adding relevant keywords into your web pages and content, creating keyword-rich titles and meta-tags, internal linking, ALT tag, SEO friendly title, and other factors.
• Off-page SEO is simply the optimization that is happening off itself, for example, earning backlinks, guest posting, blog commenting, social networking, and others. This part of SEO includes building better connections and producing content that people will want to share. The truth is, it takes a lot of spadework, however, it is indispensable to SEO success.

Now, why does SEO matter to Shopify? 

Shopify believes to create its own path to global business. Shopify store owners are investing a lot in social media marketing, paid advertisement, as well as content. However, most of the time, after a while these investments are not recreating any part to increase the customer growth. 

Though they are investing money, they are not creating the opportunity for their customers to easily find their Shopify store. And that’s where SEO comes to help you make your Shopify store easily discoverable in the search engines. Some of the key reasons why SEO matters to Shopify are as follows: 

SEO Brings Quality Traffic

SEO helps your customers with supportive and helpful information when required. It does not irritate potential customers by sending them spam emails or even interruption ads. This raises the chances of transforming your messages into leads and sales. So the number of real customers increases and it results in an expansion in your traffic quality.

SEO Improves ROI

When you are planning to invest in digital marketing strategies, you are expecting to earn the best ROI (Return on Investment) possible. With competitive and smart SEO strategies, you can achieve your goal as SEO is a proven technique to convert your visitors into leads. 

Dodge Competition

SEO has gained ubiquity and is viewed as a significant part of any advertising methodology. A Shopify store optimized with SEO will definitely draw the attention of a larger number of customers than non-upgraded ones. So assuming that you are utilizing SEO for your Shopify store, then, at that point, you are already one step ahead of your rivals.

SEO Improves the Speed of Shopify Site

Search Engine Optimization not only improves the performance of your site but also speeds up your site, which makes user interaction less tedious. Delay in loading time irritates the visitors consequently making them leave your site early. SEO will minimize it and improve your customer satisfaction. 

SEO Makes Your Brand Known Better

If you rank higher, you will be able to build more trust. If your webpage is on the top ranking in search results, it demonstrates your brand is reputed, well-established, and performing well in your industry, henceforth building the trust towards your brand and consequently expanding your brand credibility.

Is Shopify good for SEO?

SEO can do so much to grow your business, now the question may arise whether Shopify is the right platform for SEO or not? What Shopify can do to rank higher on Search Engines? In short, is Shopify good for SEO?

The quick answer is YES.

Shopify is a great platform for SEO when employed in conjunction with true and practical SEO best practices. Fortunately, for Shopify users, this platform does numerous things when it comes to SEO, particularly the fundamental components. This incorporates:

• Managing Meta Tags: Meta tags come with a short description of the page and post. Though nowadays meta keywords are not in trend, the Shopify product tag, meta description, and title tag are used by bots when they cross your site.
• Creating 301 Redirects and Canonize URLs: Without diminishing your ranking, you can redirect your traffic from one URL to another using Shopify. Shopify also has the ability to help Google bots find the master version of a page from various identical pages.  
• Intuitive User Interface: Though this one basically depends on the Shopify theme you choose for your site, however in general Shopify offers a savvy design that simplifies the navigation.
• Image Alt Text Shopify SEO: Using Shopify, you can modify the names of image files and the alt text. You can follow the Shopify SEO tips like adding relevant keywords to the description of image alt text. Likewise, Shopify compresses larger images to reduce the size of files, which will help your site to load faster.
• Shopify Product Tags SEO: Product tags basically help to organize your products on the site. It is often overlooked as it offers a very small opportunity to optimize your site for online searchers. Some mindful adjustments like using product tags on your product page will offer you higher chances of ranking well than a page without product tags.
• Generating Sitemap: Shopify automatically creates a sitemap for your store, which helps Google bots to categorize your URLs. For advanced SEO, you might need to do it manually, however, Shopify does really well at generating the sitemap for you.

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How much does Shopify SEO cost?

When it comes to Shopify SEO costs, it is always worth considering the number of benefits like getting more traffic, increasing the revenue, or even increasing your brand awareness, and others that you will be receiving after adopting the SEO strategies. SEO costing plan will rely upon what your organization needs to accomplish and what it can manage. No two SEO consultants or agencies value their services similarly. 

The size of your company, plan of action, and SEO needs will direct the scope of your SEO program and how much you need to pay for it. Yet, some basic SEO cost evaluating models are available that many offices and experts use to decide how much their SEO services will cost. The most well-known ones are per hour basis, monthly pricing plan, and project-based SEO cost. 

How to make it cost-effective? 

To make your SEO strategy more cost-effective, you can also try the best Shopify theme for SEO. Numerous themes are available in this list. Some of them are: 

• Lezada by BootXperts: It is popular because of its SEO-friendly layouts, Social media interaction, Google Analytics, Well Documentation, and Multi-language Support. 
• Corano by HasTech: This is another best SEO optimized Shopify theme that offers SEO-friendly layouts, features, RTL, Cross Browser Compatibility, Pagination, Google Analytics, and more. 
• LeArts by BootXperts: This creative theme includes SEO-friendly design, multiple currency, Cross Browser Optimization, Google Map API, and other features. 
• Electro by Arenatheme: It includes a ton of powerful features like SEO, Revolution Slider, Mega Menu, Slideshow, Google Rich Snippets, and others. 
• Mira by 99Shopify: Comes with SEO Optimized feature, Daily Deal, Mega Menu, Ajax technology, Quickview, and Slideshow. 
• Minimog by ThemeMove: Offers all SEO Support, mobile-friendly design, drop-down navigation, and others. 
• Space by Cleversoft: It offers a Powerful admin panel, SEO optimized, a strong mega menu, email subscription, and others. 
• Wokiee by p-themes: Includes product filtering, mega menu, product tag, powerful admin panel, and others.

These are only a few. You will get a bunch of Shopify SEO themes like Enroll by Themetidy, Fresh Food by Shopilaunch, HappyChild by Engotheme, Lapras by Themedeux8, Shoptym by Webcontrive, Venster by Tvlgiao, Maxive by Velatheme, Furwood by Engotheme, Boutique by Engotheme, Leo Care by Leo-theme, JMS Ceramics by Joommasters, and many more to choose from.

Not only themes, to cut off your SEO cost, you can also install the best SEO App for Shopify like:

• Hello Rich Snippets for SEO: This app is useful for better SEO ranking, improving CTR, and increasing organic traffic.
• Hello GTM & Data Layer: This easy-to-use app supports collecting data from data layers and fetching accurate data.
• Hello Google Analytics 4: It is a free app that helps you take the advantage of Google Analytics’ contemporary features. 
• NoIndexify ‑ Sitemap Manager: You can easily manage the NoFollow or NoIndex status of your collection list and product list using this app. 

AVADA SEO by Avada, Plug in SEO by Sureswift, SEO Doctor by Kudobuzz, SEO Get Clicked by Adolab, SEO Expert Pro by Expert Village, SEO Manager by Venntov, Smart SEO by Kabuki, Ultra SEO by Coolence, SPO by Sillycube, TurboSEO by Eastside, SEO Assistant by Buymaxx, and FireAMP by Mlveda are some other excellent SEO apps for Shopify. 

Optimizing your store page for SEO 

There are a lot of reasons to figure out how to optimize your store pages for conversions. The accompanying Shopify SEO course will set you up: 

Keyword Research

The initial phase in Shopify SEO is to figure out what you are optimizing for. This implies recognizing terms people are looking for, which is known as “Keywords” that you need your site to rank for. There are a few essential factors to consider while choosing the right keywords:

• Search Volume: The primary component to consider is the number of people looking for a specific keyword. If more people are searching for a keyword, then the chances are higher to reach the potential audience. 
• Relevance: Probably many people are looking for a keyword, but if it does not match your industry and if the relevancy is zero, then the keyword will not bring any value. Keyword relevancy and the search query is important ranking signal.

There are many ways to do keyword research. You can also use keyword research tools. But whatever method you are using there are basic steps you need to follow:

• Study your niche and define your goal
• Create a list of relevant topics and seed keywords
• Study search intent
• Identify long tail, short tail keywords
• Learn more about your competition

Optimizing Site Speed For SEO

One of the ranking factors for any website is a site’s speed. Therefore, to get a higher rank on search engines, you should improve your site speed. Delay in loading time irritates the visitors consequently making them leave your site early and impacts badly on the overall SEO of your site. Thus, you can get a higher rank on search engines and boost customer satisfaction.

Optimizing URLs for SEO

The URL of your page not only offers an extra value to your keywords but also shows up in the search results. Your URL turns into a part of an advertisement that appears in the organic search result. It is important to optimize your URLs as it influences the individuals whether to click or not. Google also shortens the longer URLs to make them look simple. Following are some other Shopify SEO tips to follow: 

• Make your page URLs read well: It is necessary to make human-readable URLs. You do not need to focus on perfect grammar, yet at a glance, the context that you are trying to deliver on that page should be clear. It is a clever choice to check whether your URL mirrors your page title. 
• Only One URL for Each Page: Ensure that each page on your Shopify site has one URL. You may disappoint Google if you have duplicate pages with similar URLs.
• Hyphens Vs Underscore: How you separate the words also matters when it comes to optimizing the page URL. Google bots are set up to understand hyphens, not underscores. So it is an ideal choice to use hyphens instead of underscores. 
• Canonicalize your URLs: Some pages can create copy content especially when they are dynamic pages with filters. Using canonical URLs can help you prevent this action. You can use a 301 redirect rule, or even add a rel=” canonical” tag to the duplicate content. 

Optimizing Title Tag and Meta Description

Title tags give a high-level overview to the search engines about your web pages. On the other hand, adding meta descriptions is always a good practice when it comes to SEO. Let’s see how you can improve your title tag and meta description.

• Front-load Keyword: If you want to bring more weight to your title tag, then it is better to place keywords closer to the beginning of the tag. Your Keywords do not really need to be at the absolute starting point of your title. However, the closer the better. 
• Title Tag Modifiers: For the long-tail version of the target keywords, you can also use different types of modifiers like “Top”, “Best”, “Checklist” or even “Guide”. This will help you rank for your keywords.
• Keyword Rich Meta Description: It is consistently essential to write a remarkable meta description and to that end, Google recommends writing a unique description that includes keywords.

Image Alt Text and Title Tag

If you want your images to be easily found in the search engines, image alt text can help you do that as it tells what your image is about. When an image cannot be found, alt text will be displayed. On the other hand, the title tag is shown when a visitor hovers their mouse over the image. For on-page SEO, this tag is also important.

Optimize Page Speed

Page loading speed is always crucial. As you are decorating your page with different sorts of layouts, banners, styles, fonts, and other components, you will not want to see a page that looks like a word document, right? Your visitors and search engines will not like that as well. To speed up your page, you can:

• Optimize image size and videos
• Stick to JPG format when possible
• Limit the number of components on your page
• Enable browser caching and lazyLoading
• Load CSS and JS files asynchronously 
• Minimize HTTP requests

Publish Unique and Fresh Content

Content SEO implies making content that helps your website pages to rank higher in the web crawlers. It incorporates everything to do with structuring and writing content on your site. Publishing unique and dynamic content is a  smart strategy and you can easily do it to improve SEO Shopify. Updating your content on a regular basis will certainly help you. Some tips for SEO content are:

• Write keyword-rich comprehensive content
• Share your content on social media
• Focus on link building

The Basics of Link Building on Shopify

You’ve made unique and fresh content that people are looking for, that addresses their inquiries, and that web crawlers can see, however, those characteristics alone do not mean it will rank. You have to establish authority to outrank the rest of the site. That can be done by earning quality links from legitimate sites and building trust.

Link building plays a significant part within SEO in driving organic traffic. When you combine it with great On-page SEO strategies, a strong technical foundation, good user experience, and excellent content, you will enjoy the power of link building to get more traffic. 

What is Link building?

It is basically the most common way of gaining hyperlinks from different sites to your own. A hyperlink is a way for visitors to explore between pages on the Internet. Not only humans, but search engines also use links to crawl the web. On your Shopify store, they will crawl the links between the pages and also between the entire site. 

How to Find High-Quality Links? 

Before we dive into link-building tactics, it’s essential to understand what makes a worthy link. This will help you to focus on building quality links to improve your rankings. Following are some of the ways to identify links that actually matter: 

• The Authority of the page linking to your page really matters. Links from the high authority pages has more impact on search engines than links from the low authority pages
• Relevancy of the authority site will always be valuable while building links
• The position of the link is important. If the links are stashed away in the sidebar or footer, it is not as worthy as the links that are placed in the body of the content.
• Editorially-placed links have much more weight than unnatural links. Unnatural links are also considered a violation of link-building guidelines.
• Search engines use anchor text as a ranking signal but it is not always a good idea to focus on keyword-rich anchor text. Keyword-rich anchor text is often abused and sometimes is considered spammy.  
• A mind-blowing guest post on a relevant and authoritative site can also help you rank.

Real-life Link Building Tactics

When it comes to link-building tactics, there are many ways available. But the truth is you just need one right strategy to be successful. Let’s discover some of the world-class methods of link building.

Content Marketing

Starting with content marketing. This is one of the amazing ways to unlock backlinks. Many people only focus on publishing content on a regular basis. But that may not give you the success you are desiring. There are four types of content that can help you generate more links.

• List Posts: A number of top strategies or best methods, tips, guidelines, or even any types of list that go with your brand. List-post contains a lot of value and can help you generate more links than any other method! 
• Visual Content: Visual content like diagram, images, chart or infographics are a great way to earn links. When people will share the visual content that you have already posted to your site, you will automatically earn the link! 
• Research and Orginal Data: This type of content is highly linkable as it reveals fresh data from surveys, research, and studies. When someone cites your information they link to your site. 
• Ultimate Guideline: In-depth ultimate guidelines also have the power to assist you to generate more links. This type of guideline is packed with a huge amount of information that can be a go-to resource for the given topic. 

Email Outreach

Email outreach is one of the best Shopify link-building methods that can help you generate white hat links. 

• Find Potential Linkers: There are different ways to find potential linkers. However, the simpler method is searching by your keywords and getting the URLs of your result. Use a link analysis tool to get the list of potential linkers. Collect their email address and get ready to send them an email.
• Choose a Catchy Subject Line: A simple and clear subject line that gets right to the point is necessary. You really want to express yourself in one short sentence. The headline is the primary thing the recipient will see. If you fail to catch the attention, they will not read your email. 
• Personalization: The body of your email needs to be customized to the individual you are sending it to. Assuming that you send a similar email to multiple potential linkers, they will catch on and you will be on their blocklist!
• Demonstrate Value: The body of your email needs to show your worth. Demonstrate how linking to your site can be beneficial for both of you. Keep away from indulgent pitches. Be persuasive and concise without bagging for a link! 

Guest Blogging

Every site owner always wants to post unique content to their site that brings value to their audience. But doing this on a continuous basis is really challenging. That’s why many site owners look for guest articles on their sites. 

It’s an opportunity for you to build links through your posts on different relevant sites. Following are some tactics for great guest blogging:

• Pick a Winning Topic: When you have an understanding of the target site where you want to post, it’s time to pick an ideal topic to work on. You can add value by providing more info on a popular topic, or you can write something new that yet has not been covered by others. 
• Make Your Pitch: The primary rule is to keep the pitch to the point. Secondly, choose a catchy post title. Also, do not forget to focus on the format.  
• Work on Bio: It works like a payoff for your effort. As a guest blogger, you need to write a creative bio where you can strategically include links to your site, or you can add social media links. 

Strategies to earn links are high effort, however, offer a great prize. You need to prepare yourself to invest your time and resources into earning quality links. Doing so will help you earn more links that your rivals will struggle to imitate. 

Watch the video about The Ultimate Guide to Shopify SEO

Conclusion

All things considered, getting your Shopify SEO right is necessary for the success of your Shopify store. Many people want to compare Shopify vs WordPress SEO. While WordPress brings great control and highly-customizable solutions that have an impact on SEO, Shopify also offers easy-to-master tools for all kinds of users. You can reach millions of audiences with the support of SEO at almost no cost! SEO will enable your potential customers to reach you.

If people get your brand frequently on their search results, it will present your brand as a trustworthy choice. It will help you improve your sales. The more you sell, the more you earn. When sales go up, you can put more effort into the growth of your business. All these started with SEO. So, never be left out! Invest your time in developing a well-thought and smart SEO strategy to set your brand on the path of massive success!