The Complete Guide to Shopify SEO in 2023

Once you've set up a store for your business on Shopify, you'll need some tips to implement SEO techniques. Although Shopify has built-in SEO elements, you may need to make some adjustments to take advantage of advanced options. That's why it's significant to determine how the SEO parameters work for Shopify and take action accordingly. Taking advantage of the recommended Shopify SEO tips will help your store stand out in many search engines, especially Google, which will increase your customer acquisition rate.

Removing Repeated Content from the Store

Duplicate content is text that exactly matches the content on a completely different web page. Additionally, the plagiarism page can be on your website or someone people. However, the future of your Shopify store is not favorable if the content is repeated. This situation is because not all search engines, especially Google, are tolerant of external duplication. When such a situation is detected, search engines will penalize your store with a sanction.

On the other hand, duplicate material can be found on many Shopify sites, which is problematic. But don't worry, if you can solve the duplicate content problem, your performance will be positively affected. 

So, how can you spot duplicate content on Shopify? Running your paper through a plagiarism checker will ensure that it is entirely original. For this, there are many successful tools available online, such as Quetext. Thus, you can detect and intervene if there is any external or internal duplicate content in your store.

Creating a Rare Page Title & Writing a Meta Description

Page titles and meta descriptions are the most important elements for SEO. Both the meta description tag and the title tag should contain keywords or phrases related to the content. Thus, search engines can easily understand what your page is about with the help of metadata. In fact, the better search engines understand you and your page, the better they can position your page on the search results page.

On the other hand, all titles and descriptions on your page should be written according to SEO rules. In other words, the title should not have more than 60 characters, and the meta description shouldn't have more than 160. If you pay attention to these nuances, there is no reason why your page should not be SEO-friendly.

Finally, you might not know how to edit meta titles and descriptions, especially if you're new to Shopify. For this, you need to click the "Preferences" category in the "Online Store" tab. However, there is a tip that you should pay attention to when filling them in, but that many people do not know. You should avoid stop words like "a", "an", "the", "or", "and", "but", "so", "thus" and "if". This way, you can have a more professional description.

Optimizing Store Images in Shopify

Optimizing the Shopify photos for your store is another technique to raise your search engine rankings. To optimize, you should start with image alt tags because search engines use alt tags to understand the content of images on websites. Therefore, all images on your page should have appropriate alt tags that contain keywords. 

For example, if someone is looking for purple eyeliner in your store, the picture for your product should also have an appropriate description and alt tag. If this is the case, there is a higher chance that search engines will notice your page.

The usability of the images is a primary element as well. For instance, visually impaired users can use a screen reader to review your site more easily. With a screen reader, one can perceive the visual aurally. However, a good alt tag is needed for this. So, the better and more descriptive your alt tag is, the more you encourage a potential customer to make a purchase.

Considerations When Creating an Image Alt Tag

Firstly, to add an alt tag, you need to learn how to add an alt tag in Shopify. For this, you can follow the steps below: 

• You need to go to the "Products" tab and click the "All Products" tab. 
• After selecting the product, you want to edit, hover over its images and click "Edit alt text" from the three-dot icon.  
• Add your text in the image alt text box that appears.
• Finally, press the "Save" button.

Now that you know how to add an alt tag, you can examine what you should pay attention to when adding an alt tag. The most vital advices for the alt tag is listed below.

• When writing an alt tag, write a suitable definition without crowding the keyword.
• Use an alt tag that you have not used before.
• Use an alt tag that is short, concise, and clearly describes the image.
• Avoid adding alt tags for any smaller images and buttons.

You can easily create an SEO-friendly alt tag by following the advice given above.

Adding a "Products" Category to the Homepage 

Your homepage is the most influential page because it is the center of your website. That's why it's almost imperative that you create navigation links for your homepage. In this manner, users may quickly explore and shop at your store regardless of the layout of your website.

However, not making any links from your homepage to your category content is one of the worst things you can do for your store. This situation is because your category content will get lost in the depths of your site, making it harder for users to find these pages.

If you think you don't have a lot of products and this is not a problem you are wrong. If you want to be a professional e-seller, you need to make sure you add categories to your homepage. This way, all your pages will be accessible from the homepage, and your user experience will improve.

Using Technical SEO

It is not enough to make SEO arrangements only for your content. You should also get support from SEO outside the content. At this point, technical SEO will come to your aid. You can make your page SEO-friendly by paying attention to the following tips:

• To allow bots to crawl the site by checking the robots.txt file at regular intervals
• Having a sitemap.xml file and adding this file to Google Search Console
• Create and install Google Analytics
• Create and install Google Analytics
• Validate HTML and CSS programming languages
• Fix redirect issues and crawl errors
• H1, H2 ve H3 gibi hiyerarşik başlık etiketlerini kullanın
• Analyze site speed for all devices using tools like GTMetrix and PageSpeed Insights

In this way, you can adapt technical SEO to your site and make your site SEO-friendly not only for your content but throughout.

Adding Sitemap.xml to Google Search Console

A sitemap tells all search engine spiders, especially Google, what should be crawled or indexed on a website. A sitemap file that provides a summary of your website's content, including its products, is generated automatically by Shopify stores. Naturally, only people who desire a flawless and SEO-friendly page should utilize this.

However, in order to do this, you must upload your sitemap to Google Search Console. This way, your site can be crawled and indexed conveniently, as mentioned at the beginning. The methods listed below can be used to submit your sitemap to Google Search Console:

• First, sign in to your Google Search Console account.
• Then click on the URL of your website.
• Finally, click on the sitemap on the left side and click on "Add/Test Sitemap". 

However, keep in mind that it may take a few days to process your request. In addition, the Shopify sitemap is located in the root directory of the store as yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml

Making Google Analytics Integration

Google Analytics integration is almost a must for tracking and reporting your website traffic. In addition, Google Analytics is a free tool that helps you track users' site movement, analyze their behavior, and take action accordingly. For example, you want to know how long a user looked at the last blog content you published. Google Analytics can give you that data.

Creating High-Quality Backlinks

Like any retailer, you can want to increase the number of visitors and customers to your store. One of the best ways to do this is through quality backlinking. To employ backlinks, you may make a user profile for your Shopify store on other e-commerce platforms. This is a simple technique to boost site traffic in a quality way. Thus, you can get powerful backlinks for your Shopify account.

301 Redirect for Old Product Pages

One of the most common situations that can happen on a shopping site is when a product on sale goes out of stock. However, when this happens, many Shopify merchants don't notify search engines that the product page is no longer available. To report this to search engines like Google, you need to use 301 redirects. So, what is a 301 redirect?

In short, a 301 redirect is a practical way to automatically redirect search engines and users from a page that no longer exists to a new page. Thus, this is a great way to deal with pages that you don't want people to visit and that no longer exist. Also, with a 301 redirect, the search engine or the user won't get a "404 Not Found" error. This is an arrangement that improves the user experience and increases satisfaction. You can easily add a 301 redirect to your Shopify store by following the steps below:

• First, open your online store
• Then go to "Navigation" and "URL Redirects"
• From here, click on "Add URL Redirect"
• Put the new URL and the old URL in the redirect field, respectively
• Select the "Add" option

However, if the URL you are redirecting to still has a valid web page, the redirect will not work. For this, you need to delete the page.

Configuring the Blog Feature

If you're new to Shopify, you might not know that a blog feature comes with your store. By creating blog posts for your store, you may more easily reach your audience, gain visibility, and increase your organic traffic to boost your sales rate. In addition, there are benefits to sharing content for your Shopify store regularly, such as:

• Frequently updated websites get more visitors from search engines.
• Creating quality and beneficial content makes your site more useful because many users want to find answers to all their questions immediately when they visit a website.
• Search engines can identify which subject areas you are knowledgeable in based on the material you produce.

This way, you can make your Shopify store stand out even more with the content you write.