Shopify is a great eCommerce platform for small businesses looking to get started with eCommerce and large, multinational brands looking to scale all over the world. One of the key areas of focus for many eCommerce managers looking to scale their audience and customers, is how to get more organic traffic to your Shopify store,
Shopify is a great eCommerce platform for small businesses looking to get started with eCommerce and large, multinational brands looking to scale all over the world.
One of the key areas of focus for many eCommerce managers looking to scale their audience and customers, is how to get more organic traffic to your Shopify store, rather than constantly relying on paid ads.
Again, Shopify is great out of the box for basic SEO optimisations.
But if you’re looking to scale and really make an impact with SEO for your Shopify store, there are a few more advanced things you’ll need to know.
We think Shopify is great for eCommerce brands out of the box. You get decent and readable URL structures, themes are responsive on mobile, your sitemaps are generated automatically, and you get functions like adding canonical tags to pages.
However, basic Shopify SEO can create a few challenges.
One thing to be aware of is Shopify has a pretty rigid URL structure that’s hard to customise, which follows a basic /products/ or /collections/ hierarchy.
This means out of the box, you can’t create sub-categories for your store.
For example, you wouldn’t be able to create sub-categories like:
/clothes/tshirts/ or /clothes/jeans/
It can also create a few issues because you can get to products through the /collections/ and /product/ URLs, meaning you can end up with duplicate product URLs (which aren’t good for search engines)
But these are just the configurations out of the box, and with a bit of know-how, or the help of a Shopify SEO agency, there are some workarounds.
As we’ve said, Shopify can be a bit rigid when it comes to its URL structure, but it’s also pretty good at adding canonical tags to the relevant pages to avoid issues of duplicate content.
This effectively tells search engines which of two similar (or matching) URLs is the one to pay attention to, so the right webpage is presented in SERPs.
You’ll definitely need to check that canonical tags are in place if you allow customers to filter through collections to find the right products. Filtered collections often create duplicate content issues, because of the number of ways customers can find a product (by brand, colour, size etc)
It’s worth running an audit on your canonical tags to make sure search engines are prioritising the right page, and also run your site through Google Search Console to check for any issues with duplicate content.
Using Liquid (Shopify’s templating language), you can dynamically insert product titles, collections and shop names into your meta tags, making sure you have unique tags for each page that’s optimised for the main product keyword, without doing it all manually.
Generally, Shopify themes automatically create links between collections and product pages, which is great for SEO because it makes it easier for search engines (and LLMs) to find, crawl and display your pages.
However, you can take this a step further.
Say you’re writing a blog about the “top 10 must-have summer items for your wardrobe”.
With Shopify, you can insert featured product links into your blog posts directly to the products you’re talking about.
Again this is great for SEO because it creates more structure to your store and content, and it also helps with the user experience, as customers can find what they’re looking for on your blogs and information pages, rather than clicking through trying to find the products you’re talking about.
Say your customer is looking to buy a BBQ for the summer, that’s great as a one-off purchase.
But, you’ve got lots of cross-selling opportunities with other products like charcoal, cleaning equipment, cooking equipment, etc.
Using tags or meta fields, you can add these related products as carousels onto other product pages to keep customers engaged.
You can see how one of our customers, Charles & Ivy, do this effectively…
Breadcrumbs appear at the top of pages and make it easier for users to click back to a page they were on before, or find their way back to a specific page.
Again you can see how Charles & Ivy effectively create these breadcrumb links on their pages…
One of the things with eCommerce sites is you need lots of high quality product images and videos to show off what you’re selling.
But lots of large files or third party scripts from apps can slow your website down.
This not only damages your user experience (increasing the chances a customer goes to a competitor) it has the potential to hurt your organic visibility.
One thing you can do is compress images before uploading them to your Shopify store, or use lazy-loading, which stops an image from loading until it becomes visible as the user scrolls down the page.
You can audit your page speed and core web vitals using PageSpeed Insights, which shows how your page is performing on desktop and mobile, as well as giving a list of optimisations to improve your score.
Structured data is information used by search engines and LLMs to get context on what your page is about and understand any specific information that could be relevant to advanced search features.
Customers will never see this structured data, but it can improve how you appear in search results.
For eCommerce stores on Shopify there are a few types of schema you’ll need to use by default:
This pulls information on your prices, availability and reviews
This helps search engines understand your site hierarchy and navigation
Add this is blog posts to help search engines understand your article so it can pull information for rich snippets.
This is information about your company and is used as a trust signal by search engines
You can create schema using a schema generator or in Shopify you can add it manually to your theme.
Even with AI overviews taking organic traffic, regular content is still important for building topical authority and building trust with search engines, LLMs and your customers.
Creating a content strategy for a Shopify store is no different than creating one for any other type of business.
Think about the issues you’re customers have or the things they want to know and create your content around those themes.
When it comes to organising your content their are a few things you can do.
Content clusters are a series of blogs, videos (or any type of content you want to create) that tackle a particular subject in-depth from different angles.
Say you’re a brand selling home fitness equipment.
You’d create a main “pillar page” that would tackle the subject of choosing home fitness gear at a top level.
You’d then surround this with more in-depth articles looking at the different subtopics within that main theme, like:
If you are going to use AI for content writing, it’s still important to have a person on quality control and editing to ensure what you’re producing is accurate and in your brand voice.
Depending on the level you’re at with Shopify you have a few options when it comes to selling internationally and optimising international sales for SEO.
Shopify Plus is a good option to upgrade if you want to manage a large scaling business internationally from one store.
If you don’t want to upgrade to Shopify Plus, then Shopify Markets could be the better option.
Shopify Markets lets you target regions using subdomains or subdirectories that let you create stores for different languages or currencies.
These can be good for SEO as subdirectories, for example yourstore.com/uk/ is simple to manage as long as use consistent canonical tags across languages.
A lot is changing in SEO, but it’s still just as important as it’s ever been for eCommerce businesses.
Whether you’re focusing on getting to the top spot in search engines, or getting sources in LLMs and AI overviews, developing a technically strong site with engaging
trust worthy content is still the answer.
Shopify is a great eCommerce ecosystem out of the box for getting started with SEO, but as you scale and grow, so do the complexities and the possibilities of things going wrong.
If you think you need some help with your Shopify store’s SEO, get in touch with our Shopify SEO agency and let’s see how we can help make you more visible to customers.
Speak to a member of our team and start your project today!
Our experts will be more than happy to help you!
Speak to us today!1. Let’s Talk
Book a 30 minute consultation call with one of our team so we can understand your goals for digital marketing and what services you need within your budget.
2. Let’s get strategic
Once we know where you want to get to, we’ll put a plan in place to get you there. You’ll get a clear outline explaining all the costs and what results you can expect.
3. Let’s start growing your business
Once we’re all pointing in the right direction our expert team will get to work delivering what we’ve promised and getting you the best ROI possible.
