SEO Checklist For Shopify Stores

Shopify stores that do not focus on SEO may fail to reach their targets and grow their business. SEO is using various practices to help search engines find your store. SEO can help your store rank at the top of the search results and drive more organic traffic to your store.

Shopify comes with several SEO features and you should learn how to do SEO on Shopify successfully. Shopify SEO ensures that your store has what Google algorithms look for while searching.

Some of the issues your e-commerce store may face are duplicate content, slow loading website, complex architecture, lack of keywords, using too many apps and scripts and sub-optimised meta descriptions.

E-commerce SEO checklist

1. SEO requires tools to help you evaluate the performance of your Shopify store. Google Analytics and Google Search Console provide detailed information about your website. Google Analytics helps you to track and report the traffic on your website. Google Search Console is a free tool that helps you to monitor, maintain and troubleshoot your website.

2. Keyword research is done to identify the words and phrases people use to search. You select your keywords based on volume, intent and difficulty. Along with the exact keywords find the synonyms and LSI keywords.

3. Optimise metadata like title tags and meta descriptions and use your relevant keywords in them. A title tag and meta description is what the user sees in the SERPs. Make them compelling and use powerful words that drive the clicks.

4. Search engines use URLs to know what a page is about. Include keywords in your URLs so that they can appear in the search results for a particular query.

5. Images metadata like filenames and Alt-text should be optimised. Filename should tell what the image is about and include keywords. Alt-tags should be descriptive and provide key information about the images. Your pictures should follow the specific Shopify guidelines.

6. Optimise your content and ensure that it is relevant and includes keywords. Product pages should contain keywords that the users use while searching for your products. In your content use headings and subheadings and short paragraphs to make it readable.

7. Internal links help the users to find the other pages within your Shopify store. You should include internal links wherever possible.

8. Backlinks help to improve the rankings of your website. You should try to get high-quality links from authoritative websites. You can use guest blogging, get links from mentions and get your product reviewed to build backlinks.

9. Technical issues can negatively affect your rankings therefor you should do technical SEO. Fix all crawl errors and broken links. Use Google Search Console to detect and fix all crawl errors. Use tools like Ahrefs or ScreamingFrog to find and fix all broken links.

10. Use a responsive Shopify theme so that your store works well on desktop and mobile environments. These themes help to reduce the loading time and offer a good user experience.

11. Improve the page loading time of your website. You should optimise your images, remove unwanted third-party apps and scripts and go easy on slideshows, animations and video presentations. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix to measure the speed of your website.

12. Use a content marketing strategy and create blogs, newsletters, social media posts, ebooks, video content and more. You can provide useful content that provides value to the users.

13. Use other channels like social media and email marketing. Use social media mentions with relevant keywords and links to your store. You can ask your users to share your content on social media.

14. Customer reviews are important as they are a good source of information, backlinks and mentions. They contain relevant keywords which help you rank.

15. Check your competitors' content and find out what they are doing right. You can adjust your content to get the same results.

16. Perform an SEO audit to find any errors on your Shopify store. You can also use third-party apps to review your store.