Useful Shopify SEO features

Shopify has basic SEO features that help you optimise your website and get more traffic. It has many built-in features and apps that can help your website get indexed and ranked in the search results.

Shopify is a closed platform and offers less flexibility and customization than the other open platforms. Though Shopify is a good platform for SEO. To optimise your Shopify e-commerce you can hire a Shopify SEO agency that knows what SEO features Shopify offers.

Shopify SEO features

This is a list of SEO features offered by Shopify:

• Shopify can automatically create an XML sitemap of your website. This makes your website easy to crawl and index. In Shopify, the sitemap is generated at yourwebsite/sitemap.xml.

• Shopify can give you a preview of how your page will appear in the search results. It also tells you the showable character limit of the title or the description and this helps you to avoid getting cut off in the search results.

• It allows you to create meta titles and descriptions with targeted keywords in them. It allows you to write shorter URLs with targeted keywords.

• Shopify has strings in its URL structure like ‘/blogs’ for blog posts and ‘/products’ for product pages. This helps to coordinate the site structure. It offers a hierarchy of categories.

• Shopify allows you to create additional tags for pages and images. You can use your targeted keywords in them. It offers free blog features like meta titles and descriptions, editable tags, internal and external links, free hosting and CDN.

• Broken links are bad for SEO and therefore you need to use 301 redirects to maintain your rankings. Shopify helps you to set up 301 redirects to avoid dead links. You can also manage them manually.

• Shopify has the capability of canonising URLs which helps to tell Google which page is a master page that should be indexed.

• The Robots.txt file helps to tell Google which page to crawl and which not to. Shopify automatically creates this file and you can check this file at website.com/robots.txt.

• Search engines prefer that websites have an SSL certification. It is recognised as HTTPS protocol. This can be easily activated on Shopify. If you are a European owner then it complies with GDPR.

• Your website will not rank higher if it is not optimised for mobile. On Shopify when you create a website and switch to mobile devices the layout will adjust itself and become more responsive on your phone. Shopify also provides plenty of themes with responsive design.

• The themes, images and javascript you choose can affect the speed of your website. Shopify is known for its racing speed. It uses a faster global network and CDN and automatically converts all the images to Webp. Shopify website owners need not invest in qualified servers to get amazing speeds.

• You can easily track and analyse your website performance as Google Analytics can be easily added to your Shopify store.

• Structured data is used to tell the search engine more about your products. With Shopify’s structured data, you can display the name, price and description of your products. With the help of a Shopify app, you can also add colours, sizes and more.

• Shopify offers various apps to help you with SEO and attract more traffic. In the Shopify App Store, you can type in ‘marketing’ or ‘SEO’ to find a lot of SEO apps to choose from. Some of the apps are:
  • Plug in SEO

• TinyIMG

• SEO booster - SEO marketing

• AVADA SEO Image Optimiser free