Shopify SEO Checklist: Optimize Your Store in 2024

In this digital world, instead of spending money on paid advertising which covers a huge amount of investment, SEO has become a perfect key to enhance your online presence and visibility and stand out in this competitive market. However, for some new Shopify store owners, it is challenging to understand how search engines work and improve SEO performance. That’s why this blog comes with a comprehensive Shopify SEO checklist for your reference. Let’s dive in!

What is the Shopify SEO Checklist?

A Shopify SEO checklist is a comprehensive guide of tasks and best practices designed to optimize an online store on the Shopify platform for search engines. This checklist ensures that the store is structured and maintained in a way that enhances visibility in search engine results, drives organic traffic, and improves user experience. It covers a range of SEO factors, including keyword research, on-page optimization, technical SEO, content strategy, and backlink building.

So, why is SEO important for Shopify Stores?

• SEO is a form of free advertisement to approach your customers easily, increase company recognition. By entering keywords, and providing useful information, the Google search engine will evaluate your Shopify store as a trustworthy website, your website then will be placed at a high rank on Google search results, and thus more and more people will know about your product and cut time on making a purchase decision.
• SEO creates traffic and boosts sales. Since your website is at the top of search results, many potential customers will visit your Shopify store. By focusing on the keywords, and providing products and information they are interested in, these visitors will turn into your customers, and the sales also increase dramatically.
• The effect of SEO on your Shopify store is long-lasting, brings lifelong success. Customers always believe in the average ranking that Google offers. So, when your Shopify store gets positive reviews, it builds up your brand trust. As a result, customers are more likely to be your loyal members in the future.
  SEO Optimization improves all aspects of your store, leverages your store to a new level: much more professional and offers a seamless shopping experience.

With this increasing demand for online stores likely to continue, the need for optimizing SEO for eCommerce websites is greater and greater. Nevertheless, due to its size and complexity, it may have some challenges for businesses to face to leverage SEO results. Here, we will lead you through some common issues when it comes to improving SEO for your Shopify store:

• Insufficient product descriptions and content
• Title tags and header tags are not completed, unique and friendly
• Slow page-load speed
• Ignoring user reviews
• Not compatible with mobile devices

Basic Shopify SEO Checklist

Set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console

Google Analytics provides statistics about how visitors interact with your store and divides them into different segments to monitor visitor’s engagement after arriving through a search engine. After setting up Google Analytics and syncing with your web property, add a data stream by inserting the Google tag ID into your CMS-hosted website, such as Shopify or WordPress.

Google Search Console, on the other hand, is a free tool that offers business reports about the store’s performance and detects problems that degrade the rank of your site. To create your Google Search Console account, go to the sign-up page. Before Google offers you services, be sure it can verify that you are the website’s owner by checking your domain. Find out how to access Google services by verifying your Shopify domain.

Consider your SEO Toolkit

For online companies, staying on top of algorithm updates, rankings, and competitive keywords is not only difficult but also essential. You may achieve your search engine optimization objectives with both free and premium SEO tools. Here, we suggest some paid and free tools for your consideration:

Paid SEO tools: Moz, Ahrefs, Semrush, Keywords Everywhere
Free SEO tools: Surfer SEO Chrome, Keyword.io, Screaming Frog, MozBar, Google Ads, Keyword Planner

Make sure your site indexed

For your website to show up in search results, a search engine must index it. Using site:yourdomain.com for your site search is the easiest and fastest method to find out if it is indexed.

If nothing appears, there is no index for your website. Remember that after uploading the sitemap, indexing for new websites may take up to a week.

Shopify free trial stores are indexed and crawled. However, after your trial period ends, the work you do will be lost if you’re not on a subscription plan. Even if you are still working on some of your sites, it is imperative that you remove password protection from them. Google can then begin indexing and crawling your website.

On-page Shopify SEO Checklist

Keyword research

First things first, if you want to start an SEO campaign, keyword research is a fundamental practice to have the highest chance of driving revenue for your store. That means you will identify popular terms and phrases that your target customers are most searching for these days. Once keyword research is done, it is the basis for you to build content strategies, and improve SEO effectiveness for your Shopify store.

Pay attention to these three key factors to learn keyword research effectively:

• Search Volume: indicates how people are interested in a specific term or phrase by the number of searches each month on the Internet.
• Keyword Difficulty: shows how difficult it is for that keyword to be high-ranked in the search results.
• Relevancy: Make sure your keyword is related to the products you provide since no one visits a bookshop to buy a pair of shoes.

Besides, you can refer your competitors to see what keywords they are optimizing, using Google Ads data to define the keywords that are performing well and driving high revenue for your store and analyze the Search Results report provided by Search Console to see what queries already drive traffic to your store. Last but not least, a keyword tool might simplify the process, bring you keywords that present the best opportunities for your Shopify store.

Optimize URL

URL is an indicator of what your site is talking about. There are some limitations of Shopify URL structures but we recommend you follow these tips to optimize your URLs and improve SEO on Shopify. A well-optimized URL is typically:

• Include core keywords
• Keep them short, relevant, and readable
• Avoid some stop words like “and” or the

Write descriptive alt text for images

Alt text for images makes your website accessible to users who are visually impressed. By writing clear descriptions for the image, it can improve the overal SEO ranking since your images are taken priority to appear in the image search results.

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Optimize page titles

On Shopify, page titles are default Heading 1 tag. Typically, the Heading always contains the page’s core keywords, so that search engines can easily understand the topic of a page. A compelling and relevant title can attract more clicks, increasing your CTR and thus significantly impacting your search rankings.

Optimize meta description

A meta description is the small snippet of text that appears below your title tag in the SERP, summarizing what the content is about. The fundamentals of a meta description for Shopify store are to be concise, consistent with your content and include target keywords at the beginning. However, do not do keyword stuffing, the appropriate characters for keywords is not over 155.

Website Content checklist

Create a strategy for content marketing

In essence, a good content strategy is the key to win customer’s minds by taking care each small step in the buyer shopping journey. Here, we will walk you through simple steps to build a content marketing plan for your website.

• Define your goal: What do you want to gain with your content?
• Audience persona: Who you’re creating content for?
• Content Audit and Analysis: What kinds of content and topics are already effective and drive more traffic?
• Brainstorm ideas: Use your content audit, persona research, and goals to keep these insights top of mind.
• Publish and manage your content.

Format content for readability

Well-structured content is easier to read, understand, and navigate, which can reduce bounce rates and improve your search engine rankings. Below are some key elements to make your content more approachable to your target audiences:

• Use Headings and Subheadings, and include keywords
• Short Paragraphs is appropriate
• Use Bullet Points and Numbered Lists
• Incorporate Visuals
• Add Internal and External Links
• Optimize for Mobile

Avoid duplicate content

Duplicate content can negatively impact SEO by confusing search engines, diluting page authority, wasting crawl budget, and reducing user experience. So, to make sure your Shopify store is visible with customers, it is essential to create original content just for your site and your customers. For example, we know that many businesses are using product descriptions provided by their manufacturers and this is the main reason for poor content, reducing the chance of selling more products with their outstanding features and benefits.

A pro tip for you: Adding a rel=”canonical” to link to the head of any page with duplicate content.

Create specialized landing pages

A landing page is a single URL that delves deeply into one issue, as opposed to sending visitors to the homepage and urging them to locate what they’re searching for. These pages are tailored to specific audiences, campaigns, or keywords, providing targeted content that meets users’ needs. By creating a specific landing page for a particular promotion, you are removing distractions to completely capture the customer’s attention and guide them through exactly what they need.

Technical Shopify SEO Checklist

Optimize on mobile devices

That said, most of the world’s web traffic comes from mobile devices, thus sites that are not mobile-friendly will have fewer opportunities to be placed at higher search rankings and miss out on an extensive amount of traffic.

All Shopify themes are designed to be compatible with mobile devices. In case you want to double-check your mobile optimization, Google’s mobile-friendly test to see how it looks on mobile phones and tablets.

Ensure an SEO-friend navigation menu

The Shopify website’s navigation is not just about instructions to move from this page to other pages but an intuitive and straightforward shopping journey for customers to interact with your content, perceive your brand, and achieve their goals. Common types of navigation links include single-bar navigation, double-bar navigation and dropdown navigation.

Use an HTTPS-secure domain

An insecure website is never appropriate by search engines since it may leads to customer data lost and ruin the search experience. That’s why taking SSL certification and HTTP domain are important in evaluate the reputation of your website. To optimize your website for SEO using HTTPS, follow these steps:

• Obtain and install SSL/TLS Certificate for your website
• Updated internal link
• Set up 301 redirects
• Update canonical tags and site maps
• Check for mixed Content
• Monitor and test security status

Add internal links

Internal links play an important role as fuel for your content growth and success. This idea is about linking the current page to other pages that provide relevant content. Done right, search engines can effortlessly crawl and index your site, recognize your topical authority, and boost your SERP ranking.

Fix broken links

Broken links do not just create a frustrating experience for your visitors, they’re also bad for robots like search engines to crawl a website. Thus, if you are alerted about any errors in your links, work to inactive and fix them immediately. Discover these 5 ways to repair broken links:

• Web-Based SEO Audit Tool
• Google Search Console
• Desktop Software
• Online Broken Link Checker Tool
• Broken Link Checker WordPress Plugin

Improve website speed

“Time is money” phrase is especially true when it comes to your website since people have little patience (under 8 seconds) for a page load. Therefore, if your website loading speed is not fast as expected, your visitors are more likely to move to an alternative solution.

Luckily, speeding up page load is not require high technical skill, you can review these easy steps to improve the speed of your Shopify website:

• Utilize a content delivery network
• Move your website to a more reputed and secure host
• Reduce the image size without lowering the quality
• Eliminate inessential plugin
• Group all JavaScript into one, and CSV files as well
• Detect 404 errors
• Use prefetching techniques

You may concern 15+ Best Shopify Themes for SEO to Drive More Traffic

Off-page Shopify SEO Checklist

Leverage a Backlink Plan

Backlinks enhance your website’s organic exposure in addition to bringing in direct referral visitors. Reputable websites that link to yours convey authority and trust, which can improve the internet visibility and reputation of your website. In fact, backlinks are such an important part of SEO that Shopify owners are encouraged to select niche market products to help make the link-building process easier.

Use guest posts

Writing for the Shopify Blog is a great method to share your value with the world. Blog post should be about 1500 words long, have internal and external links, unique, useful and furthermore, be from different authors. To find the guest post, please use this formulas:

[niche] + “write for us”
[niche] + “contribute”
[niche] + “guest post”

Optimize social media accounts

As journalists, were always on the hunt for news to cover in our publications. Hence, befriending these journalists can land you PR high-authority hits which results in secured posts on websites that generate solid backlinks to your site. You rank a little higher when you pick up a good backlink. As you rank better, your website will be seen more and this means traffic to your site is increasing giving rise to great backlinks popping up.

Reclaim brand mentions

More advanced: If you have some momentum, consider using a brand monitoring tool to find “unlinked mentions” of your store or products on other websites. Simply ask the writer or publication to make that brand mention a link.

Local Shopify SEO Checklist

Set up Google My Business

Google Business is a good free SEO tool for businesses. It allows customers to discover your company over Google Search and Maps.

You can sign up here to get started. The only information you would need for your business is the name, category, location and contact details. When done you need to optimize Google Business page so that your business can be located and customers could find a way to reach out.

Get listed at major directories and platforms

If you write about this topic often, the chances are that at some point listing your business on web directories has crossed your path. Yes, there are thousands of directories but only a small fraction matter when it comes to affecting your rankings.

Some directories is most-used are Facebook, Bing, Apple Maps, Google My Business, LinkedIn Company Directory, Yellow Pages, Yelp, etc. Feel free to discover other web directories to find the best one for your niche and business.

Completely fill out your Contact Us page

You pour your thoughts into making the perfect homepage and landing pages. It is an essential page for local businesses, it helps to create trust and attract a new prospects in your area.

Your name, address and phone number can be included in a basic purchaser contact structure. Google is strict about the consistency and accuracy of information for those who use it to search, making this critical in local SEO. You do not want someone driving over to a store that is closed for the night because your opening hours are out of date.

Consider local landing pages

And if you have more than one brick-and-mortar location in different cities, make sure each individual city gets it’s own unique landing page as well. This way he would be able to rank in each market area without needing an individual website for every place.

Write location-specific copy for each landing page in your local SEO checklist Certainly – it can be a more resource-heavy and time-consuming initiative to generate, especially if you have many locations. It doesn’t produce those thin, useless pages that Google can penalize you for.

Read more: How to Add Sub Collections in Shopify: A Comprehensive Guide

FAQs

How long does it take to see results from SEO on Shopify?
It depends on many factors and company goals. However, after 3 to 6 months of SEO strategy, you can expect to see initial improvements.

How do I complement keyword research for my Shopify store?
Several useful tools have been created to shorten the time spent on keyword research. Some most popular and recommended are Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Ahrefs. Remember to embed these keywords naturally into your content to bring the best effect.

Why is it important to submit a sitemap to search engines?
Because it offers search engines a better understanding of your site’s structure. However, it is not a big deal as Shopify will automatically generate a sitemap for your store and it can be sent to Google Search Console

What should I do to address the duplicate content problem in Shopify?
You are always alerted that duplicate content is harmful to your SEO campaign. So, it is better to avoid duplicated content. Nevertheless, when it happens, use canonical tags to indicate the preferred version of a page.

Final Thoughts

With this Shopify SEO checklist in hand, we believe that you are on the right way to conquer SEO successfully and leverage your Shopify store performance. The dream of top ranking is coming true sooner than you expect. Just follow this guide and always keep updated on search engine updates and algorithm changes. You can also refer to our Shopify Website Development Services, we will assist you in creating intuitive, sales-driven, and robust online stores. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to leave comments below.

Hope it helps!