Shopify On-Page SEO: 12 Tips to Increase Your Ecommerce Traffic

Over time, the Shopify platform has become more and more well-liked. Shopify is becoming a trusted place for companies and merchants of all sizes to develop their business strategies. 

But how can your Shopify store gain more awareness and customers in the face of such fierce competition?

On-page SEO is crucial for sellers and companies with Shopify websites since it can raise sales and website traffic. You should be aware that Shopify on-page SEO activities entail more than merely writing content and pressing “publish.” Instead, you should comprehend how On-page SEO for Shopify functions and the best implementation methods.

This article will provide the necessary information, including benefits, factors affecting the SEO process on Shopify, and the most efficient way to execute Shopify on-page SEO.

Table of Content:

• What is Shopify On-Page SEO?
• Why Is Shopify On-Page SEO Important?
• Factors Affecting Shopify On-Page SEO
• How To Implement On-Page SEO On Shopify
  • Build Credibility For Your Shopify Store
  • Look Up Keywords
  • Optimize Your Shopify Store Based On Search Intent
  • Deploy SEO Standard Content
  • Optimize The HTML For Your Shopify Store
  • Optimize Images
  • Optimize Store Website Structure
  • Check for Broken Links
  • Remove Duplicate Content in Your Store
  • Optimize Page Speed
  • Build a Mobile-Friendly Shopify Store
  • Check The Result
• Optimize Shopify On-page SEO with The Help of Mageplaza
• Conclusion

What is Shopify On-Page SEO?

Shopify on-page SEO is the process of combining strategies and methods to optimize each page of your Shopify store to improve its exposure and ranking in search results. Its objective is to increase the appeal of your Shopify store to search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. From there, when prospective clients look up similar terms or phrases, your pages have a higher chance of showing up in search results.

It can be said that on-page SEO is one of the SEO projects, focusing on internal factors, that is, changes that you can make on your Shopify store. It includes three main tasks: creating content around keywords, optimizing content for keywords, and optimizing site structure and internal linking.

Simply said, on-page SEO is about making your Shopify store as easy to navigate as possible for search engines and your content as understandable as possible to get the most out of SEO value.

Why Is Shopify On-Page SEO Important?

A website with effective on-page SEO is similar to a well-organized physical store, with distinct areas, signage, shelves, labels, and even rooms. This strategy can provide your Shopify store with the highest quality leads.

While you can create excellent content, provide excellent products, and have distinctive selling propositions, your Shopify store will suffer without on-page SEO in terms of exposure and search engine rankings. Besides, on-page SEO for Shopify is crucial for the following reasons:

• Cost-effective: You can attract steady organic traffic without relying solely on paid advertising.
• Improve brand recognition: Users consistently seeing your Shopify store in search results can help you build a brand reputation over time.
• Better conversion rates: Relevant and high-quality content and clear calls to action (CTA) can lead to better conversion rates. So when customers find what they’re looking for on your site, they’re more likely to take action, such as purchasing or signing up for a newsletter.
• Higher click-through rate (CTR): Well-crafted title tags and meta descriptions can lead to higher CTR in search results. When your Shopify product listings are attractive and accurately represent your content, users are more likely to click through to your store.
• Better user experience: Positive user experience can increase customer retention and conversion rates.

Factors Affecting Shopify On-Page SEO

Before implementing On-page SEO optimization for your Shopify store, you need to understand the factors that can impact your page’s ranking in search engine results. Here are some factors that affect your Shopify’s On-page SEO:

• Keyword: Choosing the right keywords and phrases for each of your Shopify pages is important. Consider search volume, keyword relevance, and competition when choosing keywords.
• Title tags: One crucial component of on-page SEO are title tags. You can optimize title tags by including your target keywords, keeping them short, and making them relevant to the content of the page.
• Meta descriptions: Write compelling meta descriptions that entice users to click on your store in search results. While they don’t directly affect rankings, they do affect click-through rates.
• Header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.): Use title tags to structure the content on your Shopify pages. The H1 tag should contain the page’s main title. The content should be arranged using subheadings (H2, H3, etc.) and incorporate pertinent keywords.
• URL structure: Keep your URLs clear and descriptive. Include keywords where appropriate and avoid long, complex URLs with random characters.
• Content: You need to produce interesting and educational content that speaks to your target customer’s demands. Use keywords naturally in content and provide valuable information.
• Images: Images on your Shopify store pages need to be optimized with compression to load faster. Besides, adding descriptive alt text is required.
• Internal linking: Implement internal links to connect related pages in your Shopify. This helps customers navigate your store and distributes SEO value throughout your content.

How To Implement On-Page SEO On Shopify

Implementing On-page SEO on your Shopify requires a long process that involves many steps to optimize each page for search engines. However, if you do it with careful research, you can quickly see efficiency and positive changes for your store.

Below are steps to help you optimize On-page SEO for your Shopify pages.

1. Build Credibility For Your Shopify Store

The first and relatively important step in implementing on-page SEO for your Shopify is to ensure your store’s reputation. Reputation is a fundamental measure by which Google can consider providing search advantages to your Shopify website.

Essentially, this means you must meet Google’s EEAT (Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness) guidelines. More specifically, please refer to the following steps to improve EEAT for your Shopify store:

• Create high-quality content: Your Shopify content must ensure three basic elements, including originality, usefulness for users, and written by people, for people. In addition, you need to regularly check and update your content to avoid being outdated and keep your EEAT level high.
• Ensuring transparency: Give your Shopify articles credibility by providing an About Us category or specific information about the author and their past work. If you’re a small business owner or don’t have enough capital to hire a professional, consider hiring talented writers to do their research to create quality content.
• Use trustworthy sources: Link your article content to official sources, research papers, academic databases, or the websites of reputable experts and authorities.
• Create a positive brand reputation: You should pay attention to negative reviews or articles about your product or brand to provide timely feedback and handling. Actively interacting with your customers is also an effective way to increase the EEAT level of your Shopify store.
• Leverage user-generated content: User-generated content (UGC) includes images, product reviews and blog posts, created by consumers who have experienced Test the services on your Shopify store. One way you can collect UGC to improve your website’s EEAT is by encouraging satisfied customers to tag your brand in images they post of your products.
• Optimize backlink building: The more high-quality backlinks you earn, the higher you will rank in Google search rankings. So create linkable content (for example, helpful infographics or video tutorials), or create helpful how-to guides for the topics in your Shopify store.

2. Look Up Keywords

You can receive high-quality traffic to produce leads and encourage conversions by optimizing your Shopify store with the appropriate keywords and search intent. For the keyword search procedure to be as effective as possible, originality is necessary. 

You must take into account the following when selecting the best keywords:

• Look for keywords connected to your product; they should indicate buying intent. Keywords must be flexible enough to adapt to various store pages and fit into different stages of the sales funnel.
• Research your competitors to see what high-quality keywords they are targeting.
• Avoid choosing highly competitive keywords because your Shopify store is unlikely to appear on the first page of search engines.
• Your keyword list can be divided into categories based on search intent to help you identify the right keywords for each stage of the sales funnel.
• Make a list of negative keywords you don’t want to rank for to increase your effectiveness.
• Continuously research data and update and adjust your keyword list to suit customer needs over time. You can take the help of Google’s Keyword Planner tool to gather data and make detailed predictions for your keywords.

3. Optimize Your Shopify Store Based On Search Intent

Each page in your Shopify store serves a different purpose for your customers along their purchasing journey. Therefore, each page needs to be optimized with appropriate display keywords for each type of search intent.

With on-page SEO optimization for Shopify, you’ll see four types of search intent. Each type will be associated with a different stage of the sales funnel. More specific:

• Information: This search intent will link to TOFU (top of the funnel) to increase awareness.
• Navigation and commerce: These two intents will align with MOFU (mid of the funnel) to make potential customers curious about your product. At the same time, you can provide them with information to find exactly what they need at the purchase consideration stage.
• Transactional: This objective will be connected to the BOFU (bottom of the funnel) to facilitate and inspire clients to make purchases.

4. Deploy SEO Standard Content

Writing SEO-standard content – a step that sounds difficult, but that’s only if you haven’t researched keywords and appropriate information.

To write SEO articles, first and foremost, you must always include the right keywords. However, you should remember that using black hat SEO methods has become outdated. So, spread your main keyword and LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords throughout your articles or product descriptions so that the context of the topic is clear.

Next, you can use title tag modifiers to attract more long-tail traffic without much effort. Some simple title tag modifiers you can use are “best”, “top”, “simple”, “free”, “tutorial”, “how to”, etc.

Finally, you should not skip the content formatting step when implementing on-page SEO for your Shopify store. Of course, readers will always be attracted to beautifully formatted text, including short paragraphs, bulleted lists, and many interesting images. An article with a standard SEO format will be:

• A short paragraph (maximum 3-5 lines)
• Bulleted lists are clear and follow a logical hierarchy
• Align line and paragraph spacing appropriately
• Use bold and italics to highlight important and unique information
• Add images and appropriate descriptive Alt tags
• Build a clean page layout with heading tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, etc)
• Link with appropriate internal links

5. Optimize The HTML For Your Shopify Store

HTML optimization will include optimizing title tags, meta descriptions, and Alt tags.

• Title tags: Title tags can help Google better understand your store and products. At the same time, it must also be attractive to encourage customers to click through to your Shopify website.
• Meta description: All of your Shopify pages, including the homepage, collection pages, product pages, and blog pages, need to have their meta descriptions optimized. Meta descriptions majorly affect how your pages appear on the SERP. This has a huge impact on your CTR (Click Through Rate).
• Alt tags: Alt tags serve as a substitute for image captions. Without Alt tags, search engines cannot determine the image’s relevance to the page content.

6. Optimize Images

Besides optimizing Alt tags, optimizing images is also an important step to pay attention to. Some principles for optimizing images on Shopify:

• Before uploading images to Shopify, you need to change the image filename to include your main keyword for SEO value. Avoid using generic names (e.g., IMG0001.jpg), as they will not help Google understand the image’s content.
• Use the appropriate image file type (e.g., JPEG, GIF, or PNG).
• Ensure your image size isn’t so heavy that it affects page speed. However, you don’t need to worry too much, as Shopify has integration with SEO features that automatically compress your images.

7. Optimize Store Website Structure

Optimizing your Shopify website architecture can bring you many benefits, including:

• Improve the ranking of pages that directly impact your profits (e.g., collection pages and product pages).
• Delivers a better shopping experience for customers and helps reduce bounce rates.
• You’ll have the opportunity to get Sitelinks to help customers easily navigate your store and quickly find what they need.

So refer to the principles below to optimize your website architecture.

• Create a low-depth page hierarchy: All important pages in your store should be no more than 3 clicks away from the home page. From there, your home page can pass link equity to all the pages on your Shopify site quickly.
• Create a reasonable URL structure: The URL should contain the keywords you want to rank for, and be concise, comprehensive, and easy to read for both humans and search engines. Shopify also has built-in SEO features that help set your website’s URLs to a readable structure that only uses standard characters.
• Create an intuitive site navigation structure: This will include building simple and intuitive header menus, drop-down menus, sidebar menus, and footer menus. Through this, you can provide a good user experience and optimize your store for search navigation purposes.

8. Check for Broken Links

To optimize on-page SEO for Shopify sites, you are required to apply three types of links that help increase traffic, including:

• Internal links: URLs that point back to your website
• Outbound: Links going to other websites from yours
• Inbound (backlinks): External links pointing to your website

Therefore, there will be times when you encounter broken links appearing on your websites. Broken links will lead your customers to non-existent pages with error messages (e.g., 404 page not found, invalid host, invalid URL, etc).

A broken link can be due to many reasons. For example, the website URL has been changed, or the resource has been password-protected or deleted. However, for any reason, providing a broken link can cause your Shopify website to be considered unreliable by Google. This will result in your store having lower SERP visibility and less traffic.

Additionally, broken links can negatively impact user experience, leading to higher bounce rates and reduced sales. At the same time, they will reduce the value of your SEO efforts.

Therefore, you should regularly monitor your Shopify store for damaged connections and quickly fix them by removing or replacing them with appropriate URL addresses.

9. Remove Duplicate Content in Your Store

Duplicate content can confuse search engines. Therefore, it can affect your rankings, leading to lost traffic and missed sales opportunities. Google’s advice is to avoid creating duplicate content and promptly handle duplicate content issues.

One of the most common examples of duplicate content is a product page displayed on multiple separate URLs. Although customers clicking on it may understand that they view the same page, search engines evaluate your website as multiple pages presenting the same content.

So, to fix the duplicate content issue, you will need to implement canonical tags. This type of tag will tell search engines that you own several URLs with duplicate or similar content. It can also tell which pages are main and which are variations to help search engines determine which pages they should index.

10. Optimize Page Speed

Improving the page speed of your Shopify website can enhance your customers’ shopping experience. From there, it will positively affect CTR, bounce rate, sales, and more. Additionally, it is a ranking factor and affects the ability of your Shopify store to be found on search engines.

Shopify offers essential methods to help optimize your store’s website speed, such as hosting your website on fast, reliable, and scalable servers, or providing a CDN dual and automatically setting local browser caching for all cacheable resources. Additionally, it offers Shopify Online features that help you measure your storefront’s performance over time.

However, this does not mean that you will not need to implement any other methods to optimize your page speed. There are many ways you can proactively ensure your website functions smoothly and loads rapidly on different devices.

First, analyze and find the main reason why your website is slow. Then you can start implementing some of the following changes to ensure your site loads as quickly as possible:

• Choose a suitable and lightweight Shopify theme 
• Select system font
• Continuously monitor the performance of the applications you have installed and their impact on your website performance. Delete all the apps you don’t use or don’t bring much value.
• Optimize collections and filters
• Minimize redirects
• Optimize image and video content
• Eliminate unnecessary HTTP requests
• Implement AMP

11. Build a Mobile-Friendly Shopify Store

Optimizing your store for mobile devices also affects your website’s ranking on search engines. So, besides having a responsive website, you must implement some mobile-first design principles. Detail:

• Reduce the number of navigation layers and implement a mobile-friendly menu alternative (e.g., hamburger menu).
• Minimize the use of pop-ups.
• Choose the right font. Use the base font size of 16 CSS pixels, as recommended by Google.
• Implement an attractive and intuitive “Add to Cart” button.
• Optimize your payments for mobile devices.
• Ensure that any interactive elements—such as buttons, links, icons, etc.—can be readily clicked by mobile users.
• Make your Shopify store “Thumb Zone”-friendly.

12. Check The Result

The final step is to evaluate your adjustments, including settings and spelling.

Naturally, these improvements won’t impact search results right away. The new version will take some time to load before search engines can assess whether your Shopify on-page SEO approach is effective. To demonstrate to search engines that your website is current and relevant, update and renew your material frequently.

Optimize Shopify On-page SEO with The Help of Mageplaza

As part of Avada Commerce, Mageplaza prides itself on being one of the market’s leading Shopify development and custom development service providers. Mageplaza’s team of Shopify experts with nearly 10 years of experience can ensure they have the necessary skills and expertise to help you optimize your Shopify performance and speed effectively.

Mageplaza offers Shopify speed and performance optimization services to help your store attain blazingly quick page loads, lower bounce rates, and enhance your clients’ experience. The performance and speed optimization services that Mageplaze provides include:

• Analyze website speed
• Check Google’s PSI
• Optimize the Shopify app
• Optimize images
• Optimize web fonts
• Server and storage optimization
• Browser cache
• Code optimization
• Deploy CDN (Content Delivery Network)
• Reduce file requests
• Lazy loading
• Mobile optimization

When you use Mageplaza’s Shopify speed and performance optimization service, you can receive benefits such as:

• Advice from industry-leading Shopify optimization experts
• Experience best practices, the latest technology, and robust and reliable solutions
• A full range of optimization services, such as caching, code optimization, and image optimization
• Work with each client to develop a customized plan, tailored to their needs
• Transparent prices.

No matter how big or small your store is, Mageplaza can help you achieve your ecommerce goals with powerful Shopify speed and performance optimization services.

GET A FREE CONSULTATION NOW

Conclusion

In short, Shopify’s on-page SEO is essential for driving organic traffic, improving search rankings, enhancing user experience, and ultimately increasing sales and revenue. This is an ongoing process that requires attention to detail and adaptation to changing SEO practices and search engine algorithms.

Although this strategy seems easy, it is often overlooked by e-commerce sellers. So, by investing in on-page SEO, you can establish a strong online presence and grow your Shopify store’s success over time.