7 Best Practices for Optimizing Shopify Stores for SEO

You’ve decided to build your ecommerce store using Shopify SEO Services at Impressive Digital, and you’re ready to start getting some traffic and sales. If you want people to find your site and give you their money, search engine optimization (SEO) is absolutely essential.

However, the way that you set up your store can have a major impact on the amount of traffic and sales it receives. In this article we’ll be sharing 7 best practices that will help you optimize your Shopify store for SEO.

Pay Attention to Shopify’s Technical SEO

Shopify, by default, has a lot of technical SEO built into the platform. The only way to really mess it up is to disable things like sitemaps, slashes in URLs, or product descriptions that are missing alt text. Optimizing your Shopify store for search engines is a great way to boost traffic and sales. SEO can help put you in front of customers looking for what you sell exactly when they’re ready to make a purchase. And it works better than other means of advertising, especially for ecommerce stores.

According to MarketingSherpa, 60% of people click on a search engine result because it’s more relevant to their needs.

“SEO is an ecommerce marketing channel that should not be overlooked by merchants,” says Taylor Holiday, co-founder of Common Thread Collective, a digital marketing agency that helps online stores grow through SEO, content creation and social media marketing. “It can help with the overall brand awareness of your company and create a brand image that will last.”

Optimize Your Product Descriptions for Conversions

Many ecommerce stores use product descriptions straight from the manufacturer. This is a mistake because those descriptions can often be buried with keywords and other nonsense, which ends up hurting your SEO. Instead, you should rewrite your product descriptions so they’re:

• Concise
• Unique
• Informative

Leveraging the Power of social media

Social media has become a powerful tool for driving traffic to Shopify stores.

While search engines are still important, sites like Facebook and Twitter allow you to engage in direct conversations with potential customers and can also help you to identify and connect with influencers in your niche.

Optimize your meta data.

Shopify is a simple, straightforward platform. It’s incredibly easy to get started with your online store and start selling right away.

But if you want to optimize your store for SEO, it can be a little tougher to figure out how to get started.

The first step is making sure the basics of on-page SEO are covered. This includes things like page titles, meta descriptions, header tags, and image alt text. These elements impact not only the user experience but also how Google crawls and indexes your site.

Eliminate duplicate content.

You can have duplicate content on your site if you have multiple URLs that lead to the same product. For example, if you’re a clothing retailer and someone visits www.yoursite.com/mens-shirts/blue-shirt and www.yoursite.com/mens-shirts/red-shirt, Google might think they’re the same page. To avoid this, use rel=”canonical” tags to tell Google which URL is the “official” one.

Fix broken redirects.

A redirect sends visitors from one URL to another — for example, when your customer clicks on a product link on Facebook that points to a sold-out product on your site and they are redirected to your home page instead of another page with similar products. Redirects help improve the user experience by taking them where they want to go, but broken redirects can hurt your rankings by sending search engine robots in circles — or nowhere at all.

Keyword Research is Like Romance

Keyword research is a lot like romance. It takes time, effort and commitment to get it right. But if you don’t put in the work, you won’t have a chance at success. You could have the best product in the world, but no one will ever find it if you don’t optimize for search engines.

To help you get started with your keyword research, we partnered with WordStream to create a free guide: The 30 Minute Guide to Keyword Research.

The guide will walk you through our keyword research strategy and give you actionable steps that you can apply today. If you’re new to SEO and want to learn more about how search engines work, this is the perfect place to start (and it’s only 30 minutes).