BEST SHOPIFY SEO TIPS FOR IMPROVING YOUR ONLINE STORE RANKING

6 min readAug 29, 2023

Ranking your website with a high position in Google Search at that time is not straightforward as it used to be in the early time of the website era. As you know, having an eCommerce store is a great way to sell products online and Shopify is a powerful platform that has the ability to empower you to do that. However, with so many stores online, it can be difficult to stand out from the competition. That’s why it’s important to use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to help your store rank higher in search results. In this article, we’ll be sharing some of the best Shopify SEO tips for your Shopify store that will help you outrank your competitors and attract more customers.

What is Shopify SEO?

Simply, Shopify SEO is the process of optimizing your Shopify store’s website and its content to improve its visibility and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). Shopify SEO is similar to regular SEO done on WordPress, with a few differences. It’s important to be aware of these differences and follow the best Shopify SEO tips to achieve better business and brand growth. With a well-executed SEO strategy, your Shopify store can rank higher in search engine results and drive more organic traffic to your website, leading to increased sales and revenue.

Particularly, Shopify SEO includes optimizing the website structure, content, and metadata to make it more search engine-friendly and increase its chances of ranking higher in relevant search queries. Shopify SEO is crucial for increasing organic traffic to a store and attracting more potential customers. It involves a range of techniques such as technical audit, keyword research, on-page optimization, internal linking, and off-page optimization, among others.

Effective Shopify SEO requires ongoing monitoring and updating to stay ahead of the competition and improve website traffic and conversions. Thus, to achieve these goals, let’s take a deep dive into some of the key strategies that you can utilize to improve your Shopify store ranking high on Google.

Top Shopify SEO Tips For Your Online Store to Improve Ranking on Google

Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to the process of optimizing a website’s technical aspects to improve its search engine visibility and ranking. It involves making changes to the website’s backend structure and code to make it more search engine-friendly and ensuring that it meets technical SEO best practices.

Set Preferred Domain

Setting your preferred domain is an essential part of Shopify’s technical SEO and it is one of the very first things you need to do in the website development process. A technique that can be used in this step is known as domain canonicalization.

Domain canonicalization refers to the process of selecting a preferred version of your website’s domain and redirecting all other versions to that preferred version. This helps to prevent duplicate content issues and ensures that search engines crawl and index your website correctly. For example, if your website can be accessed through all four domains:

Although your users can see the same content on all of these sites, search engines may see these as four separate websites, leading to duplicate content issues. By selecting a preferred version of your domain and redirecting all other versions to that preferred version, you can consolidate your website’s authority and improve its search engine visibility.

Fortunately, Shopify is really great at handling this issue when it can help you redirect alternatives to the one that it thinks it’s your preferred domain. However, it doesn’t always operate correctly. To implement domain canonicalization with Shopify, go to your Domains settings.

If you want to use the domain that Shopify didn’t choose as the main version, click on that domain and hit Set as Primary.

Ensure Your Store’s Pages Are Mobile-friendly

With more people accessing the internet through mobile devices than ever before, having a responsive design for your Shopify store is crucial for ensuring that your website looks great on any device, including desktops, tablets, and smartphones. The easiest practice you can do is to apply a pre-made responsive Shopify theme. With this theme, your website’s layout and content are adjusted to fit different screen sizes, greatly improving user experience and keeping visitors engaged on your site for longer periods of time.

Additionally, as you may know, Google takes time-on-page as an important metric when assessing a website’s value. By having a website that’s easy to navigate and read on any device, you can improve your website’s search engine rankings. This, in turn, can result in repeat visitors and increased conversions, a win-win situation for any eCommerce site.

Not only use a responsive theme, but you also need to apply many other techniques to complete a mobile-friendly store website like optimizing images and fonts for mobile. Large, high-resolution images can slow down your website’s loading time on mobile devices and some fonts may be difficult to read on smaller screens. To optimize your images and fonts for mobile, compress images to reduce file size without sacrificing quality and use some fonts that are designed to read easier on mobile devices.

After implementing the above practices, you need to test your website’s mobile-friendliness. To do this, you can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to check if your website is mobile-friendly. This tool will analyze your website and provide suggestions for improvement.

Improve Your Store’s Page Speed

Page speed is a critical factor that affects how quickly your website loads on various devices, including desktops, tablets, and smartphones. Studies show that users are more likely to abandon a website that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Slow page speed can also negatively impact your website’s bounce rate, which is the percentage of users who leave your site after viewing only one page.

To improve your store’s page speed, the easiest thing you can start is optimizing your images and videos to reduce their file sizes without sacrificing their quality. You can also use caching to reduce the amount of time it takes for your website to load by temporarily storing previously accessed data. Make sure to regularly update your Shopify store’s software and remove any unnecessary apps and code that can slow down your website’s performance.

For more advanced practice, compressing your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files can reduce their file sizes, resulting in faster load times. Consider using a content delivery network (CDN) to distribute your website’s content across multiple servers, reducing the distance and time it takes for users to access your website.