SEO
The Only Shopify SEO Checklist You Need To Rank Your Site
![The Only Shopify SEO Checklist You Need To Rank Your Site The Only Shopify SEO Checklist You Need To Rank Your Site](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/1642790364_The-Only-Shopify-SEO-Checklist-You-Need-To-Rank-Your.png)
When it comes to driving motivated traffic to your Shopify store, no other digital marketing strategy is as affordable or impactful as SEO.
For e-commerce retailers, taking the time to ensure your web pages are properly optimized can help increase your organic traffic, meaning more potential customers browsing your products.
Unlike Google Ads or social media advertising, SEO strategies can drive site traffic to your Shopify website long after your ad budget runs out.
For this reason, leveraging SEO is one of the best digital investments a Shopify site owner can make.
What Is Shopify SEO?
Shopify SEO is the process of optimizing a Shopify website to perform better in search engine results.
Although SEO can be applied to any website, Shopify SEO is focused on helping e-commerce retailers who utilize the Shopify CMS to earn more keyword rankings and organic traffic.
Common SEO Challenges For E-Commerce Websites
In general, e-commerce websites are more likely to face certain challenges that can negatively impact search engine performance.
- Thin Content: Google loves in-depth, long-form content. Because product pages tend toward thin content, it can be difficult to boost their rankings in search.
- Duplicate Content: With multiple product pages that are so similar or auto-generated, many e-commerce websites face duplicate content issues.
- Poor Site Architecture: Google likes to see an optimized site structure that users can easily navigate. With so many pages on their website, e-commerce retailers can easily suffer from poor site architecture signals.
- Not Utilizing Schema: Products schema helps Google crawlers understand your products and promote them accordingly. Not utilizing schema is a huge mistake for Shopify retailers.
To make sure that your website doesn’t suffer from these common setbacks faced by e-commerce sites, the Shopify SEO checklist below is a great place to start.
Automated SEO Features In Shopify
The Shopify platform does have some SEO features built-in that ease some of the SEO workload on-site owners.
These features include:
- Auto-generated “rel-canonical” tags: this feature helps avoid duplicate content penalties!
- Auto-generated robots.txt and sitemap.xml files.
- Automatic SSL certificates: Google prefers to rank secure pages with HTTPS protocols.
- Auto-generated page titles that include the store’s name.
However, SEO is a vast and multidisciplinary field.
Counting on the Shopify platform alone to do the work of SEO for you is not going to produce the best results.
19 Must-Do Tasks On Your Shopify SEO Checklist
Remember that SEO is not a one-and-done process and will require work both when you initially set up your store and throughout the lifetime of your website.
The checklist below is organized by the type of optimization, but it can be easily completed “in order.”
Some of these steps are a one-time optimization, but the majority will need to be repeated whenever you add new products or pages to your online store.
General SEO
1. Invest In A Custom Domain
It’s generally better to invest in a custom domain and drop the “myshopify” from your URLs.
Why? Because the URL path is visible to users at the top of the SERP result. Custom domains look more professional and more enticing to users, and higher CTRs lead to better SEO performance.
-
Screenshot from Google Search, January 2022
You can buy custom domains from Shopify or any third-party domain provider.
Then, add your custom domain in the Settings > Domains menu of your Shopify account.
2. Choose A Fast And Responsive Theme
With last year’s page experience update, fast page speed and load times are non-negotiable if you want to rank well in Google.
Although flashier themes might be tempting, it is better to choose a theme that is optimized for speed and performance.
Your theme also needs to perform well on mobile devices, as Google will index the mobile versions of your web pages.
-
Screenshot from Shopify, January 2022
You can get a sense of how fast your current Shopify store is in comparison to others in your dashboard or via your PageSpeed Insights report. If your scores are low, it’s likely impacting your ability to rank in top positions.
Consider another, more SEO-friendly theme.
Here is a list of some of the fastest themes on Shopify.
3. Setup Your Analytics Tools
Your Shopify Analytics dashboard will give you an overview of your e-commerce metrics.
However, you need to set up additional tools to better understand where your website traffic comes from and how users behave once arriving at your website from search.
Google Analytics and Google Search Console are must-haves for any site owner, and they are completely free to users.
After you create your accounts, here are some other key steps you’ll want to take:
4. Get Helpful Shopify SEO Apps
There are all sorts of Shopify SEO apps that can help ensure you are meeting SEO best practices across your web pages. Some of my favorites include:
- Plug In SEO: Similar to Yoast SEO for WordPress and ensures best practices.
- SEO Pro: Great for schema and more advanced optimizations.
- Smart SEO: Very affordable option for lots of SEO value.
On-Page SEO
5. Do Your Keyword Research
Before you start optimizing your content, you need to identify which keywords have strong relevance to your products and will bring qualified traffic to your website.
There are hundreds to thousands of ways users might be searching for products like yours. A keyword tool allows you to discover what users are searching for.
-
Screenshot from SearchAtlas, January 2022
Some of those keywords will be easier to rank for than others, and a part of your SEO work is identifying which keywords present the best opportunities for your store.
The most important keyword metrics to pay attention to are:
- Search Volume: You want your keyword targets to get a reasonable number of searches per month, otherwise you’re optimizing for no one.
- CPC: Higher CPCs represent stronger conversion potential. Higher CPCs are more common with commercial and transactional keywords.
- Keyword Difficulty: Higher scores will mean the keywords are more difficult to rank for. Make sure you choose keyword targets where you can realistically rank on page 1.
Ideally, each web page in your Shopify store will be targeting a different keyword or keyword cluster.
For your product and category pages, optimize for keywords that show more transactional intent, as those users are more inclined to make a purchase.
For your blog posts, optimize for informational queries to capture searchers near the top of the funnel.
6. Optimize Your URLs
There are some URL best practices that are essential to improving your rankings in Google.
- Keep it short and sweet.
- Include your target keyword.
- Avoid unnecessary words like and/or/the/etc..
You can easily edit the URL paths in the Search Engine Listing Preview at the bottom of any page in the Shopify CMS.
-
Screenshot from Shopify, January 2022
7. Optimize Your Page Titles And Meta Descriptions
While you’re editing your Search Engine Listing, make sure you also optimize the other meta tags visible in your SERP result: the title tag and meta description.
You’ll want to follow best practices here as well by including your keywords and meeting SEO best practices, especially length – no more than 60 characters for your title tag and no more than 160 for your meta description.
-
Screenshot from Shopify, January 2022
Google looks to these pieces of metadata to understand what your content is about and when to promote it.
And because the meta description may also be visible as a search snippet (although not always), it can influence whether searchers click on your result.
Google is smart enough to understand the terms and phrases that have a semantic relationship to your primary keyword, so there is no need to stuff these on-page elements with the same keyword over and over again.
Your meta tags should read naturally and adequately describe the content on the page.
8. Use A Content Optimization Tool For Your Product Descriptions
Thin content on product pages can be a serious hindrance for e-commerce websites.
Make sure you take the time to craft original, descriptive product descriptions that include relevant keywords, synonyms, and related terms.
-
Screenshot from Shopify, January 2022
-
Screenshot from the SEO Content Assistant, January 2022
A content optimizer tool can help you identify which related keywords have the most SEO power and show strong relevance signals to your products.
Do your best to include them in a natural way to elevate the ranking potential of your product pages.
9. Optimize Your Alt Text
Your Shopify website likely has lots of images that showcase your products.
But remember, Google cannot see your images. It’s important you communicate to Google what those images are through descriptive file names and keyword-rich alt text.
-
Screenshot from Shopify, January 2022
This also makes your Shopify website more accessible to users with visual impairments.
10. Create Blog Content To Target Long-Tail Queries
To capture users who are near the top of the sales funnel, create high-quality blog content that is optimized for relevant long-tail queries.
-
Screenshot from Shopify, January 2022
By answering the questions users are asking about products like yours, you can build brand awareness and expertise.
It’s also a great way to increase the total number of keywords that your Shopify store ranks for.
Technical SEO
11. Create An SEO-Friendly Navigation Menu
Navigation menus help your users easily move throughout your online store. Not only will a SEO-friendly navigation menu look better to Google crawlers, but it will also create a better user experience.
-
Screenshot from Shopify, January 2022
A few SEO tips for navigation:
- Prioritize clear and easy navigation.
- Take the time to make sure that your products are well organized into collections.
- Keep your navigation consistent across the page.
- Use the nav to help users easily contact you or your support team.
12. Leverage Internal Links
Your internal links accomplish a few things.
They keep users moving throughout your website, they help search engine crawlers understand your site architecture, and they distribute your PageRank across more of your site.
The majority of your Shopify website’s PageRank will be on your homepage, which is why the links you include in your nav menu should be strategic.
-
Screenshot from macaronqueen.com, January 2022
Avoid sending link equity to items that are out-of-stock, seasonal, or are unlikely to rank well in search results due to thin or unoptimized content.
Instead, push PageRank toward pages that you want to elevate in search, like your primary category and collection pages.
13. Add The Products Schema
There are a few different ways to add structured data to your Shopify website, and which is best for you will be determined by how comfortable you are editing your website’s code. To add schema manually, go to Themes > Action > Edit Code.
You can use a schema generator tool to generate your markup and input all of the required properties.
Shopify users should consider using the following Product Schemas when applicable:
- Aggregate rating.
- Brand.
- Category.
- Color.
- Dimensions.
- Model.
- Material.
- Special offers.
- Image.
If working in your HTML editor isn’t your jam, plenty of Shopify plugins have Products schema features and make the process simple.
14. Add Product Reviews
Positive reviews on your products can push users toward a click or purchase.
Download the Product Reviews app in the Shopify store to start leveraging product reviews. This app sends structured data information to Google so those yellow stars appear with your SERP result.
-
Screenshot from Google, January 2022
They can be game-changing in improving CTRs and generating more clicks to your store.
Off-Page SEO
15. Build Links To Your Shopify Site
You will also need to build off-site signals in order for Google to trust your online store and rank it in search results.
This is arguably the most difficult part of SEO because you don’t have control over whether a website chooses to link to yours.
However, there are some easy ways to start earning links:
- Create high-quality content like blog posts and ask other site owners to link to it.
- Get featured in gift guides or product roundups.
- Guest blog on relevant sites.
16. Invest In Public Relations
Public relations and organic outreach are at the heart of link building and one of the best ways to earn high-quality links from authoritative websites.
If you don’t yet have the time or resources to do PR outreach, sign up for Help-A-Reporter Out (HARO). You’ll get daily emails from journalists and publishers looking to hear from experts or feature certain products.
Shopify Website Maintenance
17. Regularly Audit Your Website
Over time, your website will change. This occurs as you add or delete pages on your website, as your pages accrue backlinks, or as the landscape of search changes.
A regular website audit can help you determine which of your pages are performing the best in search and which are underperforming.
The insights provided from a website audit can help you identify key content, page experience, or authority issues that you need to prioritize and resolve.
18. Repair Broken Links
As you change up your product offering or items go out of stock, you will likely unpublish or delete pages of your Shopify Website.
If that page was linked to anywhere else on your website, you will create a “broken link.”
Google does not like to rank websites with excessive broken links, as it looks as if the website is not active and being properly taken care of.
Once a quarter, it’s a good idea to run a site crawler across the entirety of your website to identify broken links and repair them.
19. Study The Data And Iterate
As more users visit your online store, your analytics tools will provide you with loads of data about how they are behaving on your website, how they got there in the first place, and more.
Make sure to draw insights from that data to iterate on your keyword targeting, page content, internal linking, meta tags, and more.
Conclusion
Remember, SEO has a wonderful way of lowering customer-acquisition costs in the long term.
Learning the basics of Shopify SEO and taking the necessary steps can be all the difference in outranking and outperforming your competitors.
Follow the checklist above, and you’ll most likely see Google reward you with more keyword rankings and more site traffic.
More resources:
Featured Image: Kaspars Grinvalds/Shutterstock
SEO
WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation
![WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/WordPress-Insiders-Discuss-WordPress-Stagnation.jpg)
A recent webinar featuring WordPress executives from Automattic and Elementor, along with developers and Joost de Valk, discussed the stagnation in WordPress growth, exploring the causes and potential solutions.
Stagnation Was The Webinar Topic
The webinar, “Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?” was a frank discussion about what can be done to increase the market share of new users that are choosing a web publishing platform.
Yet something that came up is that there are some areas that WordPress is doing exceptionally well so it’s not all doom and gloom. As will be seen later on, the fact that the WordPress core isn’t progressing in terms of specific technological adoption isn’t necessarily a sign that WordPress is falling behind, it’s actually a feature.
Yet there is a stagnation as mentioned at the 17:07 minute mark:
“…Basically you’re saying it’s not necessarily declining, but it’s not increasing and the energy is lagging. “
The response to the above statement acknowledged that while there are areas of growth like in the education and government sectors, the rest was “up for grabs.”
Joost de Valk spoke directly and unambiguously acknowledged the stagnation at the 18:09 minute mark:
“I agree with Noel. I think it’s stagnant.”
That said, Joost also saw opportunities with ecommerce, with the performance of WooCommerce. WooCommerce, by the way, outperformed WordPress as a whole with a 6.80% year over year growth rate, so there’s a good reason that Joost was optimistic of the ecommerce sector.
A general sense that WordPress was entering a stall however was not in dispute, as shown in remarks at the 31:45 minute mark:
“… the WordPress product market share is not decreasing, but it is stagnating…”
Facing Reality Is Productive
Humans have two ways to deal with a problem:
- Acknowledge the problem and seek solutions
- Pretend it’s not there and proceed as if everything is okay
WordPress is a publishing platform that’s loved around the world and has literally created countless jobs, careers, powered online commerce as well as helped establish new industries in developing applications that extend WordPress.
Many people have a stake in WordPress’ continued survival so any talk about WordPress entering a stall and descent phase like an airplane that reached the maximum altitude is frightening and some people would prefer to shout it down to make it go away.
Acknowledging facts and not brushing them aside is what this webinar achieved as a step toward identifying solutions. Everyone in the discussion has a stake in the continued growth of WordPress and their goal was to put it out there for the community to also get involved.
The live webinar featured:
- Miriam Schwab, Elementor’s Head of WP Relations
- Rich Tabor, Automattic Product Manager
- Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO
- Co-hosts Matt Cromwell and Amber Hinds, both members of the WordPress developer community moderated the discussion.
WordPress Market Share Stagnation
The webinar acknowledged that WordPress market share, the percentage of websites online that use WordPress, was stagnating. Stagnation is a state at which something is neither moving forward nor backwards, it is simply stuck at an in between point. And that’s what was openly acknowledged and the main point of the discussion was understanding the reasons why and what could be done about it.
Statistics gathered by the HTTPArchive and published on Joost de Valk’s blog show that WordPress experienced a year over year growth of 1.85%, having spent the year growing and contracting its market share. For example, over the latest month over month period the market share dropped by -0.28%.
Crowing about the WordPress 1.85% growth rate as evidence that everything is fine is to ignore that a large percentage of new businesses and websites coming online are increasingly going to other platforms, with year over year growth rates of other platforms outpacing the rate of growth of WordPress.
Out of the top 10 Content Management Systems, only six experienced year over year (YoY) growth.
CMS YoY Growth
- Webflow: 25.00%
- Shopify: 15.61%
- Wix: 10.71%
- Squarespace: 9.04%
- Duda: 8.89%
- WordPress: 1.85%
Why Stagnation Is A Problem
An important point made in the webinar is that stagnation can have a negative trickle-down effect on the business ecosystem by reducing growth opportunities and customer acquisition. If fewer of the new businesses coming online are opting in for WordPress are clients that will never come looking for a theme, plugin, development or SEO service.
It was noted at the 4:18 minute mark by Joost de Valk:
“…when you’re investing and when you’re building a product in the WordPress space, the market share or whether WordPress is growing or not has a deep impact on how easy it is to well to get people to, to buy the software that you want to sell them.”
Perception Of Innovation
One of the potential reasons for the struggle to achieve significant growth is the perception of a lack of innovation, pointed out at the 16:51 minute mark that there’s still no integration with popular technologies like Next JS, an open-source web development platform that is optimized for fast rollout of scalable and search-friendly websites.
It was observed at the 16:51 minute mark:
“…and still today we have no integration with next JS or anything like that…”
Someone else agreed but also expressed at the 41:52 minute mark, that the lack of innovation in the WordPress core can also be seen as a deliberate effort to make WordPress extensible so that if users find a gap a developer can step in and make a plugin to make WordPress be whatever users and developers want it to be.
“It’s not trying to be everything for everyone because it’s extensible. So if WordPress has a… let’s say a weakness for a particular segment or could be doing better in some way. Then you can come along and develop a plug in for it and that is one of the beautiful things about WordPress.”
Is Improved Marketing A Solution
One of the things that was identified as an area of improvement is marketing. They didn’t say it would solve all problems. It was simply noted that competitors are actively advertising and promoting but WordPress is by comparison not really proactively there. I think to extend that idea, which wasn’t expressed in the webinar, is to consider that if WordPress isn’t out there putting out a positive marketing message then the only thing consumers might be exposed to is the daily news of another vulnerability.
Someone commented in the 16:21 minute mark:
“I’m missing the excitement of WordPress and I’m not feeling that in the market. …I think a lot of that is around the product marketing and how we repackage WordPress for certain verticals because this one-size-fits-all means that in every single vertical we’re being displaced by campaigns that have paid or, you know, have received a a certain amount of funding and can go after us, right?”
This idea of marketing being a shortcoming of WordPress was raised earlier in the webinar at the 18:27 minute mark where it was acknowledged that growth was in some respects driven by the WordPress ecosystem with associated products like Elementor driving the growth in adoption of WordPress by new businesses.
They said:
“…the only logical conclusion is that the fact that marketing of WordPress itself is has actually always been a pain point, is now starting to actually hurt us.”
Future Of WordPress
This webinar is important because it features the voices of people who are actively involved at every level of WordPress, from development, marketing, accessibility, WordPress security, to plugin development. These are insiders with a deep interest in the continued evolution of WordPress as a viable platform for getting online.
The fact that they’re talking about the stagnation of WordPress should be of concern to everybody and that they are talking about solutions shows that the WordPress community is not in denial but is directly confronting situations, which is how a thriving ecosystem should be responding.
Watch the webinar:
Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Krakenimages.com
SEO
Google’s New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO
![Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Googles-New-Support-For-AVIF-Images-May-Boost-SEO.jpg)
Google announced that images in the AVIF file format will now be eligible to be shown in Google Search and Google Images, including all platforms that surface Google Search data. AVIF will dramatically lower image sizes and improve Core Web Vitals scores, particularly Largest Contentful Paint.
How AVIF Can Improve SEO
Getting pages crawled and indexed are the first step of effective SEO. Anything that lowers file size and speeds up web page rendering will help search crawlers get to the content faster and improve the amount of pages crawled.
Google’s crawl budget documentation recommends increasing the speeds of page loading and rendering as a way to avoid receiving “Hostload exceeded” warnings.
It also says that faster loading times enables Googlebot to crawl more pages:
Improve your site’s crawl efficiency
Increase your page loading speed
Google’s crawling is limited by bandwidth, time, and availability of Googlebot instances. If your server responds to requests quicker, we might be able to crawl more pages on your site.
What Is AVIF?
AVIF (AVI Image File Format) is a next generation open source image file format that combines the best of JPEG, PNG, and GIF image file formats but in a more compressed format for smaller image files (by 50% for JPEG format).
AVIF supports transparency like PNG and photographic images like JPEG does but does but with a higher level of dynamic range, deeper blacks, and better compression (meaning smaller file sizes). AVIF even supports animation like GIF does.
AVIF Versus WebP
AVIF is generally a better file format than WebP in terms of smaller files size (compression) and image quality. WebP is better for lossless images, where maintaining high quality regardless of file size is more important. But for everyday web usage, AVIF is the better choice.
See also: 12 Important Image SEO Tips You Need To Know
Is AVIF Supported?
AVIF is currently supported by Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari browsers. Not all content management systems support AVIF. However, both WordPress and Joomla support AVIF. In terms of CDN, Cloudflare also already supports AVIF.
I couldn’t at this time ascertain whether Bing supports AVIF files and will update this article once I find out.
Current website usage of AVIF stands at 0.2% but now that it’s available to surfaced in Google Search, expect that percentage to grow. AVIF images will probably become a standard image format because of its high compression will help sites perform far better than they currently do with JPEG and PNG formats.
Research conducted in July 2024 by Joost de Valk (founder of Yoast, ) discovered that social media platforms don’t all support AVIF files. He found that LinkedIn, Mastodon, Slack, and Twitter/X do not currently support AVIF but that Facebook, Pinterest, Threads and WhatsApp do support it.
AVIF Images Are Automatically Indexable By Google
According to Google’s announcement there is nothing special that needs to be done to make AVIF image files indexable.
“Over the recent years, AVIF has become one of the most commonly used image formats on the web. We’re happy to announce that AVIF is now a supported file type in Google Search, for Google Images as well as any place that uses images in Google Search. You don’t need to do anything special to have your AVIF files indexed by Google.”
Read Google’s announcement:
Supporting AVIF in Google Search
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands
SEO
CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO
![CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/CMOs-Called-Out-For-Reliance-On-AI-Content-For-SEO.jpg)
Eli Schwartz, Author of Product-Led SEO, started a discussion on LinkedIn about there being too many CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) who believe that AI written content is an SEO strategy. He predicted that there will be reckoning on the way after their strategies end in failure.
This is what Eli had to say:
“Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO.
This mistake is going to lead to an explosion in demand for SEO strategists to help them fix their traffic when they find out they might have been wrong.”
Everyone in the discussion, which received 54 comments, strongly agreed with Eli, except for one guy.
What Is Google’s Policy On AI Generated Content?
Google’s policy hasn’t changed although they did update their guidance and spam policies on March 5, 2024 at the same time as the rollout of the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update. Many publishers who used AI to create content subsequently reported losing rankings.
Yet it’s not said that using AI is enough to merit poor rankings, it’s content that is created for ranking purposes.
Google wrote these guidelines specifically for autogenerated content, including AI generated content (Wayback machine copy dated March 6, 2024)
“Our long-standing spam policy has been that use of automation, including generative AI, is spam if the primary purpose is manipulating ranking in Search results. The updated policy is in the same spirit of our previous policy and based on the same principle. It’s been expanded to account for more sophisticated scaled content creation methods where it isn’t always clear whether low quality content was created purely through automation.
Our new policy is meant to help people focus more clearly on the idea that producing content at scale is abusive if done for the purpose of manipulating search rankings and that this applies whether automation or humans are involved.”
Many in Eli’s discussion were in agreement that reliance on AI by some organizations may come to haunt them, except for that one guy in the discussion
Read the discussion on LinkedIn:
Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands
-
SEO7 days ago
Google’s Revamped Documentation Shows 4 Reasons To Refresh Content
-
SEARCHENGINES5 days ago
Daily Search Forum Recap: August 26, 2024
-
SEARCHENGINES7 days ago
Google Ranking Bug Fixed, August Core Update Swings, AI Overviews, Google Ads Bug & More
-
SEARCHENGINES4 days ago
Daily Search Forum Recap: August 27, 2024
-
WORDPRESS7 days ago
How to Secure Your WordPress Store
-
AFFILIATE MARKETING7 days ago
Business Owners are Batting 1,000 With This All-in-One Management Hub
-
SEARCHENGINES6 days ago
Google Migrating All To Google Merchant Center Next By September
-
WORDPRESS5 days ago
9 Best Elementor Alternatives 2024 (Faster Page Builders)
You must be logged in to post a comment Login