The Ultimate Shopify SEO Checklist [Updated for 2023]

Shopify is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms for online stores. Since its start in 2006,the company has grown from 5 people in a coffee shop to over 5,000 across the globe.  

At IWD, we’ve been a Shopify agency almost since day one. We love the countless ways it helps companies of all sizes nail their marketing and revenue goals.

One of the many ways it does this is by making it fairly easy to implementSEO best practices that have proven effective at driving traffic.

As aShopify SEO agency, we’d be happy to help your business use this powerful eCommerce platform to attract the kind of visitors who become customers.

But if you’d rather handle this process on your own, here’s the Shopify SEO checklist you need to win over Google and other search engines:

Is Shopify Good for SEO?

The Ultimate Shopify SEO Checklist

Connect Your Shopify Store to Google Analytics

Optimize Your Shopify Store’s Website Structure

Create User-Friendly Web Pages and Content

Make Your Shopify Store as Fast as Possible

Do Effective Keyword Research

Create SEO-Friendly Product Pages

Then Put Those Keywords EVERYWHERE

Add a Blog to Your Shopify Website

Track Your Results 

The 9 Best Shopify SEO Apps

Put Our Shopify SEO Checklist to Use

You can also go through the checklist from beginning to end below.

Before we continue with our Shopify SEO checklist, let’s answer this very common question (though, we just kind of did).

Although I just answered this question, it comes up enough that I want to quickly delve into the details a bit before I outline my Shopify SEO checklist for improving your organic traffic.

In short, yes. Shopify is fantastic for SEO. The main reasons it’s great for generating organic traffic from search engines are that Shopify makes it easy to:

• Manage and update themeta titles, tags, and descriptions (those short bits of text that describe each page on your store) for your entire Shopify website.
• Automatically generate a sitemap for your store, helping Google bots tell which URLs to categorize to improve rankings. This is absolutely vital if you plan on building your Shopify store out to hundreds or even thousands of pages. That’s too many to manually submit on a regular basis. Choose Shopify and never worry about going through the whole sitemap.xml process everyweekor so.
• Create 301 redirects, moving traffic from one defunct URL to another without diminishing search rankings.
• Use canonical URLs to tell the Google bots which one is the master version of multiple identical pages – this becomes especially important when you’re running an eCommerce website that offers products with numerous variants
• Simplify your navigation with Shopify’s smart architecture for a better User Interface (UI)
• Take advantage of Shopify’s mobile-friendly design(Google prioritizes the mobile version of your store)Enjoy the benefits of a vast array of Shopify apps from the absolutely massive Shopify App Store that help with SEO - many of which are completely free (I list some great options at the end of this post). If you don’t find any you like, you can always take advantage of our customizedShopify app development services, too.

Alright, now know whyShopify is so great for SEO. It will make it much easier to rank your store and get the traffic you want.

The next step is understanding HOW to take advantage of this potential to bring your eCommerce store as much organic traffic as possible.

So, here’s your checklist for Shopify SEO with 9 proven ideas from my agency's 10+ years of experience working with Shopify.

Regardless of the platform you’re using, if you’re serious about SEO, you need to register your store withGoogle Search Console andBing Webmaster Tools. Doing so confirms for both of these major search engines that your website exists and helps ensure that it gets crawled.

Just be sure to register all versions of your domain:

·       Both the www and non-www (i.e.www.IWDAgency.com and IWDAgency.com)

·       Both the secure and non-secure (i.e. http:// and https:// versions)

The registration process for both is pretty simple, but check out these resources if you need more information about this very important step toward better Shopify SEO.

Adding a store to Google Search Console

Adding a store to Bing Webmaster Tools

Submit Your Sitemap to Google and Bing, Too

Your sitemap is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: it’s a map that tells Google and other search engines where it can find all the different pages that make up your Shopify store.

You can check to see what your sitemap looks like by going to Google Search Console and checking here:

But you can usually just add “sitemap.xml” to the end of any root domain to see it, too. This is also how you can check the sitemap of a competitor’s store, too.

In any case, it’s important that you submit your sitemap to Google, so that it can easily crawl each and every one of your web pages and better understand what your store has to offer its users. Google can still do this without a sitemap, but it’ll take longer, and you’ll have mixed results. We created this SEO checklist specifically, so you WON’T have to take a hit-or-miss approach and worry about mixed results.

Fortunately, Shopify takes care of this for you. So, as you add more pages to your store, you can rest assured that Shopify is automatically updating Google about all the new pages on your store.

Similarly, asimpler website structure makes it easier for search engines to crawl your Shopify store and rank your pages. So, the next Shopify SEO tip is simple: keep the architecture of your store SIMPLE.

Categories and subcategories are certainly important, but organizing your content for user experience is vital to your Shopify SEO success. If shoppers can find what they are looking for quickly and easily, they will view more of your pages and spend more time on your store - helping your search engine rankings.

Shopify makes it easy to organize your content. They call their Category pages “Collection Pages”, so I recommend you use structures like these:

·       Homepage » Collection Pages » Product Pages

·       Homepage » Collection Pages » Sub-Collection Page » Product Pages

Ideally, your products should be one or two clicks away from the homepage of your store to make it quick and easy for search engines to not only crawl the store but, most importantly, for shoppers to find what they’re looking for.

The same goes for that all-important search box that should be found throughout your store. While this feature may not directly win over Google, helping visitors find what they’re looking for will increase dwell time, which isprobablygreat for SEO. So, make sure it’s not just featured prominently, but that you prompt visitors to use it whenever they need help finding that perfect product.

Plus, a good rule of thumb that applies to ALL of digital marketing is “make your customers happy.” Whatever you do, if it makes customers happy, your store is going to benefit.

That said, this is still an SEO checklist for your eCommerce store, so let’s keep talking about how to make Google happy.

But keeping your customers in mind, focus onimproving your website’s user experience. Doing so not only keeps customers happy but also helps you to rank higher in Google.

One of the most obvious steps you should take it to focus on aresponsive design. This will ensure that your Shopify store looks great on every device, whether a shopper is using their desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone.

Now, if you’re using one of the approved Shopify themes, you’re in luck. It’s already responsive and already great for Shopify SEO.

On the other hand, if you purchased your theme from a source other than Shopify’s market or custom-built your own, then you absolutely must check to make sure it’s responsive or Google is going to give you a cold shoulder in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

Also, as I mentioned in the last section, Google probablyconsiders time-on-page as an indicator that a store is valuable, so you want to select a design that makes it easy for customers to navigate your store and read what’s on every page. Doing so means improved rankings, more repeat visitors, and increased conversions.

You know from your own experience shopping for a particular product that a store that loads slowly or lags when you attempt to navigate is frustrating. In some cases, slow website speed is even a deal breaker. If you’re like me, you’ve looked elsewhere for that product because a store’s load time made the search too frustrating to continue.

Aside from customer satisfaction, one of the main advantages of a faster Shopify store is higher ranking in search engine results sinceGoogle prefers fast websites.

So, how can Shopify help your SEO with website speed?

Even though you are obligated to use Shopify’s servers and template, you still have access to some great tools and apps that will help your Shopify store load as quickly as possible and win over Google:

• Shopify does a great job at optimizing your images as you upload them, but to optimize them further, you can use a tool likeTiny Png.
• Minimize your use of any external scripts or custom code on your store.
• Remove any Shopify apps you are not using and doublecheck your store regularly to make sure this doesn’t happen by accident in the future.
• Avoid using image sliders on your store and try to keep the rest of your images to a minimum (and optimized)
• Similarly, keep the number of web fonts you use on your Shopify store to a minimum, too.

One huge improvement you can make to your Shopify store that we’ve become big fans of lately is building a PWA (Progressive Web App) for your site, so that customers can bring up pages and have them load as if they were apps. The result: faster load times and a better user experience for your store.

In my opinion, your Shopify store can never be toofast. Still, as far as guidelines go, I know that’s not very helpful. Instead, useGoogle’s PageSpeed Insights to see how the speed of your store stacks up.GTMetrix is another great tool for this. It will give you a lotof feedback about where your Shopify store could use some help.

The next tip on our SEO checklist might be the most obvious one, but it’s SO important that you nail this step: keyword research.

Specifically, we’re not talking about eCommerce keyword research, which is different than the type that focuses solely on blogs. The type you need to nail Shopify SEO involves looking at your product and category pages, too. Those are the pages where the vast majority of your money will be made.

The good news is that effective keyword research is actually REALLY easy.

All you need to do to find keywords that will get Google to love your Shopify site is to see what’s already working for your competition. It really is (almost) that easy. If your competition is using certain keywords to drive traffic to their sites from Google, those are the same keywords you should be focusing on, too.

Don’t overcomplicate this.

Run your competitors’ websites through a keyword research tool, see what keywords are driving their traffic, and then create similar pages that target those exact same keywords but for your store.

We’ve done two articles (with videos) that will make this part of our SEO checklist as easy as possible:

·       How to Use Semrush to Do Keyword Research

·       How to Use Ahrefs to Do Keyword Research

BUT ONE BIG CAVEAT: as I mentioned, you have to create pages that are similar to the ones your competitors are using to rank for those keywords.

For example, we have a “services page” designed to sell our services that targets the keyword, “Shopify SEO services.” It wouldn’t make sense to write a blog around that keyword because when you search for it, all of our competitors have service pages, too. That’s what customers want when they search for that keyword.

However, when people search for “Shopify SEO tips” (or “checklist), they want a blog. So, to rank for those keywords and win over Google, we need a blog.

So, let’s cover that Shopify SEO tip next…

When we say “content”, we’re referring to the blog on your Shopify site.

And while a blog may not be what drives a ton of sales (compared to your product pages), they’re still important for winning over Google. The more Google sees that your blogs do well for keywords related to what you sell, the more it will assume your product pages would do well for those terms, too.

So, if you want your store to rank well for “mountain bikes” – a keyword people probably search for when they’re ready to actually buy a product – you want lots of blogs that talk about that topic on your Shopify website, too.

Instead of covering all the ins and outs of this important topic right now, check out this article we did on how to write an SEO-friendly blog post.

But remember that it all starts with the right keywords.

Knowing your keywords isn’t enough, though. This Shopify SEO checklist wouldn’t be very effective if we left things there.

You need to know where to use them, too. With the proper control of your titles, headers, and URL, you can ensure that search engines index your content properly — and that your SEO soars.

• To edit your Shopify website’s home page title, you need to click Sales Channels > Online Store > Preferences. Then, use the box provided to enter your home page title.
• For other pages, you need to locate your page, product, or post in the Shopify dashboard. Then, enter the Title at the very top where prompted.

Add your Title here and it automatically updates as your Shopify page’s Title Tag.

Going forward, whenever you create a new page on your Shopify store, use the above advice to create these kinds of keyword-optimized title tags.

Headers are another helpful way to organize your content in a manner that people and Google will find helpful – hence why it gets its own section on our SEO checklist. Think of them like the chapters and subsections within your book.

TheH1 tag is the most important. On this page, our H1 tag is, “The Ultimate Shopify SEO Checklist [Updated for 2023].”

This tells Google what the rest of the page is about (again, much like the title of a chapter would do). For this reason, it’s usually best to make your Title and H1 tags the same. Someday, we’ll do an entire SEO checklist for optimizing the title tag on each page of your store. For now, an easy way to help Google better understand your store is just by keeping your Title tags and H1s uniform.

As long as both describe the information on the page, you can’t go too far wrong for SEO purposes.

Then, there are your H2 tags, which serve as subheadings. On this page, our H2s are:

• Is Shopify Good for SEO?
• The Ultimate Shopify SEO Checklist: 9 Proven Tips for Improving Traffic
• 9 Shopify Apps That Will Improve Your SEO
• Start Putting This Shopify SEO Checklist to Use for Your Store

Whether it’s in a blog post or another type of page, they’re an effective way of cutting up the information into more manageable pieces (and using your keywords for SEO purposes).

After that, you can continue using H3s, H4s, H5s, and H6s to subdivide the information even further. Just be sure to use them in order. For example, you wouldn’t create a blog post with an H1, then an H2, then another H1. You wouldn’t have an H2, then an H6, then and H3.

Yoast has a very effective guide onproperly using header tags for SEO if you want more information on the topic.

Fortunately, Shopify makes it incredibly easy to turn text into these types of headers for your store in a way that supports SEO. Here’s what it looks like to select the right header in Shopify:

It should come as no surprise that the “cleaner” and more succinct the URLs are for your store, the better chance you will rank highly in search results.

By default, Shopify will add prefixes to your pages and products.

For example, Shopify uses:

·       /pages/ before pages

·       /posts/ before posts

·       /products/ before products

Even though this format is not ideal from an SEO perspective, you can still rank highly if you offer the correct ranking signals.

Keeping your URL simple and intelligible goes a long way. After all, a clean URL like

www.yourdoman.com/red-wagons

Is WAY better than

www.yourdomain.com/prds/ct/p223.php?red=14556redwgn

If you’d like to edit a URL in Shopify, go to your page, product or post you wish to edit, scroll down to the bottom of it, click “Edit Website SEO”, and then make your changes under “URL and handle.”

Just remember that if you change a URL on an existing post or page, you need to create a redirect from the old one. Fortunately, this is one more SEO task that Shopify makes veryeasy.

Check the box for “create URL redirect” and you’re good-to-go. Google will be notified of the change when it does its next crawl.

Meta descriptions won’t actually help you rank better, not directly anyway. It’s just the text that goes under the title tag of your website’s page:

Still, if yourmeta descriptions convince people to click, that  will  help boost your rankings, so take this text seriously.

Your meta description should:

• Be under 160 characters
• Contain the keyword (or even keywords) that you are targeting
• Really sell the value of your page

Learn to craft winning meta descriptions and you’ll have an easier time climbing the rankings.

Using the keywords that you’ve already identified, get started on optimizing your pages that will give you your biggest bang for your buck. Obviously, you’ll want to begin with your Shopify site’s top pages:

• Homepage
• Top Collection Pages
• Top-Selling Product Pages

After that, make a schedule to go back and optimize the rest of your Shopify site’s product pages, so that each one is playing a role in boosting your SEO.

Once you know which pages to optimize first, you must decide how you want to name your pages across the entire site. Use your keywords in a consistent way.

For example:

Keyword 1 – Shop for Keyword 2 – Store Name

Red Wagons – Shop for Red Wagons Online – The Store

Next, come up withtitles and descriptions for your product pages and categories. Don’t force anything here. Your keywords should fit into your copy naturally. If done correctly, tags and descriptions improve SEO. This is even true for the alt text for images you create.

And, once again, your competition can be hugely helpful here. They’ve invested a lot in SEO and digital marketing. Take FULL advantage of that.

Speaking of making the most of keywords...

High-quality photos of your products are vital for making the product pages on your Shopify website SEO-friendly.

As you know, when you navigate to a website on your desktop or your mobile device, high-quality images catch your eye and make you want to stay on the page.

Shopify understandsthe importance of powerful product images, too, putting it this way:

“The perceived value of your products is directly impacted by the quality of your product photography.”

That said, Google can’t “see” your product photos. It needs help understanding what they are, which is where “alt text” comes in. This is a form of metadata you can assign to your images. While your users can’t see it. Google can.

Adding alt text to your images gives you three main advantages:

• Screen readers use this text to provide a description of an image to any visually impaired users who visit your website
• Search engines use it to categorize and better understand your content
• If your image fails to load, a description of will be displayed to help avoid confusion.

Shopify makes it unbelievably simple to add alt text to your images. While it may depend on your theme, for the most part, all you need to do is click on the image and find where it prompts you to add alt text.

For example, here’s what it looks like in a Shopify blog:

On product pages, you may just get the image with the text “Edit alt text” next to it and the prompt “Save alt text” after you’ve included it. Here’s an example from aRunners Athletics product page:

Additionally,creating effective file names for your images from the very beginning is important, too, as changing them in Shopify is not entirely simple.

If you ultimately do have to change an image file name after you’ve uploaded it to Shopify, you’ll have to delete your existing image and reupload it with the file name you wanted.

Remember: your keyword should appear in the file name, and that the file name should be short.

For example, if you are selling red plastic wagons in your Shopify store, ensure that the image you upload is called ‘red-plastic-wagons.jpg’ instead of something indecipherable like IMG9481JXA-583.jpg.

As I touched on earlier, Shopify acknowledges the importance of high-quality images.

However, it still cautions against making any changes that will negatively impact site visits. Since Google considers the load speed of your website, you should avoid using large product images, as these take longer to load.

Alright, we already talked about this, but it’s worth reiterating because of how important a blog will be to your Shopify website’s overall SEO success.

Fortunately, Shopify comes with a blog right out of the box. All you need to do is optimize it in order to attract lots of organic traffic.

To do that, I’m going to cover three important ways towrite SEO-optimized blog posts:

• Use topic clusters to highlight keywords
• Continually create and publish evergreen content
• Repurpose or update your current content and remove outdated content.

One of the most powerful ways you can use your blog to win over Google is by focusing oncontent clusters.

First, choose the broad topics you want to rank for.

I recommend putting your target keyword into Google to see what kind of articles are currently ranking so you understand what kind of article Google thinks is best for such queries

Once you know your topics, you can create content based on specific keywords related to that topic. This, of course, helps with SEO, as your keywords will all link to each other and not only establish broader search engine authority but also enhance your credibility.

If your content isn’t about topics that are relevant, timeless, and valuable, your Shopify site will struggle to maintain SEO. This is whycreating evergreen content is essential. The reason it’s called “evergreen” is because it will “always” remain useful. Creating content around trendy topics has its benefits, too, but evergreen content does the following:

• Ranks over time - and not just in the near future.
• Maintains steady page traffic, even well after the date it was posted.
• Generates leads over a longer period of time and not just immediately after you post.

So, create evergreen blog posts now and benefit from them for years to come.

While effective bloggers must continuously generate new content, regularly improving what you already have on your Shopify site is a smart way of improving your SEO, too.

Repurposing and updating content on previously published blogs will help you reap many benefits, but here are the main two:

• Save time and resources: Completely new pieces of content take time to settle on the search engine results page (SERP) and gain authority. Updating an already-existing piece of content takes far less time and fewer resources.
• Maintain credibility: Updating your posts will extend their lifespan, helping your rankings over a longer period of time. Keeping your content evergreen also helps you remove outdated information and add industry changes over time.

Part of making a blog SEO-friendly is making sure it remains accurate and helpful. The moment it loses those two traits, expect Google to start treating your blogs - and the rest of your Shopify Site - accordingly.

Finally, check in with Google Analytics and Search Console regularly to see how well your Shopify site is doing.

Aside from the obvious reasons, Search Console is a fantastic way to find the kinds oflow competition keywords you want to target for easy wins that will drive lots of traffic to your Shopify store.

In short, use Search Console to look for terms that your Shopify store is getting lots of impressions for but no – or almost no – clicks.

When you see this happening, it means Google likes your site for a certain keyword. It’s searchers who aren’t clicking. To change this, check what kinds of pages are ranking for the term in question. Create something similar and watch the clicks roll in.

As I talked about at the beginning of this post, one of the many advantages of using Shopify is that you have access to an awesome arsenal of apps

Here are nine apps that are great for Shopify SEO (of course, we also offer Shopify app development services if you need a one-of-a-kind solution).

The Plug in SEO app is a crucial time- and money-saver, showcasing only the essential elements that boost your SEO: page titles, headings, meta descriptions, speed, article structure, content, and much more.

With the added bonus of providing a quick analysis of the main things you should be focusing on, this app will help you identify the key issues that are worth spending time and money on to improve your Shopify site’s rankings.

You’re guaranteed automatic, regular monitoring to optimize your SEO experience.

The SEO Booster app is designed to save you money and to ease the burden of getting started on some important SEO tasks.

This app will score the SEO of your website, give you an SEO checklist based on another website, and increase your daily page rank. You’ll also enjoy the benefits of daily and automatic updates of ALT texts for new images and redirects of invalid links.

Additionally, the app optimizes page traffic by updating trending keywords from your selected geographical areas and by offering keyword interests on your site. Finally, by using full JSON-LD, the app helps you structure your data in an SEO-friendly way, making it simpler to follow and integrate Google Analytics and Search Console into your website.Download SEO Booster for a free 7-day trial. After that, it’s just $18.99/month.

The SEO Doctor app lives up to its surgical name by scanning your Shopify store for SEO issues and then providing a diagnostic report about how to fix them. This app will take the reins on a complete evaluation of your on-page SEO related issues, image alt text issues, 404 Errors, and Google data structure setup.

There’s even the option to speak with an SEO guru about how to fix your site’s specific problems.

Download SEO Doctor for a 5-day free trial. After that, it starts at only$10.00/month.

If you need help optimizing your meta tags and are willing to pay an ongoing monthly fee, thenUltra SEO is the app for you.

By targeting keywords, the app aims to optimize higher rankings for your site’s pages. Its main focus is to help how your store appears in search engine results, providing quick analysis and recommendations to help you get more page traffic.Download Ultra SEO for a free 7-day trial. Then, it’s only $10.00/month after that.

The creators of theSmart SEO app have said their app reduces time spent on SEO for your Shopify store by 80%.

This app does so by automatically generating the meta tags required for on-page SEO. It also offers templates for quickly creating meta tags if you want to do it manually.

Furthermore, the app provides Google and other search engines with the information they want, which means a better chance of boosting your rankings.Download Smart SEO for a free 7-day trial. After that, it’s only $4.99/month.

TheSEO Image Optimizer app has been used on over 50,000 Shopify stores, making it the most popular and best-reviewed of all image optimizer apps for the platform.

If you’re a store owner who wants a quick and easy way to optimize images to increase traffic from Google image searches, this app is perfect. It’s ideal for helping owners harvest the power of images to generate the kind of qualified traffic that sells products.

Download SEO Image Optimizer for free.

TheAMP by Ampify Me app is ideal for helping shop owners convert their store into an AMP (Accelerated Mobile Page). This is crucial for enhanced user experience, as the app not only enhances the aesthetics of mobile pages but also helps the mobile pages load more quickly than others. Additionally, the app improves SEO by showing your store at the top of Search Results, helping your store have cheaper cost per click on ads, dominate Google search results, and make customers love your brand.

Download AMP by Ampify Me for free.

TheAlt Text app is one of many apps that helps you automatically set alt text tags for your images (similar to SEO Booster).

These image tags are crucial for your store’s SEO, helping improve your Google Image Search rankings. The ease of setting a default ALT Tags template and simply clicking a button to optimize images makes this app ideal for helping you run your online store more efficiently so you can spend time on more important things, like growing your business.

Download Alt Text for only $1.99/month.

With theSitemap Page Generator app, you can take control of your sitemaps by easing the process of creating, submitting, and updating your sitemap. Automatic generation of sitemaps and daily updates helps your store grow. Additionally, this app helps you with submitting sitemaps to Google to keep the search engines updated.

Download Sitemap Page Generator for a free 7-day trial. After that, it’s just $3/month.

Whether you just recently launched your first Shopify store or you’ve had yours for years, the best time to take advantage of this checklist is now.

I know some of this may seem daunting at first. The good news is that mostof this SEO advice can be implemented for free.

So, get started where you can, begin making the changes I recommend above, and if you’d like help from an agency that has been working with Shopify for 10+ years, you can alwayscontact us.