The Ultimate Guide to Shopify SEO for Ecommerce Stores

The growth of ecommerce over the last decade has been nothing short of spectacular. The market is expected to be worth over $8.1 trillion by 2026, and Shopify is set to account for a significant chunk of that. With some 6.4 million customers, it’s the top choice for entrepreneurs looking to quickly set up an online store.

With so many players, online merchants need to come up with new ways to stay competitive in their industries. SEO is an excellent, cost-effective way to achieve this. It can help you boost organic traffic sustainably without having to buy your way into search results.

Here’s how to go about improving SEO on Shopify.

Why SEO Matters With Shopify

SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of optimizing your website so that it’s more visible on search engines for relevant queries. Organic results also tend to get more traction than paid results. Consider that the average CTR on the first organic result is 28.5%, whereas that on paid results is 2%.

SEO is particularly important in the context of Shopify given the massive competition both on the platform and in ecommerce more broadly. What’s more, SEO on Shopify is a bit trickier to execute than on other non-proprietary platforms.

If you’re able to get it right, this gives you a significant competitive edge over your rivals.

Understanding Shopify SEO Basics

With the right technical knowhow, you can absolutely level up your Shopify SEO and accelerate sales.

It’s worth noting that Shopify itself provides you a lot of options to boost website performance. It has a flourishing app ecosystem that you can bank on to optimize your store. This includes:

• Review Apps: Review apps help you showcase customer reviews for your products. This improves visitor experience on your site and is a trust indicator for search engines, improving your chances of ranking higher.
• SEO Apps: These help you do everything from adding alt text to images to creating meta tags and fixing broken links.
• Email Marketing Apps: Improving email campaign management should be a focus for any ecommerce brand. Coalition client Koyal Wholesale was able to increase email revenue by 277% using email optimization strategies.
• Payment Apps: These help provide customized payment processing options for your buyers.
• Page Speed Optimization Apps: You can boost page load speeds to improve user experience on your site.
• Image Optimization Apps: These help with image compression and SEO optimization to improve page load speeds.
• Promotion Conversion Apps: These are integrations to boost on-site conversion and product promotion.

Outside of third-party Shopify apps, the core platform also provides you a number of features for store optimization, such as:

• Automated XML sitemap
• Control over Robots.txt
• Option to hide pages for search engines using Noindex tag
• Native Google Analytics 4 integration to track ecommerce revenue
• Ability to optimize URLs
• Manage canonical tags
• Mobile-friendly build for stores

You can also take steps for off-page optimization by ensuring relevant and authoritative third-party websites link to your store and products. This is called backlinking and helps drive link equity to your site. This is essentially an indication to search engines that your website is worthy of consideration. A systematic backlinking campaign can help boost your site’s Domain Authority (DA) and its search ranking.

Implementing SEO

SEO is a precise science made up of a host of different actions you can take both on your website and off it to improve your store’s search ranking.

On-Page Shopify Optimization

On-page optimization includes all the actions you can take on your store to make it more competitive and convert-worthy.

Keywords are a big part of this. Your prospects use keywords (search queries) on search engines to find relevant results. If you aim to figure in those results, you should have those keywords embedded throughout your content. This includes your product and category pages, blogs, as well as your meta elements.

Meta elements include your title tags and meta description, which is the brief information snippet users will see next to your site link in search result pages.

Crucially, all your content should be relevant and original. The results of a focused content strategy can be eye-opening. Coalition client Color Cord, for instance, was able to boost organic sessions by 84% and nearly double organic revenue through a revamped content and SEO strategy.

Other aspects of on-page optimization include improving navigation, which in turn, boosts user experience. This is a key metric for search engines when allocating search rankings. A seamless user experience improves on-page dwell time and reduces bounce rates, which is the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing just one page.

User-friendly URL design can also help with improving navigation. Users are more likely to remember easy-to-read web addresses and directly navigate to those pages if they’re interested.

Effective interlinking, where you link relevant site pages to one another, is another important on-page activity. This drives good semantic and link equity value to your internal pages, helping search engines understand them better.

Finally, the value of high-quality images cannot be overemphasized in the context of ecommerce. People buy with their eyes and without high-definition, varied product imagery, you’ll be falling behind your competitors.

Technical SEO for Shopify

Technical improvements to your site, particularly those targeting website speed and mobile responsiveness are key to improving SEO performance. Users simply won’t waste time on a website that loads slowly or isn’t optimized for the device they’re using. This, in turn, increases your bounce rate and affects search ranking.

Rainbow Symphony, another CT client, was able to increase organic sessions by 371% and monthly organic revenue by 339% through a concerted approach of optimizing product images and on-site technical optimization.

It’s also worth looking into aspects like structured data and schema markups (such as Google FAQ Schema). These are a standardized way of structuring your content at the backend so that search engines quickly pick it up.

Ensure your site features an XML sitemap, which is a file that helps search engines better understand and log your site structure. Submit this sitemap to search engines, including the Google Search Console, to help them crawl your site quicker and successfully.

Tracking SEO Performance

You can’t measure the results of your optimization if you’re not tracking site performance all the way through. The most important of these are Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

The former gives you comprehensive, granular information on how your web pages are performing across multiple fronts, such as organic sessions, number of users, channels, bounce rate, dwell time, and click-through rate among others. Google Search Console helps you ensure web pages are crawled, fix indexing issues, understand your site’s search performance, and more.

You can use these in combination with other tools SEMRush, Ahrefs, Copy Scape, and Hotjar to further improve SEO and on-page conversion.