Step-by-Step Guide: SEO Setup for Your Shopify Store 2023

How to do SEO Setup for Shopify Store?

SEO is a technique to improve website visibility on Google. There are many e-commerce online stores designed on Shopify, Magento, and other platforms which creates huge competition in ranking. That's where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes into play. By optimizing your Shopify store for search engines, you can increase your visibility, attract more organic traffic, and boost your sales. In this step-by-step guide, we'll walk you through the process of setting up SEO for your Shopify store. So, let's dive in and unlock the secrets of SEO success!. 

In this article, I will explain basic SEO tips for Shopify store owners to improve ranking and traffic.

Step 1: Research Relevant Keywords

Keywords are the foundation of SEO. Start by brainstorming a list of keywords and phrases that are relevant to your products or services. Think about what potential customers might search for when looking for products similar to yours. 

For example, if you sell handmade soaps, relevant keywords could include "natural soaps," "organic skincare," or "artisanal bath products." 

Utilize keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush to discover popular and high-ranking keywords in your niche.

Step 2: Optimize Your On-Page Elements 

Once you have a list of keywords, it's time to optimize your on-page elements. Start with your page titles, meta descriptions, and URLs. These elements play a crucial role in telling search engines what your page is about. Make sure to include your target keywords naturally while keeping the titles and descriptions compelling for human readers. 

For example: 

Page Title: "Luxurious Handmade Soaps | Natural and Organic Skincare" 

Meta Description: "Indulge in our collection of luxurious handmade soaps, crafted with natural and organic ingredients. Transform your skincare routine with our artisanal bath products."

Step 3: Build High-Quality Backlinks 

Backlinks are like votes of confidence from other websites, indicating that your store is reputable and trustworthy. Focus on building high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites in your industry. 

You can achieve this by reaching out to influencers or industry bloggers, participating in guest blogging opportunities, or creating shareable content that naturally attracts backlinks.

Step 4: Optimize for Mobile and Speed 

In today's mobile-centric world, optimizing your Shopify store for mobile devices is essential. Ensure that your website is mobile-responsive and provides a seamless browsing experience across different screen sizes. Additionally, optimize your website's loading speed by compressing images, leveraging caching techniques, and choosing a reliable hosting provider.

Your Shopify website should be mobile-friendly. Google has recently added this factor to the SEO. Mobile users are increasing rapidly so it is compulsory that your mobile website user experience should be good. 

A study says that you are losing 30% of visitors if your website loading time is more than 5 seconds. You should optimize your website page load time for all devices (desktop, mobile, tablet) to improve your SEO score while Shopify uses CDN hosting to maintain page load time that will help you in page speed.

Check your website page speed by Google Page Speed Checker

Step 5: Leverage Social Media 

Social media platforms offer tremendous opportunities to promote your Shopify store and increase its visibility. Establish a strong presence on platforms where your target audience is active. Share engaging content, interact with your followers, and encourage social sharing. The more your store is shared and discussed on social media, the more exposure and potential customers you'll attract.

Step 6: Setup Webmaster and Google Analytics

Google webmaster provides technical issues and statistics. Whenever your website gets a penalty or other errors then Google webmaster informs you with details then you can resolve your website issue and send a reconsideration request to Google webmaster. 

You can see crawl errors, sitemap errors, Meta tag errors, hacking errors, 404 errors, robots.txt errors, AMP errors, schema tag errors, etc in the webmaster.

Google Analytics provides traffic data on many dimensions like a landing page, traffic source, location, medium, device, etc. You can optimize your website traffic and conversions with the help of Google Analytics reports.

Step 7. Target Long Tail Keywords

There is too much competition for e-commerce Shopify websites so you should target long-tail keywords. You can find long-tail keywords from the Google Planner tool and other Google auto-complete tools.

Read more about Long Tail Keyword 

Example -

Short-Term Keyword 

• Buy Earring Online

Long Term keyword 

• Buy Diamond Earring Online

Step 8: Add Meta Tags

You must add Title and Meta Description on your all pages. The title should be a maximum of 55 characters (with space) and the Meta description should be a maximum of 164 characters (with space). You can use SEO tools or webmaster tools to find meta tag errors. Shopify provides a Meta tag setup option in the footer of the relevant page.

Step 9: Optimize Images

Generally, Shopify's website has many images and you have to optimize them for improving your SEO score. You should take relevant image names, alt tags (not stuff too many keywords) and image compression, and make sure image quality should be good.

Step 10: Improve URL Structure

You should categorize your products and create a URL structure accordingly. You should also use breadcrumbs to improve user experience, so users can easily jump category and sub-category pages. Don’t worry about this because Shopify already has this integration.

Example –

www.domain.com/earrings/ (not the following hierarchy)

www.domain.com/daimond/earrings/ (following hierarchy)

Avoid dynamic URLs where possible and use static SEO-friendly URLs.

See this in the example.

www.domain.com/earrings?id=345 (Dynamic URL)
www.domain.com/daimond/earrings/ (Static URL)

Step 11: Add Content in category and sub-category pages

Generally, Shopify website owners don’t add content to the website and fill pages with products but Google doesn’t like thin content. You can increase traffic and ranking by adding content. This is not compulsory to add content to all products because they are thousands & more and they have product descriptions. 

You can content in category and sub-category pages of at least 300-500 words. If your Shopify theme doesn’t have any option to add content to your category pages then Shopify web designers can customize your theme for that.

Step 12: Make your Product Heading in H1

Heading tags are highly responsible for SEO ranking so use the H1 tags in your all product names and also add heading tags in category and sub-category pages. Shopify already has this feature in all themes.

Step 13: Generate Sitemap & Robots.txt

You can generate XML and HTML sitemap and robots.txt by using tools or with the help of your developer and submit them to Google webmaster so Google will easily crawl and index your all pages don’t forget to mention XML sitemap URL in the robots.txt file. If you are struggling with that then you can hire Shopify SEO services from CGColors.

Conclusion - Don’t over-optimize

Google change their algorithm daily that’s why SEO ranking is becoming more complicated. You should use all the above-explained basic Shopify SEO optimization strategies to generate more traffic and revenue. You should not over-optimize your jewellery website for SEO by using too many keyword-based alt tags, too many heading tags & link title tags. You should take 1-2% keyword density on the web page.