How to optimize your Search Engine Optimization on Shopify?
Optimizing your shopify SEO allows you to position your e-commerce website in the first position on search engines. Although paid advertisements are effective, there are also free ways to reach the first place and naturally increase your traffic. This way, you can easily increase your sales and your number of visits. Let’s find out how you can optimize your natural SEO on Shopify.
As with all websites, those developed on Shopify do not escape the rule of optimizing the 4 pillars of SEO:
- Technical: The site must be both accessible by search engines and perform well in terms of loading time
- Content: You must be able to publish a unique content on each of your pages responding to the searches of your users but also to the intentions of the latter.
- Usage: This concerns both the content: providing the right answer to the search of your user, the UX: a page that is pleasant to read and browse and the loading that must allow your site to load in a minimum of time whether on desktop or mobile.
- Netlinking: Even if your site perfectly meets the first 3 pillars, without popularity, that is, being cited by sites in your theme, you will have a hard time to go up on the requests that interest you.
What is shopify SEO?
First of all, you should know that Shopify is a platform that allows you to sell different products online. To start your business, you need to start by creating your online store. However, it is not enough to have an online store, it has to be perfectly made to enhance your products.
Also your products will be able to be in first position on the search engines. Thus, Internet users will have information that will lead them to your online store. This is called SEO. This will mean that you have to optimize your SEO on shopify.
You don’t need to be a shopify seo expert to know how to optimize your shopify SEO. You just need to follow certain steps in order to increase the traffic to your site and consequently the number of potential customers.
Search for the right target keywords
Unfortunately, Shopify does not provide direct access to the most relevant keywords for your site. However, they determine your rankings and performance. To find good keywords, the first step is to use your business expertise and put it to good use on a keyword research tool, such as Google Ads’ Keywords Planner or Ahrefs.
You can also find other sources of inspiration like :
- Forums related to your products.
- Social media hashtags related to your products.
- Examining the titles, meta descriptions and alt-text images used on competitors’ sites.
Shopify themes optimized for search engine optimization
The theme you choose for your Shopify store has of course a great influence on the aesthetics of your site and the available features. However, this choice is also crucial for the SEO optimization of your e-commerce. Among the free themes, SEO options are limited. That’s why I advise you to choose a paid template adapted to the needs of natural referencing.
By doing so, you ensure that the development is done by experts, that the updates are regular and that the configuration of the pages is optimized according to the criteria of search engines. In addition, when deciding which theme to use on Shopify, you’ll pay particular attention to the following points:
- compatibility with different reading media (mobile, tablets and computers) ;
- SEO features;
- number of reviews and average rating.
To speed up your search, here are two themes developed in France that I recommend.
Phantom Shopify: Best SEO Shopify Theme
Phantom is designed to meet the needs of Internet users by promoting the user experience (UX). In addition, it provides you with many SEO settings and add-ons only available on their theme. Another important point is that the support is provided in French, which is far from being a generality on Shopify.
Get the Phantom Shopify SEO theme right here:
https://phantom-theme.fr?afmc=THEMESEO10
↑↑↑↑ GET 10% OFF ↑↑↑↑ CODE: THEMESEO10
Phantom Shopify offers an ultra fast and powerful theme. It is perfectly adapted to mobile versions and focuses on user experience. In addition to SEO, it is conversion oriented. The updates are regular and the customer service speaks French.
The shopify SEO Phantom theme is made by a French developer, it is possible that the purchase page is in French, but the theme download on Shopify is in English, so, no problem to do your best work in On-site SEO
SEO Optimisations on Shopify
The SEO options on Shopify are limited. Without adding add-ons (called apps), there’s not much you can do. However, here are already the few settings you absolutely must make on your online store.
Metadata SEO Shopify
The data displayed on the search engine results pages is of great importance for your SEO and the improvement of the click-through rate (CTR). Don’t neglect your title tags and meta descriptions! Luckily, Shopify allows you to adjust these elements on your individual pages.
Home Page SEO Shopify
In your admin panel, go to “Online Store” and choose the “Preferences” tab.
You can then simply fill in the desired information to promote your homepage in the serp (search engine results page).
Quick SEO Tips: Use the main SEO keywords, simply, your niche, your main products
Product pages SEO Shopify
In the basic settings, the meta title is the name of the product and the meta description is its characteristics. To customize the meta-data of each product sheet, go to the “Products” section of your back office.
Choose the article you want to optimize and scroll down to the bottom of the page to click on “Edit Website SEO” in the “Search Engine Preview” block.
After clicking on “Edit Website SEO”, the drop down box will show you the parts that you will be able to modify your meta description & title.
That will allow you to increase your CTR as well as the meta Title SEO count 55 characters and 150 characters for the meta description.
Quick Tips: Be Sure to Check your URL and Hangle, pick the targetet Keyword, the URL Must be as Short as possible.
Pages SEO Shopify
To transform the metadata of all other pages (blog, categories, about, etc.), you go back to “Online Shop” and click on “Pages”.
Quick Tips: Don’t waste too much time on pages like: “Size Guide”, “Privacy Policy”, BUT… pages like “about us” or “our story” are really important, make sure they are well optimized!
Collection Page SEO Shopify
Again, you choose the page you want to transform, and select “Edit Website SEO” in “Search Engine Preview”.
Blog Page SEO Shopify
Once you click on “manage blogs“, select the blog you want to optimize and it’s just the same as the product page, pages and collection.
Again, you choose the Blog you want to transform, and select “Edit Website SEO” in “Search Engine Preview”.
Alt attribute for images (+ Files SEO Optimisation)
By filling in the attribute of your images, you describe its content to search engine robots. In addition, it allows visually impaired people to know what a photo corresponds to. It is therefore important to take care in the writing of this data.
Quick Tips: Be sure to compress all images using this tool: https://tinypng.com/
light images, it’s a page that loads faster, in the end, happy users! and that’s an important SEO factor!
Images of the homepage
At the top, first choose the page you want to optimize. In the dashboard, select the image you want to process and click on “Edit”.
All you have to do is fill in the alternative text and save the information.
Images of the product Pages
The procedure for filling in the alt attribute of a product photo is very easy. To begin, take the item of your choice in the “products” section of the administration panel. Then click on the image and fill in the data in “Add alt text”.
**IMPORTANT** Be sure to re-download your image and check if the file has the right keyword/name.
for example, the image presented above did not have the SEO optimized file, so we downloaded the photo again, we renamed the image on our computer, and here it is now optimized in .jpg and also in ALT TEXT version
LINK OPTIMIZATION/INTERNAL LINKING
1 – SHOPIFY MENU
Like most CMS, Shopify has a built-in feature to manage menus.
Despite the impossibility of having an ideal URL structure with sub-collections of collections, it is still possible to have parent/child collections using nested menus.
You can use drop-down menus to group products, collections or pages together and make it easier for customers to navigate your online store. For example, if you have a lot of products, you can add them to collections and then use a drop-down menu in the main menu to organize the collections. This can help a customer find the type of products they are looking for.
Organizing your menus is very simple and intuitive. You can create drop down menus by creating or moving menu items so that they are “nested” under a top level item.
2 – BREADCRUMB navigation on Shopify for SEO
The breadcrumb trail is essential on a website.
The breadcrumb navigation indicates your position in the structure of the site and allows you to navigate easily to the parent pages. So, it’s a useful way of navigation for visitors but it also helps to strengthen your internal link structure.
A large portion of Shopify themes support breadcrumb implementation with a few exceptions.
If your theme doesn’t, here is a short guide available at the following address: https://shopify.dev/tutorials/customize-theme-add-breadcrumbs
3 – Build Backlinks
Netlinking is an SEO strategy that works like this: the more people you know who are talking about your site, the more you can get your store to the first page of Google. However, you should know that this approach carries a bit of risk if you are the one undertaking the netlinking. You need to have enough knowledge and make sure that the sites that talk about you have a good reputation.
You also have the option of entrusting your linking strategy to a shopify seo agency to avoid possible worries. In addition, you can use social networks to improve your link profile. For example, you can work together with influencers to optimize your SEO on Shopify. Of course, you should work with influencers who have an active community and whose page is close to your theme.
Conclusion
Shopify is therefore a CMS particularly suited to small stores and/or sites that do not have very specific needs. It allows you to discover step by step the world of e-commerce and has many add-ons to progress yourself and your site. However, it is important to keep in mind that optimizing your online store is a daily task. You will have to use the data from your customers’ visits and your knowledge of the market in order to continue to improve your store. While the choice of CMS is very important, don’t forget to take ownership of your own site’s success! Learn everything you can about Shopify, web marketing, and e-commerce in general so you can make better decisions.
