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8 Shopify SEO Tips to Boost Organic Traffic for Your Store

Shopify SEO tips

For any online business, as well as your Shopify store, SEO is essential for success. Though the basic principle for SEO is the same for any website, for eCommerce stores, a few more things should be taken care of.

Here are eight tips to revitalize SEO for your Shopify store.

Do the keyword research beforehand.

As soon as you have decided on the products you will be selling online, you should first research the keywords for your Shopify store.

This is very important that you have the list of keywords ready before you start creating your store. This will help you set up store pages, such as collection pages.

For example, say you are planning to sell prom dresses. You may have designed the collection pages based on the various styles of the dresses. But with keyword research, you may find keywords like “prom dresses under $100”. This is an SEO opportunity for which you should create a collection of “prom dresses under $100”.

Setup Search Console and submit your sitemap.

Google is the source of 75-80% of the organic traffic. To ensure that your Shopify store gets adequately indexed on Google, you must submit your store to Google Search Console.

In the Webmaster tool, you can submit your store Sitemap to Google for crawling and indexing. If you don’t submit your store to the Webmaster, Google will discover your store pages and index them. However, with the tools in Search Console, you can control your store’s search engine presence much more.

In the Search Console, you will be able to monitor a lot of things like:

  • The crawl errors and indexing status, if there are any.
  • The broken links (404 Page not found errors). You must regularly check and fix the broken links.
  • All the Search Analytics data like the queries, landing pages, and how many impressions or clicks you are getting for your store pages.

search analytics shopify store seo

Put ALT Text on all your product images.

Not having ALT texts for the product images is a sin for any e-commerce store. It’s great to have ALT texts for all the pictures, including banners on your store, but it’s a must for product images.

Why do you need ALT texts for?

Search engines like Google can crawl a piece of text and understand the content of the text, but they can’t understand the scope of an image without an ALT text.

That’s why if you don’t add proper ALT texts for images, search engines will not index your product images, and your product images will never appear on search results.

alt text on images - shopify store seo



Minimize page loading time

On-page SEO depends on mainly two factors, the content, and the user experience. The first hurdle for any user to experience your store is its loading speed. If your store is too slow to load, then it’s a significant roadblock to a good user experience on your store.

Many factors may cause slowing down your Shopify stores, but the most common reasons are heavy images and usage of apps that run heavy scripts on the front end.

Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to analyze the page speed of all main landing pages of your store. Find out the factors and optimize your Shopify store’s page loading speed.

Regularly manage 404 errors.

Broken links are the big no-no for SEO. If any page of your store is indexed and later deleted/changed to a different URL, Google gets the 404 Page not found error which hurts SEO. However, for any eCommerce store, there is little chance of avoiding broken links.

The best way to monitor the broken links is in Google Webmaster tools. Go to your dashboard in the Webmaster tool, and on your left-hand sidebar, go to the Crawl > Crawl Errors menu. You will find all the URLs with 404 errors listed under the Not found tab, as shown below.

manage 404s - shopify store seo tips

Create content to target long-tail keywords

The best weapon to win the search engine is quality content, and what’s better than having the content on your store? The best thing about Shopify is it has everything you need for SEO. You can easily create blog posts and publish them on your store.

Now the question is what to write for the blog posts. If your focus is SEO, you should create content based on search terms and long-tail keywords used by your target audience. It takes time to develop and publish content, but if you can pull it right, you can have a regular source of organic traffic that you can channel to your store.

Generate backlinks regularly

Backlinks are like nutrition for SEO. The more quality backlinks you have, the better you rank on search engines. Now, if you have launched your store and are sitting duck thinking that someone, somewhere, will give backlinks to your store, then you may be living in a euphoria. You don’t get a backlink. You create one.

There are several ways to create backlinks, whether guest posting, deal sites, or social bookmarking sites. Some may work for you some may not. You need to figure out the channels through which you can get backlinks for your store. Once you have figured out the track, you need to repeat it regularly and have a process.

Try to maximize user-generated content on your store

Search engines love user-generated content as it signifies user engagement on your website.

As an e-commerce store, if you don’t have product reviews, you lose the credibility and trustworthiness of your visitors and search engines. Not only product reviews, but try to get testimonials for your store and show them off on the home page or any other landing pages.

Another way to use user-generated content is to collect testimonial for your store from return customers and show it on your store’s homepage.


About the author

Tamal Santra

Tamal is currently working as Marketing & Content Coordinator at Carson Shopify Experts. Being a Shopify seller and with prior expertise in digital marketing, he loves creating actionable content for Shopify sellers.



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