How to do SEO Setup for Shopify Store

SEO is a technique to improve website visibility on Google. There are many ecommerce online stores designed on Shopify, Magento and other platform which creates huge competition in ranking. I am here explaining basic SEO tips for Shopify store owners to improve ranking and traffic.

Step-1. Setup Webmaster and Google Analytics

Google webmaster provides technical issues and their statistics. Whenever, your website get penalty or other errors then Google webmaster inform you with details then you can resolve your website issue and send reconsideration request to Google webmaster. You can see crawl errors, sitemap errors, Meta tag errors, hacking errors, 404 errors, robots.txt errors, AMP errors, schema tag errors etc in the webmaster.

Google Analytics provides traffic data on many dimensions like landing page, traffic source, location, medium, device etc. You can optimize your website traffic and conversions with the help of Google Analytics reports.

Step-2. Target Long Tail Keywords

There is too much competition for ecommerce shopify website so you should target long tail keywords. You can find long tail keywords from Google Planner tool and other Google auto complete tools.

Example -

Short Term Keyword àBuy Earring Online

Long Term keyword àBuy Diamond Earring Online

Step-3. Add Meta Tags

You must add Title and Meta Description in your all pages. Title should be maximum 55 characters (with space) and Meta description should be maximum 164 characters (with space). You can use SEO tools or webmaster tool to find meta tag errors. Shopify provides Meta tag setup option in the footer of the relevant page.

Step-4. Optimize Images

Generally, Shopify website has many images and you have to optimize them for improving your SEO score. You should take relevant image name, alt tag (not stuff too many keywords) and image compression, make sure image quality should be good.

Step-5. Improve URL Structure

You should categorize your products and create URL structure accordingly. You should also use breadcrumbs to improve user experience, so users can easily jump category and sub-category pages. You don’t worry about this because shopify already have these integration.

Example –

www.domain.com/earrings/ (not following hierarchy)

www.domain.com/daimond/earrings/ (following hierarchy)

Avoid dynamic URLs where possible and use static SEO friendly URL.

See this in the example…

www.domain.com/earrings?id=345 (Dynamic URL)

www.domain.com/daimond/earrings/ (Static URL)

Step-6. Add Content in category and sub-category pages

Generally, Shopify website owners don’t add content in the website and fill pages with products but Google don’t like thin content. You can increase traffic and ranking by adding content. This is not compulsory to add content in all products because they are thousands & more and they have product description. You can content in category and sub-category pages at least 300-500 words. If your shopify theme don’t have any option to add content in your category pages then shopify web designers can customize your theme for that.

Step-7. Make your Product Heading in H1

Heading tags are highly responsible for SEO ranking so use H1 tag in your all product names and also add heading tags in category and sub-category pages. Shopify already have this feature in all themes.

Step-8. Generate Sitemap & Robots.txt

You can generate xml and html sitemap and robots.txt by using tools or with the help of your developer and submit them into Google webmaster so Google will easily crawl and index your all pages and don’t forget to mention XML sitemap URL in the robots.txt file. If you are struggling with that then you can hire a shopify seo services from CGColors.

Step-9. Improve Website Speed

A study says that you are losing 30% visitors if your website loading time is more than 5 second. You should optimize your website page load time for all devices (desktop, mobile, tablet) to improve your SEO score while shopify uses CDN hosting to maintain page load time that will help you in page speed.

Step-10. Optimize for mobile

Your shopify website should be mobile friendly. Google has recently added this factor in the SEO. Mobile users are increasing rapidly so it is compulsory that your mobile website user experience should be good.

Conclusion - Don’t over optimize

Google change their algorithm daily that’s why SEO ranking is becoming more complicated. You should use all above explained basic Shopify SEO optimization strategies to generate more traffic and revenue. You should not over optimize your jewelry website for SEO by using too much keyword based alt tags, too much heading tags & link title tags. You should take 1-2% keyword density in the web page.

I am Saurabh Rawat working in Company Cgcolors which is a small web design agency based out of Long Island. They have been designing modern, elegant and mobile friendly Shopify stores for small and medium size businesses.