What is Shopify SEO ? Is Shopify SEO-Friendly ?
When it comes to building an eCommerce website for your store, Shopify is one of the top-rated options. Businesses can easily optimize products and articles with available SEO features to increase rankings on search pages and increase the rate of naturally reaching customers. Let’s go over the concept of Shopify SEO and whether it’s user-friendly or not.
What is Shopify SEO?
SEO is an abbreviation for “search engine optimization.” In simple terms, it refers to the process of improving your site to increase its visibility when people search for products or services related to your business on Google, Bing, and other search engines. The higher the visibility of your pages in search results, the more likely you are to attract attention and attract new and existing customers to your company.
Shopify SEO also works as SEO improvements that are more unique to Shopify than other websites, with SEO built-in and features to help you optimize your products and content, making your online store more visible in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Compared with other forms of advertising like google ads, influencers marketing, users are ready to spend some time researching your industry or learning more about their options for a specific type of product, they can find you on their own through SEO. This is not only more convenient for customers, but it also generates more qualified leads for your company.
Paid search can bring you traffic but it is not a long-term solution. Furthermore, ad blockers and ad blindness can reduce the effectiveness of paid search. Therefore, you should consider SEO as one of the prominent options for search regardless of the much less expensive cost.
How SEO-friendly is Shopify?
One thing to consider when building an eCommerce website with Shopify is the built-in SEO tool, which includes available features for your online store, aiming to increase rankings in search engine page results.
The following are some of the SEO features and the advantages of using Shopify SEO for your online store:
Simple Title tag and Meta description optimization
Meta title and Meta description are two factors that make an impression on users when they search for information on search engines. With an eye-catching title, your product or article will stand out from the crowd.
Additionally, a complete meta description will result in a 5.8 percent increase in clicks when compared to others. Fortunately, Shopify has done an excellent job of developing SEO tools, particularly for basic and foundational SEO steps such as title tag and meta description optimization.
To adjust these elements, find the collection, product, blog post, or even homepage you wish to edit and scroll down to Search Engine Listing Preview, then click the Edit website SEO link. And as a result, you’ll be able to customize the Title Tag, Meta Description, and also URL / Handle.
Default Robots.txt setup
Shopify automatically disallows access to pages such as cart/shopping pages, account pages, and search query pages. Therefore, most stores won’t need to customize this part.
This action of the robot.txt file is to manage web crawlers from accessing all or part of a website. It is a text file used for SEO, containing commands for the search engines’ indexing robots that specify pages that can or cannot be indexed but must exist for the user journey (shopping cart, etc…)
However, if you would like to edit the robot.txt file, Shopify still assists in modifying it by following these steps:
1. Open your Shopify Dashboard
2. Go to Online Store > Themes
3. In the Live theme section, click Actions > Edit code
4. Under the templates section, click Add a new template
5. Change create a new template for to “robots.txt“
6. Click Create template
Easy 301 redirects
While many platforms require plugins and apps for 301 (permanent) redirects, Shopify does this with a few quick clicks. These Shopify SEO features are both helpful in cost-saving & keeping the original rating, also original values on your new website or new URL
1. Start by going to Online Store > Navigation:
2. Click View URL Redirects
3. Select Import or Create URL Redirect
You can then choose between importing hundreds or even thousands of 301 redirects at once or doing one at a time by filling the old website/URL in the “Redirect from” section and replacing it with a new website/URL in the “Redirect to” section.
Sitemap
Sitemaps make it easier for search engines to crawl and index your website’s content – which essentially means organizing your pages and the links on each page so that you can better understand how everything is connected.
Even if you have no time researching or getting your hands on one sitemap before. This is no longer a problem when Shopify does generate the sitemap for you when pages, products, collections, and blog posts are created and organized thoroughly.
You can find it by going to yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml
SSL (Secure socket layers) security
Fortunately, Shopify stores already include this feature, which is especially important for online stores because you want your customers to feel confident that their payment information is secure in your hands. SSL is also preferred by search engines because it increases the authority and trustworthiness of the site.
Canonical Tags
Shopify generates canonical tags automatically, using each product’s default product page, with no collection or variant selected.
For example, if you have a product page for red socks that you’re selling, but it can be reached from a few different categories – such as “Women’s Accessories,” “Socks,” or “On Sale,” then you’ll end up with multiple versions of this same page. This is the thing that Google hates as duplicate content does not help it in knowing which version needs to be indexed, page types are used to rank for relevant queries, or should they consolidate “link equity” on one page or split it up into multiple categories.
With this Shopify SEO built-in feature, canonical tags will be useful if you have multiple versions of the same page on your website.
Default server setup
From the customer experience or your point of view, if page load takes quite a long time, even if there is a demand for a page or product, you will be impatient and leave quickly. Therefore, page load speed plays an important role, especially for online stores with hundreds of product pages.
Be relieved and let Shopify does the job to get your site speed optimized by default with these:
- Server configuration: Shopify handles maintenance and upgrades for all your servers to keep your stores and shopping carts up and running so that your pages load quickly.
- Leveraging browser caching: Browser caching allows some important and regularly accessed files such as Javascript and CSS files (for style and functionality) to be downloaded to the users’ device, then accessed locally rather than re-downloading each visit.
- Using a CDN: A content delivery network (CDN) is where files are stored on servers across the world, then loaded from the nearest server to your visitors’ location. A visitor from the UK may have files loaded from a London server, whereas someone in New York may have them loaded via a NY server. This again increases site speed and again is managed by Shopify with their CDN run by Fastly and Cloudflare.
While other platforms require users to have their server, why don’t choose a significantly easier and cost-saving way by doing it yourself with Shopify?
Most themes are SEO-friendly
Every Shopify theme provides proper heading structure, structured data, breadcrumbs, etc – which is the basics of SEO.
Apart from the compatibility of themes on desktop devices, most of them provide plenty of responsive mobile themes (i.e. able to resize fluidly for different screen sizes) that you can use to ensure your store is mobile-optimized, as well as the ability to implement mobile checkouts. It not only provides a better experience for users when using their phones or tablets but also makes your site in mobile version be considered friendly by Google bots.
Google Analytics Integration
It’s easy to sync Google Analytics with your Shopify store – all you have to do is navigate to Sales Channels > Online Store > Preferences, and then paste your Google Analytics code in the box.
With Google Analytics integration, this tool is currently the most powerful option for traffic, conversion tracking, analysis, and other functions. It’s free, and it gives you all the information and insight you need to make better SEO improvement decisions.
A great deal of SEO Apps
Image optimization, AMP integration, Google snippet management, meta tag checkers, and so on. There are numerous SEO plugins available in the Shopify app store that will make your life easier and allow you to devote more time to sales strategy and customer service.
Useful resource: 28 Best Shopify SEO Apps Of 2021
Conclusion
SEO is important. SEO efforts, on the other hand, range from the most basic to the most advanced, depending on your business needs. But after all, that’s what every company should do in the long run. With standard features and the benefits of sales performance with many SEO apps, you can save time, fix important issues, increase traffic surprisingly, and many more to discover.