Shopify is an affordable ecommerce platform favoured by many small businesses who want to get started with selling niche products online. It’s believed that Shopify currently powers in excess of 30,000 websites and helped to ship over 20 million items to date. The eCommerce platform allows users to easily and quickly create their own online store without all the technical work involved in developing their own website, or the huge expense of having someone else build one.
This guide is designed for SEO’s and competent webmasters who have some understanding of implementing code to websites. I don’t plan to cover off all of the basics of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) but if you are at all interested in learning more about SEO before tackling the tasks on your Shopify site then please feel free to check out the resources that I recommend below:
SEOmoz – Beginners Guide to SEO
Remember to back up your theme files and any code before making any amendments!!
Redirect non-www to www
Google and the major search engines consider http://google.com and http://www.google.com as different websites. This can mean that the search engines will have difficulty determining which version of your site to index. It can also mean that if your website has been linked to from different websites and blogs using a combination of the two URLs you are diminishing the value of the links pointing to your site.
To resolve this you need to create a 301 redirect.
On your Preferences go to the DNS & Domains page, check the option for “always redirect customers here” beside your primary domain – this will then make sure your customers and also the search engines visit the correct site.
Redirect Old Pages
If you no longer stock an item then you may want to redirect your customers and the search engines to an alternative product or category page. It’s very important that you redirect rather than return a 404 Not Found especially for pages that may have links from other websites pointing to them.
Luckily Shopify have given us a very easy to use tool for this. You can find the Redirect feature in your Navigation tab in the admin, at the bottom of the page.
You can also use this feature if you are moving your eCommerce store to Shopify from a different CMS.
Shopify URL’s, Title Tags and Alt Tags
Write title tags for humans; format them for search engines.
The title tag is possibly the most important tag on your web page as it tells Google what your page is about. It is vitally important to your SEO strategy that you have unique titles for each page. Title tags should be a maximum of 70 characters long, including spaces & your most important keywords should first in your title.
Shopify provide us with a very easy way to modify title tags and URL structure for products, categories and pages.
Why does Google care about meta descriptions?
Google want snippets to accurately represent the web result. They prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL’s content.
It is very easy to add a unique meta description to your store click Preferences → General Settings.
- Show facts about the content on the page that are not represented in the title
- Make sure your meta descriptions are easy to read and less than 156 characters
As part of a good web user experience it is important that you add alt tags to your images to describe them. The idea of alternative text is to provide a textual replacement for pictures (images), a replacement that conveys the same thing as is communicated to a sighted user seeing the image. By not adding them you will not be compliant with either the Section 508 Web Standards or with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, Version 1.0 or 2.0.
Tips for Good Product Descriptions
- Don’t use the Manufacturer Product Descriptions
- Focus on Singular Keywords on Product Page
- Add Keywords and Keyword Rich Links
- Tell me something I don’t know
- What problem does the product solve?
- Use testimonials
- Answer your customer questions e.g. size, dimensions, batteries not included
Avoid Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is probably up there as one of the biggest nightmares for SEO’s. It is quite common with Content Management Systems and eCommerce websites that you generate duplicate content issues due to the way in which you can navigate to a web page in various different ways.
Thankfully we have some ways in which we can get around these problems with rel attributes.
rel=”canonical”
In your admin, go to Themes → Template Editor. Open up the theme.liquid file and insert the below before the closing head </head> tag.
<link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical_url }}" />
rel=”next” & rel=”prev”
As you may have noticed with your Shopify category pages they are split into different pages if you have a fairly big number of products in them. With rel=”next” and rel=”prev” markup, you can tell Google that you would like them to treat your web pages as a logical sequence; this means that they will return your first page as your primary search result.
To implement rel=”prev” and rel=”next” on your Shopify site you can add the below code in the <head> section of your site.
{% if paginate.previous %}
<link rel="prev" href="{{ shop.url }}{{ paginate.previous.url }}/" />
{% endif %}
{% if paginate.next %}
<link rel="next" href="{{ shop.url }}{{ paginate.next.url }}/" />
{% endif %}
{% if paginate.current_page == 1 %}
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.myshopifystore.com{{ collection.url }}/" />
{% else %}
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.myshopifystore.com
{{ collection.url }}?page={{ paginate.current_page }}/" />
{% endif %}
Meta Robots
Unfortunately you do not have access to robots.txt with Shopify so if there are web pages that you do not want the search engines to add to their index then you can add the following code to your theme.liquid file:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />
So for example if I did not want to show /collections/types?q=PRODUCT TYPEthen I would add:
{% if template == 'collection' %}{% if collection.handle %}{% else %}
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />
{% endif %}{% endif %}
Add Schema.org markup
schema.org is a collaboration by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! to improve the web by creating a structured data markup schema supported by major search engines. On-page markup helps search engines understand the information on webpages and provide richer results. A shared markup vocabulary makes it easier for webmasters to decide on a markup schema and get maximum benefit for their efforts. If you’ve marked up your content for rich snippets using microformats, microdata, or RDFa, then you’re already familiar with the process. schema.org works the same way, using the microdata markup format and a vocabulary that is shared by all the search engines and that supports a wide variety of item types and properties
Go to Theme > Template Editor and open up product.liquid paste the following code into the file:
<div id="richsnippet">
<div itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Product">
<span itemprop="brand">YOUR STORE NAME</span>
<span itemprop="name">{{ product.title | escape }}</span>
<img itemprop="image" src="{{ product.images[0] | product_img_url: "large" }}" />
<span itemprop="description">{{ product.description }}</span>
Category: <span itemprop="category" content="CATEGORY_NAME">CATEGORY_NAME</span>
Product #: <span itemprop="identifier"
content="sku:{{ product.variants[0].sku }}">{{ product.variants[0].sku }}</span>
<span itemprop="offerDetails"
itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Offer">
Regular price: {{ product.price | money }}
<meta itemprop="currency" content="USD" />
$<span itemprop="price">{{ product.price | money }}</span>
Available from: <span itemprop="seller">YOUR_URL</span>
Condition: <span itemprop="condition" content="new">New</span>
<span itemprop="availability" content="in_stock">In stock! Order now!</span>
</span>
</div></div><!-- end richsnippet -->
Setup Google & Bing Webmaster Tools
Google & Bing let you access data about the indexing of your website within their search engines. To do this you need to setup your site with their Webmaster Tools accounts.
- Copy the full meta tag XHTML to your clipboard — select it on the Google web page and press Ctrl-C or Command-C on the Mac.
- In your shop admin, go to Theme → Template Editor. On the Template Editor page, scroll down a bit and click on the ‘theme’ file under . This will open the Layout file theme.liquid in your theme editor.
- Paste your code snippet in the head element of the page, between
<head>and</head>.
- Save your template.
- Go back to the Google website and click Verify.
Google will verify that the meta tag they gave you exists in the correct location. If Google can’t find the tag, it will give you some information about the error encountered. Make sure that your store front is not password-protected when you click on the Verify button.
Shopify automatically generates an XML sitemap of your products, static pages and blog posts, you can find it at the address yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. Log into your Google Webmaster Tools account, navigate to your shop’s site and submit the sitemap.xml file you just saved.
How to Add Bing Webmaster Tools
Google Analytics
“>Shopify will automatically pass ecommerce data to Google Analytics once you connect them together. All you have to do is give Shopify your Google Analytics property ID, turn ecommerce tracking on in Google Analytics, and you’re done.
Link Building
Since the late 1990’s search engines have used links as votes – representing the democracy of the web’s opinion about what pages are important and popular. The engines themselves have refined the use of link data to a fine art, and complex algorithms create nuance evaluations of sites and pages based on this information – SEOmoz
There are literally dozens of ways to obtain links to your website below are a few easy link building tactics:
- Add regular content to your blog with internal links back to your products and shopping categories.
- Contact bloggers about the possibility of reviewing your products or perhaps to offer them an exclusive discount offer or contest for their readers.
- Increase the chances that people will share your products on Social Media sites such as Pinterest by adding social sharing buttons to your product listings.
- Create link worthy content on your blog and promote it to other webmasters
- Contact your suppliers and see if they will consider linking to you
The Big Guide to Shopify SEO by Chris Dyson - if you enjoyed this post you can read more at TripleSEO or follow Chris on Twitter
