Shopify Plus SEO: Solutions To Increase Traffic For Businesses

Enterprise-level merchants using Shopify in general, and Shopify Plus in particular, often need to apply multiple strategies and invest significant amounts of money in technology. This is how they can maintain the safety and smooth operations of their stores. Hence, SEO is regarded as a highly effective yet affordable strategy for businesses looking to grow into market leaders.

Your company needs an optimal and efficient e-commerce website if you want to stand out from the many rivals in the industry. The good news for retailers is that Shopify Plus includes helpful features and functionalities that will help you increase the effectiveness of your website’s search engine optimization.

Whether switching from another e-commerce platform or upgrading from the basic Shopify plan, this post will offer advice and recommend some efficient Shopify Plus SEO strategies. By adhering to these tested strategies, you may maximize the potential of your Shopify Plus store and draw more clients to your online business.

Table of Content

• What Is Shopify Plus SEO?
• SEO Features Are Integrated In Shopify Plus
• Common SEO Issues On Shopify Plus Websites
  • Duplicate Product Pages
  • JavaScript Rendered Content
  • Navigate By Aspect
  • Structured Data
• Best SEO Practices For Shopify Plus
  • Research Keywords Thoroughly
  • Optimize Your Shopify Plus Store Structure
  • Optimize SEO On-Page For Shopify Plus Site
  • Taking Care Of Technical SEO
  • Get Your Store Featured In SERPs
  • Use Content Marketing
  • Build Backlinks
  • Analyze Shopify Plus SEO Performance
• Improve Your Shopify Plus SEO With Our Experts’ Help
• Conclusion

What Is Shopify Plus SEO?

As an update to the original Shopify platform, Shopify Plus was released to boost several potent features, tools, and services that help online retailers expand and grow their businesses. As it offers a seamless and dependable e-commerce solution focusing on performance, flexibility, and customization possibilities, the platform was designed primarily to serve large-scale businesses or enterprise-level sellers.

Shopify Plus SEO consists of search engine optimization methods and strategies created especially for Shopify Plus-powered websites. Shopify Plus SEO’s main components are as follows:

• Technical SEO: Optimize your Shopify Plus store’s technological features, such as improving site speed, and mobile-friendliness, and ensuring that search engines can crawl data and index your site properly.
• On-page SEO: Optimize individual product pages, collection pages, and other content on your site for search engines. It involves keyword research, optimizing titles and meta descriptions, creating high-quality product descriptions, and using relevant, high-resolution images.
• Content marketing: Producing informative and interesting information, like blog entries, tutorials, and product guides, can help drive organic traffic to your Shopify Plus store.
• Mobile optimization: Make sure your Shopify Plus store is mobile-friendly and provides a great user experience on smartphones and tablets.
• E-commerce SEO: Optimize product listings, taxonomies, and product filters. It’s important to structure your product and collection pages in a way that is easy for both users and search engines to navigate.
• Link building: Constructing backlinks of the highest caliber from reliable websites can help improve your Shopify Plus store and search engine rankings.
• Schema markup: Implementing schema markup on your Shopify Plus store can help search engines understand your content better and potentially show rich snippets in search results, which can increase the click-through rate.
• Monitor performance: Monitor the results of your SEO activities on a regular basis with tools like Google Analytics and Shopify’s built-in analytics. Adjust your strategy based on data and trends to continuously improve your SEO.

With the correct SEO approach, you can improve your store’s search engine exposure, draw more organic visitors, and eventually boost online sales using the Shopify Plus e-commerce platform. The best practices for SEO are continuously changing, so it’s critical to stay current.

SEO Features Are Integrated In Shopify Plus

Shopify Plus offers a number of SEO benefits to help businesses improve their online visibility, attracting organic traffic. Here are some SEO features commonly integrated into Shopify Plus:

• Customize meta tags: You can customize meta titles and meta descriptions for your products and pages, enabling you to optimize them and improve click-through rates in search results.
• Mobile-friendly design: Shopify Plus offers responsive and mobile-friendly themes, which is important for SEO because Google takes mobile optimization very seriously.
• Canonical and custom URLs: This platform provides canonical URL setting functionality, allowing you to manage duplicate content issues and ensure search engines understand the preferred version of your page. Additionally, you can customize the URLs for your products and collections to include relevant keywords.
• Optimize images: When adding pictures to your website, Shopify Plus automatically compresses and optimizes them so your web pages load faster.
• XML sitemap: This platform generates an XML sitemap for your store, making it easier for search engines to crawl and index your pages.
• Set up redirects: You can set up 301 redirects to maintain SEO authority when you change URLs or remove products on your Shopify Plus store.
• SSL security: This e-commerce site offers SSL certificates for secure and encrypted connections, which can boost your SEO rankings.
• Page speed optimization: Shopify Plus is known to have an improvement in loading websites faster than its original version.
• SEO apps and integrations: You can use various SEO apps and integrations available in the Shopify App Store (e.g., SEMrush, Moz, and Google Analytics) to further enhance your store’s SEO capabilities.

• Structured data: Shopify Plus allows you to use structured data to show rich snippets in search results. This can increase click-through rates and make voice search queries easier for search engines to comprehend and react to.
• Content creation: Shopify Plus allows merchants to create blog posts and content pages through built-in blogging functionality. Besides providing customers with useful information, high-quality content can help you attract backlinks and improve your website’s search engine rankings.

These distinctive capabilities and functionalities that Shopify Plus provides have greatly aided in the development and adoption of SEO tactics by businesses. It’s critical that you keep up with both current SEO best practices and the newest additions and modifications to the Shopify Plus platform. 

In this way, it is promised that you will achieve the highest efficiency in the process of developing your e-commerce service.

Common SEO Issues On Shopify Plus Websites

Shopify Plus is a robust e-commerce platform that provides a number of features to support businesses’ online success. To ensure that search engines will rank your website highly, you may need to solve some typical SEO difficulties, just like you would with any platform. Following are some typical Shopify Plus SEO problems and solutions.

Duplicate Product Pages

The presence of duplicate content on Shopify Plus websites is one of the main SEO issues. When the same content is available at two or more URLs, it is considered duplicate content. There are many possible reasons why your Shopify Plus website is generating duplicate content.

Duplicate content can be created from duplicate product pages. Typically, you’ll find category pages on Shopify Plus automatically link to duplicate product pages.

For example, when you visit one of a Shopify Plus store’s product pages from a category page, you may see that the site’s URL will contain both /collections/ and /products/. However, checking that site’s canonical tag will give you a different URL that includes only /products/. When you navigate to this page, you will see that it is indeed an exact replica.

This means that the page linked from the category page is not a canonical URL. Rather, the category page points to a duplicate page that search engines are probably going to crawl and index.

From there, you will see that this setup creates a large amount of duplicate content. Each product page linked from the category page is a duplicate page and this will greatly affect important pages that are implementing SEO. More specifically, Google can ignore canonical tags and index duplicate tags.

The solution for you to ensure that your Shopify Plus category pages can link to the correct product pages is simply to adjust your Shopify Plus theme files. Detail:

• Step 1: Select Online Store > Themes
• Step 2: Select Actions > Edit code
• Step 3: Find the “Snippets” folder and select “product-grid-item.liquid”
• Step 4: Adjust the code <a href=”” class=”product-grid-item”> to <a href=”” class=”product-grid-item”>

JavaScript Rendered Content

Content presented via JavaScript also presents a significant SEO challenge for companies using Shopify Plus. This is because enterprise-level Shopify Plus sellers frequently have enormous sizes and large inventories. Therefore, it is likely that developers will need to design a JavaScript framework to supply content during the website’s lifespan.

Although Google has significantly improved over the years in crawling and indexing JavaScript, the procedure is still far from ideal. This methodology can make it difficult or impossible for Google to crawl and index material. For any website implementing this technology, JavaScript SEO recommended practices must still be followed to prevent ranking detriment.

Navigate By Aspect

As you know, Shopify Plus sites can have larger inventories, so businesses are likely to have multi-faceted navigation implemented. This means users will easily sort and filter category pages by different criteria (e.g., size, price, material) to find the products that best suit them.

However, faceted navigation can cause serious SEO problems by creating duplicate content. Every aspect selected will create a new URL. These URLs can add up to a lot of pages quickly.

According to a Google study of their store, 158 products generated 380,000 URLs. URLs generated by faceted navigation often include duplicate or similar content to the source page because they only include views of the original category page that were sorted and filtered.

The solution to your problem is that Shopify provides default rules in the robots.txt file to prevent duplicate pages from being created by faceted navigation. However, you also need to analyze whether Google can crawl and index the large number of URLs that may be generated.

Structured Data

You can add structured data, or code, to your website’s pages to make them easier for users and search engines to navigate. However, Shopify Plus provides inconsistent, incomplete, or duplicated structural data for its sites.

You can check out some structured data mappings for your Shopify Plus sites.

• Home page: Organization 
• Category page: CollectionPage or OfferCatalog 
• Product page: Products 
• Blog posts: Articles 

Remember that each page on your site should only have a single version of each schema element.

Many of these common SEO hurdles can be effectively overcome with the right expertise. This is where Shopify Plus development services come into play. By leveraging our services, businesses can ensure that their Shopify Plus sites are not only optimized for search engines but also tailored to meet their specific marketing goals and customer needs.

Best SEO Practices For Shopify Plus

Actually, if you want to boost the SEO of your Shopify Plus business, you’ll have to put in a lot of effort. So let’s break down the process into 9 straightforward yet incredibly powerful SEO strategies that will aid your company in increasing its online presence and organic traffic.

1. Research Keywords Thoroughly

No one can deny that suitable keywords are a factor that strongly impacts the effectiveness of an SEO strategy. So, you need to research and ensure you find the right keywords before posting any content to your Shopify Plus store. 

Rather than selecting keywords with the largest volume of searches (because they are competitive and difficult to rank for), optimize for long-tail keywords that demonstrate search intent related to your products. Four primary categories of search intent exist, including:

• Information
• Transaction
• Commerce
• Directional

Clearly defining the purpose of each specific query can help you understand what customers are looking for. From there, your website will have positive changes in ranking growth.

An easy example of this method is if you want to cook beefsteak for dinner but you are very hungry and want to eat it now. Of course, you would go to Google and search for “Quick and simple beefsteak recipe” instead of just searching for “Beefsteak recipe”.

However, keep in mind that the black-hat method has become outdated with the development of SEO today. Therefore, to avoid being penalized by Google, you must check your keyword density and spread your main keywords evenly.

Additionally, each page on your Shopify store needs to be optimized for a different keyword. This way, you can avoid keyword cannibalization. This means that when multiple pages on your Shopify Plus site all target the same or similar keywords, they can compete with each other to the detriment of your site’s traffic and rankings.

2. Optimize Your Shopify Plus Store Structure

Optimizing your store structure is an essential task in implementing SEO for your Shopify Plus website. This is intended to positively impact user experience (UX), helping customers make the decision to stay long-term on your website.

Additionally, Google will perceive your store’s organization and hierarchy through the structure you build for it. If you do it well, this can largely determine your Shopify Plus site’s search engine rankings.

2.1. Edit The General Structure Of The Store

As you begin setting up your store on Shopify Plus, consider the following:

• Simplify your store structure as much as possible.
• Proper use of Shopify themes.
• Create sub-collections to target more specific search queries.
• Use breadcrumbs to help your customers navigate your store conveniently.
• Use simple, clear fonts with colors that match the theme to make the content clear to customers.
• Show off the relationships between your Shopify Plus websites with appropriate internal links.

2.2. Provide SEO-Friendly URLs

A well-crafted Shopify Plus URL will make it obvious to users and search engines alike what your page is about. Some methods for building clearer and more effective URLs include:

• Consistency: Build your URLs following the same formatting rules.
• Use keywords: Because keywords in the URL can also help your website increase rankings. So, implement URLs around the main keywords you have researched.
• URL length: A reasonable length for a URL is between 50 and 60 characters.
• Avoid special symbols: Symbols like &, %, $, or @ will make your URL harder to read.
• Avoid dates and numbers: Never put any date or numbers if you want your URL to still be up to date and rank well in the future.

An example of a good URL would look like this: “https://www.mageplaza.com/blog/shopify-themes/”. This is a short but completely understandable URL. Obviously customers can expect to find shopify themes after clicking on the link.

2.3. Speed Up Your Shopify Plus Store

Page load speed is a factor that directly impacts the rankings and conversion rates of your Shopify store. You need to understand that no user likes to wait too long while browsing the web. This also makes your website untrustworthy to both customers and search engines.

So, here are some ways to increase page load speed and make your Shopify Plus store more efficient:

• Image compression: Unoptimized product or ad images on your store will slow down your site significantly.
• Image sizes: Shopify Plus allows you to upload images with the following dimensions: 4472 x 4472 pixels for optimal images; Square images are 2048 x 2048 pixels; Maximum image file is 20MB; and 72 dpi for image resolution.
• SEO-friendly theme: Choose a theme that is minimalist and has clean code, designed for fast load times.
• Control third-party scripts: Choosing the right page to load your app will significantly improve your store’s speed.

2.4. Optimize On Mobile Devices

Google often prioritizes websites that are optimized to be mobile-friendly. This is also an understandable problem when most users today want to read and shop online on their phones. Therefore, while implementing Shopify Plus SEO, optimizing your store for mobile shopping is mandatory. Factors that you need to take into account include:

• Responsiveness: All elements on your page need to be dynamic. Shopify Plus lets you choose a responsive template for your website and has built-in mobile commerce cart features.
• Visual hierarchy: Choose correct padding, image and logo sizes, increase font size to improve readability.
• Navigation: Remember drop-down menus and mega menus don’t work well on mobile devices. Create an efficient navigation structure with as few layers as possible. Use a mobile-friendly menu style like a hamburger menu.

3. Optimize SEO On-Page For Shopify Plus Site

On-page SEO is also an important factor that you should not ignore when performing SEO for your Shopify Plus store. Each type of website on Shopify Plus must be optimized differently according to its use and the customer’s search intent. Now let’s talk about the steps to improve each individual Shopify Plus page type and general SEO details on your website.

3.1. Metadata Optimization

Metadata optimization is a way to positively represent your website to search engines. While Shopify Plus provides basic functionality for implementing meta tags, meta titles, and descriptions are individual for each page. Therefore, you need to build them carefully to get the best results.

• Meta titles: Since title tags show up on SERP results pages, they should be well-written, short (50 to 60 characters) but descriptive. In addition, the title must also contain the main keyword associated with the search intent to drive rankings and clicks.
• Meta description: Meta description is the space where you briefly explain the content of the page. Therefore, it must include relevant keywords, provide specific descriptions, emphasize benefits, and use action verbs to motivate purchases. A reasonable length for a meta description is no more than 150 characters.

3.2. Optimize Product Pages

Product pages are the most potential place for you to drive conversions for your Shopify Plus store. So, don’t hesitate to take the time to optimize them because you will realize that pushing them to the top of the SERP is well worth it.

• Establish focus keywords: You need to determine which specific transactional-intent keywords you want this product page to rank for. Analyze the competition of elements on the page, and find synonyms to use as secondary keywords.
• Work with meta: A well-crafted meta title and meta description will not only help you move up in the rankings but can also be the deciding factor for people to choose between you and your competitors.
• Product descriptions: Writing informative and unique product descriptions will serve your product page rankings well.
• Show customer reviews: Implement structured data to get rich results and show your product ratings.

3.3. Optimize Collection Pages

When it comes to SEO, Shopify collection pages often get overlooked. Unfortunately, many customers are still searching for abstract product descriptions, such as “white women’s t-shirt” or “vanilla perfume.”

You’ll be wasting the potential of these search intents if you don’t rank your Shopify Plus collection pages on search engines. Like product pages, collection pages should also follow SEO best practices, including metadata and keyword optimization. Besides, you need to ensure some of the following factors:

• Introduce user-friendly product filters or search functions
• Make your collection easily accessible from your homepage and product pages

3.4. Optimize The Homepage

When Google crawls your website, Shopify Plus Home is the first thing it looks for. It also helps you obtain the most organic links from other websites. So, besides highlighting your homepage with content and images, you also need to apply some effective on-page SEO methods.

• Use appropriate metadata: The meta title on the homepage should contain your store name, and the meta description should contain content that clearly represents what you offer, thereby encouraging clicks.
• Optimize the title on the homepage: The H1 on the homepage is important for both SEO and your brand image. The content above H1 can be about your main features and offers but must include the main keyword.
• Navigation: Customers and Google can access the most important pages in your store directly from the homepage. So links from the homepage are valuable, choose them wisely.

4. Taking Care Of Technical SEO

Technical SEO will work in tandem with your on-page SEO strategy to increase the visibility of your Shopify Plus store on SERPs. Although technical SEO may seem complex, it is actually broken down into manageable phases.

• Improve internal linking: Design your linking strategy to promote your most important pages. To do that, ensure those product and collection pages get the most internal links with relevant anchor text.
• Review the rules in robots.txt: Shopify Plus automatically creates a robots.txt file for your store and adds a default “Disallowed” tag. You have the option of introducing new rules to it, however, if a mistake happens, you can lose all your traffic. So, hire a professional to adjust your robots.txt file to avoid harming your website.
• Check sitemaps: There are 3 types of sitemaps, including main XML sitemaps, image sitemaps, and video sitemaps. To assist Google in finding and crawling every page on your website, you can submit a sitemap to them.
• Fix redirects and broken URLs: Incorrectly implemented redirects and broken links harm site health. The best methods to fix Shopify Plus redirects today are to find and remove redirect chains and take care of 404 pages.

5. Get Your Store Featured In SERPs

Getting your Shopify Plus store featured in the SERPs can provide benefits like ranking well on Google and getting a high volume of organic traffic. Improve your website’s click-through rates with these two strategies.

First, you will need to optimize your images for search. Attractive and up-to-date product images can attract website visitors and increase conversion rates. Image SEO best practices include:

• Reduce image size
• Select the appropriate file type
• Optimize image titles and alt tags
• Make sure the images are appropriate and related to the topic

Next, you’ll need to implement HTML typing so that Google can better understand your page’s content. More specifically, you’ll add structured data to product pages to capture rich snippets, such as ratings, product price, number of reviews, and more.

Rich SERP snippets help increase click-through rates and attract an audience more likely to convert. You can include structured data into your Shopify Plus store in one of two ways:

• Choose a Shopify app that can provide search engines with structured data. Usually it will be in JSON-LD format
• Choose the manual route if you are code savvy

6. Use Content Marketing

One surefire way to attract knowledgeable customers is to write quality content that ranks well. By sharing information with your shoppers in blog format, your Shopify Plus store can receive the following benefits:

• Improved topical authority: Having a blog will make you appear more knowledgeable about the field to readers and search engines alike. Your product pages will have an easier time rising in the search results the more content you write.
• Draw in organic traffic: If your content assists readers in solving a problem, nothing converts better than an astute reader who found your store through an organic search.

Additionally, enhance your product pages with internal links.  If you use the proper internal linking strategy, users who are browsing your highly-ranked blog pages will have no trouble finding your product pages. Increase sales by establishing a silo structure with your primary product pages at the core.

7. Build Backlinks

Don’t start your backlink-building efforts with superficial blog posts filled with recycled information. You’ll waste hours on planning, cold emailing, and guest writing without any tangible results. Instead, you’ll need solid products and valuable content to get quality backlinks.

Once you’re confident your Shopify Plus store is solid, consider the following methods:

• Understand scope: Analyze the backlink profiles of your key competitors to know what you’re up against.
• Request credit: Find links from other sites with nofollow tags or even unlinked mentions and contact their marketing team to request attribution.
• Take advantage of HARO: Give journalists information about your sector in return for exposure and maybe do-follow links.
• Guest post: Make contact with other websites within your niche and propose to contribute a blog post in return for a do-follow backlink.

8. Analyze Shopify Plus SEO Performance

After you have taken many steps towards a perfect SEO strategy, you need to conduct an SEO performance analysis to make timely adjustments. More precisely, the position will involve weekly tracking of organic traffic, new backlinks, and primary keyword rankings.

Of course, these improvements won’t immediately affect your Shopify Plus store’s search engine rankings. The new version will take some time to load before search engines can evaluate whether your Shopify Plus SEO approach is effective or not.

Improve Your Shopify Plus SEO With Our Experts’ Help

Mageplaza, a component of Avada Commerce, takes great satisfaction in being one of the industry’s top providers of Shopify development and custom development services. With ten years of combined experience, Mageplaza’s team of Shopify specialists can guarantee that they have the know-how to assist in enhancing and successfully implementing SEO on your Shopify Plus stores. 

Mageplaza offers powerful Shopify Plus Development services to help you get the most out of the Shopify Plus platform, optimize your online store for maximum performance, and minimize downtime and other issues. Shopify Plus Development services that Mageplaza provides include:

• Set up your Shopify store
• Customize your Shopify theme
• Optimize Shopify speed
• Shopify migration
• Shopify integration
• Shopify support and maintenance

When using Mageplaza’s Shopify Plus Development service, you can receive benefits such as:

• Mentorship from industry-leading e-commerce and Shopify development experts
• Experience best practices, the latest technology, and robust and reliable solutions
• Enjoy a variety of powerful Shopify Plus development services
• Ensuring projects meet the highest functional and quality standards
• Optimize implementation costs
• Quick deployment time
• Ongoing support and maintenance services

With its robust Shopify Plus development services, Mageplaza can assist you in achieving your e-commerce objectives by implementing the best SEO methods, regardless of the size of your Shopify Plus business.

GET A FREE CONSULTATION NOW

Conclusion

Overall, boosting your Shopify Plus SEO is one of the most important things you need to do to give your ecommerce website the boost it needs to improve performance and profitability.

You can improve the SEO optimization of your Shopify Plus store in a number of ways. Prioritize more difficult activities like adding structured data and internal linking after finishing more fundamental ones like creating keyword maps and meta descriptions.  Also, don’t forget to take advantage of the unique SEO features built into Shopify Plus to maximize your website’s visibility and drive organic traffic.

This post contains helpful information and steps for setting up Shopify Plus SEO, which will assist you in creating a strong SEO plan. By concentrating on your SEO strategy, you may set the groundwork for a long-term successful marketing strategy that will advance your e-commerce.