Shopify SEO Tips

If you have an ecommerce business in 2022 then no doubt you are on Shopify. For good reason, too!

Both big and small businesses can take advantage of Shopify’s scalable features, tools, and analytics to help get their products online where they can then be bought by the masses.

It’s getting your products discovered by the masses which can be the hard part. For improving discoverability on Google, you have two options: paid advertising and search engine optimisation (SEO).

Today we’re going to delve into Shopify SEO and give you some actionable tips that you can use to level up your own performance on Google. Strap yourself in and let’s go!

Is Shopify bad for SEO?

No, Shopify isn’t inherently bad for SEO. For most people, Shopify’s SEO is perfectly fine and won’t present any limitations.

However, selling on Shopify does come with certain pitfalls that will affect your organic performance and these will need to be addressed if your site is to perform at its best.

In the past, Shopify had a bit of a bad reputation when it came to SEO. After many years and many updates, it has now improved quite substantially. Generally, the only people who will encounter any problems concerning SEO on Shopify (provided that they are using it correctly!) will be people who want the most complete control over every aspect of their SEO.

If this sounds like overkill, then Shopify should be perfectly fine for you! Just make sure that you follow Shopify’s best practices for SEO.

How to improve SEO on Shopify

If you want to maximise your performance in the SERPs (search engine results pages), then there are a few simple actions you can take to do this.

Fix duplicate content

One of Shopify’s biggest SEO hurdles is the amount of duplicate content that there is. This is when there’s two or more pages on your site that have similar content, which can confuse Google when it wants to display accurate results for certain searches.

Let’s say you sell a pair of shoes, and these shoes come in five different colours. Each of these pages will have similar copy, and what’s more, they will likely all internally link to each other. This can cause havoc when people search Google for those shoes, and your own pages can cannibalise each other (they will fight against each other in terms of ranking keywords, to the detriment of your SEO.)

You want to make sure that you’re using canonical tags in your collection pages to avoid issues surrounding duplicate content. This means that when Google crawls through your pages that are similar, if they are marked as non-canonical in the URL then Google will be signposted to the canonical ‘master-copy’ page.

Use optimised written content

Google and its users have a relationship based on language. Users type search queries in their chosen language into Google, Google deciphers what their query means and then goes through its extensive library of content to return relevant results.

To help make your site more appealing to Google, you should include written content that Google can analyse and use to understand whether you are a relevant search result. By including target keywords and entity salience best practices in your content, you can make it more likely that Google will return your site for relevant searches.

This is a very simple overview, but let’s say somebody searches Google for ‘bedroom posters’. If your website states clearly in multiple places that you sell posters, and you have a category page specifically for bedroom posters that links to multiple products that you stock then you stand a good chance that Google will understand that you are a relevant search result.

You should also work to publish content in your blog section. You may think that your blog is useless because you are an ecommerce site, so you want people to go to your product pages and make purchases – this isn’t the case. Blog content can help you become a topical authority in your niche, improving the chance that your site will be returned higher up the SERPs for relevant searches.

On top of this, you can use your blog to create internal links to your category pages or your best-selling products to boost their performance too!

Improve page speed

Page speed is one of Google’s ranking factors. Fast pages lead to a better user experience, and a better user experience generally leads to better SERP positions.

On the whole, Shopify does tend to have pretty good page speed scores as standard. But there are steps that you can take to ensure your site meets the standards that modern-day users have regarding page speed.

This includes:

• Compressing image files
• Remove Shopify apps that you don’t use
• Use a system font that most people will have on their devices, rather than an obscure font that may take longer to display
• Choosing a theme that loads quickly, and isn’t stuffed with features that you aren’t going to take advantage of

As long as your page fully loads within 3 seconds, you should be okay. Although it doesn’t hurt to be lightning fast and load in the milliseconds either!

Do tags on Shopify help with SEO?

Product tags are only really used for organising your products within Shopify. They do not have much sway when it comes to SEO.

These Shopify tags are not the same as title tags and meta descriptions, which do have importance for SEO! Don’t get them confused.

Does changing a Shopify theme affect SEO?

Yes, some Shopify themes are faster than others and this can have an impact on your SEO performance!

Fast Shopify themes will have smaller file sizes than other themes. Some of the fastest themes will be behind a paywall, but there’s a good selection of free themes that will be okay to use too.

Shopify SEO advice from Blaze Media

These are just a few tips that we want to give ecommerce businesses to help their SEO from our SEO agency in Liverpool.

If you want to discuss more about how your Shopify SEO can be improved then don’t hesitate to get in touch with our team, we’d love to speak to you!