This complete Shopify SEO guide will cover everything you need to know about optimizing your Shopify store for search engines.
From keyword research to on-page optimization and link building, I’ll walk you through everything you must accomplish (or outsource) to get your store ranking high in Google.
Whether you a new Shopify store owner, or a seasoned pro, this in-depth Shopify SEO tutorial has something for you.
And, much more!
Ready to get started? Let’s dive in!
Shopify SEO is a set of search engine optimizations distinctive to the Shopify platform.
When correctly applied, these Shopify adjustments help improve your store’s visibility in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
While Shopify does handle some SEO basics out of the box, a standard Shopify setup is unlikely to propel your store to the top of the SERPs.
That’s because Shopify has several SEO “issues.” In-built problems like duplicate content and pagination issues that, if not addressed, will result in your store being suppressed in search engines.
Put another way:
Shopify SEO is the magic bullet that shatters the barrier obscuring your Shopify e-commerce store from search engine users. Think of it as a spotlight shining on your store, singling it out, and making it more visible to potential customers.
This spotlight is crucial because a Shopify store without Shopify SEO is practically drowned in a sea of other competitive and maybe even more visible stores.
By 2022, Shopify had a whopping 3.83 million merchants and at least 2.1 million daily active users.
Statistically, a Shopify store that isn’t making any effort to stand out will get a handful of daily visitors without competition from leading e-commerce platforms like Amazon.
When you factor in competition and other factors like bounce rate, low organic traffic translates to meager sales, if any. This is why it is essential to harness the power of Shopify SEO.
Using this strategy, a Shopify store can gain LOTS more organic traffic from search engines.
And, since organic search is Shopify stores’ top converting cold traffic channel, that means more transactions, customers, and revenue.
In a detailed click-through-rate study, Backlinko revealed that a site at the top of a Google search engine results page was likely to get ten times more traffic than a site at the bottom of the same page.
Such a distinct difference emphasizes the importance of SEO on a Shopify store’s performance.
So, let’s break down how Shopify SEO works and identify tips on how to boost SEO on Shopify stores for the best ranking possible.
Wherever Search Engine Optimization is mentioned, keywords follow closely behind.
This is the same for Shopify SEO. For better ranking on search engines and a higher likelihood of traffic and conversions, a Shopify store needs to identify the most relevant search terms that potential customers would incorporate in their search queries.
You don’t have to crack your skull trying to find relevant keywords.
In this internet age, there are faster, simpler, and more comprehensive ways to do this.
Here’s a breakdown of three tools you can use to find keywords that “could” enrich your Shopify SEO strategy.
Amazon Suggest is just a fancy term for the search bar on Amazon.
But fancy terms aside, this is one of the best tools for finding keywords for your Shopify store.
Amazon has at least 98 million monthly users constantly searching for products. The platform has a rich data set of keywords. You can access these by typing a seed keyword into the Amazon search bar.
For example, if you sell video games and equipment in your store, you can begin your search by typing “video gaming” in the search bar.
As you type, you will see several autocomplete suggestions for your terms. All these suggestions are variations of search terms that Amazon users use when shopping for video games.
Write down all the essential words and phrases. We’ll analyze them in detail later.
PRO TIP – While noting these words, focus more on long-tail keywords. These are phrases made up of at least three or more words. Long-tail keywords are more specific than short-tail ones, making them excellent terms for your product pages.
Another essential keyword-finding tool is the Keyword Tool Dominator. This free-to-use resource will help you find relevant e-commerce search terms from multiple autocomplete databases like Walmart, Etsy, Amazon, and eBay.
Keyword Tool Dominator’s interface allows you to select one of these platforms by simply clicking on its icon. Instead of opening multiple tabs to find these sites one by one, this keyword tool serves as a one-stop shop for all your e-commerce keyword research needs.
Like Amazon Suggest, getting keywords on Keyword Tool Dominator requires you to type in a word that describes what you offer on your Shopify store.
If you’d like to get even more specific, you can select the target market using the Country/Marketplace field.
Like you did with Amazon Autocomplete, note down any relevant terms.
For more advanced keyword searches, I highly recommend Ahrefs. Although this tool will set you back about $99, it is worth every bit because it gives you more than words.
Ahrefs gives you keywords, competitor keywords, and their search volume for several search engines, including Amazon, Google, and Bing.
It also indicates a keyword’s difficulty and the number of clicks each generates.
As I’ll share with you later in this post, such metrics are precious because they help you decide which words to incorporate into your Shopify SEO strategy.
But first, here are two ways you can use Ahrefs to generate keyword ideas for your Shopify store.
What are the words your customers use to describe your products?
Plug those words into Ahrefs Keyword Explorer.
Let’s imagine you sell carpets in your Shopify store.
You’d add words like carpet, rugs, and flooring into Keyword Explorer:
Hit the search button, then ‘Related terms’ – Ahrefs will throw up a list of connected keywords.
Scroll through the list and note down any relevant keywords.
Utilizing competitor keyword research is a great way to uncover keywords for your Shopify store.
Utilizing competitor keyword research is a great way to uncover keywords for your Shopify store.
Pop a competitor’s domain into Site Explorer, click ‘keywords,’ and Ahrefs will show you all the keywords the site ranks for.
Like with the first method, simply note down any relevant keywords. We’ll analyze them next.
Selecting the right keywords for Shopify SEO can be overwhelming.
According to a report by Statista, in 2021, the U.S. alone had at least 263 million online shoppers. So, predicting the most valuable words from (potentially) billions of e-commerce queries isn’t easy.
But don’t despair. Understanding the words and phrases most relevant to your eCommerce shop gets easier when you apply the right filters.
Let’s analyze the four most essential considerations for choosing relevant e-commerce keywords.
This is hands down the most critical metric to consider when choosing keywords for your Shopify store.
Let’s face it:
If shoppers aren’t searching and clicking your chosen keywords, it doesn’t matter how easy they are to rank or how well they convert.
Before you ask, there’s no particular minimum number you should aim for. Firstly, search volume varies significantly by industry. Secondly, SERPs can include many or very few features that impact traffic potential.
SERP Features With that said, you’ll get a good feel for high – or low-traffic potential keywords in your industry over time.
So how do you identify traffic potential for a given keyword?
There are several tools you can use. But if you are going to pick one, my recommendation is Ahrefs.
Navigate to Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, enter your keyword in the finder, select your target geography, and hit search.
But wait, what exactly is traffic potential?
Traffic potential is the sum of organic traffic that the top-ranking page for your target keyword receives from all the keywords it ranks for. The higher this number, the better.
It’s a much more useful metric than search volume because it factors for zero-click searches and all keywords your page can rank for.
With traffic potential covered, let’s move on to the second factor.
Aside from traffic potential, this should be your primary focus when conducting keyword research for Shopify SEO.
After all, your Shopify stores’ main goal is to make sales, so you should target commercially oriented keywords over informational ones. This is because informational keywords only show curiosity, while commercial investigation and transactional keywords show a desire to buy.
Of those four, transactional keywords have the highest commercial intent, followed by commercial investigation, navigational, and informational keywords.
Of those four, transactional keywords have the highest commercial intent, followed by commercial investigation, navigational, and informational keywords.
Using transactional and commercial investigation keywords is the best way to get buying-ready customers to your Shopify store. Why? Because the mere use of these keyword types shows the person behind the keyboard plans to purchase soon. Here are keyword examples by intent type: Keyword Examples by Search Intent I’ll show you how to find high-purchase intent keywords in just a moment.
The third essential factor when choosing the right keywords is competition. Put simply, the more websites that target your chosen keyword and the better their SEO, the more difficult it will be to rank. To find out how competitive a given keyword is, you can use Ahrefs “Keyword Difficulty” score:
Keyword Difficulty measures how hard it is to rank in the top 10 organic search results for a given keyword. The nearer that number is to 100, the harder it is to rank for that keyword in Google. In other words, you should prioritize keywords with a lower Keyword Difficulty number.
This fourth factor is a huge deal. Imagine you’ve found a keyword that ticks the first three boxes:
Surely, it’s a great keyword to target. Not necessarily. If the keyword doesn’t accurately describe a product(s) in your store, it won’t convert. Let’s say your site sells Ethiopian ground coffee. And your research identifies the keyword “Arabica coffee beans.”
Although you don’t sell Arabica coffee beans (only Ethiopian grinds), you may stand a chance of ranking for that keyword if you create a category page around the term. In theory, you could convert some of that traffic into what your site sells. The trouble is, it’s a hard sell. That’s why I recommend sticking to keywords that perfectly describe your products. The best way to imagine this is a target:
The second box you need to check for Shopify SEO is site architecture. Site architecture, or structure on Shopify, refers to everything from internal linking to the organization of pages on your Shopify website. The most crucial part is arranging your products into logical collections that map to the keywords you identified in step one. But that’s not all. Let’s look at all the elements of site structure you need to optimize for optimum Shopify SEO.
Once you’ve chosen a domain name and launched your Shopify store, your next step is to set your preferred domain version for users and search engines.
This critical step is known as domain canonicalization and ensures search engines know which domain version to rank.
By default, your Shopify store is accessible via multiple domains:
If like this widget example, your website is accessible via different URL paths, you will face duplicate content and link dilution issues. You want all variations to point to your chosen version. That way, all users and link equity are channeled to the canonical of the page – and search engines aren’t confused about which version to rank. Shopify does handle the redirection for you, but the trouble is the wrong domain is often selected. To check and update the version, go to your Domain settings in Shopify:
But wait, which is the correct version?
You always want your Shopify website on a domain you own and control. You gain the benefits of branded URLs, and you can move your website to another platform and keep the same domain should you wish to. Neither of those would be true if you built your business around widgets.myshopify.com, for example. If your store is brand new, then choose either example.com or www.example.com. Both are fine. However, if your store is old, select the version which is most linked to. Choosing the most linked version ensures you take full advantage of link equity pointing to the site. To check that, use Ahrefs Site Explorer’s ‘Best by links’ report. It will show you the number of domains linking to each version of the page. In the example below, for our client Luxury Promise, it’s the non-www version (300) that has the most domains linking to it versus the www version (21).
In Shopify Domain settings, luxurypromise.com is the one we’d set as the primary.
If you want your products to be found by users and search engines (who doesn’t want that), then you must organize your product listing and product detail pages into a logical hierarchy. How a site is organized is an essential consideration for any website – but for a Shopify store (which has many more pages than your average brick-and-mortar business website), it’s crucial. Here’s the basic structure I recommend:
As you can see, the homepage links directly to top-level categories (AKA “collections”), which then link to second-level subcategories. Finally, the sub-categories link to individual product pages. A single level of Shopify Collections is ideal if your store has fewer product types. As a general rule, keep your collection tiers to two or fewer. When you have more than two, the number of clicks required to reach the product pages gets high. The greater the number of clicks, the less link juice and users reach your product pages – a bad thing for rankings AND conversions.
Another thing to consider is keeping your site structure simple and scalable. As your Shopify site grows, you will want to add more products. If that results in your product groupings slipping into a disorganized mess, you are in trouble. Here is an example of user and SEO-friendly site architecture for a Shopify store selling women’s clothing:
The keyword research you did in step one should help you define the collections for your store. Ensure you have collections for all the high-volume searches relevant to your products, and you are good to go.
Next, we’ll cover how to create collections in Shopify.
First, let’s get clear on what Shopify collections are: Shopify collections group items that have similar characteristics, such as “Most Popular,” “New Trends,” “Manufacturer,” or any other attribute that store owners want to use.
There are two types of product collections on Shopify. Let’s break down each type and analyze its significance.
Automated Collections: These are collections that Shopify creates automatically when you select certain matching conditions. These conditions include product type, category, vendor, weight, or inventory stock. When you add products that match specified conditions, Shopify automatically adds the product to the collection.
Manual Collections: With these, you can manually add items to collections. Manual collections are more daunting to maintain, but they can work for stores with fewer products in their catalog.Creating Shopify collections is downright easy. You can use these few steps to have as many collections as you need for your store. 1). Go to your Shopify Admin panel, and click on ‘Products’ then ‘Collections.’
2). Type your collection’s title in the ‘Title‘ field. 3). You can add a description in the ‘Description’ section. This will only appear in themes that support descriptions, but using relevant keywords helps improve SEO.
4). Next, select whether you’d want your collection to be manual or automated. 5). Next, move to the ‘Collection Availability Card’ to determine which channels you want the collection to appear. Deselect the channels you want to exclude, but keep the ‘Online Store’ checkbox selected to allow the collection to appear on your store’s main menu.
It’s important to note that a collection doesn’t have to be published immediately. You can indicate when the collection will be published on the ‘Collection Availability’ card. However, an unpublished collection cannot appear on the Main menu. 6). You can also add the main image to your collection by clicking the ‘Add Image’ button under the Collection Image section. Add keywords to your image’s alt-text to boost SEO. 7). Click the ‘Save’ button at the bottom of the page. If you opted for a manual collection, this creates a Product section where you can scroll your inventory and add the products to the collection. Otherwise, you can proceed with the next step.
The next aspect of setting up a proper Shopify structure is focusing on navigation. How easily can shoppers move through your store? Do they have an easy time finding what they want to buy? Navigation has an overarching impact on a Shopify store’s ranking because it impacts dwell time and PageRank. Let me explain… Dwell time is a ranking metric used by Google to measure searcher satisfaction. The metric measures how long users “dwell” on your site before returning to the search engine. A longer dwell time indicates higher searcher satisfaction, while a shorter one implies a dissatisfied searcher.
Shopify menus are the easiest way to ensure your store is straightforward to navigate. Menus organize a store and help users locate product and category pages effortlessly. Shopify has two distinct menus: the main menu and the footer menu. The main menu is displayed horizontally at the top of every page or vertically along the sides. While the footer (as you might expect) is at the foot of the page:
As the name suggests, Breadcrumbs is a form of navigation that leaves traces of pages the user had to get to before reaching the page they were on. Each trace is a link back to the previous page. With this, users don’t have to click the back button multiple times to land on a previously visited page. All they have to do is click the link on the breadcrumb navigation.
On Shopify, there are three types of breadcrumb navigation. Each type considers a different hierarchical structure for your store. Here’s a quick outline of each breadcrumb navigation type and the kind of store it suits best.
These breadcrumbs retrace a user’s navigation steps based on the page they previously landed on. This navigation is the equivalent of a back button going back page by page. Somewhat handy for users but not at all helpful for search engines since this breadcrumb type doesn’t provide a logical hierarchy for pages.
These are breadcrumbs that serve as filters. Borrowing from the women’s clothing Shopify store example above, an attribute-generated breadcrumb would list all the attributes from summer dresses to dinner dresses such that a user doesn’t have to be on the main dresses page to switch to a different subcategory. This breadcrumb can aid search engines in discovering all the pages on your store since each page will be linked via breadcrumbs.
Hierarchical breadcrumbs list the pages associated with the current page the user is on, on a hierarchical basis. When a user clicks on a subcategory, the breadcrumb shows the main product category and the homepage. The list changes based on the pages the user opens and their hierarchical structure.
Hierarchy-based breadcrumbs are the most common and the type I recommend. They are great for multi-layered sites since they help users and search engines:
For breadcrumb navigation to work, you must think about several things.
Here are essential tips and tricks for designing Shopify’s optimal breadcrumb navigation.
Keep Them Short: Although breadcrumbs make it easy for users to navigate your site, you also do not want a long list in your breadcrumb navigation bar. When creating your site structure, ensure the last page is about three clicks away from the home page to get that short but optimal breadcrumb.
Incorporate Keywords in the Breadcrumb: You can kill two birds with one stone by incorporating keywords into your breadcrumb navigation link texts. With this, users can quickly identify with your site’s offerings, and search engines can see relevance which is good for higher ranking.
Ensure Breadcrumb Titles Relate to the Pages they Point to: As much as you incorporate keywords in the breadcrumb titles, you must ensure these keywords relate to the product pages they point to so that shoppers and search engines aren’t confused.
With keyword research and site structure out of the way, on-page SEO is the next focus for an effective Shopify SEO strategy. Product and Collections page SEO on Shopify refers to the efforts made to make the search engine rank the page highly. On-page efforts mainly involve aligning elements “on the page” to be more relevant to what a shopper is looking for. Let’s look at the different parts of a Shopify store page and how to make them search engine friendly.
The first on-page element that needs optimizing on a Shopify product or collections page is the page’s title (AKA “title tag”). Let’s consider the rules of the game for title tags. While Shopify suggests up to 70 characters, the ideal length for a title tag is between 50 and 65 characters. Pages with title tags above 65 characters will truncate in SERPs, look overstuffed, and reduce the page’s overall click-through rate and ranking. The title tag must also incorporate your target keyword (or a close variation) toward the start. It is essential to do this so that search engine knows what to rank the page for and for users to determine whether your page is relevant as they scan their eyes down the SERPs.
Meta description tags were once an essential part of on-page SEO. But, with Google only displaying the coded description about 37% of the time – that’s not the case anymore. Still: Spending a few minutes setting up templates, so your meta descriptions display nicely (and win clicks) when they are shown is well worth your while. You can use a Shopify app like Smart SEO to create meta templates.
he Smart SEO app allows you to pull product tokens from the Shopify database to “automagically” create meta descriptions at scale. Available tokens include:
When it comes to headings, the best practice is to have a variety of headings for different sections of the page. For example, the product’s name should be an H1, while the product description headline should be an H2. Higher headlines discuss broader subjects, while subsequent ones discuss more specific topics. Web crawlers can easily follow the content of a page with this kind of structure.
Creating and optimizing content for Shopify product and collections pages is one of the most arduous but fruitful parts of Shopify SEO. Yes, you want to write high-quality content, but you also want your content to convert. Here are four content writing essentials for Shopify stores:
By now, you’ve implemented seamless navigation and installed breadcrumbs on your Shopify site. Because of that, your internal linking is already in a good place. That said, you can give your priority pages an additional ranking boost by adding strategically placed internal links. Let’s say – we want to rank our page selling “Hermes Birkin hands bags.” Here’s how we do it: First, we identify our store’s most authoritative pages and posts using the Ahrefs ‘Best by Links’ report: Then we scan down the list and look for relevant pages.
Every Shopify page has a URL associated with it. The URL begins with the domain name, then the names of the subsequent subfolders where the page is stored, and ends with the page’s URL slug. If you’re not careful, Shopify product URLs can get seriously long – which is terrible for SEO performance.
When it comes to technical SEO, Shopify is far from perfect. From duplicate content to product variant issues, Shopify offers various technical challenges. The good news is – all are addressable if you know how to find and fix them. In this next section, I’ll show you how. Let’s begin:
In terms of SEO, duplicate content is Shopify’s Achilles heel. Duplicate content occurs when two separate URLs carry the same (or very similar) content.
By default, Shopify allows product pages to display via two different URL Paths:
Shopify presents another issue when you have extensive product collections spread over multiple pages. Links to the first page from paginated pages in the sequence link to “?page=1”
Let’s say you sell a style of sneaker in white, black, and blue. You would end up with a product in your Shopify store with the same specifications but on three different URLs. The only difference? A slight change in attribute – its color. Here’s what the URL looks like: shop.com/products/nike-air-max?variant=7925702568452 Product variants (color/size/quantity, etc.) don’t necessarily cause duplicate content issues as the variants are canonicalized to the main product URL. However, they do offer a huge SEO opportunity.
A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which pages not to crawl. It’s an essential aspect of technical SEO.
A Sitemap is a digital map of your site. They help web crawlers navigate your site. For some sites, site owners must manually generate and update the XML sitemaps. However, Shopify automates this process. On Shopify, sitemaps are created immediately when you add the first page to your store. They are also updated with every change made to the site’s structure. As such, optimizing XML sitemaps is as easy as making the best updates to site architecture. By default, Shopify generates a sitemap index file at the URL path /sitmap.xml linking to child sitemaps for products, pages, collections, and blogs:
While you cannot adjust an XML sitemap on Shopify to control which of your store’s pages gets displayed by search engines – you can add a “noindex” tag. When inserted in a page’s header, a meta-robots no-index tag tells search engines not to index that page. And when a page is not indexed, it cannot rank. In other words, a “no index” tag is a great way to remove unwanted Shopify store pages from search results. There are two ways to do it:
Site speed is a core ranking signal. It’s one of the few ranking factors Google has publicly announced. But site speed doesn’t just affect your SEO rankings. It impacts your bottom line too. According to research by Unbounce, if an eCommerce site loads slower than expected, over 45% of people admit they are less likely to make a purchase. Let’s take a look at how site speed can be improved in Shopify:
One of the ways to improve the speed of a Shopify site is to disable apps the site rarely uses. Enabled apps take time to load every time a user accesses the store. Therefore, ensuring that only essential apps run at a given time can help improve site load speeds.
Large image files can slow a Shopify site down. To combat this, I recommend manually resizing images on priority pages, such as your home and collections pages, and installing Crush Pics for Shopify to compress images automatically.
If every image needs to be rendered for your page to load, your page speed will get seriously slow – especially for collection pages with LOTS of images. That’s why I recommend you implement lazy loading using Lazify, which delays an image load until the user gets to the part of the page where they will see it.
If you are anything like me, you probably have a bunch of pixels like Facebook, Google Analytics, and HotJar installed on your site. When each one of these codes needs to load separately, it makes your store’s site speed very slow. To combat this, move your tracking pixels to Google Tag Manager. Google Tag Manager provides one container for all your tracking codes and can shave off 2 seconds from your load time.
You can do all the keyword research, and on-site and technical SEO in the world, but until you win links to your store – your Shopify website will not rank. But here’s the thing: Not many site owners will link enthusiastically to a “money” page, so acquiring backlinks to products or collections can be really hard. Because of this, it’s often easier to win backlinks to informational pages like blogs. You can then use internal links to channel link juice to the pages you want to rank. Let’s cover next some of the link-building strategies you can use.
Guest blogging is the practice of writing blogs as guest authors for third-party websites. It’s one of the few e-commerce link-building tactics you can use to win links to money pages since you write the content and decide where links in that content point. Here’s a quick step-by-step process to find and leverage guest blogging opportunities.
SEO on Shopify is a broad topic, and although the six steps above cover almost every aspect, there are a few other tips and tricks to explore. Here are some bonus tips to help improve your Shopify SEO strategy.
One of the reasons why Shopify has so much popularity is how flexible it is for stor owner’s needs. A Shopify site is compatible with many applications that allow users to customize their Shopify experiences. These apps also simplify the workload that comes with Shopify SEO. Let’s discuss these must-have apps for Shopify SEO.
SEO is important for any website that wishes to thrive on the internet. The same case applies to Shopify stores. Stores that implement an effective Shopify SEO strategy manage to gain search engine credibility, higher rankings, increased visibility, more traffic, and, ultimately, more sales.
All Shopify stores need Shopify SEO. Shopify SEO makes stores more visible and improves their ranking in search engines. Therefore, it is important for every store, regardless of what it sells, to improve its Shopify SEO efforts.
Yes. Shopify has all the features necessary to improve a store’s ranking on search engines like Yahoo, Bing, and Chrome. Shopify SEO focuses on keywords, site structure, on-page SEO, and technical SEO, which are the SEO elements that search engines require.
To get your Shopify store to rank well on Google, you need to use Google’s best SEO practices on your site. This usually means picking the right keywords and using them in the right way, making sure the page is relevant, making sure the site is easy to navigate, making sure the bounce rate is low, and using the right on-page SEO and technical SEO.
Shopify plans do not have any effect on Shopify SEO. Shopify will allow you access to all the SEO features available on the platform, regardless of your plan.
Which of these Shopify SEO strategies will you be putting into practice on your Shopify store? Perhaps you will be fixing Shopify’s duplicate content issues? Or maybe you’ll focus on creating meta templates for your store? Let me know by commenting below