Shopify is a widely used ecommerce platform that was made to help business owners easily create and manage a website so they can produce sales. However, as competition increases online, you may need to enhance your Shopify site’s SEO in order to beat your competition.
Here are some things that can help!
1. Enhancing Product Titles
One of the easiest ways to optimize your site for SEO is through adding keywords to your h1s. Say you sell dog toys – instead of having a product named “rope,” you could try out “durable rope toys for dogs” or anything of that nature. According to Shopify, you have up to 70 characters to work with.
2. Extending Page Copy
Depending on what theme you are using on your site, you should have the ability to add extra copy to your different page types – homepage, categories, products, etc.
In addition to giving a basic description of the product, it is also a good place to squeeze in more keywords, links to other relevant pages, additional information on your business, and more.
For years, there has been chatter in the marketing industry on what word count is ideal for SEO, and while we have read everything from 250 to 2,000 words, our professional opinion is that it’s ideal to have at least 500 words on every page.
3. Adding Meta Data
At the bottom of your product pages and other pages, you may see a box that says “search engine preview listing.” This is where you can incorporate meta data. Basically, this section is to add in what information you want to display for users on Google, Bing, and other search engines.
Via Shopify
In Shopify, this information is automatically pulled from copy on your page unless you fill it out otherwise. So if you click on the edit button, you will be able to add in what you would like. For example, instead of what is shown above in the example, we would recommend something along the lines of:
Dock Shoes | Shoes for Men | Johns Apparel
https://johns-apparel.com/products/dock-shoes
These stylish dock shoes feature a nonslip sole to ensure you can perform at your best in wet conditions. Come to our site to see what makes our dock shoes better than the rest!
You will want to try and add in keywords that you know customers may use to search for your product, while also making your brand notable in the headline.
4. Using an AMP Add-On
Accelerated Mobile Pages are a great way to optimize your website pages for mobile search. And as internet users are using their phones more than ever, it is important that you do what you can to ensure your website is as mobile-friendly as possible. Thanks to AMP add-ons, you can do just that. There are a few that you can find in Shopify’s store that will get the job done, such as:
5. Adding Image Alt Tags
Not only is meta data used for pages, but it’s also used for images. In Shopify, on your product pages, if your hover over the image you have set for that page you will see a small “ALT” button. Here is another place you can sneak in some keywords for your website (ex: “red flat women’s shoes”), and this will also help increase your site’s accessibility.
6. Buying a Rich Snippets Add-On
One thing you can find in the add-ons store is a variety of rich snippets features. Rich snippets work with search engines to help them receive as much information about your website as possible. From social media profiles to ratings and more, they can really help shape up search results and make your listings look their best to potential customers.
6. Doing 301 Redirects
If you use Google Search Console or any other website auditing tool, you will be able to see how many 404s you have on your website. These 404s are any broken URLs that no longer exist on your site, so if you recently renamed or restructured URLs, or deleted products, then you likely have a large number of 404s on your site.
Having 404s hurts your SEO when Google reads your site map and sees you are indexing pages that do not exist. To combat this, you can add in redirects so the old page will automatically go to a relevant new page.
You can find out to how to perform redirects in Shopify from this helpful article.
7. Increasing Site Speed
Unlike other content platforms, Shopify doesn’t really offer any add-ons to have a better cache on your site, but there are some manual things you can do to shore up load time:
- Remove add-ons you aren’t using
- Reduce file sizes before uploading (or invest in an add-on to do so)
- Have your developer remove unused scripts, CSS, or other coding
- Avoid having pages full of images (especially sliders!)
- Ask your developer to reduce the number of web fonts on the site
Want More Ways to Boost Your SEO?
Here are some other blog posts that might be able to help.
- Our Best Link Building Tactics
- Where to Use Keywords for SEO
- What Type of Marketing Do You Need?
- Appear More Prominently in Local Search
And if you are interested in investing in an SEO agency to help you manage your Shopify site, be sure to inquire about our services.
