Shopify SEO Checklist for Beginners: The Ultimate Guide

Here’s the most actionable guide on Shopify SEO Checklist for Beginners.

Shopify, as a company, is one of the heroic survivors of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020 alone, not only did it survive but also solidified its place in the list of 1% of companies whose stock went up significantly.

It’s easy to figure that all of the competition to rank on Shopify makes it a daunting task, especially with search engine optimization on a new online store. If you know your way with your Shopify SEO, its alright. But, the first experience is always hardly controllable, right?

Beginner’s luck won’t get you anywhere with Shopify so, we’re helping you with a Shopify SEO Checklist for beginners. This is a simplified and procedural roadmap that shows step by step how you can rank your store on Shopify.

Let’s begin…

Some Prerequisites Before the Main Course – Shopify SEO Tips

Here are some preconditions that need to be set up before getting all hands down on that Shopify eCommerce SEO checklist for beginners. However, you can rest assured if you can get help from an SEO expert, and take the best SEO service for your Shopify store.

1. Integrate Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the first on the list of most important things you need to set up before working on your Shopify SEO checklist for beginners. Google Analytics for Shopify SEO is important because it gives you visual results of your SEO efforts to increase the sales margin.

Read More: How to Change Shopify Store Name?

Here’s why you should integrate Google Analytics before everything else –

• Allows you to see how much revenue you’re getting from the SEO
• Allows you to see the conversion rate of your traffic
• Gives the most precise insight of your most successful and least successful products in your Shopify eCommerce store

2. Integrate Google Search Console

Integrating Google Search Console is equally as important as Google Analytics. A search console is a must-have tool that enables you to check the indexing status of your store and optimize its visibility. However, it’s important to get your website verified beforehand because the search console only gathers data on a verified website.

Here’s why you need Google Search Console for Shopify SEO –

• Observe keywords that generate the most clicks
• Click-through rate (CTR) of your page in the Google search results
• Change of ranking positions over time
• Helps to request for crawling and indexing the pages of the website
• Submitting the sitemap, i.e., the structure of your website, to Google
• Review the robots.txt file for possible errors
• Looking for website errors (Mobile page speed, Responsiveness, etc.)
• Penalties

3. Use a Keyword Research Tool

If all goes well, then your site should start seeing organic traffic. And this is why you should use a keyword research tool to find out the search term having the highest traffic.

Read More: Most Affordable SEO Services for Small Business

Although using a keyword tool is a debatable approach. But judging from what most people use for visible success – Google Keyword Planner, Moz, Ahrefs, and a few others can be your best friend.

That concludes the list of prerequisites. Now, you’re ready for that Shopify SEO checklist for beginners. Let’s move on to the action. Check out each of the items we have shared in our checklist. It will help you to improve you store performance and increase sales.

Shopify SEO Checklist for Beginners

Why SEO Is the Missing Piece in the Shopify Big Picture? Let’s check it out.

Just like ranking on Google for better traffic, ranking your Shopify store is also possible if you know how to improve your Shopify SEO. So, SEO is the name of the game here if you want to reach out and bring more organic traffic from the web.

Here’s what you need to do.

i) Sitemap Submission to Google Search Console

Organizing the contents of your website is the single most important element for any website owner. And what better than to organize those contents into a bite-sized and easily consumable content. Here’s a quick example of what it should look like –

Homepage >> Category >> Product

Now, the Question is – Why Do You Need This?

Making your contents easy to navigate makes it easier for the customer to land and search for their favorite products immediately. And everyone absolutely loves that.

Read More: Website Auditing Checklist

Just imagine – if customers spend less time finding their favorite product on your site, it opens up a window of opportunity for them to explore and think of other products.

And That Should be Your Goal – Encourage More Sales!

Plus, a simple site structure allows the robots to crawl fast and easily, which creates a better impression of your site. In addition to simplicity, add category and product pages easily navigable.

Make an About page, Contact page, and include a search box on the landing page for a more seamless experience – User experience. This brings us to our next point.

ii) Enhance the User Experience

A better user experience means better ranking. Experts say this because every user demands a seamless experience coupled with speed and accessibility. Always remember that your site is built for everyone. So…

What Can You Do to Speed Up Your Shopify Store?

Here are some actionable tips –

• Consider a fast theme that is responsive across all internet accessible devices
• Use lightweight and optimized images with a relevant alt tag
• Remove all irrelevant plugins and apps
• Avoid using sliders as they take much time to load and interact with the customers
• Make sure your theme is SEO-friendly

iii) Search for the Right Keywords

The foundation of every successful SEO attempt is to focus on the right keywords. Always put your user’s need and intent before you start thinking of a keyword. That way, you can keep your head straight while searching for the right keyword. But…

How Do You Search for the Right Keywords?

Well, this is where your previously set up tools come to use. Use your Google Analytics to find out which products are doing well on your site. Choose at least five important topics that your customer searches frequently and work your way around those main topics to find a suitable keyword that you can target.

Read More About Ecommerce SEO Strategies

Now, put yourself in a customer’s position and think of a list of possible words they’d use to search for a product. It’s essential point among Shopify SEO checklist for beginners because, it helps you to identify the queries of your consumers. For better ideas –

• Search on related forums
• Explore Subreddits that are relevant to your niche
• Look for public feedback on your products using hashtag search on social media
• Search for the keywords on Google SERP and look at the titles, meta descriptions, meta tags, alt-texts from images on competitor sites

While you’re fully delved into finding keywords, you might as well use a good keyword research tool, or you can do it manually. Like I said before – it can be done in both ways.

iv) Revamp Your Shopify Product Pages

Having a list of user favorite keywords will not take you anywhere if you’re not using them to optimize your product on your Shopify store. So, with that in mind, start optimizing your list of products based on the keywords you’ve found.

Always start with the best pages on your site so that they consistently do good and at the same time start bringing in new customers from the newly added keywords for those products. The idea is to keep the store at its maximum potential by maintaining the maximum conversion rates.

Read More About: Image Optimization for SEO

This is a familiar technique for prevalent store owners, but what about the new ones? Do they need to optimize too?

New stores should optimize from the start, and that’s because it makes it easier to bring customers right from the start. If you’re relatively new, only choose those pages that get around 10k views per month.

So, what is the best way to optimize the title tags for different categories?

There is a best practice that you can use for all products. And the general format looks like this –

Keyword 1 – Shop for Keyword 2 – Name of the Store

And this is what an example looks like –

Baby Shark T-shirts – Shop for Baby Shark T-shirts – The Baby Shark Store

Next up, you should add titles, descriptions for the products and add categories for those products. You can add the product description by copying it from the manufacturer but, genuine self-assessed information will always be appreciated by the users.

The keywords used in the content title, description, and the meta-description should fall into the whole thing swimmingly. Rightly so because your user needs a seamless experience with the content. The same goes for images as well – image and alt texts need to be perfectly relevant and naturally adjusted with the content structure.

v) Build Backlinks and Boost Your Ranking

Backlink – a cool name for an external link to your website. Backlinks are one of the quintessential elements needed to improve your Shopify Google search ranking. When other people refer to your site on their content, it makes Google notice that your site is important. And so…

Read More: Google My Business Optimization

The more backlinks you have, the better chances you have at ranking higher up on Google Search Engine Ranked Pages (SERP). Getting backlinks is not confirm as it requires a lot of effort and top-notch content quality.

Here’s how you can land quality backlinks –

Guest Posting

Guest posting is a relatively easy way to receive backlinks with little effort. This process involves guest writers giving their own insights, which gives a fresh look to the website. So, it’s good to try guest posting where you can put in a link or two in your content that takes the visitor to your website.

Links from Your Product Manufacturer

Your manufacturer can be a reliable source of your backlinks if you sell products from other companies in your store. Ask your manufacturer to enlist your store on a ‘Where to Find Our Products’ page, and you can get a good quality backlink without any hassle.

Allow Influencers and Bloggers to Review Your Product

A nice way of getting backlinks is to have renowned influencers or bloggers to review one of your products within your niche. Certainly, this allows you to get a few high-quality backlinks and a good flow of organic traffic from the blog sites. This particular Shopify SEO checklist for beginners will work for you if you can use it wisely because people loves reviews to get idea about the product they want to buy.

Create A Content Marketing Strategy That Perfectly Represents Your Company

Let’s get it straight – you cannot come up with an infinite number of products to rank for every juicy keyword on the web. And this is where content marketing falls into place.

Create a blog section on your site where you can write unique content using the right keywords. The contents shall cater to the customer’s need for information on the product. And this will ultimately drive more traffic to your site.

Read More: How Can I Improve Website Page Speed?

Remember, your goal is not to send the customers repeatedly to your same old landing page over and over again. Complement your products with information, and it will help you to gain the trust of your customers.

Ultimately, it will lead to more traffic, better conversion, and obviously more sales in the long run.

Use the Power of Social Media to Expand Your Reach

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest – are the top 4 social media giants that hold the maximum number of users from all over the world. Promoting your products on social media opens up an enormous possibility of finding new customers and new traffic to your website. Traffic from social media is also taken into count for a better ranking.

And besides, Shopify is now directly integrated with Instagram and Facebook, which makes it easy to sell your products directly on Instagram and Facebook.

Best Tools for the Best Ranking

Use of better tools always gives you better insight, which ultimately leads you to taking better and effective decisions. Here is my top 5 Shopify SEO Tools –

Shopify SEO Plugins for Beginners

• Plugin SEO
• Smart SEO
• SEO Image Optimizer
• Yoast SEO
• SEMrush

Frequently Asked Questions

Can You Do SEO on Shopify?

Certainly, you can use the Shopify SEO best practices to rank your store on the search engine to drive more organic traffic. Shopify SEO is indifferent from your regular SEO, and so, it's fair to say that the best practices are pretty much the same. Check our Shopify SEO checklist for beginners to check how you can do it

How Do I Add SEO to Shopify?

Adding SEO to Shopify is done in a series of successive steps that need to be done one at a time. The steps are – 1. Adding Google Analytics and Google Search Console 2. Adding a sitemap to Google 3. Keyword researching 4. Removing duplicate URLs 5. Adding a blog page for the products 6. Add a product page 7. Category page 8. About us, and contact page 9. Using SEO friendly content and images, and 10. Finally, optimize for better speed.

What is the Best SEO App for Shopify?

As of 2020, here are the best SEO apps for Shopify according to mass user preference: 1. SEO Optimizer for Booster Apps. 2. Sitemap NoIndex Manager. 3. Crush Pics. 4. AMP by Shop Sheriff.

How Do I Get My Shopify Website to Show Up on Google?

Ranking a Shopify website on Google is the same as ranking any ordinary website. The fundamentals are – Using Analytics, Domain, Security, Site Speed, Image Optimization, Using Shopify Apps, Removing Duplication and Broken Links, Submit Sitemap, Internal Linking, Optimizing Site Structure. These are the main factors that help to rank on Google. However, there are other small but relevant factors for you to learn and execute.

Why is Shopify Bad for SEO?

Shopify as a platform isn't bad at all. Recent surveys confirm that the two eCommerce platform giants – WooCommerce and Shopify, scored an impressive benchmark of 97 and 98, respectively. Shopify offers a platform with all the SEO tools at your disposal; you need to rank a site. But it has only a few technical shortcomings that are difficult to go around. For example – categories and taxonomies need to be defined very specifically so that the search result for one term doesn't show up in another, problems using canonical URLs, using breadcrumb URLs, and some others. These are problems that you would experience under very specific situations, and in most cases, people do not even get to dive that deep to address this matter with severity.

How Do I Optimize My Shopify Speed?

The best way to optimize the speed of your Shopify store is to take a speed test. Usually, a speed test allows you to see the current benchmark of your website and gives you a list of actions that you can work on to improve the speed. Here are some important tips – 1. Remove excess clutter from the landing page 2. Optimize images for faster loading 3. Use Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) for the mobile version of the site.

In Conclusion

Any eCommerce platform is only as good as its features and flexibility. Shopify ensures that it gives a seamless user experience for most people, and that is what makes it hard to rank on their platform – competition. Thankfully, Shopify SEO Checklist for beginners is a huge boost towards understanding Shopify SEO as a beginner and also creates a seamless user experience.