Shopify SEO Services: A Beginners Guide

Shopify is one of the leading eCommerce platforms across the globe, with thousands of stores, businesses and creators making use of its drag-and-drop format, easy-to-choose themes, and customisable elements.

Its user-friendly nature makes it appealing to many, but it requires the same consideration regarding SEO as other platforms. Here’s a run-down of the Shopify SEO services on the platform, what you can edit and optimise, and more…

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is making changes and improvements to everything from your site structure to your image captions to help increase traffic and climb the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). It’s essential on any website, including those on Shopify:

·  SEO can help you rank higher in the SERPs.

·  SEO can help you attract more suitable customers to your site.

·  SEO can help build customer trust and credibility.

Some common SEO tactics include title tagging, keyword optimisation, content optimisation, site mapping, link building, alt text and data on imagery/videos, improving site speed, improving meta descriptions and internal linking.

What is Shopify SEO?

Shopify SEO focuses mainly on content-based SEO. This means finding and using optimal keywords in page titles, descriptions, image alt text, and creating linkable content to encourage backlinks and authority sharing.

Built-in Shopify SEO

To help you rank and support your content creation, Shopify has some automated SEO in place, such as:

·  Auto-generated canonical tags to prevent duplicate content.

·  sitemap.xml and robots.txt files are created automatically.

·  Themes which generate title tags automatically including your brand name.

·  Social media linking and sharing as standard.

The function to add and edit this content, such as URLs, meta descriptions, alt text and more, is also included, just in case any auto-generated content is not ideal.

Some site structure is also automated in Shopify. For instance, formatting your content hierarchy to be logical and making sure there are no irregular URL characters. There are things you can do yourself to support site structure optimisation, including using descriptive file names and link text and creating your ideal store navigation using Shopify recommended best practices.

You can also find a wide range of well-known plugins you can integrate, such as Yoast, EZSEO and more to help your rankings improve.

Coding Customisations for Shopify SEO

Compared to other platforms, Shopify does offer less control over the design and code, as much of this is taken care of through the themes and platform itself using Google best practices. However, there are some customisations you can make to the code.

·  The robots.txt file can be customised to control which pages get crawled.

·  hreflang tags can be used in your chosen theme to manage translated content.

·  Metadata can be included in your theme for easier searching.

·  Adding further navigation and menus to your shop.

·  Creating customised storefront searches.

·  Adjusting storefront and tag filtering.

Why use a Shopify SEO Agency?

You might think that with all these auto-generated files, content, structures, and tags, you don’t need any SEO support. But SEO can be a complex beast at the best of times. We know it can be tempting to let the platform do what it thinks is best, approve all the automated content and leave it as recommended, but no one knows your business as well as you do.

·  Not every recommended URL structure will be ideal for your keywords.

·  Not every suggested meta description or title tag will be suitable for your target audience and goals.

·  Not every generated robot.txt file will be optimised to crawl the right pages.

Using an SEO team who are experts in the Shopify platform with experience customising codes, themes, and more to optimise a website’s SEO is a simple way to really put your mind at SEO-ease.

Visit our Shopify service page for more information on how we can help you perfect, customise and launch your ideal Shopify Site with all the SEO improvements you need to rank.