SEO and Shopify: Optimizing the SEO of Your Website

Introducing the Shopify CMS

For entrepreneurs who embark on e-commerce, the question of the website is essential. If you have already decided on using a CMS rather than developing an online store from scratch, you are probably interested in Shopify, one of the stars of the market. Shopify has many advantages, but its weak point is search engine optimization. Yet, good SEO is essential for success in e-commerce. NaddraBlog tells you how to make your Shopify store more "SEO-friendly".

How does Shopify work?

Shopify is a content manager dedicated to e-commerce, which allows you to both host and easily manage your online store. Very easy to use, it allows all beginners to quickly launch their e-shop. The best known e-commerce CMS are PrestaShop, Magento and WooCommerce (WordPress extension). Start by going to Shopify's online portal and creating an account . You will then have to select a theme that will define the design and ergonomics of your online store, then choose the authorized payment methods. You can then start creating product sheets and define the associated shipping costs. Once the legal notices have been chosen, the online store will be ready to open its doors.

Related: SEO Definition of Index

The benefits of Shopify

First advantage, Shopify does not need to be installed on your computer. It's SaaS or software as a service: all the tools you'll need are online. Accessible with a simple web connection (desktop computer, smartphone), it is practical for quickly updating your product catalog. The system also takes care of all the technical web configuration , which makes it a great argument for beginners. If you are apprehensive about having to configure a server, payment gateways or update, Shopify is for you. You will, however, have to configure the store itself, but it's not very complicated and gives you some control over your website.

If you need additional features compared to the basic version, Shopify apps (free or paid) allow you to add options without the need for web development. If you can't find the option you need, web developers can use Shopify's API to create the necessary custom modules. The strengths of Shopify are also the quality of customer service and the ability to get detailed data reports on your customers, sales, etc.

Shopify constraints

For starters, Shopify is paid. It offers 3 monthly subscriptions, to be chosen according to the size of the online store, the volume of the product catalog, the professionalization of the need, etc. Each offer level unlocks new features and increases the size of the catalog. In addition to the price per month for the subscription to Shopify, it will be necessary to add a commission levied on payments by credit card (the rate changes according to the offer you have selected).

Apart from that, the major problem is the following: if the CMS takes care of all the technical part, it will not directly help you to work on your SEO on search engines . Attracting customers is entirely up to you. A good referencing is at the origin of an e-commerce that performs.

Optimize the SEO of your Shopify site

Without search engine visibility, there will be no organic traffic, and without web traffic, there will be no sales. Natural referencing is one of the keys to the success of an e-commerce. If you neglect your on-site optimizations, your off-site efforts to boost this visibility will be diminished. NaddraBlog advises you on the optimizations to be made to the pages of your online Shopify store.

Related: How to Choose the Right Keywords For your SEO Strategy

Select an SEO optimized Shopify theme

Not all Shopify themes are created equal. Some are more practical or more aesthetic than others, but they are not necessarily designed to optimize the SEO of your pages. Be careful, the term SEO is also a commercial argument, a theme that calls itself SEO is not necessarily so. It's best to check using an analytics tool like Spotibo. The trick is to check out the demo pages of the themes you prefer and see what Spotibo shows you. You will quickly know if the chosen theme is really optimized for SEO or not.

Optimize your title and meta description tags

First thing to optimize the SEO of your Shopify store: optimize the Title and Meta desc tags. Google has recently reinforced the weight of the Title tag with Titlegate , and can force the rewriting of your page titles. To ensure that you control the display of your Title in a Google search results page, remember to systematically fill in this field in the preferences of the Online Store tab. If you don't, Shopify will use the default product name, which might not be ideal.

For the referencing of your e-commerce pages, it is essential that each Title and each Meta description be unique (no duplicate content ). The content of a meta description tag should be simple and clear, oriented for the user's search .

Choose titles optimized for SEO

Your product pages need to be seen quickly among search engine results. When a user searches on Google, they should be able to immediately identify what you are selling, and it starts with the H1 title of your product category. Each page title must be unique and include the main keyword as far to the left as possible, without exceeding 100 characters.

Optimize your Shopify site structure

Properly prioritize the content of your categories using H2, H3 tags and orient your content according to the search intent of the Internet user. Create content optimized by category page , for example "cheap leather handbag" or "green fabric backpack". This is certainly a lot of content to create, but you can aim for the long tail and optimize your visibility during a search on Google.

Even though the core of Shopify is built for performance, some themes can cause pages to load slowly. Some apps also consume resources, and hoarding them usually doesn't do site performance any good. A page that is too slow to load drives away customers, which is never good for SEO. Note: Avoid iframes with Shopify if you are  unfamiliar with Google's noIndex and Indexifembedded tags , or your content will not rank well.

Customize your URLs to improve your SEO

By default, Shopify offers you an e-shop address with a subdomain like "yourshop.myshopify.com". For the sake of credibility and optimization for search engines, prefer a personalized domain name , if possible in .fr or .com. You will also need to optimize your product page URLs, as Shopify always adds /products/ to them if you do nothing. Rewrite each URL and don't use special characters.

Optimize your images with the Alt attribute on Shopify

An image whose ALT attribute is not filled in is not referenced on the Google search engine, nor even on Amazon . Since Shopify does not do it for you, remember to edit the ALT tag of each image on your site with a quick description (your main keywords if possible). With a good SEO of your images, your products will be better seen.

Beware of "featured products"

This feature allows you to display products to highlight on your home page. It's interesting from a marketing point of view, unfortunately the CMS adds SEO tags by default that block the page's SEO . Too bad you picked your best sellers. Concretely, Shopify determines that your featured products are copies of your product pages and adds the  default canonical tag  to them. Canonical instructs Google search engine crawlers not to reference this duplicate content.

Related: Why is hosting your website essential in SEO?

Shopify extensions for SEO

Shopify has many extensions or apps, some dedicated to SEO. The goal is to improve the natural referencing of your pages, but you won't be able to do it on all of them. In a competitive industry, you will focus your SEO efforts on the home page and category pages by targeting long-tail or even niche keywords. Here is a list of Shopify SEO apps that can help you improve on the points we talked about in this article.

Yoast SEO is available on Shopify

Available with the paid version of Shopify, the famous WordPress Yoast SEO plugin guides the user on the SEO improvements he can make to his site. Very practical, however, some of its recommendations must be taken with caution, especially on content optimization. A minimum of SEO knowledge is required to operate this Shopify extension.

Plug in SEO

Similar to Yoast SEO, Plug in SEO is free with Shopify. This very comprehensive module helps to easily detect and fix many SEO issues mentioned in this article, such as broken link search, URL personalization, etc. It handles structured data (highlighted in Google search engine snippets) and also offers organic traffic tracking (Google Search Console integration).

Smart SEO

Paid (after a free trial), Smart SEO can manage meta and alt tags for you, saving you significant time . It can also pass your URLs for Google SEO and generate a sitemap to precisely control your SEO.

Booster SEO & Image Optimizer

An e-commerce is more credible if it displays high quality images of its products. Problem, they are usually cumbersome and time-consuming to find and fix SEO-affecting issues, like  404 errors .

SEO Product Optimizer (SPO)

Very complete, this paying tool after a free trial period has many SEO functions. It lets you customize how your links appear on social media, makes it easier to find niche keywords, generates rich snippets, and more.

AMP by Shop Sheriff

Dedicated to mobile, this free application improves the customer experience on smartphones as well as your SEO. With the rise of mobile search, this is a more than indispensable function. It allows you to convert your pages to Accelerated Mobile Page format , optimize your URLs and even integrate Google tags and Google Analytics. No wonder the official Google AMP team recommends using this extension.

Conclusion

Shopify is a particularly powerful and performance-oriented CMS, which makes it a popular e-commerce medium. On the other hand, on the SEO side, the efforts must come from you… If you let the software fill in the SEO tags for you, your site will never perform as it should despite the link campaigns. It would be wasted money, which is certainly not your goal. Yes, referencing product pages takes time  when you have a lot of them, but it is essential to be seen on Google and therefore attract customers. Luckily there are extensions to help you cut through some of the work and monitor the SEO health of your pages.

On-site and off-site optimization work together, interdependently as explained by our SEO consultants NaddraBlog. The link strategy is even more effective on optimized content, and optimized content performs even better when it is boosted by links. So if you want to remove the brakes from your netlinking strategy, consider optimizing your online store.