It is estimated that in the next three years, more than half of the international e-commerce market will be driven by search engines. If you aren’t optimizing your Shopify website for SEO, you have to ask yourself one important question: “what’s stopping you?”
This Ultimate Shopify SEO Checklist is a comprehensive list of the best aspects of SEO that you can use to optimize your Shopify store. There’s no guesswork here, just a list of tasks and tips you can use today to improve your traffic and make your site more viable.
When it comes to Shopify SEO, there is a myriad of suggestions & tips that can each be tweaked to help improve your organic traffic. Many of these are viewed as best practices or best guesses for the future, which may or may not be true.
So, let’s dive right in.
What is Shopify SEO exactly?
Shopify SEO is the art of increasing your website’s visibility to search engines and shoppers. It includes best practices like keyword-rich products and page titles. Keywords play an important role in improving the search engine rankings of your Shopify store.
There’s a lot more about Shopify SEO. It can be complicated even for experienced SEOs to fully understand Shopify SEO. There are many components to its strategy.
With the influx of new Shopify stores, it’s becoming harder and harder to improve your organic search rankings within search engine results pages (SERPs). While Shopify themes are heavily optimized to rank in search results, there is always room for improvement.
Top 7 Tasks That Must Be on Your SEO Checklist
#1 Having a Custom Domain Name
It may not seem like a big deal, and it’s certainly not your first priority, but the URL path of your Shopify store is important. More specifically, the part after “myshopify.com” — everything after that small chain symbol.
Don’t settle with a free domain name from Shopify. If you are building a serious online presence, you’ll want to invest in your domain name. You must decide whether it’s time for your business to invest in a custom domain for Shopify in order to grow your business.
In order to make your store look more professional and legitimate, you must have a custom domain name. This creates brand awareness and assures trust among the visitors.
#2 Invest in a Fast & Responsive Theme
Chances are you already have a theme on your store and it might not be ideal for helping rank in top positions. If so, you need to consider changing it to another theme that is optimized for speed and performance.
Performance matters for your Shopify store, especially when it comes to SEO. It is always better to choose a theme that is optimized for speed and performance & less heavy.
Also, don’t forget that Google will index the mobile versions of your web pages. Mobile optimization is therefore also something you should consider.
#3 Install a Shopify SEO App
It can be especially tough to get started on the right foot when you’re creating a new Shopify store. The good news is that you have a lot of control over what tools and apps you use for your online store, which means you can get up and running with some useful SEO tools & apps. It’s easy to choose from a wide variety of Shopify SEO apps, but we would suggest installing SEO Doctor app for automating your Shopify SEO.
#4 Setup Google Analytics
One of the first things you’ll want to do is add a Google Analytics tracking code to your Shopify store. This will allow you to track and view traffic from Google, which is obviously an important source of traffic for most companies.
With the Google Analytics tracking code in place, you can see which elements are driving traffic to your site, without having to ask your customers. The information you get from this code – how long your visitors stay on-site, what devices they use, and what pages they visit – is important to improving your website.
#5 Keyword Research
Keywords are the foundations of your SEO strategy. Why? Because without the foundation, you have nothing to put on top of it. If you start optimizing for keywords halfway down the funnel, where conversion rates are lower and visitor intent is more ambiguous, you’ll be wasting time and energy.
Using a keyword research tool will save you a ton of time, but there are a lot of options out there. Building keyword-rich content isn’t easy. It takes a lot of time and research. You have to be able to come up with hundreds of long-tail keywords, intricate keyword combinations
Factors like Seach Volume, CPC, and Keyword Difficulty should be considered while doing keyword research for your store.
#6 Optimizing Page Title and Meta Descriptions
When you’re editing your Search Engine Listing, it’s easy to get focused and lose track of the SEO components on various sections of your individual pages. This is a mistake – don’t forget about the other major sections of your page that can be optimized: title tags and meta descriptions.
Shopify’s meta tags are simple to edit, but they still need to be done properly. You’ll want to follow best practices here as well by including your keywords and meeting SEO best practices, especially length – no more than 60 characters for your title tag & 160 characters for meta description.
The title and description meta tags that you see when clicking through your Shopify Search Engine Listing URL can help search engines understand your content and why it should be displayed higher in their results.
#7 Link Building to your Shopify Store
In order for your Shopify store to rank in search results, it needs to have strong signals from external forces. Search engines like Google use a variety of ranking factors but more importantly, they are governed by algorithms.
Those algorithms will favor incoming links to your product pages and store domain over any other metric you can measure online. They’ve done this for good reason — to combat spam and prevent sites from ranking too quickly.
Call for Professional SEO help – JustHyre
Shopify store owners: have you ever wanted to attract more customers by increasing your site’s visibility on search engines like Google and Bing? Don’t you wish your Shopify SEO was better? No need to worry, that’s where we come in.
Our team at JustHyre is a dedicated Shopify SEO agency that helps businesses of all sizes grow their online stores through search-friendly optimization. If you want your business to grow and reach new customers, don’t hesitate — to contact us for a free quote today!
Conclusion
With all of the above tips in mind, you can now begin the task of improving your Shopify store’s SEO. Don’t rush the process. Instead, use the checklist to create a more keyword-focused Shopify site. Remember, there is never one exact formula for success and no site will ever be perfect from an SEO perspective. However, you can significantly improve your organic traffic by tweaking each best practice and using it as a guide for creating your own imperfect strategy.