As an online business owner, you likely hear SEO everywhere you turn. You know it’s important, you just have no idea what it actually is or how to optimize your Shopify store. We get it.
The all knowing Wikipedia defines SEO, or search engine optimization, as the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a web search engine’s unpaid results— often referred to as “natural,” “organic,” or “earned results.
Did you know that Shopify makes it simple for you to SEO optimize your site?
Shopify + SEO
Every single Shopify plan includes the following powerful SEO features.
- editable title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs for your pages
- editable ALT tags for all images, customizable image file names
- automatically generated sitemap.xml and robots.txt files
- automatically generated canonical URL tags (to stop duplicate content).
If that sounded like a lot of gibberish, let us break it down for you!
Title tags are what appear in the search engine results page (SERPs) as the clickable headline. They’re hugely important for social sharing and SEO. The title tag serves as a quick, concise description of the page’s content.
Meta descriptions are what you see in the little website preview on a search engine results page (SERPs). They’re HTML attributes that also provide concise explanations of the contents of a webpage.
The image’s file name & alt text tell website viewers the contents of an image. Search engines cannot crawl an image without the file name and/or ALT text. So indicating what’s in the picture will also help your products show up when customers search images.
Sitemap.XML file contains all your products, pages, collections, and blog posts.
Robots exclusion protocol (REP) or robots.txt is a text file webmasters create to instruct robots (usually search engine bots) who to crawl and index pages on their website.
Optimize your Shopify Store for Growth!
Shopify covers the basics for you. But in order to stand out above the rest, there are a few things that you can tweak to extend your organic reach.
Add title tags.
Edit the title tags to your online store and set the title tag for each product, collection, and/or page. To do this, scroll down to the search engine’s section on each of these pages in Shopify to make the adjustments.
Modify Meta Descriptions.
Modifying the text that Shopify automatically pulls from your page will ensure that it’s full of the proper keywords. You can modify the meta descriptions for your home page, additional pages, collections, and blog posts using the Shopify admin.
Keywords + Page Headers.
Including main keywords in your store’s products, collections, and blog posts will help your pages show up when people search for for those keywords.
Content Content Content!
You’ve heard this before, we’re sure. But by providing more content in your product descriptions, collection texts, or blog posts, you’re increasing your site’s chances to be found on Google and other search engines. Including a few paragraphs of text filled with keywords is always good. Need help with the content on your site? We work with Bliss Creative, and highly recommend them!
We’ve definitely only scratched the surface on all things SEO. If you find that you need some extra help, get in touch with us here at Arya Creative!