Complete Guide For Shopify SEO

2. The Shopify platform, like many of its competitors like Wix, happens to be a major platform for a range of businesses. Owing to a stat by the BuiltWith usage statistics, we can see that usage of the CMS has more than doubled since July 2017. Currently, 4.47% of the top 10,000 sites are using Shopify.

3. Moreover, a recent trend of clients using the Shopify platform at Go Fish Digital has been noticed, which further confirms our assumption that Shopify is one of the leading e-commerce companies. Now that we have proved to you the massive traffic the website receives let’s look at what Shopify SEO really is, facts you should know before getting started, Shopify SEO issues and finally, SEO tips that give your website the traffic you deserve. What is Shopify SEO Just as the name suggests, Shopify SEO implies to the SEO improvements that are unique to Shopify. Consisting of several SEO-friendly features, Shopify has many more covert features that could get you ranked high on the SERPs. Here is the brif Shopify SEO Guide.

4. Before You Get Started… Before getting to the SEO tips and tricks we have picked out for you, it’s important you understand and know some key features and adopt the following recommendations: Paid Plan Custom Domain Security It is imperative you sign up for the paid plan since Shopify doesn’t let search engines index stores on trial accounts. A custom domain is highly recommended since people are more likely to visit websites such as besteventplanner.com and not besteventplanner.myshopify.co m Make sure the SSL encryption sent between your visitors and your store is enabled so that it ensures the users faster page load times, removes mixed content to get more security and better SEO.

5. Mobile-Friendly Google Analytics According to recent studies, it’s been found 50% of searches are done via mobile, and this number will only continue to grow. Therefore, use the responsive Shopify themes and test them using Google’s mobile-friendly tester. Setting up Google Analytics makes it easier for you to monitor and track your visitors. If you don’t already, learn how to set up the free app to your Shopify here. Google Search Console Sitemap Submission Google Search Console shows what keywords you rank for, amongst a number of other things. Refer to this guide to know how you can go about it. Submitting your website’s XML sitemap is a great SEO tactic as it allows you to quickly find your essential website pages. Shopify creates an XML sitemap for you at yourstore.com/sitemap.xml, and here is how you can submit it.

6. Technical Shopify SEO Recommendations Now that we have mentioned the Shopify basics, there also exist certain SEO issues such as duplicate content, and this guide provides you with recommendations on how to overcome these barriers to ranking high and revamp your e-commerce business! Duplicate Content Duplicate content occurs when either duplicate or similar content exists on two separate URLs. This is detrimental for you SEO since it creates issues for your search engines as they might not be able to determine which of the duplicates is the canonical version. (A canonical tag is a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page.)

7. By default, Shopify stores allow their /products/ pages to render at two different URL paths: Canonical URL path: /products/ Non-canonical URL path: /collections/.*/products/ This is to ensure that all /collections/.*/products/ pages include a canonical tag to the associated /products/ page. While this definitely helps Google consolidate the duplicate content, a more alarming issue occurs within the internal linking structure; by default, Shopify links the non-canonical version to all your product pages. An example of such is shown below:

8. Adjusting the internal linking structure The theme.liquid can be thought of as the master template; all other templates are rendered inside of theme.liquid. Therefore, the change can be made in the theme’s .liquid files that build the links to your products. This will vary theme to theme, but in “Supply” (for example) you can find the relevant line of code in the Snippets section, as “product-grid-item.liquid”.

9. Duplicate Collection Pages Shopify also happens to create duplicate content through the site’s pagination, i.e., a duplicate is created of the first collections page in a particular series. This occurs due to the fact that once you’re on a paginated URL in a series, the link to the first page will contain “?page=1”: Since “?page=1” will almost always contain the same content as the original non-parameterized URL, we suggest that you adjust the internal linking structure so that the first paginated result points to the canonical page.

10. Product Variant Pages It is common to see multiple product URLs created for the same product with slight variations on Shopify. This implies that there can exist multiple duplicate/similar product descriptions and images in situations where a core product on your website is the same but only an attribute such as size. Here is an example of the same: https://recordit.co/x6YRPkCDqG Sometimes, however, this duplication cannot be considered an SEO issue since some sites could benefit from these URLs as they allow you to have indexable pages that could be optimized for very specific terms. To understand the best course of action to undertake for product variations, do consider the following:

11. Usability Duplication of Effort User-centric SEO is not only popular but recommended, and with the goal of providing the best user experience, you could provide all of the colour combinations possible in the same page (using a dropdown menu, for example). Writing custom copies for each colour of each product should usually balance out through the possible return on that investment of time and resources. Creating multiple custom pages might be rewarding in some cases but do end of being a liability if proper maintenance is not provided. Content Duplication If your Shopify store contains product variants, then it’s worth determining early on whether or not these pages should exist at a separate URL. To avoid search engines crawling your webpages and indexing them as duplicate content, it is advised that you write specific content for each colour of your product.

12. However, this is feasible for websites that are selling a product which consists of over 500 colours, and under such circumstances, you could: ● Add colour options next to the same core product. In this case, the URL doesn’t change, and you never even encounter a specific page for the other colour, although it exists.

13. ● Add a colour selector next to the same core product, but when you select another colour, the whole page reloads to the other colour page.

14. Crawling and Indexing After observing a few Shopify stores, we’ve found some SEO items that are unique to Shopify when it comes to crawling and indexing: Robot.txt file The robots.txt file, also known as the robots exclusion protocol or standard, is a text file that tells web robots (most often search engines) which pages on your site to crawl and which ones to not to crawl.

15. The following list shows the sections of a site that Shopify disallows crawling in: ● ● ● ● ● ● Admin area Checkout Orders Shopping cart Internal search Policies page While it might be great that Shopify creates default disallow commands for you, its biggest limitation has be not allowing users to adjust the robots.txt file, especially when robots.txt is the easiest way to control Google’s crawl of your site as it’s extremely easy to update and allows for a lot of flexibility. In response to this, we recommend using other methods of adjusting Google’s crawlers such as “nofollow” (The nofollow tag is a way publishers can tell search engines not to count some of their links to other pages as “votes” in favour of that content) or canonical tags.

16. The “noindex” tag Just to reiterate, the nofollow tag is a value that can be assigned to the rel attribute (which defines the relationship between a linked resource and the current document) of an HTML an element to instruct some search engines that the hyperlink should not influence the ranking of the link’s target in the search engine’s index. As we mentioned above, Shopify doesn’t allow you to edit or modify the robots.txt file, but does allow you to add the “noindex” tag, and here is how you do it:

17. Step 1 From your Shopify admin, go to Online Store > Themes. Step 2 Find the theme you want to edit, and then click Actions > Edit code.

18. Step 4 1) To exclude the search template, paste the following code in the <head> section: {% if template contains ‘search’ %} <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”> {% endif %} 2) To exclude a specific page, paste the following code in the <head> section: {% if handle contains ‘page-handle-you- want-to-exclude’ %} <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”> {% endif %} Step 3 Click the theme.liquid layout file. Make sure that you replace page-handle-you- want-to-exclude with the correct page handle. Step 5 Click Save.

19. Structured Data Structured data markup (or schema.org markup) consists of data types and properties arranged in hierarchical order. In Shopify, it is recommended that you add structured data to your homepage, product pages, collection pages, blog page, and article pages. Product Structured Data In general, Shopify does a great job with structured data since it provides multiple themes that contain “Product” markup out-of-the-box which provides Google with essential information about your product such as name, description, price, etc. Article Structured Data The Article Structured data comes in handy if you’re an active user of Shopify’s blog functionality. This schema type lets Google know that your blog content is more editorial in nature.

20. BreadcrumbList Structured Data In the story of Hansel and Gretel fairy tale, the two title children drop breadcrumbs to form a trail back to their home. This anecdote from the fairytale has inspired the current age concept of a “breadcrumb”. Keyword Optimisation Similar to Yoast SEO, Shopify too allows you to optimize certain key elements of your such as your title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs, and to adjust these elements on your Shopify site, simply navigate to the page you wish to adjust and scroll down to “Search Engine Listing Preview”:

21. Register your Shopify store with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools Registering your Shopify site with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools – the two most popular search engines, would put your website on the map and make sure it gets crawled. Note that you should register both the www and non-www version of your domain (i.e., www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com), and, if you’ve got a secure and non-secure version of your website, the http:// and https:// versions of each.

22. Non-technical SEO Recommendations Moving on the non-technical SEO tips, do note that these tips are more general recommendations which would allow you to rank better in the SERPs. Even though these recommendations can be easily employed without much coding knowledge, we encourage you to research the following topics more so that you can take it a step further. Logical Site Structure Below is an example of an e-commerce site structure

23. Adding categories and subcategories While you set up your main menu under Shopify Admin > Online Store > Navigation, you can “nest” the collections that you consider the subcategories under the main category. This will cause a drop-down effect to happen on the main menu. Keyword Research Keywords are two to five-word phrases that your potential clients would type into a search engine when looking for you (or a business like yours.) The primary way to do this is to search on Google for a word or phrase that describes your page. If the top-ranking pages are similar to yours, look at their title tags to try to deduce the keywords they’re targeting. The next bit of keyword research involves using short or long-tailed keywords.

24. At Pearl Lemon, we have carefully selected the most effective ways to help you find the keywords for your website: ❏ Make a List ❏ Be Specific ❏ Put yourself in your Customers’ Shoes ❏ Embrace Technology ❏ Google Keyword Tool ❏ Moz Explorer ❏ SEMrush ❏ Study your Competitors ❏ Always choose Quality over Quantity

25. Start Blogging Beardbrand, which is a men’s grooming company, has successfully generated 136,000 search visits per month, out of which 77% of their total estimated search traffic comes from their blog accounts. ➢ Adding Content to Product Pages Ideally, if you want each product page to be indexed its recommended that you add unique content to each page. A common issue across Shopify stores is that your Shopify products may not have unique on-page content associated with them. This occurs due to the use of the same descriptions across multiple products or lack thereof.

26. SEO Apps ● ● ● ● ● Crush.pics JSON-LD for SEO Smart SEO Yotpo Reviews App Limitation In the wake of rampant digitalisation across all sectors of the economy, don’t step back when it comes to using these applications as SEO best practices. Create Backlinks A backlink for a given web resource is a link from some other website to that web resource. A web resource may be a website, web page, or web directory, and the best way to optimise your Shopify game is by creating backlinks to your website. ➢ The Right Writer ➢ Use Keyword Research ➢ Long-Form Content ➢ Keyword-rich ➢ User Satisfaction ➢ Add Images ➢ E-newsletter Sign-ups ➢ Encourage CTAs