Better results for your store • Yoast

Yoast SEO for Shopify

Good product images make it clear what a product is all about. It helps consumers view products from all angles without having the product in their hands. Product images need to be good, as it is one of the main drivers of conversion. Good photos also can catch the eye of the shopper. Great photos stand out in visual search engines like Google Images, Instagram, or Pinterest. So what should you look for?

1. Use high-quality images: Use high-resolution images that are clear and visually appealing. This will highlight your product features and attract customers to your website.
2. Use consistent image sizes: Maintaining image consistency throughout your website will give your store a more professional look and make it easier for customers to compare products.
3. Use multiple images: Use multiple images to show different angles of the product, including close-ups of essential features, which will help customers easily understand the product.
4. Develop lifestyle images: Contextual lifestyle images, such as images of people using your product, will help customers visualize how they might use it.
5. Optimize your images: Optimize images for faster loading times, improving your website loading speed and preventing customers from leaving before seeing your products. Platform feature like Shopify automatically optimizes images for the online store.
6. Consider getting professional help: Working with a professional photographer or graphic designer to create high-quality images to make your products stand out and attract more customers.

Optimize the file sizes

Influencer marketing might be an option for you. In most niches, you’ll find influencers who’d like to talk about or promote your product. Influencer marketing is an exciting way of getting your name out there, and it might make sense for your industry.

Offline marketing

Shopify automatically generates titles and meta descriptions based on a straightforward template. You can edit your products’ titles, meta descriptions, blog posts, pages, collections, and general site settings. Go to a specific page and open the search engine listing preview in Shopify. Add a title and meta description for the search results pages here. These differ from the regular title and descriptions, as these are specifically meant for the search results. You might have a specific title visible on your store and choose something else to show on the search results pages.

Average product pages have around five or more images. If these product photos are enormous, high-res files, your product page’s loading times will increase. You need to keep your file sizes in check. There’s no need to upload 3MB photographs. Be sure to size them and run them through an optimizer properly. You can find several tools in the Shopify App Store to help you do this.

Shopify has a redirect feature built-in. For one, Shopify automatically adds a redirect when you change the slug of an existing post. You can upload CSV files with your redirects if you need to do large-scale work on your site. Or use the URL redirect feature in the navigation section of the admin settings. It’s a straightforward redirect feature with just two fields: one for the old URL you want to redirect and one for the new URL you want to old one to point to.

Add your Shopify store to Google Search Console

Starting a blog on Shopify is very easy. Open your online store and navigate to blog posts in the sidebar. You can add a blog post from here by clicking the green button. By default, Shopify has a blog called News, but you can change that to anything you want. You could also run several blogs side-by-side. If you need help setting up your blog, we have a more detailed post about adding a blog to your Shopify store. Check it out!

Advancements in e-commerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and Adobe Commerce have made launching an online store easy. The platforms simplified managing store operations and enabled businesses to conduct digital marketing campaigns. The global COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated the shift to online shopping, and the trend is expected to continue as e-commerce businesses evolve and adapt to changing consumer behavior and technologies.

The robot.txt file is one of the crucial tools that you can use to optimize your online store or your website. It gives a way to tell Google how you want them to crawl the site. Ideally, you use this to prevent search engines from crawling less critical pages or sections of your site. For huge ecommerce sites, this is very important.

Let’s go over a couple of things you should look out for when choosing a theme:

• Determine what you want and need: Will you run a store with a single product or a theme that can handle thousands or more? The theme store has a handy selection of themes for stores with large and small catalogs. What type of design do you need? What options do you need?
• Figure out your budget: Themes in the Shopify theme store run from free to a one-time payment of a couple hundred dollars. Check what you are willing to spend. Free works for some, but then you hardly get support from the developer. Paid themes often come with more options and tend to be better built.
• Check the themes in the marketplace: Quite a few themes are available. Shopify has even structured these in several collections, like the catalog size or the type of industry, like clothing or electronics. You can filter on different properties, like features you need for the product pages or what’s available on the homepage of a shop. Now, there are over 80 themes available in the Shopify Theme Store.
• Read the reviews: You are probably not the first to pick a theme, so it’s a good idea to read the reviews of people who worked with it.
• Check the support the developer offers: Every theme comes with documentation and support, but the level and quality of support differ from developer to developer. Read the documentation and check around. Don’t be afraid to ask your questions.
• Ensure the Shopify theme is lean and mean: Many themes want everything and appeal to every store owner. But that means that there’s bound to be stuff built in that you don’t need. Keep in mind that all those features come at a price. Try to find a theme that has low overhead and loads lightning fast.
• Try the demos and check out other stores that run the theme: The Shopify theme store offers demos for all the themes, and you need to check these out. Also, Shopify provides examples of stores that run the specific theme you are looking at. It’s a good idea to closely examine those online stores and run these through their paces. For instance, run a performance test on web.dev/Measure and see how they do. You’d be surprised at the results.
• Check mobile-friendliness: As consumers increasingly use their mobile devices to shop, your online shop must function correctly. Again, the theme store allows you to see a mobile view of the theme.
• Test the user experience: The Shopify theme store also gives you a good idea of how users might experience the store. Click around, see the various layouts, and check how images load, animations work, the structure of the menu, and how it all feels. You can also try out the theme on your store to get an even better sense of how the theme feels and performs.
• Pay extra attention to the shopping cart: Does it feel like it wants customers to move through the process as quickly as possible? Or are there elements that take away focus? Other distractions? Is there room to expand the basic cart with upsells/cross-sells, promotions, and the like? Test your cart to see if you can reduce shopping cart abandonment rates.

For total control, build your own Shopify theme

You can edit the robots.txt liquid file by visiting your Online Store admin page. Go to the theme section and select Actions > Edit code. Find the template section and click Add new template. Click the dropdown and select robots.txt from the bottom. Click create template, and you can start editing.

Structured data for your products

One of the essential tips to improve the SEO of your Shopify store is optimizing your images. It’s also something everyone can do — whether you are a seasoned ecommerce SEO expert or just starting. Optimizing your images, compressing them, and giving them proper names helps!

User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /cart
Disallow: /orders
Disallow: /checkout
Disallow: /54914154724/checkouts
Disallow: /54914154724/orders
Disallow: /carts
Disallow: /account
Disallow: /collections/*sort_by*
Disallow: /*/collections/*sort_by*
Disallow: /collections/*+*
Disallow: /collections/*%2B*
Disallow: /collections/*%2b*
Disallow: /*/collections/*+*
Disallow: /*/collections/*%2B*
Disallow: /*/collections/*%2b*
Disallow: /blogs/*+*
Disallow: /blogs/*%2B*
Disallow: /blogs/*%2b*
Disallow: /*/blogs/*+*
Disallow: /*/blogs/*%2B*
Disallow: /*/blogs/*%2b*
Disallow: /*?*oseid=*
Disallow: /*preview_theme_id*
Disallow: /*preview_script_id*
Disallow: /policies/
Disallow: /*/*?*ls=*&ls=*
Disallow: /*/*?*ls%3D*%3Fls%3D*
Disallow: /*/*?*ls%3d*%3fls%3d*
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /apple-app-site-association

You can find your robots.txt file on https://example.com/robots.txt. Here’s what a standard robots.txt of Shopify looks like:

Whatever you pick, ensure that the parameters generated by the faceted navigation don’t end up in the search results pages — block them in the robots.txt liquid file with a disallow rule.

There’s a set limit for XML sitemaps of 50.000 URLs. As many sites have more than that, they will generate sub-sitemaps with fewer URLs. The Shopify sitemap, for instance, can contain up to 5.000 URLs, after which the platform breaks these up into smaller parts. This also has the added benefit of speeding up the loading times of these sitemaps.

When doing keyword research, you must also see what your competition is doing. There are a ton of competitors operating in every niche you can imagine. Whenever you are looking at entering a market — or growing your piece of the pie — you must look at the competition. Who are they? What do they stand for? What’s their offering? Their prices? Service? How do they talk about the product? Who are they targeting, and by which terms do they do that?

Keep reading: Product identifiers like SKU and GTIN are essential for ecommerce SEO »

Write great titles and meta descriptions

Your theme is an essential part of your online shop. Your chosen theme influences many things — from branding to user experience to conversions. Everything depends on how awesome your Shopify theme is. Luckily, there’s ample choice in the Shopify Theme Store, and many of these should function perfectly fine for your store.

Alt text is crucial for both SEO and web accessibility, and there are essential tips to follow when writing them for your product images. Firstly, it’s vital to be descriptive in the alt tag and clearly and concisely describe the product’s features, manufacturer, and model number. Additionally, including relevant keywords in the tag can improve your website’s visibility in SERPs and drive more traffic to your site. However, avoiding keyword stuffing and keeping the tag short is essential. Lastly, you should always follow best practices for accessibility, ensuring that the alt tag is descriptive and accurate and can be used by screen readers to describe the image to people with visual impairments.

Shopify works well with product variants like sizes or colors. You have plenty of options to make different combinations of whatever you like. The thing with variants is that it’s hard to get these to show in Google properly. You might not need that depending on your needs, but if you want the different variants of products to be indexed, you might be better off turning your variants into individual products.

When you have your store up and running, the next thing will be getting those customers — and getting them to return and spend more and more. For fledgling stores, ranking products in the search results is complex. It would be best to do more to get noticed, and marketing your Shopify store can get you there. Also, improving the UX can help you get those conversions up.

Marketing, in addition to SEO

Read more: How the right Shopify SEO tools can boost your traffic »

Edwin Toonen

Luckily, most themes and Shopify itself output some product structured data. If you need a more complex setup without coding, you can use one of the structured data apps in the Shopify App Store. But there’s also another possibility: Yoast SEO for Shopify.

Yoast SEO for Shopify outputs structured data automatically

Together with product photography, product descriptions are the life and blood of your online store. With good product descriptions, customers can get a good feel for a product without having it in hand. The problem is many online shops count on the descriptions manufacturers supply to stores. You can probably guess what that means; the same descriptions litter the web, causing duplicate content issues.

While Shopify does some lazy loading by default, you might have to check if your theme has incorporated it. In the past, you needed to use JavaScript libraries to get this done. Today, you don’t have to use those for lazy loading — use native lazy loading. This works in almost all major browsers, with Safari being the last hold-out. For Apple devices, you must turn this on manually in Safari as of now (for the curious: Settings > Safari > Advanced > Experimental Features > Lazy image loading). It shouldn’t be too long before Apple rolls it out for everyone.

First, you have to determine what the goal of your blog is. Do you want to reach new customers, build your brand, form a bond with your current customers, or do something else? What type of content would you want to share — or, instead, what content resonates with your customers? Think about how the user might find you — in other words, map out the user journey. And don’t forget about keyword research! Use those insights to build a content strategy for your Shopify store.

Don’t forget old-school offline marketing for your Shopify store. You must consider offline marketing if you are a local store catering to a local audience. Think of advertising in the local paper, printing flyers, or doing a guerrilla sticker campaign. The options are endless.

Do your image optimization before you upload the images to Shopify. If you already have them uploaded to Shopify, you can use an app to fix them. Compressing thousands of images is tedious, and there are better ways to spend your time than going through them individually. Luckily, some tools can help you speed this up. In the Shopify App Store, you’ll find multiple apps that take care of the compression and optimization of your photos. You could try TinyIMG or Crush.pics to get started.

Lazy loading images

Yoast SEO for Shopify has an additional structured data option to set yourself up for posts and pages. For pages, you can now describe them in detail. For instance, you can tell Google that your contact page is exactly that using a simple selection in the app. After that, Yoast SEO will add ContactPage Schema structured data to your contact page — ready for Google to enjoy.

Shopify ensures you set up your store quickly, and customers and search engines can reach it. Shopify already has some basic SEO features, and you can use SEO apps such as Yoast SEO for Shopify for a lot of the other tasks. Of course, this being a closed platform, your control over SEO is limited to what the developers of Shopify allow.

Building your theme is a good idea if you reach the limits of what’s possible with a pre-built theme. Only so much customization is possible in an existing theme — both in a technical and design sense. You have much more control over the conversion optimization options if you do it yourself.

and:

While trying out every Shopify app under the sun is exciting, keep yourself in check. Many apps are bulky and heavy on JavaScript. Adding many apps will add much extra code to your store, as everything must be constantly loaded. One of the most crucial performance improvements you can make is to keep the number of apps low. Think about what you need for your store, pick the best apps that do that job, and remove the rest.

Properly working with images on your store to improve Shopify SEO

One of the most apparent successes in the meteoric rise in online shopping is Shopify. And with the following SEO tips for Shopify, you can also benefit from that rise.

What is Shopify?

On WordPress, Yoast SEO has one of the best implementations of structured data out there. We built a complete graph that describes and connects every nook and cranny of your site. Google loves this! We bring that to Shopify in our Yoast SEO app, so we can help you tell Google all about your products and their details.

If your store loads slowly, customers will leave it and try a competitor. Luckily, Shopify has performance high on the list of priorities. For instance, it has an automatic content delivery network (CDN) for hosting your content on servers near your customers. In addition, it has an Online Store Speed report that gives you insights into how well your store is performing regarding loading speed. For this, Shopify uses Lighthouse to get real-world results on your store’s performance.

Writing excellent product descriptions is crucial for online stores as it can significantly impact the products’ success in driving sales. Here are some expert tips on how to write product descriptions that will help you attract customers and make money:

1. Know your target audience: Before writing any product description, understand your target audience’s needs and preferences. Compile a consistently elaborate and compelling answer to the three core questions, “What is the problem?”, “How will my product solve this?”, “What will you get by buying this?”
2. Focus on benefits: Emphasize the benefits of the products as opposed to just the features. Benefits tell customers what they stand to gain from buying your product, while features describe what the product does.
3. Use sensory language: Use descriptive language to paint a picture of what the product looks, feels, smells, or tastes like. Invoking the sensory love of your target audience enhances the chances of them making a purchasing decision, which is crucial for converting visitors to buyers.
4. Keep it short and skimmable: Online shoppers bounce between different tabs or windows. Make your product descriptions short but informative and easy to scan so that they can be quickly absorbed. But don’t make it too short! The text has to have a certain heft to it.
5. Optimize for SEO: Be intentional about your keywords, headlines, and subheadings to ensure your product descriptions are optimized for search engines. Include descriptive terms to make it easy for potential customers to find your products.
6. Address pain points: Mention common pain points that the product can solve so that the product description speaks to your customer’s pain and provides them with a solution.
7. Use social proof: Including reviews or testimonials from happy customers can increase the credibility of your product’s quality and effectiveness, increasing the likelihood of purchases.

Keep on reading: Get more sales on Shopify with these 14 tips »

Conversion rate optimization in Shopify

Building your theme is quite complex, and you must consider what you want and need. You need to plan to ensure you don’t encounter issues later. Of course, it’s possible to go into the nitty-gritty yourself, but there are also agencies out there that can help you get this done. The developer section of Shopify has ample documentation to learn more about building and adapting store themes.

Technical SEO for Shopify

Yoast SEO for Shopify not only helps store owners improve their site in a technical sense, but it also comes with an advanced SEO and readability analysis. The app will help you enhance your product page descriptions by suggesting improvements. These suggestions help you make the best product descriptions.

WordPress fans have enjoyed using Yoast SEO for more than a decade — it’s the most popular SEO plugin for a reason! Yoast SEO is for SEO experts by SEO experts. But we didn’t make it for experts only. We’ve made SEO accessible so everyone working with WordPress can use Yoast SEO and get a fair chance in the search results. Over 13 million websites trust Yoast SEO, and our WordPress app has over 25,000 five-star reviews on wordpress.org. Now, Yoast SEO is also available for Shopify. We’re ready to help shop owners get more out of their stores.

File names also help Google make sense of your image. Suppose your file name is DSC37612.jpg, which says nothing about what the image contains. Add something useful. So, if you sell iPhones and the photo shows a close-up of the back camera of an iPhone 14, you can give the file a name like this: iphone_14_back_camera_closeup.jpg. You see this, and you know right away what the image contains. Try to add relevant keywords as well if it makes sense.

With Shopify SEO, you’re building a technically sound store that is tuned to what potential customers are looking for. You will use Shopify SEO in such a way that you build a much better solution than what your competitors are doing. You use research to find out what customers need, and you use the power of high-quality content to draw people in. The Shopify SEO tips also have to do with what you do to market your store in other places — both online and offline. At Yoast, we practice holistic SEO and advise you to do the same — it’s the only way to get sustainable results.

Shopify SEO tips in a handy checklist

When you have a strategy, you can build the blog content on your store. Use cornerstone content as a basis and add articles supporting that main content, so you can fully describe your topic from all angles — and connect everything by proper internal linking. Be sure to write high-quality, unique content that comes across as trustworthy and authoritative.

Blog on WordPress or Shopify?

SEO for your Shopify store must start with keyword research. Keyword research produces a list of terms you want your products, services, or store to be found for. Doing keyword research will give you insights into your audience, which words they use, which solutions they prefer, and how they behave. Do it well, and you get to fill in your SEO strategy for your Shopify site instantly.

Read on: How to get your Shopify store on Google »

Social media marketing

Want to outclass your competitors and boost your Shopify store’s organic traffic? Yoast SEO for Shopify has everything you need, from creating top-notch content to making your products eligible for rich results in Google. Our 24/7 support team and valuable SEO courses will ensure you stay ahead of the curve.

Introduction

We’re talking about duplicate content when a product or content appears on multiple URLs. This is not ideal, as Google might be confused about the main one. Therefore, duplicate content can hinder your performance in search.

Writing your product descriptions can help you establish trust with the consumer. Having your content in your own words makes you more unique and lets you stand out from the crowd. Do keyword research for the products to determine which terms your consumers use. Use those terms in your descriptions and craft a compelling piece of content from that. Incorporate the details from the manufacturer, like SKU and product titles, but don’t rely on their descriptions.

7 tips to write better product descriptions

Shopify has only a handful of filtering options for your online store — no Amazon-style mega menu for you! Luckily, there are ways of getting more filters in your navigation. There are two options: add your custom filters if you use an Online Store 2.0 compatible theme or add an app to manage it.

While at it, check if your theme enforces width and height attributes on img tags. This helps avoid cumulative layout shift (CLS), one of Google’s metrics to determine your Core Web Vitals scores. CLS happens when elements move around during loading because image boundaries haven’t been defined. This causes jerkiness, and that’s a sign for Google that your user experience is lacking. You can try this by running your online store through Google’s page quality checks at web.dev/measure. You can also learn why and how to optimize your site for CLS on that site.

Your site structure should follow a logical path, and your collection system in Shopify should make sense. Please keep it simple. You can see collections as categories, so use the collections to keep customers from having trouble understanding your site. It’s also nice if they don’t have to wade through a million products to find what they need. Make sure to give the collection overview pages the love they need. At the least, give these a proper description.

Internal links are essential

Images are an essential asset for every online store. Customers can’t get a good feel for the product without great photos. But you need to offer all those images in the best way. Optimizing your images is one of the best and quickest tips to improve your Shopify SEO.

The importance of good product images

Launching an online store has become increasingly popular due to several economic and technological trends driving growth. The e-commerce market has been growing steadily, and with increased accessibility to the internet, entrepreneurs can connect with a broader global audience and start businesses from anywhere. The low cost of starting and operating an online store makes it easier for small business owners or start-ups to enter the market. With most internet traffic from mobile devices, a mobile-friendly online store is critical for success.

Just as your product descriptions should be excellent, your titles and meta descriptions should also be epic. The title and meta descriptions are essential aspects you can focus on to improve Shopify SEO. Use your keywords tactically and write something enticing those consumers want to click.

Social media is vast — use it to your advantage! There are a ton of well-known platforms out there, like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, but also more niche ones, like Reddit. Get creative and find out where your audience lives. Find out what they need and connect! Build your brand, your voice, and push your store.

Video marketing

You should also look at the different search intents around your products or services. No one goes from not needing something to buying it in the next second. The buyer journey goes through a whole number of steps. You need to provide content for those steps.

Look at what the competition is doing

With product structured data, you can describe your product to search engines. You’ll tell them about the product’s name, description, images, SKUs, prices, reviews, etc. Search engines like Google might give your product listings a rich result in return for this valuable information. A rich result is a highlighted search with price information, availability, and even star reviews. Getting this is essential for online shops.

Get more organic traffic by creating the best product and blog content. Make your products eligible for rich results in Google. Plus, you’ll get access to our top-notch SEO courses and fantastic support team (24/7). Check out the Yoast SEO for Shopify product page, or get the app now!