This is a comprehensive SEO Shopify guide with complete information, tips and tricks to ensure that your shop thrive.

When adding search engine optimization to your Shopify website, you should strive to improve the search engine ranking for your store which will help prospective customers find your shop online. If you are trying to gain additional traffic on your website, you may reel some people in by optimizing your keywords enough, but you might not convert all of these website visits into sales if your strategy is just to throw keywords at potential buyers. 

So, if you are looking to properly implement SEO to improve your marketing tactics and increase the traffic to your Shopify website, there are other strategies to optimize. It is important to keep in mind that converting traffic into browsers into buyers is a process that only starts with search engine optimization, so let’s turn you into an SEO Shopify expert.

Let’s go over the Top Five Ways to optimize SEO on a Shopify website and convert your shop traffic into people who will purchase your products.

Improve your website content

Our first tip focuses less on SEO and more on style and structure of your website. If we think of using SEO as a pipeline from Google to your shop to a sale, your ultimate goal will be to keep your new customer on your site and engaged with your site for as long as you possibly can. The more time that someone spends on a website, the more likely they are to make a purchase.

Shopify recommends that your online store’s navigation is a crucial aspect of this process. Their recommendations for optimizing online store navigation include: 

• Menu items should be in an order that flows.
• Each page should contain a link in the online store navigation.
• Sales pages should not be more than three clicks away from your home page.

By making sure that your website content is easy to navigate, appealing to the eye, and has good content, you will be sure to have a higher conversion rate from website clicks to finalized sales. 

Don’t skip the basics!

Our second tip focuses on the places that should be obvious to most people adding SEO to their website, but often go forgotten about. Instead of just tossing keywords into the plain text on your Shopify website, you should be making the effort to organically include these keywords in the other visible places on your website.

First and foremost, your Page Title and Meta Description should be search engine optimized. If these two aspects of your website are not ready for SEO, you are likely losing out on a lot of traffic! Ensure that your Page Title is descriptive and contains one of your top keywords. As well, your Meta Description is the description that shows up in your search engine listing. You should try to use as many relevant keywords as you possibly can in a way that sounds completely natural. 

Secondly, Alt Text for images is another important place where you should not be skipping out on the opportunity to use your keywords. Make sure that you are adding keywords that are applicable to the page in which the image is on. This will ensure that your readers are not clicking away and frustrated that the page that Google has taken them to is irrelevant to the keyword they just read from the alt text. 

Lastly, adding keywords to the H1 (main headings) on your pages is extremely important. Not only does this tell your new customer that they are in the right place, search engines commonly use the H1 heading to figure out what the page content is about and whether or not it is relevant to the searcher’s search results. 

By paying attention to these crucial parts of a website for SEO, you will be sure to drive additional traffic to your Shopify website. These four aspects of your shop are highly important to search engine analytics and will boost your website through the search engine result ranks. 

Don’t forget the small details either. 

Our third SEO shopify guide’s tip is to not forget that SEO extends past just the actual written content on your website. There are hidden places that you should be adding your search engine optimized keywords to that you may be forgetting about. Let’s go over two easily missed details on your Shopify website that have the ability to drive traffic to your website.

Your images are not likely to come up in search engine results on their own. Instead, you will need to manually add descriptive file names for your images. For example, if your main website image is a picture of the shoes that you are selling and your file name for the photo is ‘IMG3294384.jpg’, this does not tell search engines anything about your image. Instead, reupload your photos with a more descriptive and accurate file name to add SEO to it. You may want to name it blackwedgesforwomen.jpg, if this is an accurate and search engine optimized description of the product that you are trying to sell to customers online. The only unfortunate part about making this change is that you will have to rename and reupload each of your images for your products in order to optimize your image names.

In addition to optimizing image file names, you should try to promote clicks within your website by encouraging people to click on the description of your product rather than a call to action such as a ‘Click here’. This is less of an SEO optimization trick and more of a psychological tool to make your customers more interested in your product. 

Consider a phrase such as, ‘Purchase your new backpack here.’

Instead of adding a link to the word ‘here’, engage your reader and get them excited about the product itself by adding the link to the word ‘backpack’ instead. This small detail often gets overlooked but linking your products in this way grabs the attention of your new customers in a way that is more persuasive than linking your call to action terms.  

Market yourself by collaborating with others.

A beautiful thing about improving your online presence is that if your products are showing up on other websites or blogs, you are going to get more attention on your Shopify website as long as they are linking back to your products. This way of improving SEO for your Shopify website is a little less direct but is one of the most helpful ways to start increasing the amount of conversions to sales that you are making.

You’ve surely seen those Buzzfeed listicles that tell you the top 30 products to buy for Father’s Day, there are hundreds if not thousands of other websites that will do the same thing for your products. These sorts of articles are a great way to telegraph to people online that your Shopify website is trustworthy and that your products are worth spending their hard-earned money on. 

If you make the effort to build relationships with other content creators and websites, your shop will begin to show up in search engine results more often as you start to spread out your online visibility. 

Ensure that your SEO keywords are properly researched. 

With all of the effort that you are putting into optimizing your SEO on your Shopify website, you want to make sure that the keywords that you are using are correct. Double check these keywords with SEO marketing tools online and see if the top keywords on your list are actually the top keywords that people are searching for. Just taking a guess at the proper keywords for your products is not the approach that will draw the most attention to your website and result in sales.

There is a specific science to choosing SEO keywords that will maximize your visibility online and double checking that your keywords are appropriate will help you know that your efforts to optimize your Shopify website have been worth it.  By using search engine optimization tools, you can find the exact formatting of your keywords that are most popularly looked for. 

Conclusion and Takeaway

When you are optimizing SEO for your Shopify website, your goal should be to work smarter, not harder to gain traffic and sales on your online shop. By following these top five ways to add optimization to your Shopify website, you will be acting as your own SEO Shopify expert, and you will be able to increase the amount of visitors to your shop and convert your shop traffic into real people who will purchase your products. Remember to not skip the basics or forget about the more detailed aspects of SEO optimization for a Shopify website and with the proper keywords, you are sure to successfully find success with SEO for your Shopify website.