The Ultimate SEO Checklist for Your Shopify Store

SEO (search engine optimization), the process of enhancing your website’s visibility in search engine results, is without a doubt a key factor in success in the e-commerce industry. In fact, research reveals that 93% of online activities now start with a search engine, and that the top-ranking websites on Google now get 95% of all internet traffic. Being ahead of the competition and enhancing your brand’s income, reputation, and overall performance depends on having a solid SEO foundation.

How can you claim the top spot on search result pages?

The good news is that you have gained an advantage over your competitors by hosting your shop with Shopify. Shopify will take care of your speed-based SEO needs automatically and will also provide you all the capabilities you need to create a solid SEO foundation without the usage of any expensive plugins thanks to its blazing-fast 80 millisecond page response time.

Your aim is simple to make sure that your site offers a fantastic user experience, is rich in relevant material, and is designed in a manner that search engines can easily read and portray it in order to get your shop ranking highly for your target keywords.

We’ve put together this list of the most important stages for laying a solid SEO foundation, together with some tactical suggestions to get you started and have your shop ranking at position one.

1. Perform research.

Analysing your current position for keywords related to your Shopify shop and items is the first step in creating a solid SEO foundation. This initial research is undoubtedly the most crucial phase in creating a solid SEO development plan since it will enable you to identify well-liked phrases and keywords that you can then include into the content of your website to help Google rank it highly for relevant search keywords.

Start by mind-mapping each of the key search phrases you believe your shop may score well for. What else do you think Google users would likely enter when looking for items similar to yours?

Don’t, though, make your keyword concentrate too wide or too crowded. Focus on terms that are widely used but still relevant to your business, and make sure you’ve written down enough words and phrases to incorporate them naturally into your content. “Keyword stuffing” can actually stop Google from recognising your content as valuable and deserving of a high rank position.

You should keep in mind where and for which search phrases your competitor is showing up when determining which keywords to concentrate on. This will enable you to plan how to differentiate your website from the competition, get content inspiration, and avoid competing directly with more established companies.

2. Implement technical SEO

Good SEO involves both producing interesting material for people and implementing technological changes that search engine algorithms can grasp. This implies that ensuring your site’s layout is comprehensive and exact will solve half the problem.

The best place to start is by improving the meta titles and meta descriptions for your website. These are the descriptions of your sites’ contents that are shown to visitors on the SERP (search engine results page). Additionally, they provide you the ability to convince prospective buyers that visiting your site is worthwhile.

A good meta description should be succinct, snappy, and exclusive to your business, detailing in one short paragraph the advantages of shopping at your store. A good meta title should be bold and compelling. Remember to avoid plagiarism when creating meta descriptions for the various pages on your website since it might work against you in terms of improving your Google ranking.

Additionally, you want to maintain a straightforward and user-friendly page URL. Use underscores, dashes, and lengthy number combinations sparingly to increase its memorability and include a keyword into it. Giving all of your website’s photos relevant and informative ALT tags is also essential if you want Google to be able to completely understand the material on your page. Without this labelling, Google won’t be able to interpret your picture and effectively index the content on your website.

All Shopify stores will also automatically generate an XML sitemap, which you should submit to search engines to allow them to crawl your store even more efficiently.

3. Boost the functionality and speed of your website.

Your shop must provide a fantastic customer experience, according to the SEO golden rule. This necessitates that it be swift, responsive to mobile devices, and offer a simple and efficient checkout process. A successful online business has always required optimising website performance since studies have shown that even a one-second delay in page load time may result in a 7% drop in conversions. However, now that Google has acknowledged that website speed is a crucial component of its search ranking algorithms, your SEO development plan should also take website speed into account. Thanks to Shopify’s cloud-based architecture, the majority of your speed-based SEO needs will already be met. Tag managers and image compression tools are just a few of the software that may assist keep your website operating as swiftly as possible. In the next phase of our checklist, we will go further into these tools.

Of course, in order to maintain your site functioning as smoothly and effectively as possible, you will also need to address any bugs (such 404 error pages). Screaming Frog and Google Search Console are both excellent (and cost-free!) tools for evaluating your website and determining what changes need to be done.

It’s essential to think about your site’s structure while maximising the usability of your Shopify shop. As few clicks as possible should be required for a visitor to access a product page after visiting your site. Your shop should be properly organised and simple to browse.

Google estimates that over 50% of all internet searches are now conducted on mobile devices. Your website must consequently appear just as beautiful and function just as well when visited through a mobile device since Google tailors its SERP rankings to user preferences.

4. Use the Shopify SEO tools and applications.

As we near the halfway point of this checklist, it should be abundantly evident that creating an effective SEO strategy involves a wide range of considerations, from perfecting your meta titles to enhancing your website’s design. With so many optimizations to take into account, why not take use of the many Shopify tools and applications that are readily accessible and let them handle some of the technicalities for you?

For ecommerce managers searching for a straightforward method to control fundamental components of their SEO, such as their title and description modification, indexing and 404 error tracking and repairs, Shopify does have its own SEO Meta Manager software, which we strongly suggest.

There are a tonne of additional simple-to-use Shopify applications that can assist you with a variety of various areas of managing your store’s SEO, however, if you want to develop the most successful SEO plan possible.

Tag managers:

Tag managers may be used to schedule when and where each element of a page loads, avoiding page delays and clumsy loading windows. This helps your website load faster. Every second matters when it comes to earning your rank position on Google, and even while Shopify will automatically make sure that your site loads as soon as possible, any applications you have running on the front end of your site will still slow it down significantly.

We suggest Google Tag Manager to Shopify shop managers as a highly helpful (and cost-free!) tag manager. Although Tealium is much more costly than many other products on the market since you are paying for enterprise-level setup, configuration, and support, it is also very effective.

Image compression tools:

Using tools for image compression, you may significantly enhance your website’s performance inside Shopify by lowering the size of your photographs and the number of files they include. Normally, we advise compressing photos by at least 30%, but bigger files may sometimes be shrunk by as much as 90%, greatly enhancing your store’s performance and usability. However, we advise using two or more image compression programmes on your website at once to further minimise code weight. Another excellent Shopify software to think about adding is Minifier, which not only optimises picture file names and ALT tags but also compresses photos to make them easier for search engines to interpret.

Tools for indexing:

Tools for indexing: However, not all information will be understood automatically, such as unlabeled photographs or trademarks. Therefore, you must inform search engines precisely what to index inside your business in order to make sure you are ranking for the correct keywords. Using schema markup, which organises and tags the data on each page so that it can be better understood and displayed by search engines, is a wonderful approach to do this.

JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data), which will go through and name every element on your pages so that search engines can recognise them correctly, is one schema markup tool we advise utilising. Highlighting the precise keywords you want to rank for on Google is another great usage for this tool.

Customer review tools:

One of the best tools for this is Stamped, which is affordable, very effective, and suitable for the majority of regular Shopify businesses. However, we strongly advise adding Okendo if your business specialises in fashion since it enables consumers to give multi-layered evaluations in which they may evaluate various elements of a product at once.

Tools for measuring the success of organic keywords in your store:

Google Search Console is one of the greatest free options accessible. Traditionally, this technology was only used to help website owners find issues with their sites that needed to be fixed. However, you can now utilise Search Console to keep track of both the volume of organic traffic coming to your site as well as how your shop is doing for a certain term (either worldwide or within a particular area).

You can also use it to find the most common search phrases for your most lucrative items, which will help you start generating text that is focused and raise your position for relevant keywords.

5. Produce valuable content

While optimising for keywords is unquestionably one of the most crucial components of SEO, it’s crucial to avoid “keyword stuffing” or just copying your own text to add more words, since Google will usually detect this less natural approach and penalise you for it. All of your written material should be carefully prepared for both consumers and search engines to readily read and comprehend, with an emphasis on quality over quantity.

Keep your page headers and titles brief to avoid having them chopped off on search results pages. They should be merely two or three of your goal keywords, strong and enticing like your meta titles.

Your site’s more informative sections, like the “About Us” section, should have at least 500 words and use a few of your goal keywords that are organically weaved in when the context is appropriate. Your product descriptions should ideally be approximately 300 words long.

6. Launch a blog

Making a business blog is a fantastic additional method for keyword optimization. When done properly, blogging may greatly increase your organic position since it enables you to generate focused text for popular search phrases, enables you to establish backlinks by producing shareable material, and shows Google that your company is consistently updated and new.

Create a content plan for your blog to start. Concentrate on only one or two of the keywords you want to rank for in each article, and organically include those keywords into your writing by including subjects that are up to date, interesting, and related to those search phrases. By doing this, you can make your articles more interesting and varied while also ensuring that you consistently provide high-quality material that Google will like and reward.

The longer your blog entries, the better in terms of length. There is no restriction on how much material you may publish as long as it is relevant and helpful to your audience.

7. Create internal and external linkages

Paying for Google Adwords and newspaper advertising may seem like an alluring short-term solution when it comes to effective off-page SEO. However, it is advisable to devote your time and efforts to acquiring real backlinks from other websites if you want to achieve a rank position that is long-lasting and sustainable.

The more credible the website, the better (avoid content farms at all costs! ), since Google sees these hyperlinks as “votes” that your site is worthwhile and fascinating enough to be included on the top pages.

But how can you get reputable bloggers to connect to your website? To put it simply, by producing excellent unique material that other sites will want to share. This is where having your own blog may be helpful since you can use it as a platform for sharing original business views on subjects that haven’t been covered extensively in writing.

You may also generate possibilities for obtaining backlinks by using your already established network of connections. For instance, collaborating on an article with a business you’ve previously worked with or getting a devoted supporter to blog about you are both excellent strategies to convince Google that your brand is reputable, active, and deserving of being shown on the first SERP.

You may also build your own backlinks by registering for accounts on trustworthy websites and posting useful comments and reviews.

Internal links, which point users to other pages on your website, are another way to boost your SEO since they enable link equity to flow across your whole website, raising each page’s likelihood of ranking.

8. Add social media to your website.

A strong social media presence is essential for excellent SEO practices since Google will boost your position when it detects that many actual people are following and interested in your business. In addition to helping you create backlinks, intriguing and compelling social media content encourages sharing on other websites.

Create accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Google+ if you haven’t already, then put up connections to these platforms on your Shopify website.

Sharing your blog entries on Google+, in particular, ensures that your brand will appear more often in search results since this platform’s material is promptly indexed.

9. Monitor your SEO

How can you be certain that all of your effort is paying off after you have finished the aforementioned procedures and created a strong SEO foundation for your store?

We advise using Google Analytics to monitor your progress because this free tool enables you to gauge important SEO success factors like the overall volume of organic traffic your store receives, the proportion of this traffic that originates from search engines, and which of your pages are most popular with users.

Remember that maintaining effective SEO is a continuous effort, and if you want to see long-term success, you must be dedicated to staying on top of search engine trends and tailoring your website’s structure and content production appropriately. Therefore, having a solid testing plan in place involves both analysing the effectiveness of the procedures you have already used and finding areas for improvement.

10. Think about working with an SEO specialist

There is no reason why you cannot get a strong grasp of the foundations of SEO from the comfort of your own computer, especially with the quantity of material about proper SEO practice that is freely accessible online.

However, as Google’s algorithms are continuously changing, maintaining a solid SEO strategy may take a lot of effort, and trying to rank well for competitive keywords in a market that is becoming more crowded might make you unsure of how to put your website ahead of the competition.

You can choose to engage an SEO company to manage the procedure for you if you have the funds to dedicate to boosting the exposure of your shop. As the number of people visiting your shop continually increases, these experts will utilise their extensive expertise and experience to optimise your website’s structure and content, leaving you more time to concentrate on other elements of company administration. If you do want to work with an SEO specialist, be sure to get referrals from others and invest the time to investigate various agencies and the services they provide in order to select which company would be the best match for your Shopify business.

We do, however, suggest contacting a qualified expert if you’re trying to go above and above and increase traffic to your company as much as possible. They will utilise their specific knowledge, precision, and experience to apply flawless SEO to your site.

Our knowledgeable team at BRAD ADVERTISING is pleased to provide a selection of specialised SEO services to assist you in realising the full ecommerce potential of your online business. If you’re interested in learning more, don’t be afraid to contact us.

Conclusion

The advantages of headless commerce are clear, particularly when taking into account the aforementioned brand examples. Even merely from the user’s standpoint, each headless shop is very quick, hassle-free, and inventive. However, not everyone is a fan of headless commerce. Research your competition, your customers, and the performance of your site in-depth. Find out what sort of experience your clients are looking for from your brand and if headless commerce would be beneficial.

Speak to our ecommerce specialists at BRAD ADVERTISING – Shopify Plus Agency now if you need assistance analysing your alternatives or just want to learn more about headless commerce and how to make the switch!