Most AI-written Shopify articles and collections never rank. But after testing dozens of AI workflows, we made one that consistently pushes pages to number one in Google. In this video, I’ll walk you through the exact prompts so you can copy them for your store.

The Shortcut to Finding Rankable Keywords

Here’s where most store owners kill their SEO before it even starts. They guess keywords or trust a tool without context but that’s like throwing darts blindfolded. Every miss costs time, money, and momentum.

We saw this firsthand with a client of ours, TrueTrac. They have two flagship products. No giant catalog.

Everyone says you need a lot of products or a massive content budget to rank high.

Instead, we flipped the script. We started by finding three problem-based keywords their customers were already searching for. But here’s the twist: when we checked Google, the top results weren’t blogs at all. They were collection pages.

So we built collection pages as well by following the exact AI prompts you can get by downloading the free resource at the start of this article.

This instantly created SEO-optimized content that ranked them first for entirely new search terms.

This generated hundreds of free clicks made up of people ready to buy because problem-based searches convert.

Here’s the real lesson: SEO isn’t about churning out content. It’s about matching searcher intent. This is what Google loves.

How to Find Low-Competition Keywords Step by Step

Here’s how you do it:

Step 1: Grab a product or collection name from your store.

Step 2: Plug it into Ahrefs or Semrush.

Step 3: Filter for KD 0–10 and domains under DR 10. Translation: look for terms where small sites already win.

Step 4: Search them in Google. If the top results are collections, don’t waste time writing a blog. Build a collection page.

Now you’ve got your first batch of SEO-ready topics without writing 50 random blog posts. But keywords alone don’t rank. The structure of your page makes or breaks it and this is where AI gives you an unfair advantage.

How to Use AI to Rank: Structured Content Right From the First Draft

Most people still grind away at SEO articles the old way, typing for hours, rewriting paragraphs, and praying Google notices. And then… nothing. Their post disappears on page five, buried, never to be seen. That’s not just frustrating. It’s wasted traffic, wasted time, and in many cases, lost revenue.

For TrueTrac, we tested dozens of different AI workflows. Most of them looked good on paper, but the drafts still flopped in search. Until we cracked a system that completely changed the game. Instead of fighting Google, we built custom GPTs that structure content exactly how Google wants it.

And for collection pages? Google doesn’t want fluff. It wants precise answers to exact queries. That shift alone cut our build time for collections from 2 hours to 20 minutes.

Here’s how it works. Say I want to rank a collection for “baby summer dresses”. Instead of guessing or outlining from scratch, I just drop that phrase straight into the GPT.

In seconds, it generates a clean draft that’s already optimized for structure and search intent. You can even test it yourself. I’ve linked free versions of both the article GPT and the collection GPT in the downloadable resource at the start of this article.

At that point, all I have to do is skim for details and polish. And just like that, I’ve got traffic-ready content without the grind.

That’s the raw power of AI workflows. But here’s the catch (and this is where most people fail). A perfectly structured draft won’t rank if you stop here. And that’s where the next step comes in.

Don’t Hit Publish After Draft One

Hitting publish after draft one is the single biggest SEO mistake. It’s why so many posts sit lifeless on page five, invisible to anyone searching.

Every time you skip this step, you’re basically handing free traffic to your competitors.

We refused to let that happen at TrueTrac. Instead of stopping at new pages, we refined them. The difference was night and day. By comparing each draft against the top three results, the pages went from zero traffic to 895 clicks in just three months.

That’s hundreds of ready-to-buy visitors from searches that competitors once owned.

How to Refine Your AI Content Against Competitors

So how do you actually do it? With AI.

The same prompt I’ve made for you handles all of this automatically. All you’ve got to do is drop in your collection name and paste the top 3 competitor URLs. That’s it.

In seconds, it breaks down the exact questions people are asking, shows you what competitors are covering that you’re not, and spits out a list of real SEO upgrades ready to copy and paste.

It’s not vague fluff like “add more images.” You get a precise, competitor-backed checklist of content gaps and improvements. That’s how you leapfrog straight past page five without any guesswork.

The scary part about AI today is that even if you master this process, Google is still stealing your traffic with AI Overviews. This means less sales for you from organic search. So learn this simple Shopify SEO trick that’s already beating Google’s AI and how you can protect your clicks before they vanish.

Most Shopify brands misuse ChatGPT and lose sales without realizing it. After two years building AI systems for 6, 7, and 8-figure stores, I’ve narrowed it down to the top 4 insane ChatGPT hacks to blow up sales.

This first one is critical because it fixes the core issue in AI that holds most brands back.

1. ChatGPT Hacks for Shopify: Unleashing the Human Mode

There is a hidden setting inside ChatGPT that instantly makes everything it writes sharper, cleaner, and far more human. Most brands don’t even realize the problem is baked into the default settings, and that is exactly why this hack feels like cheating. Here is how it works: Go to Settings → Personalization → Custom Instructions. Copy and paste a few instructions in the description I’m about to show you and you’ll save yourself time editing anything ChatGPT outputs.

And this little tweak becomes crucial in about 60 seconds when I show you the hack most brands had no idea you can do to save dozens of hours a month. Once I switched on this “Human Mode,” something clicked for me. You see, AI leaves fingerprints. It’s like seeing the seams in cheap fabric. Once you know what to look for, you cannot unsee it.

Identifying AI Writing Flaws

There are five tell-tale signs your writing in email copy, social media posts, video scripts, and blog articles are AI-generated. One on its own doesn’t prove anything, but when a couple shows up together, the writing feels artificial and your conversions take a hit.

1. Em dashes everywhere. Sentences like: “Balancing work, family, fitness, and wellness requires intentional choices — especially when it comes to nutrition.” You have seen this. AI loves dramatic dashes even when they are not needed.

2. Filler phrases. “In today’s fast-paced world…” “This innovative solution…” These add nothing, yet AI throws them in constantly.

3. Repetition and wordiness. Ask AI a simple question like: “Write me a hook for a video script” and it gives you a paragraph that takes longer to read than if you wrote it yourself.

4. Formulaic structure. Patterns like: “Protein is more than a muscle-builder. It is the foundation for overall vitality.” It is technically correct, but it’s soulless.

5. Hallucinations (the dangerous one). This is when the model confidently invents information. It makes up product features, fills gaps with guesses, and presents false details as if they are facts. This is a silent sales killer.

Fix these five issues and your ChatGPT output immediately sounds more human and more trustworthy, and you save hours of prompting. Once your AI stops sounding robotic, that is when the real magic starts. Because the rest of the hacks are pure revenue builders.

2. AI Customer Research for Shopify

Most ecommerce brands fail to grow long before the copy starts. They skip the deep market research that makes every ad, every headline, and every landing page actually convince someone to pull out their credit card. This makes everything afterwards like pushing a boulder uphill.

The approach I use comes from Stefan Georgi. His research method gets you so dialed into your customer that the sentences almost write themselves. You stop guessing. You stop forcing copy. You start speaking in a way that actually connects.

Before we write a single line, we create four core documents. These give the AI clarity, accuracy, and trust. These are the same documents Fortune 500 companies spend serious money on. They are not optional. They are the difference between copy that converts and copy that doesn’t.

The Total Research Method Document

This is the most important one. I copy the prompt, enable deep research mode, and upload a document I’ve made called The Total Research Method. This is my ultimate document that I use for all my market research. With it, you’ll discover everything you could dream up from frustrations, fears, psychographics, gaps in the market, and more.

The Lazy Avatar Cheat Sheet for Shopify

Once I’ve got that, I complete The Lazy Avatar Cheat Sheet for Shopify. This maps out who you are actually talking to. Their age. Their goals. Their fears. When your copy reflects that inner world, trust forms instantly.

The Irresistible Offer Brief

Now, onto the third document which is the irresistible offer brief. Again, I copy the prompt and upload the document. This is where your angle and your unique mechanism come from. It is how you explain your product in a way that feels different from everything else they have tried.

The Sequence of Beliefs

Lastly, is the sequence of beliefs document. I copy and prompt and upload the document. These are the beliefs someone must hold before they can confidently say yes. If your prospect is skeptical or jaded or convinced that nothing ever works for them, your copy has to address that head on.

Once you have these four documents, writing anything becomes easy. You do not need clever lines. You simply take what the market already told you and shape it into a clear, persuasive message. The AI stops guessing. You stop guessing. Everything flows.

3. Creating Linkable Assets for Shopify SEO

This next strategy is how you get people talking about your brand, and how you get Google and AI platforms to start recommending you without paying for ads. One of the strongest ways to get your Shopify brand mentioned inside AI conversations is surprisingly simple. You need other websites talking about you.

Because here is the truth. Links are the most powerful part of SEO and GEO. They are how Google and AI systems decide who to trust. Every major study from Backlinko, Semrush, and Ahrefs shows the same pattern. The more quality backlinks you have, the higher you rank and the more traffic you get. So if no one links to you, you basically don’t exist online.

With nothing but ChatGPT, I built a complete interactive page for a Shopify brand. The planning, the copy, the design, everything was produced with AI. And the crazy part is that it does not feel like AI at all. The best linkable assets share three traits. They are credible. They are data-driven. And they give people a unique reason to reference them.

Once the asset is done, you can pitch it to journalists, run a press release, or reach out to bloggers with one simple goal. Get them to link to the asset. This is where the magic really starts happening across search and AI platforms.

Learn how to optimize your Shopify SEO in AI to ensure customers can find you easily.

4. Replicate High-Performing Ads: The Ad Assembly Line Method

Now here is where things get stupidly powerful. Stop guessing what makes a high-performing creative.

I created this simple AI system to give myself another way to make proven ads for Meta that takes only minutes. I call this the Ad Assembly Line Method. It is inspired by Henry Ford’s production line because he figured out how to repeat what works with precision instead of rebuilding the process every single time.

By following this system, you’ll go from nothing to full brief within minutes to help you scale Meta ads. That includes proven b-roll shots. No writer’s block. No overthinking.

Step 1: Find a high-performing ad. The easiest way is with Foreplay. Go to a brand whose ads you admire. Select a filter of status Still Running. Select the format of Video.

Then, look for a video ad that has been running for at least 30 days. Longevity is the greatest signal you have that the ad is profitable.

Step 2: Download the ad. Foreplay makes this simple. If you prefer other tools, Chrome extensions and online downloaders work too.

Step 3: Get a transcript. Foreplay gives you the transcript instantly. OpenAI have developed their Open Source Whisper to transcribe, but this is unavailable in ChatGPT. You can use a free tool like freesubtitles.ai, which uses Whisper to get an .SRT file.

Step 4: Use this prompt. Upload the ad and use this prompt in ChatGPT. Modify the branding, brand voice, and product in the prompt as necessary. A key part in the prompt is extracting the scenes. The quality and extraction details help it complete the job.

Step 5: Finalize the brief. After some processing, you’ll get a good script coupled with suggested footage to use for the video. You end up with a shot list and a creative blueprint that your editor and a creator can follow for Meta Partnership Ads.

Don’t forget to get all the prompts and documents I’ve used in this guide for free within the Shopify AI Growth Kit.

There’s a trick I’m using with Shopify SEO clients to stay visible as Google floods search results with AI. That matters because 16% of ecommerce queries now show AI answers. They’re quietly stealing your traffic and sales. Most store owners have no idea it’s even happening.

In this post, you’ll see how AI Overviews are hijacking traffic. You’ll get a practical strategy that works, plus a few fast changes you can make today to start winning back sales. This is Shopify SEO Advice that’s built to survive algorithm shifts because it works with how Google behaves.

For a deeper dive into Shopify SEO, see our free expert guide with 101+ tips.

The video below breaks down how Google’s AI rewrites search results and precisely what you can do to win back clicks.

How Google’s AI Is Stealing Your Customers

Let’s say someone searches for “how to remove grout stain.” In the past, they’d see a featured snippet, a short preview from a webpage. But in 2024, Google took it a step further. It now shows fully AI-generated answers, replacing the need to click entirely.

See how we forced snippets in real time with this 7-minute featured snippet challenge.

That means: no clicks. No traffic. No chance to sell. Google’s AI already wrote the essay, solved the problem, and probably filed their taxes while it was at it.

According to a study by Bart that analyzed 25,000 ecommerce keywords, 16% of ecommerce queries now trigger AI Overviews. That’s over one in six searches. Kevin from Growth Memo also found that websites cited in these answers receive 8.9% fewer clicks compared to regular organic rankings.

This isn’t a minor shift, it’s a complete transformation in how SEO in e-commerce works. For e-commerce brands, adapting to this new reality isn’t optional.

See Kevin’s Guide on “How to craft a winning SEO strategy.”

Informational vs Commercial: The Key to Beating AI

To beat AI in Shopify SEO, you need to understand what kind of searches trigger it. Let’s break down three example queries:

• “How to remove grout stain” – Informational. Google AI provides full cleaning instructions.
• “Remove grout stain” – Still informational. Again, AI summary takes over.
• “Grout stain remover” – Commercial. Triggers shopping ads and product listings instead.

See the difference? Google AI answers questions, it doesn’t sell products. That means informational queries are more likely to be intercepted by AI, while commercial keywords, those with buying intent, still show shopping ads and organic product results.

That’s your Shopify SEO opportunity. If you’re targeting keywords that show shopping ads, you’re more likely to avoid AI Overviews altogether. Your traffic stays intact, and your store stays visible.

Optimizing Shopify Product Pages to Rank for Buyer Keywords

Product Title Optimization

Let’s look at a real example. A store called That’s Awesome is currently ranking 46th for a relevant product keyword. Their title reads:

Tile & Grout Cleaner natural non toxic and environmentally friendly 5 Litre Australian Made

It’s long, unclear, and poorly formatted. Compare that to a competitor title like:

Aqua Mix Cement Grout Haze Remover 946ml

It’s clean, focused, and keyword-rich. A better version for our example might be:

Natural Grout Haze & Stain Remover for Tiles – 5L

Keep titles under 60 characters. Put the most important keywords at the front. Match buyer search terms.

Product Description Cleanup

Many stores have product pages that look like a wall of text. This hurts both conversions and SEO. Customers, and Google, prefer scannable formats.

Use bullet points to highlight key features:

• Enzyme-based formula continues cleaning after application
• Safe for tiles, timber, and lino surfaces
• No-rinse, no sticky residue

For detailed CRO tips, see our Shopify conversion rate guide.

Fixing Internal Links

Another simple yet common mistake: broken internal links. Make sure they point to live, relevant product or collection pages. It’s one of the easiest SEO wins available.

How Schema Markup Beats AI Summaries

Google’s AI can generate summaries, but it can’t display key details like prices, stock status, or star ratings, unless you give it that data. That’s where schema markup becomes your secret weapon.

When used properly, schema can transform a plain blue search result into a rich snippet, like the one shown here. Instead of relying solely on your page title and meta description, Google pulls structured data directly from your site to highlight product-specific information that drives clicks.

To fix this, install the free schema from my Shopify SEO guide. First, edit your theme. Click the “Snippets” folder, then create a file named schema.liquid. Copy and paste the template code into the new file, it should look something like the screenshot below.

The code includes structured data for breadcrumbs and collections, which helps Google better understand your content. Edit the first line to include your logo URL. Add your social media and Wikipedia links on the second. Then, drop a render call into your theme.liquid just before the closing </head> tag to activate it site-wide.

For example, this listing includes:

• Price (e.g. $34.00)
• Stock availability (e.g. “In stock”)
• Delivery cost (e.g. $90 delivery)
• Return policy (e.g. “30-day returns”)
• In some cases, rich snippets can also display:
• Star ratings and customer reviews
• Product images and brand names
• Estimated shipping times
• Variant or SKU information

These enhancements help your product stand out in a crowded results page. They build trust at a glance, increase click-through rates, and give buyers the confidence to visit your store. More importantly, they send strong signals to Google about what your page offers, making it less likely that your content will be pushed aside or replaced by AI-generated summaries in search results.

All of this is enabled by proper schema markup. Use Google’s Rich Results Test to check your current setup.

You can also use the free Shopify SEO schema template to apply this markup across your site.

One Last Trick to Beat AI with Free Listings

AI Overviews are taking over more of the search results, but there’s one area they don’t touch: Google Shopping.

Free product listings powered by Google Merchant Center still show up in the Shopping tab and the “Popular Products” carousel, and these results don’t get overwritten by AI summaries.

To appear here, make sure your Merchant Center is fully set up:

• Enable Free Listings in Google Merchant Center
• Add GTINs (barcodes) for all applicable products
• Track conversions with Google Analytics
• Set clear return and shipping policies
• Fully complete your product feed with accurate data
• Connect Google Analytics or GA4 to track performance

Then go through your product feed and fill out every possible detail. Titles, descriptions, pricing, availability – all of it. Google rewards clean, complete data with better placements.

That’s how your products end up in visual placements like the one below, featured as “Popular Products” even without paying for ads.

While AI dominates more of the main SERPs, this is still one of the last free, high-intent opportunities for ecommerce stores to get seen. Most merchants ignore it. Don’t be one of them.

Turn AI Overviews Into Shopify SEO Wins

AI in search and ChatGPT isn’t going anywhere, but that doesn’t mean your traffic has to disappear.

Yes, Google’s AI Overviews are reshaping search. But with the right strategy, your store doesn’t just survive – it stands out.

By targeting commercial keywords (not just informational ones), optimizing your product pages for real buyer intent, and enhancing your visibility with structured data and Merchant Center listings, you can claim space that AI summaries can’t overwrite. That’s how you stay competitive and keep growing.

Ready To Win Back Your Shopify Traffic From Google’s AI?

Don’t sit back while search changes, adapt faster than your competitors. Join Shopify merchants getting weekly SEO tactics that actually grow revenue.

For more in-depth tactics, see my full Shopify SEO Guide or subscribe to my newsletter for weekly growth strategies.

I tried to get four different pages of a Shopify store to rank for featured snippets, using a beginner SEO technique anyone can use. With a tight timeframe of 7 minutes per page to get number one in Google, this method is fast and effective.

Adding to the excitement, for every page that doesn’t rank for a featured snippet in the top spot, $1000 will be given to a random YouTube subscriber.

Read on to see how you can apply the SEO strategy to your Shopify store so you too can quickly increase sales from organic search.

How I Use SEO To Rank Keywords For Featured Snippets in Less Than 7 Minutes and You Can Too

If you can press keys on your keyboard for a few minutes, you can copy this simple tactic to rank featured snippets in Google. You don’t need any money or tools; it works for any website, not just e-commerce. This technique is the holy grail of SEO because it is the easiest and fastest way, out of any other SEO method, to rank your stores for featured snippets and get in the top of organic search—page one of Google!

My SEO team has used this beginner SEO technique to rank featured snippets for hundreds of Shopify pages in the number one position for popular keywords, and you don’t need any skills to copy it and rank a page in minutes.

Revolutionising SEO: No Tools, No Costs, Just Results

It’s all about the results at the end of the day; ranking for featured snippets is no small challenge, but use this technique just like me, and you rank too.

I discovered it two years ago while working on an SEO client, Galen Leather, in a highly competitive niche with an article targeting the keyword “nibmeister”. By adding h1 and h2 tags and making a few minor content tweaks, the page got crowned number one in under a week.

The article has stayed first, because the phrase “What Is A Nibmeister” has h2 tags directly above the definition, making it a breeze for Google to interpret.

Even with a low search volume for this keyword, there was an instant surge in impressions and clicks from this one page.

The Google Update that Changed Ranking Keywords Using SEO

In 2014, Google made a change to search results that really annoyed SEO marketers. This old Google update will let you rank first in under one week. Google began to show snippets of a webpage that gave answers to search queries directly from search results. The search feature displays a summary of text, tables, or lists called “featured snippets”. Many marketers worry that people don’t need to click through to the website, but that is not the case because a link to the source is shown, which generates traffic and sales.

The advantages of optimizing for featured snippets are significant. By following the strategies outlined in this video, you can enhance your website’s visibility, establish your brand’s authority, increase organic click-through rates, and drive more traffic to your site.

An Ahrefs study of 2 million featured snippets found:

It is 99.58% positive that Google only features pages that already rank in the top 10.

So you need to optimise a page ranking in the top 10 search results that contain a featured snippet.

If you’re not ranking in the top 10 for anything or want to get more pages in the top 10, the study found that you can create in-depth content for long-tail keywords by filling in blanks that searchers might have. This increases your chances of rapidly ranking.

Featured Snippets: 3 Reasons To Use Featured Snippets To Rank

Featured snippets are fantastic for SEO because you can quickly outrank competitors, getting to the number one search result to achieve more clicks and sales. There’s no danger of getting penalised because you’re updating your content to serve users better. This is what Google ultimately wants.

The Ahrefs study of featured snippets found that the click-through rate depends on the search query’s intent. When the user wants a quick answer, like a definition, they don’t need to click any result.

This is a prisoner’s dilemma because if you don’t play the game, some other website will steal the SEO keyword and rank for the featured snippet first.

Another benefit of featured snippets is that you’re optimising for voice search. A Backlinko study found that 40.7% of all voice search results come from a featured snippet.

How You Can Use Featured Snippets To Rank In The First Position Fast

To show you how to do this, I looked into what opportunities existed for Galen Leather, and as I mentioned at the start of this article, I would try to show you how to rank for multiple keywords, 4 pages, in under a week, all with less than 7 minutes of work.

If I failed, my YouTube subscribers could win $1,000, but read on to see how well I did.

If you’re asking yourself how to find keywords to optimise for your site, you can find what search query gets a featured snippet by looking at the average position data in Google Search Console and then searching those keywords in Google.

That is the free way, without paying. The best method is to use tools like Ahrefs Site Explorer then look at the organic keywords report. Filter results by “Featured Snippets”. Remove first-position rankings with another filter. Then “bam”, you have a full list of keywords and content that can quickly rank for a featured snippet.

These are all opportunities. If you want to give yourself the greatest chance of success, it’s not about editing pages ranked 2 or 3. Featured snippets have their own ranking system. I gained this pearl of wisdom from Matt Diggity. His video on the “Google Holy Grail” revealed a hidden ranking queue for featured snippets. You can see where your website stands by sifting through Google so that you can then optimise the right page for the right keywords. This is the Google Holy Grail because you can see what’s needed to rank.

Let’s look at the featured snippets for the query “dopp kit meaning”. Plug this into Google. Travelpro.com has the number 1 featured snippet.

What I’ll then do is remove the website from search results with the minus site search query by typing in “-site:travelpro.com.”

Next, I see the number one ranking, so I’ll add “-site:graveltravel.com” to the search. I repeat this process until my website is ranked number one. The number of websites you exclude in your search is the ranking queue for featured snippets.

If you’re limited in time, go after the ones where your website is ranked number 2, then 3, then 4, etc., in the featured snippets queue.

How Did I Rank Pages For Featured Snippets in Record Time?

So now you get the idea, but you want to know how well I did at ranking the keywords for SEO. For this experiment, I picked 4 random queries from the Ahrefs report that have the featured snippets in search results and ranked between the 2nd and 6th position.

I tried to rank number one for “what is patina on leather”, “a4 notebook size”, “leather grades”, and “oil vegetable leather”.

“what is patina on leather”

“a4 notebook size”

“leather grades”

“oil vegetable leather”

This was a real experiment!

For each page that didn’t reach number for the featured snippet one in one week, I gave away $1000 to random YouTube channel subscribers who commented.

Now, let’s dive into the nitty-gritty of keyword ranking. You’ve identified the pages you want to rank first and the SEO keywords you’re targeting. But how do you make it happen?

Types of Featured Snippets

There are four main types of feature snippets: paragraph snippets, table snippets, video snippets, and lists.

The first secret is replicating the number one ranking snippet format. Most pages I tried to rank for were paragraph snippets—others I found featured snippets in a table format for prices, years, and numerical data.

Using a list format in your content can be a powerful tool, especially for queries that list items or require step-by-step instructions. This format not only makes your content more structured and easy to follow, but it also increases the chances of your content being featured in search engine results, boosting your web page’s visibility and ranking.

One effective strategy is to incorporate videos, often from YouTube, in your content. These videos can be used in featured snippets for “how to” queries, such as “how to remove an oil stain from concrete”. This approach has proven to be successful, inspiring you to take similar steps to improve your webpage’s visibility and ranking.

Copying the format isn’t enough, though. How can you improve your webpage? How will I make the right changes to these four pages so I don’t give away $4000?

Being Succinct and The Inverted Pyramid: Two Secrets To Ranking For SEO

In 2020, Google search advocate John Mueller tweeted that featured snippets are algorithmic and that ranking keywords using SEO has a variety of factors that are used to pick a good snippet.

Before then and since then, John has been secretive about what exactly must be done, tweeting there’s no technical method to achieve it.

His secretiveness is understandable since everyone would be hacking their way to the top.

Google has said there is no minimum length requirement to get a featured snippet, so your best bet is to be like your top competitor and observe the data.

The Outcome: How I Ranked My Keywords Using Featured Snippets

So instead of depending on what Google tells us, I depended on the data, and used large data studies like the one from Ahrefs to understand what gets ranked.

I found there are 3 other main changes you can make to quickly get top place.

The first is to be succinct. I’m going to look for ways to use tighter language. If a word is unnecessary, it’s going to be culled. Ask yourself, “If I remove this word, does it still make sense?”

This is a technique journalists use to grab and keep attention. You share the most newsworthy info first, which is the who, what, when, where, why and how. If there’s room, you then give the important details followed by further background information. The tactic makes perfect sense because you’re desperate to hook attention as quickly as possible, then deliver on it in order to satisfy the people searching.

Ranking For Featured Snippets: The Third Method I Used To Rank

The third best way to rank multiple keywords first in Google, specifically for a featured snippet, is to improve your rankings using all the good SEO things. Ranking keywords using SEO is a mixture of optimizing images, having user-friendly URLs, and getting backlinks. I won’t discuss that in this video as I want you to get organic traffic quickly. For help here, you can watch my YouTube video on common SEO mistakes.

Let’s see what I can do. “a4 notebook size” in search results has Gold Spot in number one position.

Let’s compare content. Here’s the content on the website from which Google pulls the featured snippet.

The heading is a h2.

This is Galen Leather’s content.

The heading is a h4.

I can update the heading to h2. I also changed “Format” to “Notebook Format”.

There’s no perfect way to do this, so it’s an experimentation.

Here’s the second page I needed to rank to save my butt. We’re ranking number 3 for “what is patina on leather”.

Here’s what’s ranking in search results which has a h2 tag immediately followed by a clear definition “Patina is”.

Galen Leather also has a h2 tag.

The intro sentence acts as a miss-placed definition of Patina. Also, “fine” is an unnecessary adjective that dilutes the title. Starting the sentence with another adjective, “leather”, makes the content seem like it doesn’t apply to the broader “Patina”, so I removed that and cleaned up other parts of the sentence.

For the third page, I wanted it to rank first for “leather grades”.

The content has a simple paragraph with general language. There’s two possible pieces to modify. One is in a list format, or we can work with the intro.

It makes more sense to have a proper definition first since it’s being talked about. Let’s edit the intro to be stronger.

For the last page I’m trying to get first, the keyword is “oil vegetable leather”. I’ve read the top ranking competitors page and seen their content.

Looking over what I’ve got.

I reckon there’s some improvements to make. I can change the h3 to h2.

Part of this was removing the redundant h2 tag that targeted nothing compared to the h1 tag.

I rejigged the heading tags and made the definition more chronological in its wording.

How I Went Ranking Keyword 1 – “what is patina on leather”

Let’s do the next check for the featured snippet and ranking for “what is patina on leather”

No, it was not a featured snippet, and it didn’t take the top position. Let’s hope the next one does better.

How I Went Ranking Keyword 2 – “a4 notebook size”.

Let’s do the next check for “a4 notebook size”.

Yes, it was in first position, but while it’s the first position, it didn’t get the featured snippet, which is in the second position in the “people also ask” box.

Phew. That one saved me $1,000.

How I Went Ranking Keyword 3 – “leather grades”

Next I checked the keyword “leather grades”.

Sadly, I didn’t have this one either, so as of now, I had to give away at least $2,000.

Unexpectedly, the ranking snippet has been updated to a different format. For another optimisation test, I could follow the list format and create some new images in the search result that visually describe the different leathers.

Experimentation is the big thing about featured snippets. Like any SEO, there’s best practices, but nothing is guaranteed. You study what’s best, implement, observe, and try again. I can also get more backlinks, improving the SEO of the page. If what you do doesn’t succeed, try again. That’s a big secret to this strategy that I want you to understand.

How I Went Ranking Keyword 4 – “oil vegetable leather”

I then checked the last keyword, “oil vegetable leather,” and I got number one position. Thankfully, I didn’t have to give away any more money!

How I Went Ranking My Keywords First Quickly and Did I Give Away Any Money?

So, as you saw above after one week of this experiment, I had to check all the pages to see the results and I gave away 2 out of 4 $1000 lots. 50/50 isn’t so bad for 7 minutes of SEO, imagine if I had no newborn and those extra 3 minutes!

One week later, I saw I got number one for “leather grades”, but this was 2 weeks after, not the 7 days like I said. While this beginner SEO technique works, I’m a man of my word so I gave away $1000 each to two of our subscribers.

Go subscribe to the YouTube channel and leave me a comment with some life wisdom, questions, or comments. You’ll get more videos to grow your Shopify store.

Featured snippets take work, but they’re worth it when you get them right. If you want help ranking your Shopify store for these high-value positions, we handle SEO for Shopify stores.

Allbirds and Gymshark are on Shopify and they can’t get their hreflang tags right. The public companies failed, even with their resources, because there’s no native way to manage tags for multiple Shopify accounts. Shopify’s own documentation in 2021 told you the basics of hreflang tags on a homepage, but you were left bewildered with how to do it sitewide.

As a result of working with SEO clients who had this exact struggle, the Digital Darts team and I invented three ways to get perfect hreflang tags in Shopify. You’ll learn how to correct every type of error, every variable you must consider, and how to keep your tags fresh with minimal effort. Businesses on WordPress, Magento, and other platforms can use what’s shared with minor alterations. No one has taught it in-depth until now. In this guide, you’ll get it all to delight Google.

What Are Hreflang Tags?

Hreflang tags tell Google the relationship between alternate web pages. The tags specify the language and region served by each version of the webpage.

If I jump into Google Australia then search “Victoria Beckham shop”, I get their international subdomain ranking at the top:

I see the international version of the store over their US English (https://us.victoriabeckham.com/) and UK English versions (https://www.victoriabeckham.com/). Why is that?

The answer lies in their hreflang tags:

<link rel="alternate" href="https://us.victoriabeckham.com/" hreflang="en-us" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.victoriabeckham.com/" hreflang="en-gb" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://international.victoriabeckham.com/" hreflang="en" />

Let’s breakdown a hreflang tag into three elements using this example:

<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/" hreflang="en-us" />

1. The first element is rel="alternate". This tells Google the URL is an alternate version of the page.
2. The second element is href="https://www.example.com/". This is the location of the page.
3. The third element is hreflang="en-us". This specifies the alternate URL is for English-speaking Americans.
4. The order of elements is irrelevant.

The Benefits of Hreflang Tags Go Beyond SEO

Hreflang tags are for multilingual or multi-regional websites. If you have a single website with one language like DigitalDarts.com.au, there’s no need for hreflang tags.

The biggest benefit of hreflang tags is more revenue from improved rankings. Good hreflang tags can give multilingual or multi-regional websites a boost in organic rankings. At the 2017 International Search Summit in Barcelona, Gary Illyes from Google said that page signals are shared between alternate versions of a page with hreflang tags to help SEO.

“Pages should be able to use each other’s ranking signals”, said Gary. “If you have a page doing well in English and you have a page in Spanish, without hreflang tags it doesn’t mean the Spanish page would do well in Google. With hreflang tags, you can tell Google that there are two pages close to equal and to share ranking signals.”

A second benefit of hreflang tags is it avoids duplicate content. Few brands have the budget to write unique web copy across all regions.

A third benefit is it lets Google serve the most relevant store in search results. This makes it easy for people to purchase on the right store. Some store setups limit shoppers in one country to order from one domain. More shoppers buy when a store is in the shopper’s language and currency with relevant messaging.

Without good hreflang tags, customers land on the wrong store from Google search—leading to confusion and missed sales.

I’ll show you some big bad brands on Shopify who can’t get their hreflang tags right. The traffic estimates on similarweb.com hint that these brands lose thousands in sales every week by taking people from search results to the wrong store.

If I search “Allbirds” from an Australian IP on Google Australia, I am shown Allbirds.com as the first organic listing:

The allbirds.com.au website made for Australians shows in second.

Gymshark has their primary domain gymshark.com meant for the US market appear in Australia as the first result:

A browser search through the source code of the homepage shows they have no hreflang tags:

An organic search report in ahrefs.com shows Gymshark has 36% of traffic outside of the US landing on their main gymshark.com website:

A small percentage of organic traffic from international search is expected since all countries don’t have their own domain, but 10 of the countries do. An inverse is similar on their UK site, which gets organic US traffic:

These are not exceptions. Our SEO team audited 100 random Shopify stores who put in place hreflang tags. Every store with multiple domains or subdomains had errors.

You can begin to see how these brands are hurting conversion rates and SEO by driving people from organic search to the wrong version of a store. How can 100 million-dollar brands with dedicated marketing and development teams get this wrong? The answer lies in Shopify.

Why Google-Friendly Hreflang Tags Are Used To Be Impossible In Shopify

Google-friendly hreflang tags were impossible in Shopify because there is no relationship of content between Shopify stores.

To run an international strategy pre-2021, stores needed multiple Shopify accounts. The only way to tell Google that a product on an English store was the same as a product on a Japanese store was manually managing that data every day.

The rel, href, and hreflang elements of hreflang tags are simple at first glance, but once you begin to put them in place, you open the doors into a toddler’s playroom that hasn’t been cleaned in a year.

At the 3:47 mark of the interview with Gary Illyes, Gary describes how Google staff messed up the hreflang tags of Google’s own help center. “Someone was trying to target Los Angeles and thought using ‘LA’ as a country code would be great. It actually means ‘Laos’.” If one of the largest companies in the world who created the rules gets it wrong, good luck to Joanne who just wants to sell scarves online.

Google’s search advocate John Mueller in 2018 on Twitter gave the most famous hreflang quote known to search engine optimizers:

hreflang is one of the most complex aspects of SEO (if not the most complex one). Feels as easy as a meta-tag, but it gets really hard quickly.

Nearly all Shopify stores do hreflang tags with a {{ canonical_url }} value.

In the theme of allbirds.com, they would use:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-au" href="{{ canonical_url | replace: '.com', '.com.au' }}" />

This produces:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-au" href="https://allbirds.com.au" />

It scales somewhat okay for all content types. You use a single line of code to handle hreflang tags on collections, products, pages, blogs, blog tags, and articles.

Yet if one store doesn’t mirror all content types across stores, or any URL handle for a store varies between another, standard hreflang tags in Shopify are bad for SEO. Google will crawl non-existent pages. The stores will lose organic traffic.

The old way to solve this problem is to have the same store setup and URLs across all stores. Yet if you have stores in different languages, that is bad for SEO and bad for the user experience, because your URL handles should use the same language as the store.

Some Shopify developers got around this by manually updating metafields. You can insert any information you want in a metafield. In this case, a full hreflang tag of another store. I estimate 80% of Shopify Expert development agencies who understand the limitations of hreflang tags use this method. It is time-consuming to set up and rarely gets maintained with URL changes.

The main problem with this method is maintenance. Every new product, collection, page, or article needs technical help to have hreflang tags updated. Any removal of a product or any content type across any store requires a metafield update in all stores. Give me paracetamol.

A lesser known problem of managing metafields for hreflang tags is it ignores all content types like collections filtered by tags common for stores with over 100 SKUs.

Why Choose Multiple Shopify Accounts?

Why would anyone opt for multiple Shopify accounts if the effort to maintain multiple accounts increases and your SEO (out-of-the-box) declines? Especially since Shopify now natively lets you sell in multiple languages and regions from a single account?

Florian from Impression Studios said to me that one reason his agency sets up clients on multiple stores is Shopify Markets requires Shopify Payments, which is available in limited countries. Other reasons he’ll setup clients on multiple stores is because it allows them to do a different homepage and create offers for each region.

The main answer for a multiple store setup is ease and control. When I asked Lori Johnson from BougeRV why they use multiple storefronts, it comes down to flexibility in targeting different cultures, niches, and budgets. “We customize our websites to localize marketing based on habits, attitudes, and cultural differences between different countries and regions,” said Lori Johnson from BougeRV. “To target different audiences in different countries, you  need multiple stores for each country’s products, store layout, and advertising methods. For example, look at the difference between BougeRV Australia and BougeRV Canada, where BougeRV has different product catalogs, images, and text.”

One of the biggest marketing mistakes Shopify brands make in expanding internationally is thinking they can set some shipping rules and people will buy. Shopping habits differ and so does messaging. The work to maintain multiple accounts can be eased. Multiple Shopify accounts can be better managed with the right apps:

• The Rewind app duplicates products, blogs, themes, pages, and collections. Then there’s also AirPower to achieve a multi-store sync from a single source in Airtable.
• Manage your orders through a single source like ShipHero.
• Consolidate customer support with Gorgias. You should be using a helpdesk anyway plus Gorgias doubles up as a solution for managing comments in social media, critical for scaling Facebook Ads.
• Your SEO doesn’t have to suffer. We created the “Digital Darts: Hreflang Tag” app to help our SEO clients get Google-friendly hreflang tags after years of frustration. You’re able to get perfect hreflang tags within one hour.

Avoid Auto-Redirecting Users

It’s enticing to redirect shoppers to a store based on the user’s IP information. Resist the temptation. “Do not use IP analysis to adapt your content,” says Google’s documentation. “IP location analysis is difficult and generally not reliable. Furthermore, Google may not be able to crawl variations of your site properly. Most, but not all, Google crawls originate from the US, and we do not attempt to vary the location to detect site variations. Use one of the explicit methods shown here (hreflang, alternate URLs, and explicit links).”

The result of this sin is that Googlebot crawls the website then gets redirected to one version based on your redirection rules. The version Google sees will differ from what other shoppers see. When a website treats the Googlebot differently to people, the website is cloaking—a violation of webmaster guidelines.

The wise alternative is to get your hreflang tags right and offer users the option to change their country and language. Most Shopify themes have a country and language selector. Allbirds offer a country selector as a pop-up:

And they provide an option in the footer to swap between stores:

If your theme does not have such features, Shopify has a template for language and country code selectors.

Two Laws—Make Them Bidirectional and Self-Referential

Hreflang tags need to be bidirectional. If an English-American version refers to your English-Australian version, the Australian version must reference the American version.

This is for security to confirm you own both domains. Otherwise you could use a competitor’s website in a tag that tells Google to give them only Yiddish traffic in Yemen while you hijack all other organic traffic.

Hreflang tags also need to be self-referential. A tag that self-references means it points to itself.

Bidirectional and self-referential tags on a Shopify collection means the hreflang tags are the same between two stores:

<link rel="alternate" href="https://example.com/collections/color" hreflang="en-us">
<link rel="alternate" href="https://example.com/collections/colour" hreflang="en-au">

There is one caveat with self-referential tags: it must point to the rel=canonical tag.

Hreflang and Canonical Tags

Hreflang tags and canonical tags are two types of HTML markup that helps Google understand the right version of a webpage to serve the searcher. One tag controls languages and regions. The other converts multiple representations of a page similar to each other into one. Hreflang tags and canonical tags support each other to deliver the right version of a webpage in search results for good SEO.

The hreflang tag must match the canonical tag of a page. If a hreflang tag differs from the canonical tag, Google will report an error in Google Search Console of a “non-self referencing canonical tag” error.

The link between rel=canonical and hreflang tags is yet another reason hreflang tags are hard to get right in Shopify. There are four areas canonicalization matters in Shopify that you must consider for hreflang tags.

Variants

In SEO, the canonical tag is the URL of a page you want Google to prioritize over its variants. Shopify canonicalizes product variant URLs to the product URL. The page /products/product-name?variant=1234567890 will have a canonical tag of:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/products/product-name">

Variants URLs have hreflang tags that point to the primary URL, not the variant. This is called a “non-self referencing canonical tag”.

A hreflang and canonical tag is a hint, not a directive that jails Google into compliance. You cannot hold Google at gunpoint to deliver one version of a page in search results over another.

Google considers other page ranking factors to decide what version of a webpage to serve. Is one faster, more mobile-friendly, and filled with useful content? Most Shopify businesses have comparable versions of a store across regions and languages. It’s rare to see an English-Canadian version of a product in one business load slower than an English-American: teams will upload the same photos of the same size to a page that contains similar content on a shared theme. The mirrored resources across regions and languages for a Shopify business prods Google to respect your hreflang and canonical tags.

Pagination

Pagination is a sequence of numbers for content. In Shopify it occurs in blogs, collections, and search results. Pagination eases the life of a shopper by reducing load times and speeding up the shopper’s ability to find what they want. How do you manage hreflang tags with pagination?

If an English store has products D, E, and F on page 2, while the German version of the store has products F, G, and H on page 2, the content is different from each other. It makes sense from an SEO perspective to not point the hreflang tags on these pages to page 2 of each store.

Similarly, the second page of a collection on one store may not exist on another—which may constantly change due to product availability. It gets messier when canonical tags come into play, and they always do in Shopify.

Shopify canonicalizes pagination of URLs to themselves. The page /collections/all?page=2 will have a canonical tag of:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/collections/all?page=2">

Google’s John Mueller said if this happens, one of the hreflang tags should mention /collections/all?page=2:

Make sure any canonical you specify matches one of the URLs you use for the hreflang pairs. If the specified canonical URL is not a part of the hreflang pairs, then the hreflang markup will be ignored.

On the back of Mueller’s guidance confirmed in an office-hours hangout, the best practice in multi-account Shopify stores is to avoid hreflang tags on paginated content. The strategy gives the added benefit of avoiding hreflang tags that point to empty content.

For the first paginated page, hreflang tags should be included because they match the canonical URL and won’t result in largely different content. The page /collections/all?page=1 has the following canonical and hreflang tags setup right:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/collections/all">
<link rel="alternate" href="https://example.com/collections/all" hreflang="en">
<link rel="alternate" href="https://example.com/collections/alle" hreflang="de-de">

Collections and Products

Shopify products can have /collections/collection-name/products/product-name in the URL. The canonical tag on such pages points to the shortened version /products/product-name. Your hreflang tags should as well.

Collections can have tags added to the end of URLs that filter results. The URL /collections/collection-name/red will show products in the collection that are tagged with “red”.

For nearly all Shopify SEO clients we’ve worked with, we’ve preferred Google to serve the primary collection over the filtered collection. Filtered collections rarely differ in content aside from containing less products. To change the canonical tag in Shopify so collections filtered with tags point to the parent collection, remove the following from your theme.liquid file:

<link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical_url }}" />

And replace it with:

{% if template contains 'collection' and current_tags %}
<link rel="canonical" href="{{ shop.url }}{{ collection.url }}" />
{% else %}
<link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical_url }}" />
{% endif %}

Then when you canonicalize collections filtered with tags to the parent collection, the hreflang tags must also point to the canonicalized URL. Each method in this guide does this for you.

How to Choose Your Language and Region Targeting

Language is required. The region is not. Each must be formatted in ISO 3166–1 alpha‑2. Google does not decipher the language if you only define the region. I suggest not including the region in hreflang tags unless you have two versions in different regions with the same language.

Valid formats for the hreflang value include:

• es: Spanish language content for Worldwide users.
• en-au: English language content for Australian users.
• mx-es: Spanish language content for Mexican users.

Always include a tag that uses x-default as a hreflang value. It’s optional, but preferred by Google as a fallback feature. Think of whatever version you set as the x-default as your catch-all store where you want people to go if they shouldn’t go to any other store. For most Shopify businesses, this is their US store.

In the first example of the guide for the Victoria Beckham shop, they should include an x-default option so the tags look like:

<link rel="alternate" href="https://us.victoriabeckham.com/" hreflang="en-us" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.victoriabeckham.com/" hreflang="en-gb" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://international.victoriabeckham.com/" hreflang="en" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://international.victoriabeckham.com/" hreflang="x-default" />

There are exceptions to valid formats. Script languages that have variations like Chinese follow the ISO 15924 format. A simplified Chinese hreflang tag targeting Taiwan can look like “zh-Hans-tw”. A traditional Chinese hreflang tag with no region looks like “zh-Hant”.

You are likely able to ignore the exception for variations in script languages because Google is able to derive the correct script from the country. My recommendation with script variations is to include the region. The example of simplified Chinese targeting Taiwan would then look like “zh-tw”.

What Countries and Languages Should You Go After?

When you have international expansion on your mind, how do you determine what countries and languages to go after? The effort to maintain localized content outweighs the cost at some point for your business. You might see a gap in an international market for your product. Maybe you speak a second language that would ease management of the expansion.

Hreflang tags should not be a factor in this decision given you know how to set them up right no matter your strategy.

I recommend clients understand high-converting countries then run more paid advertising to them to grasp potential. You can find these opportunities in Google Analytics. This is a custom report you can mimic:

I did this analysis for a paid advertising global client in Google Analytics 3. We were running ads to over 20 countries.

For this client, they have two Shopify accounts: one for the United States and the other for Australia. A new Shopify account targeting Canada would likely double conversion rate based on a hypothesis of the conversion rate of the two countries that have a dedicated shopfront. The currency displayed by default, shipping messages, and general language could be customized to better connect directly with Canadians.

Why Hreflang Tags Generator Fail

Most guides that show you how to implement hreflang tags are useless because they tell you what hreflang tags look like for the homepage. The writer has no idea what to do. Here’s an example from one well-known SEO tool advising how to do hreflang tags in Shopify:

If you follow this, like a lot of developers I see, you point all hreflang tags of a group of stores to the homepage. Our study of hreflang tags in 100 random Shopify stores found 1 in 25 stores have hreflang tags in all content types pointing to the homepage. You can see what this looks like for a page on the store Kids Ride Shotgun:

Hreflang tag generators like Aleyda Solis or Geo Targetly—tools that have been used by SEO experts for years—are limiting for Shopify stores with more than a few pages. If you manually manage URLs in your Shopify hreflang tags, you miss URLs like Kids Ride Shotgun or you end up with a large liquid file to maintain between multiple stores.

The best hreflang tag generator for Shopify is the “Digital Darts: Hreflang Tag” app. The second best is a spreadsheet tool. Let’s cover three methods to implement hreflang tags then we’ll dive into the app and spreadsheet tools.

Three Methods to Implement Hreflang Tags

You can implement hreflang tags in a header response, the sitemap, or in the HTML of your page.

1. HTML Tags

The first method to implement hreflang tags is in HTML tags. It is the method shown so far in this guide and my recommended method in Shopify. In between the <head> tags of your theme, the format looks like:

<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/" hreflang="en" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://fr-ca.example.com/" hreflang="fr-ca" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://ca.example.com/" hreflang="en-ca" />

This strategy could be slow in non-Shopify platforms when database calls are made on pages to retrieve dozens of URLs.

Hreflang tags cannot be placed inside the <body> tag because it poses a security risk. One tag injected into the body can hijack all organic traffic.

2. HTTP Headers

You can send a HTTP header in a page to tell Google the language, region, plus alternatives of a page. The header response method is good for non-HTML files like PDFs.

The format is:

Link: <url1>; rel="alternate"; hreflang="lang_code_1", <url2>; rel="alternate"; hreflang="lang_code_2"

Here’s an example “Link: header” returned by a site that has three versions of a PDF file: one for English speakers, one for French Canadians, and one for English Canadians:

Link: <https://example.com/file.pdf>; rel="alternate"; hreflang="en",
<https://fr-ca.example.com/file.pdf>; rel="alternate"; hreflang="fr-ca",
<https://ca.example.com/file.pdf>; rel="alternate"; hreflang="en-ca"

X-default can be used in the lang code. The format follows the language and region settings required for all methods to implement tags.

3. An XML Sitemap

A third method of implementing hreflang tags is in an XML sitemap. You first include a <loc> element to specify a single URL. Within the element, add a xhtml:link attribute for each language and region of a page, including the page itself. The method is similar to the HTML tags method. Keeping with our three-version store, here’s what the sitemap would look like:

<url>
<loc>https://www.example.com/</loc>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://www.example.com/" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-ca" href="https://www.example.com/fr-ca/" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-ca" href="https://www.example.com/ca/" />
</url>
<url>
<loc>https://www.example.com/fr-ca/</loc>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://www.example.com/" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-ca" href="https://www.example.com/fr-ca/" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-ca" href="https://www.example.com/ca/" />
</url>
<url>
<loc>https://www.example.com/ca/</loc>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://www.example.com/" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-ca" href="https://www.example.com/fr-ca/" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-ca" href="https://www.example.com/ca/" />
</url>

The only element that changes between the three groups of URL variables is <loc>. You can begin to see how quickly a sitemap can get bloated with hreflang tags. One upside of a sitemap is it’s independent of content downloaded to the user, meaning it will save a measly 1KB or so (nothing) in data depending on the number of tags. The real benefit of it is having a single source to manage your hreflang tags.

You cannot edit your Shopify sitemap to include this data. If you opt for this method, you need to generate and manage the sitemap yourself. Here’s how to do it for your stores.

How to Manually Implement Hreflang Tags

I’ve made a semi-automated way to use sitemaps to manage hreflang tags in Shopify.

The method can only be used if you have one domain or multiple subdomains on the one domain. Google Search Console invalidates the sitemap when it contains multiple domains. Google has no documentation revealing this limitation so I’ve saved you the heartache of spending hours completing steps then discovering it yourself at the final step. If you want hreflang tags for multiple domains, use the upcoming automatic app method.

1. Copy the Google Sheet Template

Copy the Hreflang Tag Generator by Digital Darts.

2. Specify Languages and Regions

In the first sheet “Settings (1)”, fill in the light orange fields.

Select the language and regions for all your stores. Leave the region value empty unless you have two versions of a store with the same language.

You can set your default and select up to five languages and regions. If you need more, the “Digital Darts: Hreflang Tags” app discussed next, suits you better to automate hreflang tags.

3. Extract Sitemaps

The “URLs for Mappings (2)” sheet is a bonus tool that extracts URLs from Shopify sitemaps. It’s an optional sheet that can save you up to 10 hours getting a clean list of URLs to map. If you already have a list of URLs to map, skip this step.

Enter the sitemap URL of a store of yours. Sitemaps in Shopify follow the format of https://example.com/sitemap.xml.

The columns populate with every URL in the sitemap. Copy column-by-column, the list of URLs into the “URL Mappings (3)” sheet. Paste them under the one column that matches the language and region in the header.

Once the URLs have been copied and pasted, change the sitemap URL for each store to extract their URLs. Copy-and-paste them into the URL mappings sheet. Repeat for each store.

The “URLs for Mappings (2)” does not change anything in the “URL Mappings (3)” or “Sitemap (4)” sheets. Thanks to Ben Ellwood for a quirky fix required to extract <loc> values inside Shopify sitemaps.

4. Patch the Gaps of URL Mappings

The URLs extracted from your sitemap contains the homepage plus each collection, page, blog, and article in the store. This assembles 90-100% of URLs for most Shopify stores to compile a hreflang sitemap. Yet you may not have a complete list of URLs so be prepared to patch in gaps.

For perfection in your hreflang tags:

• Add URLs of blog tags. These have the format: https://example.com/blogs/blog-name/tagged/tag-name. If you have blog tags and don’t use them to categorize content to help readers, now’s a good time to save yourself hours—delete the tags.
• Check your mappings for /collections/all. If you have not created a collection with the URL handle, Shopify creates this by default but doesn’t include it in the sitemap.
• Add collections filtered by tags. These have the format: https://example.com/collections/collection-name/collection-tag. Stores can have complex filters that create thousands of URLs. If you don’t want these mapped and they serve no SEO purpose, canonicalize the URLs to the primary collection.

If hours of work is required to gather URLs, I recommend you stop this method. Use the method to automatically implement hreflang tags for multiple Shopify accounts.

5. Map URLs

Organize each cell to map to the rows of the first store in Column C.

If you have one thousand URLs across all stores, expect URL mapping to take under one day. Mapping every page of every store is drudgery. I did say this method is semi-automated.

If you happen to discover a way to automate mapping through vlookup or any tool, share it in the comments. I will update the document and steps.

Once you’ve mapped URLs, your hreflang tags are formatted into a sitemap.

6. Upload the Sitemap

1. Go to the “Sitemap (4)” tab. There your sitemap is in a valid XML format.
2. Copy all that’s in column A:

3. Open a notepad program. Paste the code there. Save the file with the name “hreflang-tags-sitemap” in XML format. If you cannot save it in XML format, Windows notepad lets you save it as the type “All Files” then you can add “.xml” to the file name:

4. In the Shopify admin, go to “Settings” > “Files”. Upload the xml file. Copy the URL of the file.
5. Return to the Shopify admin then go to “Online Store” > “Navigation” > “View URL Redirects”. Click “Create URL redirect”.
6. Make the “Redirect from” field /hreflang-tags-sitemap.xml. Paste the URL of the uploaded file in the “Redirect to” field:

7. Go to sitemaps in Google Search Console. Enter the “redirect from” field you set up in Shopify (hreflang-tags-sitemap.xml) as a new sitemap. The only error I’ve seen at this stage is when multiple domains are in the sitemap. Multiple domains are not permitted. It’s why I advise using the semi-automated sitemap method for a single domain or multiple subdomains.
8. When returning to the Sitemaps section, the number of discovered URLs for the /hreflang-tags-sitemap.xml file will be more than /sitemap.xml. The screenshot below shows only 2 discovered URLs. It was a small sitemap I made to help you visualize a successfully submitted hreflang sitemap for Shopify:

7. Keep the Sitemap Updated

Maintain the sheet to reflect all versions of all pages. If a product no longer exists, remove the URL in the “URL mappings” sheet. If you create a new collection, include the collection URL. The new sitemap code will update in the sheet.

You then need to:

1. Update the XML file or create a new one.
2. Delete the old hreflang-tags-sitemap.xml file in Shopify files.
3. Upload the updated XML file to Shopify. Copy the file URL.
4. Edit your redirect in Shopify to redirect to the newly uploaded XML file.

You don’t need to do anything in Google Search Console to notify Google of an update to your sitemap. Google in their help center say, “You shouldn’t need to resubmit a sitemap that we already know about, even if you’ve changed it. Google will notice any changes the next time we crawl your site.”

To further automate it, I think a developer could write a private app that uploads the contents of “Sitemap (4)” into Shopify then updates the redirect.

How to Automatically Install Hreflang Tags for a Single Shopify Account

A solution that agencies and businesses have depended on for hreflang tags in Shopify is apps like Weglot and Langify. They get the job done if you have one Shopify account. If you have multiple Shopify accounts, you cannot use their hreflang tags at all.

The best hreflang tag method for single store accounts is to use Shopify Markets. Shopify inserts its own hreflang tags through {{ content_for_header }} in the theme.liquid file. You can thank the Markets Team and Jackson Lo for this when he came onboard to Shopify in 2020 to fix many such limitations of merchant SEO.

However, like Weglot and other translation apps, you cannot use Shopify’s native hreflang tags if you have multiple Shopify accounts. Your tags will be filled with incorrect or missing references and point to missing pages. Businesses with multiple Shopify accounts require a different solution.

In the event you want to avoid Shopify Markets, and you have multiple languages configured in Shopify, here’s a code base you can customize to match your configurations:

{% if template == 'page' %}
  {% assign hrefhandle = page.url %}
{% endif %}
{% if product.url contains 'products' %}
  {% assign hrefhandle = product.url %}
{% endif %}
{% if template == 'blog' %}
  {% assign hrefhandle = blog.url %}
{% endif %}
{% if template == 'article' %}
  {% assign hrefhandle = article.url %}
{% endif %}
{% if template == 'collection' %}
  {% assign hrefhandle = collection.url %}
{% endif %}
{% if template == 'index' %}
  {% assign hrefhandle = "/" %}
{% endif %}
{% if hrefhandle %}
  <link rel="alternate" href="https://example.eu{{ hrefhandle }}" hreflang="en-ch" />
  <link rel="alternate" href="https://example.eu/es{{ hrefhandle }}" hreflang="es" />
  <link rel="alternate" href="https://example.eu/fr{{ hrefhandle }}" hreflang="fr" />
  <link rel="alternate" href="https://example.com{{ hrefhandle }}" hreflang="en" />
  <link rel="alternate" href="https://example.com{{ hrefhandle }}" hreflang="x-default" />
{% endif %}

How to Automatically Install Hreflang Tags for Multiple Shopify Accounts

In 2019 we had a Shopify SEO client with 8 stores in 6 languages and over 10,000 URLs. It was impossible to automate hreflang tags for multiple Shopify accounts. I knew we weren’t the only ones with the problem. More stores by the day were delivering to new international markets.

I scratched our itch. One year later, we had a private solution turned into a public one you can use today: “Digital Darts: Hreflang Tags“. Shopify’s senior lead for SEO, Jackson Lo, in 2021 tweeted:

To automate hreflang tags in Shopify:

1. Install “Digital Darts: Hreflang Tags” in each store. The first time you install it, you’ll create an account to link your stores.
2. In the Shopify admin, go to “Online Store” > “Themes” > “Customize”. Enable the app embed for your hreflang tags.
3. Wait for your stores to sync.
4. Any page, collection, blog, blog tag, or article that has the same URL handles as another store will automatically map to each other. Products automatically map based on SKU. You can change products to map by barcode from your settings at the top-right:

5. Select the language and region for each store, and the default store from the dashboard:

6. Map any unmapped content in the app like you would in a spreadsheet.

7. (Optional) If you’ve previously used a universal language in your URLs across stores to deal with hreflang tags, you can now catapult SEO and improve the user experience by editing URL handles in the same language as the store. Your hreflang tag mappings will automatically update.

What You Need to Do Differently for Bing

The Bing search engine looks at different signals compared to Google. Bing considers hreflang tags less than its rival. “Hreflang is indeed a far weaker signal than content-language at Bing,” said Fabrice Canel on Twitter who is Bing’s project manager for Bing Webmaster Tools and document discovery.

You cannot depend on hreflang tags to deliver the right language and region of a page in Bing and Baidu search results. Instead, use the language and locale in the <meta>, <html>, or <title> tags of the document.

Pick one of the three methods. I suggest the first meta method because it has priority over the other two. In order of priority accepted by Bing, this is how you configure each one:

1. <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="{{ request.locale.iso_code }}">. Place this code in the <head> tag of your Shopify theme. This will output <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-us">.
2. <html lang="{{ request.locale.iso_code }}">. Place it in the <head> tag of your Shopify theme. This will render HTML like <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-us">. One <html> tag is permitted and required in a webpage. Most Shopify themes have this markup in place.
3. <title lang="en-us">. Place it in the <head> tag. The language and locale information in the tag has the least priority, meaning if conflicting information exists in the <title> tag and <html> tag, the <html> tag takes precedence. If you use this method, check if the other two exist to avoid an accident.

The second primary influence you have over Bing is the country code in the top-level domain. If you want to maximize search visibility on Bing in Australia, your Australian Shopify store should be a .au domain. For the UK, it’s a .uk domain. Whether the domain should be a .com.au, .net.au, .id.au, is believed to be irrelevant to tell Bing your website’s country. However, the type of top-level domain beyond its country code affects a website’s ability to rank.

The third influence Bing publicly stated as affecting Bing’s understanding of the website’s country and language is the document location. “For each document we add to Bing’s index, we perform a reverse IP lookup to determine the document’s location. Reverse IP information is yet another signal used when other signals are less conclusive.”

Hreflang Tags Checker

These are my three recommended ways to check hreflang tags.

1. Ahrefs.com Site Audit

The ahrefs.com site audit is one of few online that looks at a whole website rather than a single page. Semrush achieves similar things, but I’ve always depended on ahrefs.com for their amazing link analysis.

Set up a new project then you can run an audit.

The downside of this method is the wait for the googlebot to crawl pages then update the report.

2. Hreflang Checker Chrome Extension

I created the Hreflang Checker Chrome extension as a light-weight solution to quickly check the hreflang tags of a page. All other tools take minutes to review a page, which is frustating when you want to check only one page or when you’ve made changes.

3. Screaming Frog Scan

A Screaming Frog scan is the most comprehensive way to check hreflang tags. It is quick, accurate, and comprehensive. Follow their tutorial to audit and test hreflang tags. You only need to scan one website as the hreflang tags across any domains in the tags will be checked in the tool.

In minutes you’ll have a report like this with everything to address in your tags:

How to Fix Hreflang Tags with Errors

The following are a complete list of errors given in ahrefs, Semrush, and Screaming Frog. You learn why the hreflang errors occur and how to fix them:

Self-Reference Hreflang Annotation Missing, No Self-Referencing Hreflang Tag, Missing Self Reference

The warnings occur when the page does not self-reference in its hreflang tags. A self-reference is conditional but good practice. On the page https://example.com/collections/all, the warning is produced when no hreflang tag references https://example.com/collections/all or its canonical URL.

To fix the warning, include a self-referencing hreflang tag. On the page https://example.com/collections/all, there needs to be a hreflang tag such as:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/collections/all" />

No Return-Tags, Missing Reciprocal Hreflang, Missing Return Links

The errors occur when pages are not self-referential. If product A has a tag pointing to product B, product B must have a tag pointing to product A.

To fix the errors, add bidirectional tags for the affected URLs. If you get the error using the “Digital Darts: Hreflang Tags” app or the sitemap solution in the guide, it’s because Google needs more time to crawl all pages.

Hreflang Annotation Invalid, Wrong Language or Region Codes, Incorrect Language & Region Codes

The errors occur when the language or region codes are in an invalid format. Each language and region must be formatted in ISO 3166–1 alpha‑2. An exception is script languages like Chinese, which can follow ISO 15924. Also, if a region is included, it must follow the language. Each example has an invalid hreflang annotation:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="eng" href="https://example.com/collections/all" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="us-en" href="https://example.com/collections/all" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en/us" href="https://example.com/collections/all" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="-us" href="https://example.com/collections/all" />

Fix the error by using the correct code in the correct order. Use hyphens to separate language and region.

Inconsistent Language & Region Return Links

The error occurs in Screaming Frog when the return link has different language or region codes to the reference. Locate the Screaming Frog errors in bulk from Reports > Hreflang > Inconsistent Language Return Links.

Fix the error by using the same language and region codes on the pages as everywhere else.

Hreflang to Broken Page, Pointing to Non-Existent Pages, 404 Errors, Non-200 Hreflang URLs

The errors occur when a link in the hreflang tags point to a non-existent page. In Screaming Frog, the error “Non-200 Hreflang URLs” for Shopify stores can also mean a hreflang tag is a 301 redirect.

References to non-existent pages are common for multiple Shopify accounts that depend on liquid code to render hreflang tags. These businesses must have the exact content across all stores with the exact URL handles otherwise the error occurs.

The errors can be stopped with a good hreflang tag solution. You won’t get the error with the “Digital Darts: Hreflang Tag” app because the tags update as you remove content or change URL handles.

If you use the sitemap solution shared in this guide, change the URL of the broken page to the right URL handle. If the content no longer exists, remove the URL.

Page Referenced for More Than One Language in Hreflang

The error occurs when a page has two tags that set different languages. One page with the one URL cannot serve two languages. The HTML below produces the error:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/collections/all" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="https://example.com/collections/all" />

To fix the error, remove the wrong link tag.

More Than One Page for the Same Language in Hreflang, Multiple Entries

The errors occur when two or more hreflang tags have a language, or language and region, identical to each other. This confuses Google with what version of a page you want to serve searchers.

For example, your tags can contain “en”, “en-us”, and “en-au” but there cannot be two instances of any. The HTML below produces the error because it has two domains set to the English language:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/collections/all" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.ca/collections/all" />

Fix the error by having one language, or language and region, in tags.

Hreflang and HTML Lang Mismatch

The error occurs in the ahrefs site audit tool when the language in a hreflang tag differs from the HTML lang value. Google depends on hreflang tags to serve the right version of a page. Bing and other search engines use the HTML lang value.

Fix the error by matching the two values. Refer to “What You Need to Do Differently for Bing” in the guide.

X‑default Hreflang Annotation Missing, Missing X-default

The error occurs when pages do not contain the x-default hreflang tag. The x-default tag is a fall-back when a language, or language and region, match no other tags. It is a warning given in ahrefs.com, rather than an error, since Google does not require the x-default tag.

To fix the warning, locate the affected pages then include a x-default tag. For Shopify, if you put in place the sitemap solution or our app, as long as most of your other pages have the x-default, it’s fine to ignore this warning. The value is optional. Your main store set to the x-default will not have all the content of your other stores.

Hreflang to Non-Canonical, Non-Self Referencing Canonical Tag, Not Using Canonical

The type of error occurs when a hreflang tag points to a non-canonical URL. The hreflang tag must match the canonical tag of a page.

Fix the error by changing the hreflang tag of affected pages to point to their canonicalized version. The fix depends on what content type the error occurs or how you manage your tags. Refer to “Hreflang and Canonical Tags” in the guide.

Conflicting Hreflang and rel=canonical

The error occurs in Semrush when the page URL, rel=canonical, and hreflang tags do not mirror. As this error is reported in a third-party tool other than Google, you need to cross-check it against what Google advises.

Non-canonical pages that have hreflang tags, according to Semrush, should canonicalize to itself. Semrush says to use a self-referential canonical tag when using canonical tags on a webpage:

Semrush give an example within an infographic on tag errors reported in their tool:

The example has a French page canonicalize to English. They are right in saying it is an invalid use of rel=canonical tag. However, it is a miss-leading error because the rel=canonical and hreflang tag do not conflict with each other—the URL in the browser differs.

The error occurs in invalid situations. Using a similar example to theirs, if the page URL is https://www.example.com/fr-ca/page.html?utm_source=google, they want hreflang tags like:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/en-au/page.html?utm_source=google">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-ca" href="https://www.example.com/fr-ca/page.html">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-au" href="https://www.example.com/en-au/page.html?utm_source=google">

That defeats the purpose of canonicalization. Shopify stores will get the error because canonicalization is abundant.

You do not need to fix the issue. Many other tools like Screaming Frog or online single page inspectors of hreflang tags will not give the error. I am against Semrush based on Google’s John Mueller advice to “make sure any rel=canonical you specify matches one of the URLs you use for the hreflang pairs. If the specified canonical URL is not a part of the hreflang pairs, then the hreflang markup will be ignored.”

Semrush and anyone else is welcome to get in contact with me to discuss and correct anything in this guide that is inaccurate. Two years since I first published this guide, nothing has changed.

Noindex Return Links

The error occurs in Screaming Frog when a page cannot be indexed. Locate the Screaming Frog errors in bulk from Reports > Hreflang > Noindex Return Links.

Fix the error by removing the noindex meta tag on the affected pages.

Not All Pages From Hreflang Group Were Crawled

The warning in the ahrefs site audit tool occurs when the hreflang tags on a page were not crawled.

The message is usually of minor concern. You may have stopped the crawl before it could complete the audit. Your website can be fine despite the message. I see this warning on multiple domains.

To help the tool crawl those pages, refer to your ahrefs “no-crawl” report for why these pages went uncrawled. When viewing the affected URLs, do what you can to get the pages crawled to provide an accurate audit of your tags.

Keep Tags Up-to-Date

The “Digital Darts: Hreflang Tags” app makes keeping tags up-to-date simple. Products automatically map based on your settings of either matching the SKU or barcode values. Other content types will automatically map if they have the same URL handles. For ones with no match, map them in the app.

What matters is you have a way to intentionally stay on top of tags. To do this, create a recurring monthly task in your project management software. I love ClickUp. Whatever you use, here is a standard operating procedure you can copy-and-paste to keep your tags fresh:

This is the free bible of Shopify SEO updated for 2026. It is the ultimate reference with over 101 Shopify SEO expert tips to grow your ecommerce brand’s organic search traffic.

I have used it on the websites of billion-dollar companies. We use it for Shopify SEO clients. Shopify staff pass it around their offices and recommend it to store owners.

The guide is born out of what we see work for our Shopify SEO clients as Shopify Marketing Partners since 2015 so you too can grow your brand without paying Zuckerberg or a Chinese company for every impression.

Audit your Shopify’s SEO by following the guide every six months, when you notice a drop in organic visitors, or when you are unsure of what to do next to get more buyers from search at no cost.

How Your Position in Google Impacts Sales

Let’s begin by understanding how rankings in Google exponentially skews sales. Advanced Web Ranking’s click-through rate analysis of search results with the “people also ask” feature, estimates a second position receives 14.91% of traffic for that search query:

Here is a tabular breakdown of the exact figures for calculations I’m about to do:

If you receive 400 visitors a month in second position, first position will see your store receive 848 visitors. That is double the results from one improvement in position.

Now translate this increase of visitors into sales. Grab the Shopify revenue and number of sessions in the past 90 days from Shopify Analytics. Divide revenue by sessions to get a dollar value per session. Multiple this figure by the increase in visitors. If the dollar value per session is $1.5, 448 visitors per month is estimated to add $672 in revenue per month.

You are unlikely to experience one ranking improvement for one search term—other search terms are likely to increase traffic. It’s not unusual for good SEO to boost whole categories of pages in Google for their optimised search terms. Rand Fiskin describes the outcome as a “rising tide that lifts all boats”.

A ten-degree adjustment can deviate a large store to unseen profit by next year. Each page, collection, product, and blog post opens a new chance to get traffic from Google.

What Growth Can You Expect?

If you weigh as much as a small car, your health has more room for improvement than the average person of average weight. If your Shopify has poor SEO, you have more space for growth. Should an SEO audit show poor SEO health, you are more likely to grow from SEO than another store who passes 90% of the audit.

A second factor of rapid SEO growth involves content, or the quality and quantity of pages. Each good piece of content is a ranking opportunity. A store with 1000 SKUs has more potential to benefit from SEO, generally speaking, than a store with 1 product.

Another piece of content aside from products that performs really well for stores that anyone can use is articles. I see articles worthy of SEO as detailed guides filled with images, videos, and information you can’t anywhere else that genuinely solves a problem. An article with 4 tips for fashion is not going to reach the top canopy of search results. If you produce a guide better than anything else online about the topic, like this Shopify SEO tutorial, you have further potential to grow from SEO.

SEO is viewed by start-up stores as an affordable bootstrap way to grow a store. It can be, but not if you are a one-man show with a few dropship products. I’m not here to bull you with false hopes. You will not dominate Google with some keyword optimisations or links that come from an hour of work per week. Good Shopify SEO is a grind overtime. A general and reasonable hope, which I base on the results of past clients, is to get 10% growth from organic search each month.

Is Shopify SEO Friendly?

As a Shopify Marketing Expert with 20 years SEO experience across many platforms like WordPress and WooCommerce, BigCommerce, SilverStripe, and Magento, I get asked a lot if Shopify is good for SEO.

Well, Shopify is great for SEO. We’ve got incredible results for Shopify clients, including businesses that have been doing millions for years before they engaged with us in SEO to then double organic traffic.

I hear a lot of people in the industry say Shopify has SEO limitations. Shopify will not limit the organic performance of 99% of businesses; performance will be limited by your ability to follow the SEO tips and best practice optimisations in the guide.

What makes Shopify so good for SEO? Shopify automatically handles the following SEO best practices that can be ignored in the audit:

“You’ve got to have some issues with Shopify?”

I do. What are my biggest annoyances with Shopify from an SEO perspective? SEO is a field that incorporates hundreds of factors. These points are me being brutal.

Multi-Store Hreflang Tags and Canonicalisation

The hreflang tag tells Google what version of the page—in this case, from what store—Google should serve to users. Canonicalisation usage for multi-lingual stores across multiple domains, can be managed with manual hreflang and rel="canonical" tags when the URL structure across all websites is the exact same. Usability and SEO problems are painful when one of the stores does not have all of the same pages, products, and collections, which happens for most businesses. The hreflang tags end up pointing to non-existent pages to produce 404s.

The more impacting part of the problem arises with a change of language in URLs. Part of healthy usability and SEO is keeping URL usage consistent throughout a website. This means not alternating between “http” and “https” or “www” and “non-www” or never linking to mobile versions of the store on the desktop version. In this case, not having English URLs for non-English stores. When non-English URLs are used, canonicalisation management becomes impossible for a store with large SKUs. 404s occur and link juice gets diluted across pages.

However, after years of frustration with this for clients and seeing many other Shopify stores lose rankings and sales from bad hreflang tags, we created a Shopify app called “Digital Darts: Hreflang Tags“. All of your Shopify stores can now have perfect hreflang tags to increase sales from organic search.

Without the app, your customers may be taken to the wrong store when coming from Google or Bing search, which can lead to confusion in international shipping and poorer conversion rates. By using the app, organic conversion rates may increase as visitors are served the correct store for their region and language in search results.

If you’ve previously used a universal language in your URLs across stores to deal with hreflang tags, you can now catapult SEO and improve the user experience with URL handles in the same language as the store. This is the first app ever in Shopify to let everyone have perfect hreflang tags.

Faceted Navigation

Faceted navigation can occur on collection pages to let users filter products by color, size, brand, price, or other attributes. The navigation is a best practice to help people find what they want. However, the SEO implications are hard. This is the biggest challenge to solve in Shopify SEO today.

Let’s look at a collection of one Shopify store, French Connection, so you can see the problem. Observation the description and h1 tag that has the text “MIDI DRESSES”. The title tag is
Midi Dresses for Women | Mid-Length Dresses | French Connection UK
and meta description is
Explore our collection of elegant midi dresses. From long sleeve floral midis to cold shoulder midi dresses, we have got you covered. FREE UK delivery over £50.

When I select the color filter then choose “Black”, I get a great experience of seeing all black midi dresses:

However, SEO problems arise from unoptimised content since “black midi dresses” gets good search volume French Connection can capture. The filtered collection page has the same title, meta description, h1 tag, and collection description as the parent collection. Furthermore, it canonicalizes to the parent collection. These are all signals that tell Google to point traffic to the parent collection, which is not optimized for search variants containing color.

You can edit your theme to optimize the title, meta description, and h1 tag with unique content using liquid. I’d also recommend French Connection remove the on-page description on filtered pages to minimize duplicate content since writing and maintaining loads of unique descriptions has a high cost. All of these changes can be done to create an SEO friendly navigation. It just requires expert knowledge of SEO and knowing what Shopify, or the filtering app, is capable of to make it work well.

Sub-folders Versus Sub-domains

Sub-folders are preferred over sub-domains. Google says the two are equal, but data from tests and professional SEOs like Rand Fishkin, say sub-folders are far stronger. SEO efforts like link building are dissipated from a sub-domain structure.

If third-party software like WordPress or Zendesk could be set up in a sub-folder, that would give companies more chance to rank their content in search results.

Shopify Markets lets you launch with a sub-folder structure for different regions and languages. Separate top-level domains with hreflang tags solves any SEO concern for businesses with multiple Shopify accounts.

Indexation From Sitemaps

Shopify submits one image per product in the products sitemap. This leads to a lot of unindexed images that can capture organic traffic, especially if you have unique product imagery.

To solve this, I recommend the Image Sitemap app. The app developer has a good article on Medium about why you should not rely on Shopify for image indexation.

URL Content Type Prefixes

The most common frustration I hear with Shopify’s SEO is the use of /collections, /products, /blogs, and /pages in URLs. I am mixed about this being an SEO problem. From a usability perspective in looking at URLs, it is easy to see where you are at with the current URL structure.

The unavoidable, multiple blog folder structure of /blogs/blog-name is undesirable. It would be nice to have the option to alter folder structures to slightly boost content authority from reduced folders and improve its URL appearance.

Each of these listed issues do not affect the organic ranking performance of most stores. The SEO upside of being on Shopify far outweigh the downside.

As a Shopify Expert Marketer in SEO and a Shopify Partner, Shopify have consulted with me on these issues. As an example, there use to be a blog id that gets pre-pended in the URL of every post, but Shopify updated this. What they’ve changed over the years is proof they listen. Shopify staff read this guide all the time. The good news is they are aware of these downsides so we can hope for improvements in the future.

How to Use the Expert Guide for a Shopify SEO Audit

Work from top-to-bottom making note of what needs improvement. Use your notes to create an SEO plan of what needs further analysis, tweaks, or an immediate overhaul.

If you have limited time and can’t do everything, I recommend the health check, content, and value analysis sections. These have the greatest affect on SEO.

Back in 2016 I emailed Digital Darts subscribers an offer to complete an SEO audit of their store for the first person who replied. Josh from BrickellMensProducts.com put his hand up. Since then, Brickell has become one of America’s fastest growing companies.

Following the first publication, to keep the Shopify SEO guide fresh and accurate, I’ve also applied the expert guide to MyCityPlants.com who’ve been a Google Ads client for over 5 years. Jack, My City Plants co-owner, happily gave permission to audit his store. Thanks to Jack and Josh, you get to watch me walk through the SEO of real stores, which makes the analysis more useful.

If you want to save yourself headaches working with freelancers and agencies who don’t understand Shopify, and instead partner with a Shopify SEO expert work who will work with you on a clear step-by-step plan for organic search growth, get in contact about our Shopify SEO service.

Let’s begin the audit:

Health Check

A good doctor works on a health problem after deep analysis. The doctor might look at the problematic area or order a blood report.

Good SEO begins with a check of your store’s SEO performance. It lets you set a benchmark for performance and identify major health problems. The best surgical operation is useless—even harmful—if the wrong location is operated.

1. Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools Setup

Are each set up? Google Search Console (abbreviated to GSC or “Search Console” and formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools) and Bing Webmaster Tools is how each search engine shares critical information about a website. You’ll come back to these throughout the audit.

Search Console is one of the best tools to monitor areas of SEO like rankings in search, crawlability, mobile usability, page speed issues, and schema markup.

2. Google Analytics Setup

Check sales in Google Analytics are attributed to the right sources. The purpose of ecommerce SEO is to get sales so measure it the best you can. Good data can help good decisions.

In Google Analytics 4, sales can be confirmed from Reports > Monetization > Ecommerce purchases. Check for revenue.

Secondly, confirm payment gateways aren’t receiving credit for the sale. Go to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition. From the “Event count” dropdown, select “purchase” then sort from high to low purchases. Lastly change the primary dimension to “Session source / medium”. Confirm no revenue is attributed to payment platforms.

If sales come from a payment processor, the solution is to add the domain like paypal.com into the unwanted referrals.

For everything you need with GA4, run through my up-to-date Google Analytics setup guide.

3. Total Pages Indexed

Google must first find a page on your store before it can be suggested to people in search results. “Crawling” is this process where Google follows links across the Internet then discovers what is on a page. When a page is crawled, Google may or may not present the page to people in search results, which is referred to as “indexing” much like a librarian indexes books to organise a library.

Search in Google “site:yourstore.com”. The number of search results is the number of indexed pages. Note the number of results. MyCityPlants.com has 1,030 pages indexed. BrickellMensProducts.com has 765 pages indexed:

Download Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider. It is the ultimate tool to audit technical SEO.

Run a crawl of your website. Once the crawl is 100% complete, select “HTML” from the top dropdown.

How does the summary number from “Total Internal Indexable URLs” compare to Google’s index? Investigate the difference to spot large issues.

The scan will most likely have more URLs. The robots.txt file deters Google from crawling then indexing a lot of URLs. Another reason may be that Google is unable to discover all pages from poor website architecture. A page can be 5 clicks away from the homepage making it hard for Google to discover.

If it’s a small store under 1000 URLs, you can eyeball every page. See what is indexed that should not be and what is missed.

If your website is large, seek a sample of each page type to explain the major discrepancy. You may find it helpful to sort by the “Indexability” column to see what can be indexed. You can also search a specific page in Google with the “inurl:[url]” search like “inurl:mycityplants.com/blogs/office-plants-blog/tagged/plant-guide” to see if a page is indexed.

1. mycityplants.com/collections/extra-large-4-8?page=2: The second page inside a collection. I searched this page in Google with the “inurl:” prefix and no result came up.  I searched the crawled pages in the crawl stats report with the filter “page=” and found only 18 pages have been crawled. Google is not crawling pagination well.
2. mycityplants.com/collections/bright-light-plants/plants-in-self-watering-planters: A tagged collection that shows self watering planters in the “Bright Light Plants” collection. This comes from faceted navigation, which is one of the hardest parts of technical SEO to manage in Shopify. Navigation is addressed in the website architecture and usability sections of the guide. I looked at a larger sample of tagged collections then reviewed in Google Search Console if any generate good rankings or rank for unique terms. The only tagged collections getting traffic is the collection /collections/plants-in-self-watering-planters. The tag collections do not help someone searching in Google any better than primary collections, so my recommendation with this will be to noindex tagged collections.
3. mycityplants.com/blogs/office-plants-blog/tagged/plant-guide: Tags on the blog are used a lot. Unless you have a strong reason to use tags on blogs, delete and avoid them. Most Shopify themes are designed to have them indexed.

Are there pages indexed in Google that you do not want indexed? A verification step to spot pages you do not want indexed is to browse pages and collections in the Shopify admin, then look at the titles and description summaries. Scan the list of content then if something seems it may be useful to deindex, view the page to confirm it has no value appearing in search results. Doing this for My City Plants, I spotted many thank you pages and old pages that have no unique content.

I have seen too many developers deindex content the wrong way by editing the theme to include a nofollow and noindex rule for the page. The method is wrong because the page is still discoverable in the sitemap and from other links on the website, which may encourage the page to be indexed by Google. I’ll show you a special Shopify trick even the best Shopify Plus partners don’t use.

Use the free Metafields Guru app. Their Chrome extension makes editing metafields a breeze. Find the page or collection in the Shopify admin you do not want indexed. Load up the extension then use the following values for a metafield:

"namespace" : "seo"
"key" : "hidden"
"value" : 1
"value_type" : "integer"

The metafield will add nofollow and noindex to the page, remove the page from the sitemap.xml file, and remove the page from the storefront search. This is the proper way to de-index Shopify pages.

4. Google Search Console Crawl Stats

The crawl stat report gives an overview of total pages seen by Google overtime. Access your report from Google Search Console by clicking “Settings” at the bottom-left.

How Google crawls a website depends on many factors. Google will crawl a page that changes each week more than a page updated once a year. If a page has low value content like faceted navigation or duplicate content, Google will crawl it less.

The first check is to view the graph to look for large spikes, sharp drops, or a peak that exceed the total pages on the website. These require investigation. There are many possibilities an SEO expert can consider for crawl variability:

• An increase can come from new pages, products, or collections.
• Maybe a sitemap was submitted to Google that lead to better coverage.
• If a drop occurs, perhaps someone added a new robots.txt rule that blocked the Googlebot.
• The average response time increasing overtime can reduce the number of crawled pages. You may benefit from faster servers being on Shopify Plus.

My City Plant’s crawl stats show spider activity fluctuated by 1,600 pages on the highest day to the lowest:

There’s no large spikes or sharp drops, but the total per day is larger than what’s indexed. This will be due to the faceted navigation and many other low value pages spotted in the index analysis just before.

The second check with the crawl stats report in an SEO audit is the response codes:

Investigate bad response codes.

The third check with the crawl stats report in an SEO audit is the host status report. Go to “Settings” > “Crawl stats”. Click on the domain from “Hosts” then “Host status”:

The report looks at three factors:

1. Robots.txt fetch: The failure rate for robots.txt requests during a crawl.
2. DNS resolution: Shows when the DNS server didn’t recognize your host name or didn’t respond during crawling.
3. Server connectivity: Shows when your server was unresponsive or did not provide the full response for a URL during a crawl.

It’s hard to diagnose host issues that no longer occur. For DNS issues, speak with the person responsible for the domain. For robots.txt issues, check if the theme has a robots.txt file. If it does, the file has likely been customized so you can investigate changes. The one-time occurrence of a DNS issue for My City Plants should be reviewed a month later to see if further issues arise.

5. Lifetime Organic Traffic Drops

SEO is an unethical industry. A lot of freelancers and agencies do low-quality SEO work known as “black hat SEO”. Black hat tactics violate Google Search Essential policies with the hope to rank high. Such tactics often get the website penalized by Google. A penalty is experienced by a sudden drop in organic search. Recovery from a Google penalty can take months.

A penalty is best spotted with a sudden drop in organic traffic. In Google Analytics 4, go to “Reports” > “Acquisition” > “Traffic Acquisition”. Click from the top-right the entire time period back to when your analytics was set up. Lastly, it’s cleaner to have a visual graph of only organic search so create a filter from the top of “Session default channel grouping” with a dimension value of “Organic Search”:

Brickell’s organic traffic from the original audit years ago shows steady growth with no major drops:

If you have a drop, cross-reference the date of the drop against Google algorithm changes using two trusted sources that track algorithm updates. The most comprehensive source is Moz’s Google Algorithm Change History. A second, though less comprehensive, source is the performance report in Google Search Console, which can have annotations of major changes on the timeline:

For the period you see drops in organic traffic, transpose the dates to see algorithm changes that may have affected organic performance. Note the date and algorithm update. If there’s no algorithm update, still note the algorithm update and the time period as a possible explanation.

If you spot a sudden spike, the website likely benefited from an algorithm update. Use the same method to find out what happened to reinforce your SEO strategy.

Organic traffic growth is hard to spot day-in, day-out. Instead, look across monthly performance. 10% growth each month is a good goal for new stores. It’s also wise to compare the current year against last year to eliminate seasonal trends. Analyze a period against the previous year in the date selection of analytics.

6. Google Search Console Manual Actions

The manual actions section in Search Console lets Google make clear serious violation of their website guidelines. Most websites see no manual actions.

If you get a message, the issue has high priority to help your SEO. The method of correction for a manual action varies with every issue. Google rarely tell you the issue in detail. You’ll have to dig deeper into your analysis or consult an SEO expert to get your store in full recovery.

7. Algorithm Cross-Check

Let’s say your store passes all the health checks so far. You have not spotted any penalties or technical issues. Minor penalties can go undetected. Advanced health checks provide more coverage, analysis, and reassurance.

I recommend Cognitive SEO for their “Unnatural Links Detection” tool that provides a good source to investigate toxic SEO. Backlinks are the primary risk of penalty for most Shopify stores, which you will analyse later in the audit, so it helps to have multiple tools give their stats and opinion.

Barracuda’s Panguin Tool is a fantastic free tool that transposes algorithm updates over your monthly traffic. One store came to me after they saw organic traffic plummet in 2013. The tool made it clear the website was penalised in 2013 from a Panda update. I ran through the SEO audit revealed in this guide then acted on the insights. The website regained organic traffic in May 2014:

Based on my experience, when you recover from a penalty, Google suddenly sends the website more organic traffic. The subsequent climb out is then steady like good SEO.

Website Architecture

Website architecture looks at the store’s structure to maximise the number of visitors from SEO.

1. Collections Structure

Collections in Shopify are a group of products. They act like the sections in a physical store that tell customers where to find a product. A good group of collections tell people and Google what each is about.

A well-structured website is, first and foremost, user-friendly. Design your collections first for people. Google hates it when store owners attempt to please the search engine at the cost of user-experience. No one wants a drop-down with 100 brands.

My City Plants has 6 links in the navigation, of which, all but the contact page are not URLs:

The top collections in each dropdown provides enormous opportunity to boost SEO with keyword-rich anchor text of collections. It’s a balancing act of serving people first then adjusting the structure to suit SEO.

There are principles to follow to design good collections:

1. Use brands (Nike), product type (shoes), or product application (basketball). A mix can work well too. Product attributes (color, size, model) rarely work and are best left to filters.
2. Simplicity is your goal. Brickell use to confuse me with overlapped collections. “Travel” fits into “Kits”. They also had a “Collections” link, which is a vague descriptor. For My City Plants, “Office Plants” overlaps with “Plants”. A split-test of “Office” versus “Office Plants” is worthy but from an SEO perspective it’s not a URL so it doesn’t matter. Contact is unnecessary for most stores, yet for them it sits well since they provide consultation and services for businesses.
3. Include at least one highly-relevant word in each collection that is commonly used in search queries. Use the Google Ads Keyword Planner to generate keyword ideas. You can input your competitors’ product categories into the tool to discover relevant keywords.
4. Refer to the search analytics report inside Search Console to see how people arrive on your collection pages. Select the “Page” filter to view how a collection generates organic traffic. Are there frequently used terms that can be adapted into the collection? While you don’t want to have a navigation link like “Natural Face Products”, use these researched terms in the page’s URL, title tags, and other on-page optimisations. From my analysis, “Body & Hair” generates 10% of the traffic compared to “Face” or “Shave”. The search queries show different intent (body lotion v shampoo) so they could be broken into two. The “Kit” collection gets zero traffic. A keyword analysis of the page using Google’s Keyword Tool gives keyword ideas not highly relevant. A lack of relevant intent can indicate a product-to-market miss-match.
5. Content in the menu tells Google, “this is important”. Stores with a large number of products—I’m talking in the hundreds and above—have a great opportunity to get collections ranking quickly. Prioritize your most-viewed collections by placing them first with relevant keyword text. This strategy can increase conversion rates since the largest percentage of people seek the collections. Make the link and text consistent throughout the website to boost SEO.
6. Conduct user-testing. Use Hotjar to view heatmap data. Run HITs on Mechanical Turk asking people to find a product to test alterations. If the website has thousands of visitors per month, a split-test is wise. Base decisions on data.

If you are a large store with diverse collections, your job is complex. Do mass amounts of keyword research from multiple tools including Advanced Web Ranking and couple the data with total search volume gathered from Google. You can manually cluster the search terms into groups, run a top-ranking report in the tool, then use the VLOOKUP function in Google Sheets to see the performance of collections. The insights you gather are incredible. Only bother with this advanced strategy if you have interest in the method or a store doing five figures per month from organic traffic.

2. Domain Canonicalization

Canonicalization merges multiple elements that are similar into one. Domain canonicalization fights duplicate content and builds link value since there’s one domain all other versions point to. Any Shopify store has at least three versions of a domain:

1. https://mycityplants.com
2. https://www.mycityplants.com
3. https://mycityplants.myshopify.com

Your store may have additional domains. The HTTP version of each domain use to exist, but no longer does since Shopify requires stores use a SSL certification for HTTPS.

Visit each non-www, www, and myshopify version of your homepage to confirm each redirect. Secondly, confirm this by reviewing all domains on the Shopify account, plus the redirect settings for domain canonicalization, by going in the Shopify admin under “Settings” > “Domains”:

If the domains do not redirect to a single version, every page will have multiple versions. The sitemap.xml will be accessible from each domain which confuses  Google with what to rank. In the domain settings, click the domain you want to set as the primary. From there, you can define it as the primary.

What canonicalized version should you use? Neither non-www or www is better for SEO. The non-www version looks cleaner.

3. rel canonical

The rel canonical tag on a page tells search engines the preferred version of a page you want indexed. The tag is critical for stores with variants and collections because these circumstances alter the URLs. When a variant is selected, a query string like ?variant=8354282245 is appended to the end of a URL. Whenever a product is in one collection, Shopify creates a new URL for the product.

If the shaving cream product is in two collections, it has two collection URLs and a main product address like:

https://brickellmensproducts.com/collections/best-sellers/products/shave-cream
https://brickellmensproducts.com/collections/mens-shave-products/products/shave-cream
https://brickellmensproducts.com/products/shave-cream

A Screaming Frog scan is the fastest way to review canonicalizations. The screenshot below shows three products that have a canonicalized version different to the primary URL:

When the canonical version of a product page is domain.com/products/product-name, canonicalization is most likely set up right in Shopify. There’s a small possibility a developer has conditional statements around the canonical tag that gives it unwanted or uncommon behaviour. Check the liquid template of the store for the below code. Secondly, go through the “Directives” report of the scan to confirm.

If your scan shows no use of rel canonical or incorrect use, add the following line of code between the <head> and </head> tags in your theme.liquid file:

<link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical_url }}" />

When I implemented this one change for a client who didn’t canonicalize any pages, they saw a 220% growth in organic traffic and sales within one month. Crazy.

If your store has tagged collections, Google likely struggles to crawl and index pages. Such pages from faceted navigation rarely has unique titles, descriptions, and content that makes Google want to crawl it.

Review Google Search Console for pages with “/collections/” in the URL to see clicks and impressions of tagged collections. If the volume is low, the store will get an SEO benefit from canonicalizing them into the primary collection and giving a noindex directive. Replace <link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical_url }}" /> with the following code to canonicalize tagged collections to the primary collection and noindex tagged collections:

{% if template contains 'collection' %}
  <link rel="canonical" href="{{ shop.url }}{{ collection.url }}" />
  {% if template contains 'collection' and current_tags %}
    <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />
  {% endif %}
{% else %}
  <link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical_url }}" />
{% endif %}

4. Internal Links to Product Pages

Most Shopify themes by default render product page URLs into two formats:

1. The standard canonical URL. For example, https://mycityplants.com/products/lechuza-balconera-color-50-planter-white
2. The non-canonical URL for every collection the product is in. For example, https://mycityplants.com/collections/desk-planters/products/lechuza-balconera-color-50-planter-white

The non-canonical URL commonly occurs when navigating in Shopify from a collection to a product. This is a problem for SEO because a store will have many internal links using the non-canonical format that gives weight to Google’s algorithm that it should use them instead of the canonical product URL. The rel canonical tag is a suggestion—not a guarantee—for Google to suggest what version of a page in search results. The rel canonical link can be insufficient at telling Google you want the “/products/” version ranking.

To fix this, make all internal links point to the canonical URL of a product.

1. Use the Shopify theme search Chrome extension that lets you search code of a Shopify theme.
2. Edit the code of the theme. Search for within: current_collection and within: collection. The extension will locate all instances of such code in the theme.

3. Remove the liquid filter portion of the code, so | within: current_collection and | within: collection, of all links in templates. In this example, line 3 becomes <a href="{{ product.url }}" itemprop="url" class="hidden-product-link">.

The downside is breadcrumbs will no longer contain the collection so you may want to monitor conversion rates and time on website.

After you’ve made the template edits, there’s other sources that may need updating. You may have missed a template edit or have a non-canonical link within a blog article or page. Do another Screaming Frog scan to spot all internal links that point to the non-canonical version so you can find what needs correction.

5. Products Versus Product Variants

A product variant is a minor variant of a product. Variant qualities can include color, size, quantity, material, and configuration.

You need to decide for SEO, whether the store sells variants as separate products in Shopify, or as a single product with Shopify’s variant feature. When set up with the variant feature, you want the variants to get no search volume and canonicalize to the primary product. When set up as separate products, you want the variant quality to get search volume.

My City Plants sells variants as separate products:

This setup is good for SEO when people search for variant qualities of the product and the pages have unique content. In this instance, people are not going to search for a money tree in a pot color of gray or dark cork. If they do, the volume is miniscule. These product variants should merge into a single product.

To decide off data whether you should merge variants or separate them, use the performance report in Google Search Console. Look at the impressions and queries for each variant. Click the page in Search Console to filter what search queries it ranks for. If the variant attribute has queries not unique to the variant attribute, it may be worth having it as a standalone product. If the variant has no impressions in search results, it has no SEO worth remaining as a variant.

Each product should be assessed on a case-by-case basis to best determine the best course of action for the whole website. From a usability perspective, you rarely want some products to have variants split out into their own products while others are grouped. Go one way or the other for the store.

In the event you want products split out by variant as standalone products for usability, but they don’t attract search volume, get unique content created for each. The second next best step to take is to point the rel canonical tag of variants to one variant.

Create a Canonical Metafield Definition

1. In Shopify admin, go to “Settings” > “Custom data”. Create a metafield for any type of content you want to canonicalize. This is almost-always either products or collections. In this case, we’re doing products.
2. Give it a name of “Canonical”.
3. Select the type of “URL”.
4. Save.

Update the Theme

1. Visit the following URL for your Shopify admin, replacing the mycityplants portion with your URL:

https://admin.shopify.com/store/mycityplants/bulk/product?resource_name=Product&edit=product_taxonomy_node_id%2Cmetafields.custom.canonical%2Cmetafields.seo.hidden%3Aboolean

2. Enter an absolute full URL for each canonical value you want updated. Point the products to the most default version of the product, the one with the best content, or the one ranking the best.
3. Save.
4. Edit the theme.liquid file, replacing <link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical_url }}"> with the following to finish canonicalizing products to your desired version.:

{%- if product.metafields.custom.canonical != blank -%}
<link rel="canonical" href="{{ product.metafields.custom.canonical }}">
{%- else -%}
<link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical_url }}">
{%- endif -%}

The product.metafields.global.canonical metafield was once a native metafield that Shopify used for the {{ canonical_url }} value in theme.liquid. This meant no theme or metafield edits were required. I have no idea why Shopify removed this feature. The solution I created achieves the same result with a custom metafield.

6. Sitemap Status

When you submit a sitemap in Search Console, it helps Google understand the structure of your site and index it more effectively. A sitemap lists all the important pages on your website, ensuring that search engines can discover then crawl them. Google will not rank what it cannot see.

In Google Search Console, go to “Index” > “Sitemaps”. Is there a sitemap? If not, submit yours. You only need to submit the primary sitemap.xml file:

https://yourstore.com/sitemap.xml

The file contains references to four types of child sitemaps:

1. Products (sitemap_products_1.xml). Shopify appends a query string to the sitemap. If the store contains thousands of products, it will create multiple product sitemaps.
2. Pages (sitemap_pages_1.xml).
3. Collections (sitemap_collections_1.xml).
4. Blogs and articles (sitemap_blogs_1.xml).

Sitemap submission for a Shopify store is not about telling Google you have a sitemap. Google will find the store’s sitemap from its mention in the robots.txt file. The submission is about helping you identify errors and warnings:

7. Robots.txt

The robots.txt file can stop the Googlebot from crawling legitimate pages. In Google Search Console, click on “Pages” to view indexing.

View any issues of “Blocked by robots.txt”. These pages aren’t indexed or served on Google.

You’ll see a lot of URLs that should not be indexed or no longer exist. One common issue I see is the policy page, terms of service page, and other policies being blocked. Google’s EEAT guidelines want to see your trustworthiness so it makes sense to index these pages.

To do this, edit your existing robots.txt file or create one. Then add the rules, matching the URLs to what is blocked:

Allow: /policies/privacy-policy
Allow: /policies/terms-of-service

Shopify has this documentation for more help with editing the robots.txt file.

8. HTTPS

Does the store use HTTPS in the URL or HTTP? Google favors HTTPS websites.

All Shopify stores today are forced to use HTTPS. Web technology continues to move towards simpler security. An SSL certificate is easy to set up in Shopify.

Beware of browser messages and other SEO risks that come with implementing SSL. You damage the website’s SEO with incorrect redirects, protocol-usage in your theme, and Google Search Console configuration. If a page uses HTTPS, its content needs to load from HTTPS otherwise the mixed content will not load or produce an insecure warning in the visitor’s browser that scares them from proceeding.

Accessibility

Web accessibility in the audit refers to making the website accessible to Google, social media platforms, and people with disabilities to the degree it influences SEO.

1. Hreflang Tags

Hreflang tags tell Google the relationship between alternate web pages. The tags specify the language and region served by each version of the webpage. If you have a single website with one language, there’s no need for hreflang tags.

Since My City Plants is a local business serving New York with no alternate versions for regions or languages, they don’t have hreflang tags. I’ll breakdown a hreflang tag into three elements using a generic example:

<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/" hreflang="en-us" />

1. The first element is rel="alternate". This tells Google the URL is an alternate version of the page.
2. The second element is href="https://www.example.com/". This is the location of the page.
3. The third element is hreflang="en-us". This specifies the alternate URL is for English-speaking Americans.
4. The order of elements is irrelevant.

The most guaranteed method to audit hreflang tags for Shopify stores is a Screaming Frog scan. It is instant, accurate, and comprehensive. The one caveat to keep in mind when auditing hreflang tags with the tool is to look beyond errors and confirm each store has the desired language and region settings. Follow their tutorial to audit and test hreflang tags.

In minutes you’ll have a report like this with everything to address in your tags:

Should the store require hreflang tags, follow the most comprehensive and up-to-date guide on hreflang tags in Shopify. In it you will learn a variety of solutions I created to implement hreflang tags in Shopify and how to manage them so they are perfectly error-free.

2. Appearance When JavaScript and CSS is Disabled

A search engine sees a website mostly in HTML so it makes sense to check your store’s appearance when JavaScript and CSS is disabled. Check by changing the settings in your browser or use browseo.net.

The output from the tool focuses on pure HTML, similar to what search engines see when they visit a page. You can quickly determine a page’s structure as well as its relevance for specific search terms by toggling options such as headings (h1-h6), redirects, and internal and external links. The purpose of the check in this stage of the audit is to ask yourself:

• Is there unwanted content?
• Can you see all menus?
• Are links clickable?
• Is irrelevant content appearing at the top when it could appear lower on the page?

I’ve taken a full screen grab of the My City Plants homepage on browseo.net. A line of unwanted content is seen first on the page “- | / Save up to % Save % Save up to Save Sale Sold out In stock Menu”. Menus are all visible. Links all appear clickable.

Google’s growing knowledge of JavaScript makes this classic SEO technique less valuable. Even so, it gives insight into how to possibly restructure the content of a website. A functional website when JavaScript and CSS is disabled is good to have in the rare instance users have such features disabled in their browser.

3. Blocked Resources

For a decade search engines could not understand JavaScript. In 2015 Google wanted to access JavaScript, CSS, images, and anything else that played a role in delivering content to a typical user.

Google use to have a “Blocked Resources” report in Google Search Console that let you see in bulk any files the search engine could not crawl across the website, but the tool was removed. John Mueller in a hangout said, “We dropped that feature because we noticed most sites no longer ran into problems.”

Your store is unlikely to have blocked resources, but you still should audit it to confirm. Today’s method of auditing blocked resources is to enter the URL of the homepage, a collection, a product, and a page in the URL inspection tool of Google Search Console. Click “View Tested Page” then render a screenshot.

Google says, “This is useful for confirming that all elements of the page are present and appear as you intend. Differences might be the result of resources that are blocked to Googlebot.”

4. Cloaking

Cloaking is where a search engine sees different content to a visitor. Developers can do it with geo-location redirects. Black hat SEOers use it to trick search engines.

Google condemns the technique repeatedly saying a website should deliver the same content and experience to their spiders as the user. Think about it from the search engine’s perspective: they want to know what the user will experience.

I recommend the User Agent Switcher extension for Google Chrome. Select “Googlebot” then visit a few pages of your store to see if it looks different in any way. A second check is Bruce Clay’s cloaking checker. The tool says My City Plants is not cloaking:

5. Structured Data Errors, Warnings, and Inaccuracies

Google’s search results contain far more than blue titles, green URLs, and black descriptions. Search engines display marked up highlights about a website called “structured data”, “markup”, “schema”, or “rich snippets”. The highlights can include organization information, stock status, product price, reviews, and much more.

The following screenshot shows a structured data example of review stars for My City Plants:

Schema markup affects the click-through rate of listings as well as people’s judgement before the click. Even if your Shopify store has 5-star reviews on your product page, an aggregate 3-star rating on Amazon displayed in Google results will leave a sour impression on potential customers.

In this section of the guide, you’ll learn how to spot markup errors. (Later I’ll cover the recommended types of markup.) When errors occur, snippets may not display in search results. The use of schema does not guarantee you will see marked data in search results, but clean markup is the only way it can happen. On the extreme side, incorrect use of schema can cause Google to penalize the website.

To identify errors on current structured data, one way is to view “Shopping” and “Enhancements” reports in Google Search Console. These reports give you a website-wide understanding of the schema implemented:

If there is an error, enter a sample of URLs in the Rich Results Test tool to confirm their existence. The tool has an advantage over Google Search Console because it lets you optimize markup in real-time. The disadvantage is you can only enter one URL at a time.

The second check I recommend is to test the following sample of pages in the Rich Results Test tool:

1. Home page.
2. The “about us” page.
3. A collection page.
4. A product page.
5. A blog article (if it exists).

You only need a representative sample as an error repeats itself because Shopify uses a template system. For each type of page, review and record these three points:

1. Errors. This is reviewed again since Google Search Console can miss-report errors.
2. Warnings. A warning doesn’t have to be corrected. If the data is available, aim to provide it.
3. Data corrections. Manually review the values in each schema looking for what you want updated. These do not come up as errors or warnings. Does each field correspond to what the schema should be? While it helps to grasp the technical aspects of schema, you don’t need it for this step. Does a URL field contain a URL? Is the price accurate? Is the organization information accurate?

Duplicate markup commonly occurs when one version of markup is done by JSON-LD while the Shopify theme has inline markup using microdata. If you see duplicate markup, it’s not an issue unless the page is miss-represented. Ilana Davis works with Shopify structured data all day and says, “Duplicate structured data is expected by Google and your Shopify store is not hurt by it at all.”

What matters is one type of markup on each page is free of errors and complete with accurate information. In the next section, I will give you a copy-and-paste code base to use if you want this done for you. Then the following sections in the Shopify SEO guide will explain each type of structured data and the importance of this code.

6. Complete Structured Data for Shopify

The Digital Darts structured snippet will give you the most complete structured data on a Shopify store. No app is required. Follow the steps to install this on your theme:

1. Duplicate your rlive theme.
2. Rename the theme following your naming convention. If there’s no convention, use the current theme name prepended with “schema”.
3. Work on the schema theme by scrolling to it, then click “Edit code”.
4. In the “Snippets” folder, create a file named “schema.liquid”.
5. Copy-and-paste our template code into the new file:

<!-- Shopify structured data from staging.digitaldarts.com.au/shopify-seo v1.6 -->
{%- assign logo = 'logo.png' | asset_url | prepend: "https:" -%}
{%- assign sameas_links = 'https://facebook.com/test,https://instagram.com/test' | split: "," -%}
{%- assign enable_phone = false -%}
{%- assign enable_local_schema = false -%}
{%- assign latitude = '-27.1234567' -%}
{%- assign longitude = '153.1234567' -%}

{%- assign schema_templates = 'index,collection,list-collections,product,article' | split: ',' -%}
{%- assign url = shop.url %}
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "http://schema.org",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "name": "{{ shop.name }}",
  "logo": "{{ logo }}",
  "image": "{{ logo }}",
  "url": "{{ shop.url }}{{ page.url }}",
{%- if template.name contains 'index' -%}
  "description": "{{ page_description }}",
{%- endif %}
  "sameAs": ["{{ sameas_links | join: '", "' }}"],
  "priceRange": "$$$"
{%- if enable_local_schema == true -%},
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
  {%- if shop.address.street != blank %}
    "streetAddress": {{ shop.address.street | strip_html | json }},
  {%- endif -%}
  {%- if shop.address.city != blank %}
    "addressLocality": {{ shop.address.city | strip_html | json }},
  {%- endif -%}
  {%- if shop.address.province != blank %}
    "addressRegion": {{ shop.address.province | strip_html | json }},
  {%- endif -%}
  {%- if shop.address.zip != blank %}
    "postalCode": {{ shop.address.zip | strip_html | json }},
  {%- endif -%}
  {%- if shop.address.country != blank %}
    "addressCountry": {{ shop.address.country | strip_html | json }}
  {%- endif %}
  }
{%- endif -%}
  {%- if enable_local_schema == true and latitude != blank and longitude != blank %},
  "geo": {
    "@type": "GeoCoordinates",
    "latitude": {{ latitude }},
    "longitude": {{ longitude }}
  }
{%- endif -%}
{%- if enable_phone == true and shop.address.phone != blank %},
  "telephone": {{ shop.address.phone  | strip_html | json }}
{%- endif %}
}
</script>
{%- if schema_templates contains template.name %}
<script type="application/ld+json">
{%- endif -%}
{%- if template.name contains 'product' -%}
{%- assign json_current_variant = product.selected_or_first_available_variant -%}
{%- assign json_variant_count = product.variants | size -%}
{%- assign json_count = 0 %}
{
  "@context": "http://schema.org/",
  "@type": "Product",
  "name": {{ product.title | strip_html | json }},
  "description": {{ product.description | strip_html | json }},
  "image": "https:{{ product.featured_image.src | img_url: 'grande' }}",
  "url": "{{ shop.url }}{{ product.url }}",
  {%- if product.variants.first.sku != blank -%}
    "sku": "{{ product.variants.first.sku }}",
  {%- else -%}
    "sku": "{{ product.variants.first.id }}",
  {%- endif -%}
  {%- if product.variants.first.barcode.size == 12 -%}
    "gtin12": {{ product.variants.first.barcode }},
  {%- endif -%}
  {%- if product.variants.first.barcode.size == 13 -%}
    "gtin13": {{ product.variants.first.barcode }},
  {%- endif -%}
  {%- if product.variants.first.barcode.size == 14 -%}
    "gtin14": {{ product.variants.first.barcode }},
  {%- endif -%}
    "productID": "{{ product.id }}",
  "brand": {
    "@type": "Brand",
    "name": "{{ product.vendor | escape }}"
  },
  {%- if product.metafields.judgeme.widget -%}
    {%- assign reviewRatingJgme = product.metafields.judgeme.widget | split: "data-average-rating='" | last | split: "'" | first | plus: 0 -%}
    {%- assign reviewCountJgme = product.metafields.judgeme.widget | split: "data-number-of-reviews='" | last | split: "'" | first | plus: 0 -%}
  {%- endif -%}
  {%- if product.metafields.spr.reviews -%}
    {%- assign rd_a1 = product.metafields.spr.reviews | split: '"ratingValue":'  -%}
    {%- assign rd_a2 = rd_a1[1] | split: "," -%}
    {%- assign rd_a3 = rd_a2[0] | replace: '"', "" -%}
    {%- assign reviewRatingShopify = rd_a3 | plus: 1 | minus: 1 -%}
    {%- assign rd_a1 = product.metafields.spr.reviews | split: '"reviewCount":' -%}
    {%- assign rd_a2 = rd_a1[1] | split: "," -%}
    {%- assign rd_a3 = rd_a2[0] | replace: '"', "" -%}
    {%- assign reviewCountShopify = rd_a3 | plus: 1 | minus: 1 -%}
  {%- endif -%}
  {%- if product.metafields.judgeme.widget and reviewCountJgme > 0 %}
  "aggregateRating": {
    "@type": "AggregateRating",
    "ratingValue": {{ reviewRatingJgme }},
    "reviewCount": {{ reviewCountJgme }}
  },
  {%- elsif product.metafields.spr.reviews and reviewCountShopify > 0 %}
  "aggregateRating": {
    "@type": "AggregateRating",
    "ratingValue": {{ reviewRatingShopify }},
    "reviewCount": {{ reviewCountShopify}}
  },
  {%- endif -%}
  {%- if product.variants -%}
  {%- assign json_count = json_count | plus: 1 %}
  "offers": {%- if product.variants.size > 1 -%}[{%- endif -%}{
    "@type" : "Offer",
    "priceCurrency": "{{ shop.currency }}",
    "price": "{{ json_current_variant.price | money_without_currency  | strip_html | remove: ',' }}",
    "itemCondition" : "http://schema.org/NewCondition",
    "availability" : "http://schema.org/{%- if product.available -%}InStock{%- else -%}OutOfStock{%- endif -%}",
    "url" : "{{ shop.url }}{{ json_current_variant.url }}",
      {%- if json_current_variant.image -%}
        {%- assign variant_image_size = json_current_variant.image.width | append: 'x' -%}
        "image": "https:{{ json_current_variant.image.src | img_url: variant_image_size }}",
      {%- else -%}
        "image": "https:{{ product.featured_image.src | img_url: 'grande' }}",
      {%- endif -%}
      {%- if json_current_variant.title != 'Default Title' -%}
        "name" : "{{ product.title | strip_html | escape }} - {{ json_current_variant.title | escape }}",
      {%- else -%}
        "name" : "{{ product.title | strip_html | escape }}",
      {%- endif -%}
      {%- if json_current_variant.barcode.size == 12 -%}
        "gtin12": {{ json_current_variant.barcode }},
      {%- endif -%}
      {%- if json_current_variant.barcode.size == 13 -%}
        "gtin13": {{ json_current_variant.barcode }},
      {%- endif -%}
      {%- if json_current_variant.barcode.size == 14 -%}
        "gtin14": {{ json_current_variant.barcode }},
      {%- endif -%}
      {%- if json_current_variant.sku != blank -%}
        "sku": "{{ json_current_variant.sku }}",
      {%- else -%}
        "sku": "{{ json_current_variant.id }}",
      {%- endif -%}
    "seller": {
      "@type": "Organization",
      "name": "{{ shop.name }}"
    },
    "priceValidUntil": "{{ 'now' | date: '%s' | plus: 31536000 | date: '%Y-%m-%d' | uri_encode | replace:'+','%20' }}"
  }
  {%- if product.variants.size != 1 -%},{%- endif -%}
  {%- for variant in product.variants -%}
  {%- if variant != product.selected_or_first_available_variant -%}
  {%- assign json_count = json_count | plus: 1 %}
  {
    "@type" : "Offer",
    "priceCurrency": "{{ shop.currency }}",
    "price": "{{ variant.price | money_without_currency  | strip_html | remove: ',' }}",
    "itemCondition" : "http://schema.org/NewCondition",
    "availability" : "http://schema.org/{%- if variant.available -%}InStock{%- else -%}OutOfStock{%- endif -%}",
    "url" : "{{ shop.url }}{{ variant.url }}",
      {%- if variant.image -%}
        {%- assign variant_image_size = variant.image.width | append: 'x' -%}
        "image": "http:{{ variant.image.src | img_url: variant_image_size }}",
      {%- else -%}
        "image": "https:{{ product.featured_image.src | img_url: 'grande' }}",
      {%- endif -%}
      {%- if variant.title != 'Default Title' -%}
        "name" : {{ product.title | strip_html | json }} - {{ variant.title | strip_html | json }},
      {%- else -%}
        "name" : {{ product.title | strip_html | json }},
      {%- endif -%}
      {%- if variant.barcode.size == 12 -%}
        "gtin12": {{ variant.barcode }},
      {%- endif -%}
      {%- if variant.barcode.size == 13 -%}
        "gtin13": {{ variant.barcode }},
      {%- endif -%}
      {%- if variant.barcode.size == 14 -%}
        "gtin14": {{ variant.barcode }},
      {%- endif -%}
      {%- if variant.sku != blank -%}
        "sku": "{{ variant.sku }}",
      {%- else -%}
        "sku": "{{ variant.id }}",
      {%- endif -%}
      "seller": {
        "@type": "Organization",
        "name": "{{ shop.name }}"
      },
      "priceValidUntil": "{{ 'now' | date: '%s' | plus: 31536000 | date: '%Y-%m-%d' | uri_encode | replace:'+','%20' }}"
    }
    {%- if json_count < json_variant_count -%} {%- unless forloop.last -%},{%- endunless -%} {%- endif -%} {%- endif -%} {%- endfor -%} {%- if product.variants.size > 1 -%}]{%- endif -%}
  {%- endif %}
},
{
  "@context": "http://schema.org/",
  "@type": "BreadcrumbList",
  "itemListElement": [{
    "@type": "ListItem",
    "position": 1,
    "name": "Home",
    "item": "{{ url }}"
  },
  {%- if collection -%}
  {
    "@type": "ListItem",
    "position": 2,
    "name": {{ collection.title | strip_html | json }},
    "item": "{{ url }}/collections/{{ collection.handle }}"
  },
  {
    "@type": "ListItem",
    "position": 3,
    "name": {{ product.title | strip_html | json }},
    "item": "{{ canonical_url }}"
  }
  {%- else -%}
  {
    "@type": "ListItem",
    "position": 2,
    "name": {{ product.title | strip_html | json }},
    "item": "{{ canonical_url }}"
  }
  {%- endif -%}
  ]
}
{%- elsif template.name contains 'article' -%}
{
  "@context": "http://schema.org/",
  "@type": "Article",
  "mainEntityOfPage": {
    "@type": "WebPage",
    "@id": "{{ canonical_url }}"
  },
  "name": "{{ article.title }}",
  {%- if article.excerpt != blank -%}
  "description": {{ article.excerpt | split: '[lang2]' | first |  strip_html | json }},
  {%- endif %}
  "articleBody": {{ article.content | strip_html | json }},
  {%- if article.image.src != blank -%}
  "image": {
    "@type": "ImageObject",
    "url": "{{ article.image.src | img_url: "1024x1024" | prepend: "https:" }}",
    "width": 1024,
    "height": 1024
  },
  {%- endif %}
  "author": {
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "{{ article.author }}",
    "url": "{{ shop.url }}{{ blog.url }}"
  },
  "headline": {{ article.title | json }},
  "dateCreated": {{ article.created_at | date: '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ' | json }},
  "datePublished": {{ article.published_at | date: '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ' | json }},
  "dateModified": {{ article.updated_at | date: '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ' | json }},
  "publisher": {
    "@type": "Organization",
    "name": "{{ shop.name }}",
    "logo": {
      "@type": "ImageObject",
      "url": "{{ logo }}"
    }
  }
},
{
  "@context": "http://schema.org/",
  "@type": "BreadcrumbList",
  "itemListElement": [{
    "@type": "ListItem",
    "position": 1,
    "name": "Home",
    "item": "{{ url }}"
  },
  {
    "@type": "ListItem",
    "position": 2,
    "name": {{ article.title | strip_html | json }},
    "item": "{{ canonical_url }}"
  }]
}
{%- elsif template.name contains 'collection' -%}
{
  "@context": "http://schema.org/",
  "@type": "CollectionPage",
  "name": {{ collection.title | strip_html | json }},
  "url": "{{ canonical_url }}",
  "description": {{ collection.description | strip_html | json }}
},
{
  "@context": "http://schema.org/",
  "@type": "BreadcrumbList",
  "itemListElement": [{
    "@type": "ListItem",
    "position": 1,
    "name": "Home",
    "item": "{{ url }}"
  },
  {
    "@type": "ListItem",
    "position": 2,
    "name": {{ collection.title | strip_html | json }},
    "item": "{{ canonical_url }}"
  }]
}
{%- endif -%}
{%- if schema_templates contains template.name %}
</script>
{%- endif -%}

6. Edit the first line to include the logo URL.
7. Edit the second line for sameAs to include the company’s active social media links and Wikipedia if they have one. Include the full URLs. Separate the values with commas and no spaces.
8. Add {% include 'schema' %} to the theme.liquid file just before the closing </head> tag.

Once implemented:

1. Go to “Themes” in the Shopify admin. Next to the theme created with the schema, preview the theme.
2. View the source code of the homepage. Locate the logo URL by searching the source code for "logo":. View the logo URL to confirm the URL is accurate.
3. Use the Rich Results Test tool on the five types of pages to review errors, warnings, and data gaps. Check for data gaps by for empty values in each line of schema reported in the tool. You need to preview the unpublished theme then copy the full source code of each page as a code snippet in the tool rather than validating by URL because Shopify’s robots.txt file blocks the Googlebot from fetching an unpublished page. The URL samples to check are:
   1. The homepage.
   2. The about page.
   3. A collection.
   4. A product page.
   5. A blog article (if it exists).
4. Preview the five types of pages as a user to confirm they’re displaying as intended.
5. Publish the theme.

7. Structured Data: Product

Product markup gives extra information about a product in results. The markup includes the brand, gtin, color, URL, and more.

Use our code shared earlier in the guide to implement product markup.

8. Structured Data: AggregateRating

Review schema shows off product ratings in Google. The AggregateRating markup includes the name of the item, the number of reviews, the highest rating, and the average rating.

Use our code shared earlier in the guide to implement AggregateRating markup. Galen Leather is an SEO client who we’ve implemented this structured data for. Here’s what one of their search results look like thanks to the markup:

Shopify’s official review app automatically uses the correct schema. My favourite review app Judge.me also has Google rich snippets. If you implement our code, like I said earlier, there’s no need to remove duplicate markup from these apps.

9. Structured Data: Offer

Offer schema can display an “In Stock” message, price, and currency in search results. Such markup includes the price, currency, item condition, availability, and product URL.

Use our code shared earlier in the guide to implement offer markup. See the section above on offer structured data for an example of the review markup in search results.

10. Structured Data: Breadcrumb

Breadcrumb schema in Shopify applies to collections, products, blogs, and articles. Attributes include position, name, and item.

Search results may show a page URL that includes the “>” character because of the structured data, which gives a digestable format of the URL that can attract clicks:

Use our code shared earlier in the guide to implement breadcrumb markup. Do not confuse having breadcrumbs with schema. The frontend existence of breadcrumbs does not mean there is structured data.

11. Structured Data: Organization

Organization schema is a strong search signal for Google to use the defined logo in the markup within search results. Attributes include the name, logo, URL, and description.

Use our code shared earlier in the guide to implement organization markup.

12. Structured Data: Article

Article schema can help Google understand more about an article. Better title text, images, and date information for the article is shown in search results on Google, Google News, or Google Assistant.

Use our code shared earlier in the guide to implement article markup. The markup is unnecessary if you do not have a blog.

13. Free Merchant Listings

Who doesn’t want more traffic without spending a dime on ads? Auditing your free merchant listings is a simple way to tap into that goldmine. By showing up in Google’s free product listings, you can attract more eyes on your products without having to throw money at ads.

Google can also display your delivery and returns information in search results, making it easier for shoppers to see what to expect before even visiting your store. This data comes from Merchant Center.

Here’s how to check your free listings is set up and that delivery and returns info is up to snuff in Google Merchant Center:

1. Log in to Google Merchant Center.
2. Click on “Free Listings” to confirm the store is opted into the program. If not, it needs to be created with a Shopify feed. If you are set up on free listings, it’s worth going to the “Products” section. Make sure your feed has relevant and accurate product details.
3. Check shipping settings: Under “Delivery and returns”, double-check that your delivery options are correctly listed—regions, rates, and service levels should be spot on.
4. Check returns settings: nder “Delivery and returns”, make sure you’re laying out clear and easy-to-understand return instructions—how long customers have, and any conditions.

14. Optimise Products for AI platforms

A lot of factors in this Shopify SEO guide influence your products ability to show up in AI search. Products in the Shopify Catalog can be shown across AI tools and shopping platforms when the data is clear and complete. These systems rely on structured fields so accuracy across your catalog matters.

Start by reviewing the core product information on every item:

• Product title
• Product description
• Images
• Variants, including clear and descriptive option names
• Barcodes (these give standard product identifiers)
• Organization of products through product type, vendor, collections, and tags.

A second known factor used by AI systems is the store-level information of policy pages. Make sure your shipping, returns, and refund policies are up-to-date.

A third factor that’s unique to optimize your Shopify store for AI answers is your store data in the Shopify Knowledge Base app.

AI agents can answer shopper questions about your store. Shopify pulls those answers from your catalog, policies, and the app. The app shows what buyers are asking and how often AI references your store, and lets you control the responses.

15. Twitter Cards

Twitter Cards give rich media experiences when your pages are tweeted to drive traffic to your website:

Tweets seem to impact SEO when the user has a large following. However, the influence social signals have on SEO is unclear. Beyond SEO, a richer experience generally help sales.

Follow Shopify’s documentation to create Twitter Cards. You can try test the markup with Twitter’s Card Validator tool, but it hasn’t previewed for me in years. I suggest this preview tool instead. Refer to Twitter’s documentation on cards for more help.

16. Facebook Open Graph Markup

The Facebook Open Graph markup controls how a snippet is displayed when shared on the platform:

Facebook Open Graph like Twitter Cards don’t affect SEO in Google. They seem to have an impact on Facebook’s search results. An attractive summary gets more clicks. Some SEO specialists believe shared content is a precursor to backlinks, which does help SEO. One study found there is no correlation between shares and backlinks.

I recommend Open Graph tags to satisfy the billions of Facebook users. Take every opportunity to snag a sale. GitHub user chrisjhoughton has a project to implement Facebook Open Graph on your store. If you want and need both Facebook Open Graph tags and Twitter cards, follow Shopify’s Open Graph tags tutorial. You will also find Facebook’s debugger tool helpful to get markup right. Refer to Facebook’s documentation on sharing for webmasters for more help.

17. Heading Tags

The <h1> tag is used to mark up a webpage title. It is often the largest and most distinguishable heading tag. Heading tags go from <h2> all the way to <h6>.

Heading tags matter for Shopify SEO because they prioritize content. Words in a <h1> tag are more important than in a  <h6> when the tags are correctly used.

An SEO audit will primarily look at all <h1> tags on a page, sometimes review <h2> tags, and confirm heading tags are in their intended hierarchical structure. A lot of stores mistake using the <h1> tag for a logo. What you want for heading tags on each page type:

• Homepage: Primary keyword of the store.
• Collections: Primary keywords of the collection above the fold.
• Products: Name of the product rich with keywords.
• Pages: Name of the page.
• Articles: Title of the article rich with keywords.

There are many ways to review the tags. My favorite method to inspect individual pages is to use Chrome’s developer tools:

The best way to review heading tags in batch is the trusted Screaming Frog tool. I like the crazy amphibian because it provides a bulk measurement of what is missing, long (over 70 characters), or duplicate tags:

The quality of your heading tags may vary between the homepage, collections, products, pages, and blogs because each use different liquid templates in Shopify.

18. Image Alt Text

Alt text is the biggest SEO factor to appear in Google Image search so this is wise for Shopify stores to get right. Also known as “alternative text” of an image, it follows the HTML structure <img src="https://example.com/image.jpg" alt="This is the alt text" />. The alt text is seen by Google to understand the image, appears to the visitor when an image does not load, and is used by screen readers to describe an image to someone unable to see it.

To audit alt text, view your Screaming Frog crawl. In the “Overview” panel on the right-side, see the images section:

Fix images that miss alt text, have alt text over 100 characters, or use non-descriptive alt text.

View a sample of the actual text to ensure the text is readable, contains keywords, and describes the image. The alt text of internal images in Screaming Frog can be viewed by replicating this screenshot:

The second, and more important, section in Screaming Frog to review is external images because Shopify images are hosted on a CDN. Click the “External” tab at the top, select “Image” from the filter, then “Image Info” at the bottom:

To see the data in bulk, all images are hosted on a CDN so click “Bulk Export” then “All Inlinks” and filter by the “IMG” type in a spreadsheet.

Stores with a small SKU range can afford to manually update the alt text of images. Larger stores, or lazy folk, can use the Alt Text app to bulk optimise product images.

19. Readability

Readability refers to the ease content can be read. It is unknown if Google looks at the readability of text as an SEO factor though it makes sense as a way to measure engagement. If the text is too technical, people cannot understand it. If the text is beneath the reader’s level, they may scan it then quickly leave.

Use a readability tool like Readability Formulas. Enter your homepage, a product page, then another important page of your website. Average out your Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease score. Aim between 60-80. If you sell electronic kits to engineers, it might be beneficial to have a score below 50.

Usability

Search engines want a website to help users do what they want to do. A usable website is one the visitor can comfortably interact with to accomplish their desired goal. Usability is similar to accessibility, but with a focus on the common person’s experience on common equipment.

1. Mobile Usability

Mobile makes up 50-80% of traffic on our client Shopify stores. Basic mobile usability is an SEO factor because a store that’s hard-to-use on mobile is a bad user experience.

Review the “Mobile Usability” report in Google Search Console. Begin mobile usability analysis here because issues most times arise from a template. Your homepage could be fine, while your product pages produce warnings from photographic thumbnails being too close. My City Plants has no mobile usability issues:

Common issues for Shopify themes are “Clickable elements too close together” and “Content wider than screen”. Use Google’s Lighthouse to further identify and test fixes. You get a live analysis using Lighthouse without the wait for Googlebot to crawl then update the mobile usability report.

Also use the PageSpeed Insights tool as it can give new suggestions for mobile usability.

2. Page Speed

The load time of your store is correlated with revenue per visitor. Research shows people love fast websites that give a great user experience. A fast store has a chance of being a usable store.

Moreover with SEO, the time a page takes to load has been a ranking factor for over a decade. In 2021, Google defined this for web developers as the “largest contentful paint” which measures perceived load speed and marks the point in the page load timeline when the page’s main content has likely loaded.

A second SEO factor of page speed is the interaction to next paint, which measures how long it takes for the visual rendering of your webpage to update after a user interacts with it.

Both of these metrics are captured inside the “Core Web Vitals” report of Google Search Console:

It’s helpful to distinguish speed improvements for better conversion rates and those for SEO. You can make many speed boosts, but they may not help SEO. Use the Core Web Vitals report to determine if speed improvements will help SEO.

These are some low-cost tips for faster page speed in Shopify that everyone can follow:

1. Resize images. Unoptimized images slow down a website because they take more bandwidth to load. You can manually resize images in picture editing tools or use apps that automatically compress images uploaded on your website. I’ve seen images with no compression be 30 times larger than the optimized version. See the size of all your images with Screaming Frog. It takes a little extra work because the images are hosted on a CDN. After your full scan, click “Bulk Export” then “All Inlinks” and filter by the “IMG” type in a spreadsheet. Copy the image file names into a .txt file. At the top select “List” from the “Mode” menu then “Start” the scan. You will get a summary of all size information. Filter the column and you may get images that standout in size like below, which is your low-hanging fruit to optimise:

2. Use liquid to load the right image size for the viewport to avoid an excessively large image on a mobile device.
3. Choose image formats smaller in size. Use tools like Photoshop to test exporting the image in different formats. You will see size differences. An excellent example is JPEG, which takes up less memory compared to GIF or PNG for most images.
4. Compress JavaScript and CSS. Minimize the files to eliminate whitespace, use shorter names for variables, and prevent code-waste with efficient practices.
5. Conditionally load scripts. If a script is only used on the collections page, loading it on other pages adds an unnecessary resource. Make it conditional with code like:

{%- if template contains 'collection' -%}
<!-- Load script -->
{%- endif -%}

6. Delay the loading of non-critical scripts. If JavaScript is inserted inside the “head” tag, it may have to load before anything is seen in the browser. There are ways around this. Should a script be unnecessary for the loading of content above the fold, it may be non-critical and can be loaded before the closing “body” tag.
7. Use resource hints wisely. Values include preload, preconnect, prefetch, and dns-prefetch. Use them in a <link> element to optimize the loading of resources. Do not overdo preloads. Here’s an example code of resource hints:

<link rel="preload" href="{{ jquery.min.js | asset_url }}" as="script">
<link rel="prefetch" href="{{ stylesheet.css | asset_url }}">
<link rel="dns-prefetch" href="//cdn.shopify.com">
<link rel="preconnect" href="//cdn.shopify.com">

8. Limit the number of apps you have. Not all apps affect Shopify speed. When it comes to increasing your website speed, less is generally more. Check your apps in the admin to remove any that are unused. Some apps once uninstalled, leave files behind in your theme so review it for leftover code. The PageSpeed Insights tool has a section called “reduce the impact of third-party code” that can help you spot scripts from unused apps. If you discover apps that perform multiple functions, it’s best to use these instead of those that perform single functions since scripts may overlap. Eliminate apps to get the added benefit of saving money from unnecessary expenses.
9. Simplification. Less content will always load faster than more. Don’t instantly resort to minimalism then destroy conversions. Start with a heatmap analysis of your homepage to find what elements are ignored. Many stores have a montage of a homepage filled with every type of content. If you have a list of the latest blog posts with images, chances are they can be cut.
10. Developers can refer to Shopify’s best practices for fast themes. Shopify Plus also have a good guide to improve store speed.

There is more speed improvements to make, but these have the most impact for most stores. What else you can do to speed up your store will vary based on the analysis. Use these tools to help the diagnosis of page speed issues:

1. Pingdom’s FTP tool is an online version that provides a useful waterfall chart.
2. GTmetrix is another tool to have on hand that helps you identify what affects time to first render and other bottlenecks that can be addressed to boost a page’s speed.
3. Web developers love to use Chrome’s network and performance reports to view what is loaded and how long every element takes to load.

3. Cumulative Layout Shift

The cumulative layout shift measures visual stability by quantifying the amount of unexpected layout shift of seen page content. Google gives a funny example of someone about to cancel their order only for a textbox to appear that makes their tap complete the order.

Review the “Core Web Vitals” report in Google Search Console for cumulative layout shifts.

4. Navigation

Navigation is the consistent structure at the top of a page. It is a sub-category of website architecture. Refer to the collections structure to learn how to scientifically build your navigation.

The navigation is best refined from user research once good practices are ticked off. Do your keyword research taught in the website architecture section. Use visual styles to distinguish categories. Build links in HTML rather than jQuery to help crawling.

5. Breadcrumbs

A breadcrumb helps the user find a way to “retreat” their search through links that shows where they are on the website. This is different to breadcrumb structured data.

Breadcrumbs boost SEO because they clarify website architecture, build internal link relevancy, provide related anchor text, and improve the user experience. If someone lands on a product page for booty shorts, but the shorts are not what they want, they can go back “one level” to view all shorts.

My City Plants has breadcrumbs. In this example, I’ve navigated from the “Bright Light Plants” collection then clicked a product. There is a trail for me to return to the bright light plants collection or the homepage:

Here is a poor breadcrumb on athletic clothing store 21.15.Nine:

If you had a hard time spotting the breadcrumb, it is the “Back to Mens” text.

Review a collection, tagged collection, product, blog, article, and page. Check breadcrumbs exist on each style of Shopify page. Should you need it, get a kickstart on the code to build a good breadcrumb from Shopify’s documentation, which creates a breadcrumb for all content types.

6. Internal Links

An internal link points to the same domain. They are an easy way to boost the SEO of a store since one link only requires one quick edit. The general rule in SEO forever has been to stay under 100 internal links per page.

Select the homepage, and later a collections page, from your scan in Screaming Frog. On the left-side, view the figure under “SEO Elements” > “Internal” > “HTML”. Brickell have 68 on the homepage:

You can also sort your scan by “Word Count” to see the pages with lots of text that provide link opportunities.

A store should link between its pages when appropriate. If you mention your blue glow shorts on your long shorts page, “blue glow shorts” should be linked. Anytime there’s a new article, collection, or product, search the store for relevant keywords to add an internal link.

For an SEO audit, manually browse the store for this step. Look at a few blog posts, product descriptions, and collections to see if the user would benefit if something written about were linked. Provide a few examples in your audit to demonstrate findings.

7. Anchor Text

The anchor text of a link is the clickable text of a link. Internal and external links rich with relevant keywords will help SEO.

To review the anchor text of internal links, within Screaming Frog, go to “Bulk Export” > “Links” > “All Inlinks”.

Filter the “Anchor” column to remove rows with no anchor text. You may want to remove all rows that have a destination URL containing /pages/ to cut through the mass header and footer links. Scroll through the anchor text to see what comes up. The biggest problem you are looking for is generic text like “click here”.

If you want something more quantifiable and comprehensive, create a pivot table to cluster the frequency of anchor text then plot the data. Follow Joshua Titsworth’s tutorial to visualise internal link text.

Like the previous section on internal links, the anchor text portion of the audit most often for Shopify stores is about educating the store owner, marketing manager, or content producer with guidelines to publish SEO optimal content.

8. Image File Names

The file name of an image is the last portion of the URL preceding a question mark when viewing an image. For the URL https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1025/1611/products/bird-of-paradise-classico-50-charcoal-01_5e8e2723-ec5f-4348-b1bd-fab6dbb79109_5000x.jpg?v=1652813012, the image file name is bird-of-paradise-classico-50-charcoal-01_5e8e2723-ec5f-4348-b1bd-fab6dbb79109_5000x.jpg.

See the section in this Shopify SEO guide on image alt text to learn how to audit image names. Review internal and external images in Screaming Frog because the Shopify CDN gets images classified as external. An image file name should be descriptive of the image. You will find unoptimized image names.

Shopify names an image from the image’s file name at the time of upload. If you were to upload the image below, the name should contain target keywords that reflect what people would search to find it, such as “Bird of Paradise Large Indoor Plant Classico 50 Charcoal Pot”:

You can now edit the file name of an image in the Shopify admin. Go to “Content” > “Files”, click the image then change the name.

9. Broken Links and Images

Links and images that do not exist create a bad user experience to hurt SEO.

Confirm your links and images are functional. The best way to do it in bulk is in Screaming Frog. Click on the “Response Codes” tab then sort by “Status Code” to identify 404 errors.

Click the “Inlinks” tab at the bottom to identify where to update the broken content:

The most common reason I see for broken links is when a store migrates to Shopify and fails to redirect all URLs to the new platform. You need to map each old URL to the respective new URL with 301 redirects. Shopify allows you to bulk import and export redirects through a csv file.

10. 404 Page

The 404 page appears when someone visits a URL that does not exist. Shopify takes care of the technical aspect of using the appropriate 404 response code and not redirecting the user that I’ve seen other content management systems screw up.

A well-designed 404 page can help SEO since it improves the user-experience. It may even become a backlink strategy as some people link to such pages as a design case study.

Type your store’s address into a web browser with a non-existent address like mystore.com/errortest. What shows up?

1. Does the page clearly tell you that what you’re looking for cannot be found?
2. Does the page direct you to improve your search?

Brickell’s 404 page can improve with search functionality, a suggestion to check the URL, and a request to contact the store if the person thinks the page should exist:

Digital Darts’ has a great 404 page for an effective example. I like my chubby panda.

11. 3xx Redirect Minimisation

In a perfect SEO world, every URL on your store produces a 200 response code. 301 and 302 response codes are not bad for SEO, but become questionable when a website is filled with them.

Avoid 3xx response codes when possible by linking directly to the correct resource. See your Screaming Frog scan for internal and external URLs to update. Direct linking helps ever-so-slightly with speed and the user experience.

Content

Content is king. This sadly causes Shopify store owners to publish blogs with little methodology or purpose other than to “create content” that results in no growth.

What makes good content for an online store? How does your content compare? This section of the SEO audit takes an analytical and conceptual approach to the content factors that drive organic search in ecommerce so you know exactly if you have a peasant or dynasty king.

1. Keywords

Use keywords in content if you want them to be found in Google when someone searches such words. Pages, products, articles, and videos are all types of content.

Good keyword optimisation does not begin with tools or a density of 2.5%. That is so 2010. Look at the page you are optimising then ask yourself:

If someone were to discover only this page on the Internet then walk away happy, what would they look for?

Visit a few pages to see if and how, such pages contain these words. In your Screaming Frog scan, review the titles and meta descriptions of a few sample pages.

Brickell do a moderate job of using keywords in the title tags and meta description:

Your goal is to include relevant keywords in the title tag, h1 and other heading tags, image file names, image alt text, and sprinkled throughout the content.

Keywords can be overused. They should be relevant to the subject and readable to the average visitor.

For more help with deciding what words to optimise for, competitor research, and volume analysis, refer to my tutorial on search query analysis.

2. Title Tags

Title tags are one of the biggest on-page influencers of SEO. A title tag sits between the <header> tags of a webpage like so:

<header>
<title>Your title is here</title>
<meta name="description" content="Your description is here" />
</header>

The title tag shapes the large blue text you see in Google:

Google designed snippets to highlight content of a page that relates to a user’s search query. In order to do this, a snippet can vary with different searches for a single page. Structured data and the content of a page are other sources of data Google uses to shape the blue text of a search snippet.

You can minimize unwanted edits by Google in search results and optimize your SEO with a perfect title tag. Make it:

1. Contain your keywords from a search query analysis and keyword research.
2. Between 55-60 characters. Sometimes you can get away with 35-60 characters. Too few and you miss opportunities. Too many and Google edits the title.
3. Understandable. You’re not writing for Google alone. There’s people to help.
4. Presents the answer to the person’s search query.
5. Matches the content on the page. This should happen when the title contains your keywords.
6. Unique to other pages on your website.
7. Attractive or interesting in some way to make people want to click. Interesting is often ticked off when other steps are done.

How do most titles compare to these seven guidelines? Make note from your manual look at what needs improvement. Also refer to the “Overview” > “Page Titles” of your scan for a summary of length and duplicate issues:

3. Meta Descriptions

A meta description is often the black text you see in Google:

The actual meta description is in the source code of your page and can be different to the search snippet if Google thinks it can deliver something better to the user.

A meta description is said to have no direct affect on SEO, though it influences if someone wants to click-through to the page. The frequency someone clicks through to a page relative to its position in search results is an SEO factor. The meta description is also important because you want to sell visitors on coming to your store.

Most stores can improve their meta descriptions because there are many pages to optimise. The same principles of a good title tag apply to meta descriptions except the length can be between 145-160 characters.

Identify the lowest hanging fruit by visiting Search Console to see what pages rank high and have a low click-through rate. A Screaming Frog overview also summarises length and duplicate issues:

Refer to my Shopify guide to write hot meta descriptions.

4. Meta Keywords

Here’s an example of the meta keywords tag:

<meta name="keywords" content="keyword 1, keyword 2" />

Avoid meta keywords. They have no positive effect on SEO.

Review the meta keywords overview in your scan or filter your scan by “Meta Keyword 1” to check the tactic is not used:

5. URL Handles

URL handles are a source of content Google looks at to rank a webpage. A good URL handle contains the primary keywords you want the page to rank for. The improvement in URLs for Shopify stores usually come from:

1. Search query analysis. Refer to Google Search Console to see what terms the page ranks for and determine how the URL handled can be fine-tuned with this information. Words can sometimes be removed from the URL handle if there are no search queries containing the words. On the flip-side, a word can be added to the URL handle if it is in a lot of search queries the page is ranking for.
2. Better product names based on search query analysis, which alone helps SEO and can be carried over to more descriptive URLs.
3. Adjusting targeted keywords from a comparison of what is done, to what could be. You discover this by keyword research, reviewing the top 3 competitors for major factors revealed in this guide, and using Google Trends.
4. Removing stop words like “to”, “and”, and “of”. Stop words dilute keywords in URL handles.
5. Multi-lingual stores on Shopify Markets can use the Translate & Adapt app to modify URL handles into the native language.

Each of these improvements are done with the everyday person in mind as you make the URL readable and understandable to them. A keyword stuffed URL of /products/bop-plant-bright-light-fod-easy is unfriendly.

Brickell have done a good job with URLs. Like every store, there’s always room for improvement. Looking at the page, /collections/barrons-collection/products/shave-cream, I did some keyword research and see “men’s shaving cream” is a better target. I wonder if it’s better to go for “shave” or “shaving”. Google Trends has the answer:

The product name from an SEO perspective is best changed to “Shaving” as opposed to “Shave”. The URL could be /collections/barrons-collection/products/mens-shaving-cream. It is a natural, aloe vera product so the last part of the URL could be /mens-natural-aloe-vera-shaving-cream. Notice how it is readable and not spammy like /mens-natural-shave-cream-aloe-vera-shaving-cream-for-men.

6. Product Content

Is there enough unique, valuable content for a visitor to make a purchase decision? You want to provide all the important details of a product to firstly get the sale, but preceding that, to help SEO by keeping someone on the website. Two measurements of product content for SEO are the keywords in the content and the time someone spends on a page before returning to search results.

Here is my SEO checklist for product content. If your store ever gets manually reviewed by Google, their review team look at these factors to see how useful your store is to people:

1. Uniqueness of product descriptions. Duplicate product descriptions happen in stores whose products are sold by others online. Copy-and-paste a snippet of the product description into Google to see what comes up. Copyscape is another way to identify websites with the same content. The tool also lets you see if a competitor plagiarised parts of a product description you wrote. In a perfect SEO world you want a description used by no one else.
2. Quality of product descriptions. Trash can be unique so you have to check for quality. See my short guide to write excellent product descriptions that sell. In terms of length, I recommend 150 words minimum for all products. The more the better. I rarely see product descriptions too long. The only mistake with long form content is poorly written, gibberish that bores people.
3. Product images. The photos should be clear, provide multiple angles, and be unique which you can check with a reverse image search. To do photography right, see my guide on product photos.
4. Supplementary content. You will increase organic traffic and conversions with content beyond a product description and photo. This can be done in ecommerce by providing specifications, video, product use and care guidelines, delivery and shipping information, and reviews. All these types of information accumulate to increase visitors.

7. Collections Content

The content of collections is always a way to boost the SEO of collections. Do the collections have unique content or do they only display products? Does the content sell the benefits of the products, address a shopper’s concerns, and contain internal links? Review a sample of collections for relevant text at the top and bottom:

Best practices for collection descriptions are:

1. Confirm to the shopper the benefits of the products in the collection.
2. Address doubts or concerns about the products.
3. Affirm why the shopper is at the best place to purchase from you.
4. Link to other relevant collection pages within the collection description or as a list of links.
5. Link to useful articles on the website related to the collection page.
6. Keep it to 200 words or less.
7. Do not create content for the sake of it, like sharing an in-depth history of products or the company, unless it’s helpful and related.

Algorithms sometimes get confused when they have a list of products on top and essentially a giant article on the bottom. The algorithms have to figure out whether the intent of the page is commercial or informational. These best practices keep a strong commercial intent in collections.

Collections content rank well in the “People Also Ask” feature of search results. Our SEO manager Matt has written about a detailed guide about how to rank for these featured snippets. This is a very effective method we’ve used to hack top rankings for Shopify clients.

Collections content can be split into two—one above product listings and another below. This helps usability and conversions by not burying products below content.

To have a top and bottom layer of content around product listings, search for all instances of {{ collection.description }} within your theme. Use the Shopify theme search Chrome extension to find the code.

If the current collections content appears above product listings, you’ll replace the instances of {{ collection.description }} with:

{{ collection.description | split: '<!-- split -->' | first }}

Locate where you’d like the second part of the description then insert:

{{ collection.description | split: '<!-- split -->' | last }}

Then in your collection description, add <!-- split --> in the HTML view to designate where you want to separate the content.

8. About Page

An about page is one trust signal Google uses to judge the quality of your store. The page should never be a couple of sentences or dribble. You help SEO and conversions with a good about page.

What makes a good ecommerce about page? Tell your story using dialog, names, times, and other specific details to bring the story to life. Give a personal anecdote related to the reason the visitor is interested in your products. Share your passion as though you were talking face-to-face to the person reading. Use video. Reveal your team members. Provide contact information.Shopify Conversion Rate Optimization

My City Plants has a well-written about page:

There are a good conversion elements included like a video of a founder that persuades someone to shop with My City Plants, a summary of five points why someone should buy or work with them, and contact information. The only SEO improvement I suggest is to use the company name in the main h1 tag, replacing “About Us” with “About My City Plants”, to attract branded searches. The about page always aligns well with branded queries. When the page also sells the brand, someone seeing it will be more likely to buy.

9. Contact Page

Google’s official “Search Quality Rating Program” guides reviewers with what to look for when judging a quality website. (The document is massive so don’t freak out. This audit addresses all the SEO factors in their program that you need to worry about.)

The contact page is one trust factor Google considers to see if the store is a real company. It is a simple SEO element to review. The guidelines describe a store selling Nike Air Jordan shoes that is low in trust:

Inaccurate information about shipping and returns, deceptive use of logos and no information about who is responsible make this shopping site appear potentially fraudulent and untrustworthy. This page is selling Nike Air Jordan shoes. However, there is inadequate contact information on the contact us page for a merchant site.

What contact details could you include that are not listed? Good details on the contact page include the company address, Google Map of the company address, registered company name, photo of the building, email address to contact support, support phone number, support help desk, live chat hours, link to FAQs, and the good ole contact form.

10. Shipping and Returns Page

The shipping and returns pages are another trust signal Google looks for in an ecommerce store. Your store is considered more trustworthy in Google’s eyes when it has clear shipping and return policies plus directions. Your visitors want a good, transparent shopping experience.

A store can have one dedicated shipping page and one returns page. I suggest splitting the two up from a marketing perspective because they serve different audiences. It also allows you to have clear FAQs that cover each topic in-depth.

Brickell have no clear shipping or returns page. It’s not as bad as it sounds because they have a free shipping proposition in the header for US orders over $50, and after digging around I see the topic is addressed in the FAQ page. Is this satisfactory for SEO? It could be, but it could fall short. If you have a good shipping and returns policy, make it clear. You will encourage more people to buy.

11. Articles

Ah, content and SEO. It could only be complete with a discussion on blogging.

A blog can be used for anything—and it unfortunately is. Blogs are a great platform to share stories, photos, personal experiences on your products, news, and bad writing. A good ecommerce SEO blog is vastly different to one that announces new products.

The most common SEO mistake in blogging is publishing a 500-word piece by a writer that gives no value a reader couldn’t get from somewhere else. Soon enough you become discouraged then stop publishing because Google will not send traffic to such content.

You need a clear purpose in every blog post so you can have objectives to meet those goals. The best type of ecommerce blogging for SEO has a blog built into an evergreen content hub with useful guides, statistics that are updated, and other content that remains accurate. Websites will link to your articles when you provide information that is better than anything else published.

Your goal when covering a topic should be to answer the topic’s questions and problems twice as good as any other website. When you publish a guide, you are comforted in having built an asset that, with little maintenance, will last a lifetime. The large cost upfront pays off overtime. This mindset gets you off the hamster wheel of publishing junk to meet weekly goals.

Each content piece should address a narrow topic in detail to be linked from a “hub” so it is organized for people. The Digital Darts: Related Posts app is another good to suggest other articles of yours to help the linking of them. Portent describe this objective of the content hub. Brickell is one of few stores that have followed this content advice. They have a grooming manual, search function, list of links in the sidebar to direct people with what they should read, and their main call-to-action of a free sample.

BACtrack and Kettle & Fire are two other examples of Shopify stores doing content well.

I cannot emphasise enough that if you want your content to rank high in Google, it must be better than anything else published. Headings, lists, videos, useful pictures, quotes, research, links to articles, and other supplementary content make an article more valuable. A lot of time and resources can be placed in awesome content to grow the business.

Links

Links in the eyes of search engines are like political votes. A store with more votes has greater chance at improved ranking. Not all links are equal like political votes in Australian rural communities count more than urban votes. Some links even hurt SEO.

1. Authority

The US President has more authority in the US political system than you or I. This gives The President greater influence on the country. The same is true with links. A link from an authoritative website like Wikipedia or Forbes is more powerful at affecting SEO than a link from a WordPress blog created by a teenager last month.

While we don’t know what a search engine considers to be an authoritative website, Google asks questions that indicate what is in a quality website:

• Would you trust the information presented in this article?
• Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
• Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
• Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?
• Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?
• Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
• Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?

We need a quantitative method of measuring authority to benchmark and audit a store’s SEO. The industry standard and simplest measurement is ahref’s Domain Rating metric. The metric “runs on a scale from zero to a hundred. The higher a website’s Domain Rating (DR), the stronger and more authoritative it is… Domain Rating looks at the quantity and quality of external backlinks to a website.”

The metric can be used to assess the value of link opportunities. Most SEO experts would advise paying more for a sponsorship opportunity on a 90 DR domain compared to a 30 DR domain.

However, for this part of the SEO guide, you will use with the DR metric with the next section of total links, to see how much more authority you will need through links to rank in the first position for your biggest keyword. Enter you domain in the ahrefs Website Authority Checker to see your domain’s authority.

Next, if you’re in the region of your market, set your IP address with a VPN like Avast SecureLine, then search the dream keyword you want to rank for in Google. For Brickell, it could be “men’s skin care”. For My City Plants, “new york plants” or “buy plants” with a New York IP address. Enter the homepage of the top three ranking websites in the authority checking tool.

If you have a paid ahrefs subscription, use the batch analysis tool to easily assess domains in bulk. You need this to do a full backlink audit of the store and competitors to know how long it may take to rank in the top position for your top keywords. Here’s the data for My City Plants and their three top ranking competitors:

Unless the store ranks at the top in Google, expect DR to be less than top competitors. A lower authority is one signal the store needs more quality external links to compete in rankings. Any DR metric over 60 shows a big player. A DR over 80 is very hard to beat without a large, long-term investment in SEO. Keep the ahrefs data open to do further analysis.

2. Total Links

The total links to a domain is one measure of authority that shapes the domain rating, plus it can indicate how far a store’s SEO is from competition.

In the batch analysis tool of ahrefs, look at “Backlinks”:

The tool explains that backlinks show “The total number of links from other websites pointing to your target”.

My City Plants has a large number of backlinks. I’d expect a large number to equate to a higher domain rating, but it doesn’t, which means they either have links from low quality domains or a lot of links on fewer domains. If you see massive number of backlinks, which happens a lot for known brands like Esquire, Sephora, and Kiehls in the men’s skin care market, competition is stiff.

Before hope is lost, you need to see how many websites make up these backlinks. Sometimes established brands have a bloated number of backlinks from a network of websites.

3. Links from Unique Domains

With all SEO aspects of a domain like authority and trust being equal, two links from the same website is thought to be less valuable than a link from two websites. Multiple links from the same website is still useful, but the same number of links from more websites gives you more votes to win the SEO election. Also, links from unique domains give insight into the health of a website’s link profile.

Look at the “Ref Domains” metric in ahrefs. The metric shows the total number of individual websites linking to a target domain:

My suspicion with My City Plants was true. While they have a lot of backlinks, they lack a large number of referring domains, which means they have a lot of backlinks on single domains.

The referring domains and the domain rating metric are the clearest ways to measure the size of your competition in SEO. While it’s not as simple as saying, “My City Plants should get 7,000 referring domains to rank number one”, the measurement is another source for the work required to dominate Google organic search. For example, The Sill serves multiple regions beyond New York so it’s reasonable to expect them to have more backlinks and not necessarily be ahead in the SEO game. Furthermore, a business that’s been around longer will have more referring domains that have less value overtime.

You don’t have to dominate everyone in SEO to benefit. I’ve repeatedly seen how a few high-quality backlinks within one month can boost the whole store in search results as you gain traffic from long-tail queries. You will see position data of search queries in Google Search Console, or the 1-100 keyword rankings in ahrefs, get a little spike. This incremental increase is realistic unlike a sudden appearance in top position.

4. Ease of Link Replication

Over the years I’ve found one rapid way to measure backlink quality: ask yourself, “Who can get this link?” If anyone can get a link for no money or time, the link maybe low-quality. You will generally find the harder a link is to acquire, the more power it has for SEO because the domain has a higher domain rating.

Links that are easy to acquire are not bad, but they should be acquired with caution. Furthermore, easy-to-acquire links are weaker in retaining a competitive SEO advantage since agencies like us will be looking for easy-wins for clients with paid tools to duplicate from your link profile.

Manually review a sample of backlinks from Moz’s Link Explorer or ahref’s Backlink Checker to judge if another website could easily get a similar link.

We have an agency account at Ahrefs and love to use it for backlink analysis. Links from a forum post, blog comment, social bookmarks, or directory submission are all sources that can be easily duplicated. My City Plants have good mentions on websites that would take effort to duplicate:

1. https://www.bobvila.com/slideshow/10-huge-houseplants-that-make-a-statement-52621
2. https://www.backyardpests.com/how-to-stop-ants-from-nesting-in-plant-pots/
3. https://nymag.com/strategist/article/best-gifts-for-doctors-and-medical-professionals.html
4. https://www.shopify.com/enterprise/10-examples-of-outstanding-omnichannel-brands

5. Geo-location of Links

The geo-location analysis of links is most helpful for a store penalised by Google. A store should have most of its links from websites in the regions it delivers to. It makes sense for an American, compared to an Australian, blogger or media outlet to write about a product that only ships to the USA. With that said, links from another country are fine since the IP address of the server is not an accurate measurement of locale content.

The first goal is to spot disproportionate clusters from unexpected locations. Majestic has a great map feature insightful for ecommerce stores who deliver their products to a domestic market. The tool lets you visualise the geo-location of websites that link to the store. The US-focus for Brickell and its slight International spread is good:

The second goal to consider in geo-location analysis is the IP blocks of backlinks to check if unusual chunks come from the same servers. Private blog networks (PBNs), which violate Google’s guidelines, commonly have the same IP blocks.

Ahrefs is a great tool for IP block analysis. You can dig into the report to investigate backlinks on an IP block then determine your next step.

6. Inbound Anchor Text Diversity

Anchor text is the visible, clickable text you see on a link. From the following two link profiles, what looks unnatural to you? 50 links to a store saying “nike shoes” or 50 links with mixed text containing the store’s name, “nike shoes”, “size 15 shoes by nike”, “these bad boys”, and other variations?

Natural inbound links have diverse anchor text. Even so, targeted keywords in anchor text help link building campaigns. The anchor text needs to be comprised of the brand’s name, URLs, and text variations otherwise a store is at risky of penalty from unnatural link building.

To see the anchor text of links to a website, there are several tools you can use. In Moz’s Link Explorer, click “Anchor Text” from the navigation. Use the dropdown to select the scope of your search and see data for a root domain, subdomain, or exact page.

In ahrefs, click “Anchors” beneath the “Backlink profile” category to get your report. Review the top 10 anchor text terms for the store. If your store has approximately 200 or more referring root domains, also review the top 20-50 anchor text terms.

In ahrefs, I filter anchor text that contains “City” for the brand “My City Plants” to ballpark the number of backlinks with branded text. Then you can swap the filter to “does not contain” to see unbranded anchor text. If you want to take the analysis further, you can manually break down the unbranded report into keywords, none (like images), URLs, and generic (like “click here”.)  The data can be exported into a Google sheet so you can compile a pie chart for a visual of the anchor text distribution.

Check no single type of anchor text or unbranded words dominate the store’s backlink profile. A good rule of thumb is to use 70% branded text. Spammers frequently go for the reverse of 70-100% keywords in anchor text. Google wants you to build a real brand rather than an unknown entity.

When building links where you have control over the anchor text, mix up the context of the link. The same anchor text in the same paragraph has less value. Secondly, make the link and anchor text relevant. The anchor text should provide a short summary of what someone can expect on the page when clicking through.

7. Paid Links

Google says paid links do not manipulate rankings. Their link spam policies condemn exchanging money or products for links. I think most SEO experts find paid links have helped SEO.

Be cautious of paying for links. If Google judges a paid link to violate their guidelines, they will submit a manual action for your domain in Google Search Console.

When you do sponsorships, partnerships, or paid links, Google wants rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" added to the <a> tag of the link, much like some newspapers legally have to mention an ad is an “advertisement”. Very few marketers actually do this for paid links since it devalues the link and Google doesn’t know whether money exchanged hands.

8. Spam Analysis

Spam analysis of backlinks is an important step of an SEO audit for a penalised store. After doing the health diagnostics in this Shopify SEO guide, if you suspect your website received a Google penalty, you will greatly benefit from working with an SEO expert.

There are many great tools like SEOptimer, Cognitive SEO, Ahref’s Site Explorer and Moz’s spam analysis that analyse how likely a link is to hurt SEO. Test several tools then select one or two you find helpful. Total backlinks for a website that are less than one hundred can easily be manually reviewed.

It is okay to see low-quality links from automated websites. There is a lot of junk on the internet that we have no idea about, which the Googlebot sees every second, so don’t freak out that Google will punish you.

If the store has clearly suffered from a penalty and no SEO is working, nothing can replace manual investigation. Manually go through every link by visiting the page to identify risks. Sometimes a website that has been penalised, which links to yours, can result in a minor penalty. Request the webmaster to remove the spam links and disavow links you know are bad. The disavow tool is for those wise in SEO to deal with unnatural links. Use the disavow tool with caution.

Value

SEO is a short-term game if the store does not help people. Why should Google refer people to your store if another 100 stores sell the same gear at a cheaper price and provide more information about the products? That’s why a lot of dropshipping stores fail. Value can be measured then built into a store to improve SEO and competitive position in the market.

1. Engagement

What better way to tell if a website answered a person’s search query than to track if the person stopped searching or took a long-time to return to search results. Google are hush-hush about engagement as an SEO factor. The importance of engagement is clear when you think about it from a standpoint of user experience, which Google has always promoted: the goal of search is to give people what they want.

Arthur Andreyev at SEO PowerSuite has the best article on what engagement factors influence SEO. He shares a patent by Google to prove clicks and time on site affect SEO. There’s also a test done through Twitter that manipulated engagement to take a page from ranking fourth to first.

The simplest measurement for engagement is to look at your average session duration then consider the intent of the page. There are too many factors to say your average session duration should be “5 minutes”.

You can create a custom Google Analytics report that looks at how engaging each page of the store is to people arriving from organic search. Pages with a low engagement rate and low average-time on page are candidates for improvement. You can run a survey on these pages, targeting people coming from organic search, to ask people what they searched for and what information is missing on the page.

2. Quality of Business

It is easier to rank great products in Google that people search for yet can’t find anywhere else. The need of a market is met with low competition. Compare that to a product like printed t-shirts sold by tens of thousands of websites.

A business can only thrive with good products or services. Businesses with an awesome product that solve a problem people are searching for makes SEO easier. Initial traction can get a good product in the hands of people who socially share the product, produce citations, and get the attention of press who then create quality backlinks. For help with making awesome ecommerce products, I’ve got a YouTube video teaching the product creation formula that makes products sell like crazy.

Let’s finish the Shopify SEO guide by answering three questions:

1. How much effort would it take for a competitor to mimic product offering? If you dropship products that can be sold by emailing one warehouse, your business model is weak. A low barrier-to-entry equates to a high-quantity of competition in Google and the consumer’s mind. Backlinks from public relations and competitive position in the marketplace, is more favorable if you manufacture products.
2. What do customers say about the products or business? Do customers write rave reviews, feel “meh” about their purchase, or leave a residue of hatred? Read customer reviews on the store and Google search the brand name. Your reputation online is a ranking factor.
3. How do the products compare to competitors in value? This can be hard to honestly answer. Depend on customers in the market to tell you the truth.

Invest in a product people love to construct the foundation of good business. You will see your search rankings—and business—soar!

If you have poor Shopify meta descriptions and titles, like most stores, you may see organic search visitors increase 30% by following this tutorial. I see good SEO tags regularly increase traffic almost overnight with our Shopify SEO clients.

Google alters search snippets today more than ever, making it difficult to control your marketing message. A study by Cyrus Shepard shows Google rewrites 61% of title tags. I rarely hear anyone bring this issue up in a discussion about branding. Anywhere from 10-90% of visitors, depending on your organic presence, first encounter your store in search. This gives an enormous opportunity to influence first impressions of your brand.

Good title tags and meta descriptions have been fundamental to better organic rankings forever in SEO. When you write good copy that appeals to people, you also get more clicks right away from the same search volume.

Unoptimized titles and meta descriptions are a common SEO mistake that anyone can fix with the proven tactics I’m about to share with you. This guide teaches you how to write for Google and people so you get better rankings and click-through rates. You’ll learn how to research keywords with customers in mind, edit the theme file in Shopify for SEO, and write titles and meta descriptions that open the floodgates from organic search.

What Are Shopify Titles?

The <title> tag in Shopify can include anything, but it should be descriptive of the page’s content. For a product page, the title often includes the product name and store name. Titles are seen in the browser tab and appear prominently as the large, blue hyperlink in search engine results.

A title in the HTML of a page looks like:

<header>
<title>Your title is here</title>
</header>

What Are Shopify Meta Descriptions?

Meta descriptions in Shopify are a concise snippet of text displayed in search engine results after the title tag. It is crucial for webpages, product pages, collection pages, and blog posts on the Shopify platform. To optimize your Shopify site, ensure each page has a unique meta description that utilises clear and straightforward language. By crafting compelling Shopify meta descriptions, you can improve click-through rates and provide users with valuable information about your content.

A meta description in the HTML of a page looks like:

<header>
<meta name="description" content="Your description is here" />
</header>

Control Your Snippets

In order to write perfect meta descriptions and titles, you need to first understand how the two SEO tags work. A “snippet” in search results describes the content of a page:

Google designed snippets to highlight content of a page that relates to a user’s search query. In order to do this, a snippet can vary with different searches for a single page.

There are three ways you can shape the snippet:

1. Structured data. Also known as schema or markup, structured data defines the content of a page. For example, a review can be marked up so Google knows it’s a review. Our SEO manager Emily wrote for Search Engine Journal about the structured data to include on your store.
2. Content of the page. This includes product descriptions, FAQs, collections content, articles, and any text on the page. The h1 tag is one of the biggest influencers.
3. Titles and meta descriptions. This is what the guide is about.

Get titles and meta descriptions right on the important pages of your Shopify store and you will profit. If you fail to write good versions, though it’s not guaranteed, Google is more likely to pick the text to display. This sucks because people can write copy better than AI.

Most websites give little thought to the titles and meta descriptions of their pages. Since Google’s goal is to improve the user experience, AI is required to improve these snippets. If you follow this guide for your Shopify pages, you will create snippets Google wants to use.

Keyword Research: It All Begins with Search Query Analysis

You start with a search query analysis because it determines what search queries you want to rank for. The analysis determines what you write, who ends up being your competitors, and the SEO of everything else that you do.

The best place to begin search query analysis, or what you might think of as “keyword research”, is not a keyword tool. Look at the page you are optimising then ask yourself:

If someone was to discover only this page on the Internet then walk away happy, what would they look for?

Write down all answers. You should have multiple answers for one page.

• An online store called “Jill’s Fashion Store” answers the searches “jills fashion store”, “online fashion store”, or possibly “women’s fashion store”.
• A collection page of leather jackets could answer the searches “leather jackets”, “motorcycle leather jackets”, or “leather jackets for men”. For “motorcycle leather jackets” to apply, every product in the collection should be motorcycle-focused otherwise the shoppers may leave frustrated.
• A product page selling the Vintage Digital Gold Databank watch made by Casio could answer, “vintage digital gold databank”, “gold casio watch”, or “vintage digital watch”. The “casio watch” search is not answered by the product page because the page is too specific. Someone searching “casio watch” is unsure of what they want and should receive a page from another website with a list of casio watches and information about the brand.

You want to solve a searcher’s problem better than other websites. Fail to do this and SEO becomes hard. Google’s algorithms can—or will—detect that a competitor answers the search query better than your website and so it should outrank you. Keyword research should leave you stimulated with a host of ideas to improve a page to better serve visitors.

Once you have a list of keywords to optimise the page for, type them in the Google Keyword Planner tool, selecting your target countries. You will get an estimate of search volume, competition in Google Ads, and insights into seasonal fluctuation.

There are almost 10,000 searches alone for “gold casio watch”. That’s a lot.

I recommend you narrow the query to lessen competition by seeing other keyword suggestions. To filter through the thousand keyword ideas, I change the keyword view to group view. I see there’s a “Casio Gold Men Watch” group containing the keyword “casio gold watch mens” that aligns with the product:

The competition column contain “Low”, “Medium”, and “High” values is just for Google Ads. There’s no right competition level to consider when using this information for SEO.

High competition means there’s a lot of advertisers, relative to other keywords, who spend money on the keyword. When there are a lot of advertisers for a keyword, that is a good hint they are making profit. An advertiser will pay more for a keyword because it makes financial sense for their business. On the other hand, low competition means less advertisers compete for user attention, which distributes more clicks to organic search results.

A keyword research strategy to judge SEO competition is to search your potential term in Google. Look at the organic results, not the ad results or other snippets like images.

Do you see “casio”, “watch”, “gold”, or “mens” in the titles and descriptions of these pages? Hardly. That’s one indication of low competition.

A second quick factor to look at in search results is the types of content already ranking for the query. People’s intention behind the search query can be judged by the type of search results. If you want to rank a product page for the keyword, are product pages littered in the top five results? If you’re creating an article, are some articles in the top five results for your target keyword?

It’s a waste of time trying to rank for a keyword when your content doesn’t align with the intent of users and existing search results. A product page for a casio watch will never rank for “casio” because the intent is broad. Searchers would be unhappy.

We also want to have competition with poor backlinks since it is easiest to rank for such keywords. One listing is Asos who has a large link profile to the whole domain. I know the brand and link profiles of such large brands off the top of head, but you can use the Ahrefs SEO Toolbar to review backlink metrics. It’s awesome to not see the official casio.com store ranking high since it is the official brand, which is difficult to compete against.

A second strategy to incorporate in your keyword research that judges competition is to do a keyword difficulty analysis using Ahrefs.com. A low number of backlinks to the page, or homepage of these top ranking websites, means low difficulty and low competition. Our keyword gets a difficulty of “0”, which means ahrefs estimates you’ll need very few or no backlinks to rank in the top 10 for this keyword.

You want to balance search volume and competition. In a perfect world you optimize for high search volume (1000+ searches per month) and low competition, but there too many websites today who’ve done some SEO for that to be true. So my blanket rule is to go for keywords with some search volume and moderate to low competition.

Now you know what to go after, let’s optimize your titles and meta descriptions.

How to Edit Your Shopify Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

First you need to check if your theme is compatible with the built-in SEO features of Shopify on the homepage, collection pages, product pages, and general pages. You want all these pages to be SEO-optimised to maximise search visibility. Each presents a chance to capture organic traffic.

Homepage

For the homepage, go to:

1. Online Store > Preferences.

2. Enter a homepage title and meta description.
3. Visit the URL of the homepage. Right-click then view the source code of the page to see if your changes updated exactly how you want. If it didn’t, you need to edit the template.

Pages

For general pages, go to:

1. Online Store > Pages.
2. Select a page.
3. Scroll to the bottom then click “Edit” next to “Search engine listing”. Having clicked edit, it will look like the below screenshot:

4. Enter a page title and meta description.
5. Visit the URL of the page. View the source code of the page to see if your changes updated exactly how you want. If it didn’t, you need to edit the template.

Collections

For collections, go to:

1. Products > Collections.
2. Click a collection.
3. Scroll to the bottom then click “Edit” next to “Search engine listing”.

4. Enter a page title and meta description.
5. Visit the URL of the collection. View the source code of the page to see if your changes updated exactly how you want. If it didn’t, you need to edit the template.

Products

For all products, go to:

1. Products.
2. Click a product.
3. Scroll to the bottom then click “Edit” next to “Search engine listing”. Having clicked edit, it will look like the below screenshot:

4. Enter a page title and meta description
5. Visit the URL of the product. View the source code of the page to see if your changes updated exactly how you want. If it didn’t, you need to edit the template.

If your updates appear on the homepage, pages, collections, and products you’re fortunate to have a Shopify theme built with the option to customise these SEO factors. Jump to the next section on how to write a SEO-friendly title.

How to Edit the Title Tag in Your Shopify Theme

If the SEO text is not displaying how you want having followed the previous section, you need to edit the template. Do not edit your store’s template unless you know HTML and can easily undo your changes. Hire someone to help with your SEO.

To make the edit:

1. In the admin section, go to Online Store > Themes.
2. Click “Actions” on your live them then select “Edit Code”.
3. Click on the “theme.liquid” file on the left side. This is where you can edit the Shopify theme’s title tags and meta descriptions.

4. Find the text between <title> and </title> then replace it with:

<title>{{ page_title }}{% if current_tags %} &ndash; tagged "{{ current_tags | join: ', ' }}"{% endif %}{% if current_page != 1 %} &ndash; Page {{ current_page }}{% endif %}{% unless page_title contains shop.name %} &ndash; {{ shop.name }}{% endunless %}</title>

I recommend Shopify designers use this in their templates because it allows you to control how the title tags display on all pages in the store and provides fall back. When no title tag is entered:

• The homepage uses the store’s name.
• A general page uses the name of the page then dash and store name.
• A product page uses the name of the product then dash and store name.
• A collections page uses the name of the collection then dash and store name.

The configuration also:

• Supports naming best practices for pagination.
• Works with tags if your template uses filters.
• Does not add a dash and store name at the end of the homepage title tag if the store name is included somewhere.

The store name is good to have for ecommerce in all pages when you have a strong brand presence. If you are a small store and do not have many people search your brand, exclude the store name from your title tag since the store name takes up character space to dilute keyword value. Use this instead:

<title>{{ page_title }}{% if current_tags %} &ndash; tagged "{{ current_tags | join: ', ' }}"{% endif %}{% if current_page != 1 %} &ndash; Page {{ current_page }}{% endif %}</title>

Google may auto-insert the website’s name into the title. (It is one strategic reason to have a short business name.) Test it for you store.

How to Edit the Meta Description Tag in Your Shopify Theme

This is a lot easier to get right in your template and is often already setup.

1. Go to your theme.liquid template.
2. Find the line that begins with <meta name="description" then replace it with the following. This customizes the meta description so that paginated collections vary in description with the page number:

{% if page_description %}
  <meta name="description" content="{{ page_description | escape }} {% if template contains 'collection' %}{% if current_page > 1 %}Page no. {{ current_page }}{% endif %}{% endif %}" />
{% endif %}

3. In the unlikely case your theme doesn’t have a meta description, copy-and-paste the code after the closing title tag (</title>).

Congratulations. Your Shopify store’s title tags and meta descriptions are now ready to be optimised. Let’s continue to do your on-page SEO right to boost visitors and sales.

How to Write an SEO-Friendly Title

Title tags are the second most important on-page factor to help SEO. The most important is great value delivered in an awesome product or service, content, images, user-experience—stuff that makes your store fantastic.

Here’s the seven-step process for a perfect title. It should:

1. Contain your keywords from the search query analysis and keyword research you did earlier.
2. Be between 55-60 characters (sometimes you can get away with 35-60 characters). Too few and you miss opportunities. Too many and Google edits the title.
3. Be understandable.
4. Present the answer to the person’s search query.
5. Match the content on the page. This should happen when the title contains your keywords.
6. Be unique to other pages on your website.
7. Be attractive or interesting in some way to make people want to click. Interesting is often ticked off when other steps are done.

Some good examples of titles:

• Yo-Yos – Duncan & Yomega – Toys”R”Us
• Best Chef Knives – Six Recommendations – KitchenKnifeGuru
• The Tissue Box Cover Store, Over 50 styles!
• High Protein, Low Carb, Healthy, Keto Cereal | Magic Spoon Cereal

Go ahead and write a few title tags for your pages. Start with your keywords. Run through the other six steps once you have a title written down. It’s better to edit than to have nothing.

Shopify provide a nice preview of your meta description and title tag when editing a product or collection. You can also use Portent’s SERP preview tool to test the display of your SEO work.

How to Write a SEO-Friendly Meta Description

Google in 2009 said the meta description tag is not used in their ranking. What it does affect is user attention and click-through rate, which influences rankings.

Go ahead and write a few meta descriptions tags for your pages. A description is easier to write than a title. The process is the same yet with more character space.

Aim for 145-160 characters. Shopify makes counting character length simple by telling you the number characters in the title and description:

Include your researched keywords in the meta description so the text is bolded in search results to stand out. Write around the keywords by thinking of the intent behind the search query.

Some good examples of meta descriptions:

• MANSCAPED official AU website, home of the Lawn Mower® 4.0 waterproof trimmer. As seen on Shark Tank. All with Advanced SkinSafe Technology. Get free shipping now.
• Magic Spoon cereal is high-protein, low-sugar, keto-friendly, and gluten-free. Available in Cocoa, Frosted, Fruity, Blueberry, Peanut Butter, and Cinnamon.
• We’re simplifying the mattress and furniture game. With free and flexible delivery and a 120 night risk-free trial Australia-wide, try it out online today.
• Koala’s comfy as memory foam mattress comes with 120-night trial, 10-year warranty and fast delivery. Why wait any longer for a good night’s sleep?

To fix a brain freeze, search your targeted keywords in Google to see what other websites do. Write something different. Don’t copy the top ranking website since me-too marketing is poor and most stores do not follow the seven-step writing process to produce the perfect title and meta description.

Advanced On-Page Optimisation Strategies

If you stop your on-page SEO with a one-off setup of title tags and meta descriptions, you miss making a few simple changes that can boost rankings and CTR. Google may be displaying different text to what you wrote. Let’s check:

1. Allow two weeks for Google to re-crawl your website. This is enough time for Google to pick up the changes for most stores.
2. Discover what information Google changes in their search results. Use RankTank’s meta and rich snippet testing tool. Enter your website address in the spreadsheet. The tool will compare what you have in the HTML code of all pages against the snippet for each page when displayed in search results.
3. Rewrite titles and meta descriptions for pages that get changed in ways you’re unhappy with. Work your way through the spreadsheet.

My second favourite SEO strategy for meta optimisation is to use Google Search Console to spot easy wins in SEO. You want to identify pages that have a high ranking and low CTR, or have high impressions and low ranking.

1. Allow two weeks for Google to re-crawl your website if you’ve made recent changes to the titles or meta description.
2. Log into Google Search Console then go to “Search Results”.
3. Select the “Total clicks”, “Total impressions”, “Average CTR”, and “Average position” check boxes.
4. Click the “Pages” tab because what you are about to do needs to be evaluated on a page-by-page basis:

5. Sort the pages with the most impressions at the top by clicking the “Impressions” column. For pages with high impressions (relative to your other pages), an average position above 20, and a low CTR (<5%), see if the meta description misses any of the seven steps. Consider a rewrite of the meta description to improve the CTR. Phrase Research is a tool where you can upload your Google Search Console search analytics data to quickly identify your best CTR opportunities. The tool looks at the average clicks for other search queries in the search position analysed.
6. Bonus tip: drill down to a specific page then click the “Queries” radio box to view queries for that page. Check if those keywords are included in your SEO on that page.
7. Second bonus tip: further optimise pages that have low rankings and high impressions. How could you make the page more completely answer the search queries it ranks for?
8. Super advanced bonus tip: split-test meta data with Semrush’s SplitSignal.

How to Prevent Snippets or Adjust Snippet Length

It is possible to prevent Google from showing a description snippet in search results. To stop Google from using any description, use the nosnippet meta tag. To control the character size of the description, use the max-snippet: [number] meta tag like <meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:160">.

Google also says you can prevent certain parts of the page from being shown in a snippet by using the data-nosnippet attribute.

Meta Keywords Tag

The major two SEO tags and titles and meta descriptions. A third SEO tag exists: the meta keywords tag.

Here’s an example of the meta keywords tag:

<meta name="keywords" content="keyword 1, keyword 2" />

I made zero mention of meta keywords in the guide because it has no affect on SEO in Google and Bing.

The one use case of meta keywords is an internal tagging system, but in Shopify this is unnecessary with tagging taxonomy native to the ecommerce platform. By implementing meta keywords, you create an unnecessary task and do keyword research for competitors who can copy your hard work into opportunities for themselves.

What To Do Next?

Congratulations on improving your titles and meta descriptions in Shopify.

Once your titles and meta descriptions are locked in, the real work starts with keyword research, technical fixes, and content that ranks. If you want help with the full SEO strategy for your Shopify store, we handle organic search growth.

These 23 online marketing tools make your life easier, boost engagement, increase customer research, and grow your store. The team at Digital Darts use every tool recommended here. Best of all, they are free. Most have paid options but you can do great things with free versions.

Why do tools matter? Your skills to market a business is the greatest factor you can control to keep it alive. The right tools aid your skills, making you more efficient and effective. The best online marketing tool is the one that suits your needs.

The most recent statistics show there are 400 million businesses worldwide. Competition is stiff. The ease of starting a business does not make having one easy. Statistics in the US show that 20% of small business close within their first year. 10% close in the second year, 7% in the third year, and 3% each year on average from then on. No one sets on a new venture with the view of having to shut it down. Yet, in competition there is always opportunity. Richard Branson, said, “Business opportunities are like buses, there’s always another one coming.”

Digital marketing tools allow you to create effective marketing campaigns, execute, test them and measure their success. From coming up with content, sourcing influencers, fixing Shopify marketing mistakes, and doing deep work, use these marketing tools to grow your business.

Klaviyo For Email And SMS Marketing Automation

Klaviyo enables you to send personalized and targeted emails and texts to your customers, which improves sales.

You can create email automations for nearly anything under the sun you can think of, from people who abandon cart to customers who ordered a particular product twice. Klaviyo’s visual flow builder makes creating email, SMS—and all the conditions for them—a pleasure to work with.

Klaviyo integrates with more than 200 platforms allowing access to your data from a single place. You can import customer lists in Facebook and Google Ads to help the ad platforms find more customers like those people. It is the Rolls Royce we depend on for email marketing in Shopify.

Ahrefs For SEO

Ahrefs is one of the must-have online marketing tools that can take your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts to the next level by boosting your organic website traffic.

• The “Site Explorer” tool can check both your backlinks and your competitors. It will show you the keywords of your competition, which ones they are ranking for, the websites linking to their websites, and the quality of those backlinks.
• When you use the top pages tool, you can discover the pages on a website that get the highest traffic.
• With “Keyword Explorer”, you’ll have a variety of keywords along with their search volumes. The in-depth information Ahrefs provides can tell you the keywords you should target and the estimated amount of traffic you can get with them.

I highly recommend Ahrefs for SEO because it is comprehensive. It has the best and largest live backlinks, estimated to be more than 14 trillion.

We provide our Google Ads and SEO clients with data they want from Ahrefs, courtesy of our agency subscription with the company. If you’d also like to enjoy this benefit, get in touch with us.

Digital Darts Link Building Tool for Backlinks

When other websites link to yours, it can help your website rank higher in search results. This is where the Digital Darts link building tool comes in.

The first benefit of getting links is referral traffic. The second benefit is improved rankings since Google factors backlinks in its ranking algorithm.

The Digital Darts link building tool makes use of breadcrumbs in search engine results to detect link opportunities for any market. You enter a keyword related to your website then you get hundreds of links opportunities.

These opportunities are for directory submissions and blogs that welcome guest posts. When you can write blogs on other people’s websites, they include a link to your website. This leads to more traffic to your website and the backlinks boost your SEO.

DataFeedWatch For Feed Management

Feeds are used across nearly every major ad platform. Beyond ads, feeds can also push information into third-party marketplaces to manage listings.

DataFeedWatch is one of the best tools that can help you achieve this as it helps you create an effective product catalogue with highly optimized data about your business and products. Not enough marketers pay attention to every piece of data in their feeds.

The tool has high accuracy since it can download product and inventory data when you want. You don’t want to be wasting money advertising an out of stock product or bidding aggressively on a product with 8 out 9 variants out of stock.

For Facebook Ads, the most important optimization you can make with the feed is imagery. Stores by default use the first image of the product listing, which is often an uninspiring picture of the product on a white isolate background. You can customize your feed to include user-generated content to instantly grow key Facebook Ads metrics, like lowering CPA, of your catalog campaigns.

For Google Ads optimizations, you get complete freedom to customize the feed to increase impressions and click-through of product listings. Include your cost of goods sold in the feed to segment the profit margins of product groups. This lets you discriminate bids to scale profit.

If you run Google Ads or Facebook for your Shopify brand, you must use DataFeedWatch to boost your efforts.

Triple Whale For Attribution and Financial Wisdom

There are three metrics every ecommerce business investing in marketing needs to measure for optimal use of their money:

1. New customer ROAS (ncROAS) measures efficiency.
2. Marketing efficiency ratio (MER) measures effectiveness.
3. Profit on ad spend (POAS) measures profit.

The problem is, how do you get this data?

All marketing channels cannot separate new versus repeat customers. The data exists only in Shopify so a solution needs to access your Shopify. You also need ad spend across multiple channels pulled together into one location. You need a third-party solution to gather the three metrics of ncROAS, MER, and POAS.

To get these key three marketing metrics, I recommend Triple Whale. The tool also gives you extra insight for decisions with your own server-side pixel to track first-party data. This deals with tracking limitations of Apple’s privacy policy.

We ask all clients to sign up to Triple Whale because it becomes the heart for growth. Triple Whale can become the central source of truth for your Shopify store to view all meaningful data in real-time. See the tool in action to profitably scale your advertising.

Google Analytics For Analytics

I cannot talk about online marketing tools without mentioning Google Analytics.

Google Analytics gives you statistics about your business that you can help to improve your marketing.

You’ll get information like your bounce rate, the amount of traffic on your website, how long users took on your page, and so on. From this, you’ll know what is working in your marketing campaign and the areas you need to step up.

If you use Shopify, it is important to know how to set up Google Analytics for your Shopify Store.

Typeform For Exciting Forms And Quizzes

One of the most effective ways of growing your sales is by increasing your leads. Typeform can help you with this. That’s why we’ve included it in our best Shopify marketing tools.

Typeform enables you to engage visitors to your website with exciting and interactive quizzes, forms, and surveys.

The usability is beautiful. Users can have fun filling out this information that they’ll easily provide their emails which you can use to build your contact list and turn these visitors into paying customers.

Typeform has integrations with other platforms such as Klaviyo, Canva, and Google Sheets, making it easy to access your data across these products.

Google Docs Editors For Documents and Collaboration

Google Docs Editors makes collaboration easier and more effective because it allows you to store documents, presentations, spreadsheets, images, and more. Team members can edit these documents then share them.

The interface inside all the tools makes each easy to learn. You get enough options to do what you need without the complexity.

Compare that to the Microsoft suite. If you haven’t used it consistently, you can’t find what feature you need. It is bloatware that they can’t fix because they must accommodate decade-long users of their software.

The change history feature makes editing documents secure so you don’t have to worry about team members accidentally deleting stuff.

Slack For Communication

Slack is an online marketing tool that makes communication at the workplace easier and more effective. The platform lets all team members communicate through messages, files, and video conferencing calls.

You can create channels for groups of people to isolate activity. This promotes productivity because everyone can concentrate on communication for that particular project.

An added advantage is that Slack works well with other tools you might already be using. A tiny list of popular integrations include Dropbox, Zoom, Google Drive, Mailchimp, and Google Calendar. There’s so many integrations now for Slack that it can become a notification platform for anything you want. You can minimize switching from Slack to another app.

Be sure to use /giphy in chat for top-tier gif communication.

ClickUp For Project Management

ClickUp is an online platform that makes it easier for teams to track and manage their work. It helps you and your team to be connected and more organized since you can see what everyone is working on and what tasks they’ve completed. Team members at Digital Darts have a browser tab for ClickUp open all day.

Through ClickUp, you can:

• Assign each team member tasks.
• Incredible views for any type of reporting you can image. It all depends on your use of custom fields.
• Help your team identify which tasks are a priority.
• Allow your team to communicate when they are stuck on a project while staying on top of tasks. If a comment needs to be action, it can be marked as an action step in one-click.
• Reference anything inside your ClickUp with the /link shortcut.
• Upload files and manage documents like a wiki.

ClickUp has all the major integraions like Slack, Google Drive, and even Google Assistant.

If you’re on another project management platform, you shouldn’t necessarily move to ClickUp. Use what works for you, but use something. ClickUp does everything that Notion can do, but in a simpler format. We used Asana for 10 years prior to moving to ClickUp, so I can also recommend Asana. Their feature development was slow and they lack flexibilty compared to the power of ClickUp.

Foreplay For Managing Paid Social Creative Inspiration

Sometimes, the Facebook Ad Library sparks your creativity with an idea for your next ad. Other times, it’s the creative center on TikTok.

The problem comes in when you want to use these scattered bits of inspiration that you have as screenshots, links saved somewhere, or you have to go back to the source and download the ad.

This can be tiring. You also lose your swipe file. That’s why Foreplay you should consider for your online marketing strategy.

Foreplay allows you to save the ad you’ll use as your inspiration so it is available forever. You can create boards for groups of ads, which can be shared with clients.

Frame For Teamwork On Video

If your marketing strategy involves the use of videos, Frame could be for you since it makes collaboration among your team much easier.

Through Frame, you can upload your projects in video formats and then share them with your group or clients so they can give their opinions and criticism. This prevents a lot of back-and-forth where you send a video project to everyone individually then wait for feedback.

Since you can provide feedback and also see other people’s comments, it ensures you are on the same page regarding the execution of a video.

Frame integrates with other video editing software such as DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Premiere, and also apps like Google Drive and Dropbox. This gives you a clean workflow to speed up video production.

Shopify Collabs For Influencer Collaboration

Shopify Collabs lets business owners connect with influencers to help them promote products.

This latest online marketing tool allows you to enjoy the benefits of collaborating with brand influencers like direct sales, creative production, imagery or video for your website, and better SEO rankings when the influencer mentions in your brand on their website.

Other marketing tools you can check out that offer similar services include Incense, Tagger Media, and Grin.

Stock Up For Free Royalty-Free Photos

We all need good photos but sometimes don’t want to pay for them. Some people say blog posts with images get up to 94% more views compared to those without photos.

Stock Up came in to save the day by providing more than 25,000 great images you can use for free.

Examples of other platforms that provided free royalty-free photos include Burst, Adobe Stock, and Reusable Art.

GTmetrix For Analyzing Website Speed

A slow website can increase your bounce rate hence costing your website traffic, contributing to poor customer experience and making your SEO rankings drop.

You don’t want to deal with that. The first step to fixing your website speed is testing to know if it loads slowly.

GTmetrix can help you with this since it:

• Tests how fast your website loads in different nationalities, using various browsers and internet speeds.
• Enlightens you on what is slowing down your website and how you can use the various features to correct it.
• Informs you of any changes to your website speed over time.
• Notifies you whenever your website is slow so you can fix the issue.

ShareX For Screen Capturing And Sharing

Screen captures let you create standard operating procedures, share information with support of software tools, and communicate with your team.

With ShareX, you can capture screenshots and record GIFS with one keyword shortcut then share them. I used ShareX to produce most of the images in this article.

Vmaker For Video Capture Of Screen

Vmaker gives a video version of ShareX in an easy-to-use interface. Vmaker allows you to record your screen, webcam or both of them.

You can use the videos for customer support, educate potential customers about a product, and build standard operating procedures for your team.

Screaming Frog For Technical SEO

Screaming Frog is among the online marketing tools I highly recommend because it’s great for advanced-level SEO. It is the primary tool in our complete guide to Shopify SEO.

Checking each page of your website is not only exhausting but leaves room for error. It’s easy to not see a duplicate page or notice a blog is missing a meta description and so on. Businesses use Screaming Frog because it can comfortably crawl all websites in record time no matter their size.

You enter your domain then wait for the crawl to complete. The tool then avails the crawl data for you to improve the website’s SEO. You get nearly every on-page SEO factor presented to you in a variety of reports.

1Password For Password Management

When you’re running an online business, you have more passwords than you can remember. Sometimes, even the thought of coming up with another one is tiring. Using the same password across different websites increases your risk of an account being cracked.

Statistics show that 81% of people who get hacked experience this because of weak or stolen passwords. That’s why you need an effective password management system and I recommend 1Password.

This online marketing tool protects your personal information such as credit cards and passports by generating a secure note for each document then saving those details there. 1Password makes it safer to share login details of accounts with your team members. You can create “vaults” for individuals or groups to manage categories of passwords in bulk.

We moved away from LastPass for password management after repeated security leaks and liking how 1Password has a secret key that becomes a second barrier to accessing all passwords.

Digital Darts Google Ads Keyword Tool for Paid Search

If you do pay per click advertising and do not extensively use keyword match types, stop losing money. Use the Google Ads Match Type tool to quickly modify your keyword list in your search campaigns.

Default to phrase match types then include an exact match of each keyword. For high volume keywords that perform well, peel out the exact match version into their own ad groups then write ad copy and ad extensions. This lets you improve the click-through and conversion rate of the keyword to scale your search campaigns.

Convert For Split-Testing

Part of great marketing involves testing different strategies to see which one gives you the best results. If you constantly apply changes to your website without testing, you may mess up what’s working well or worsen what needs to be improved. This happens because you’re operating in the dark.

Convert.com is renowned for its rapid Shopify integration and extensive knowledge repository, enabling you to conduct a wide array of tests with ease. Convert has unique advantages for Shopify Plus merchants like theme testing, debugging transactions for tests run on the checkout, and granular tracking based on language, location and demographic data.

Changes don’t have to be major. You can swap the colour of an add to cart button to see if it increases clicks and sales. However, little edits rarely move the needle. For the most impact, the elements you test should be closest to the checkout or rooted in a hypothesis from research. For more help with conversion rate optimization in Shopify, read my free book.

Brain.fm For Music That Aids Deep Work

If you’re like me, sometimes you need music to be productive, especially if you’ve been working for hours. But not any music works for me.

I need something that helps me focus. I found YouTube music to be too hit-and-miss due to lyrics and the whole composition.

As the name suggests, Brain.fm doesn’t provide any regular music. Its selection is made up of songs with soft rhythmic pulses that according to science, stimulate your brain, without being distracting and therefore improve how you work.

So when you want to hit that deadline, work faster, or be more productive, you know where to get your music.

The Shopify Apps Experts Never Pay For

Time for something Shopify-specific. I’ve got a quick-fire list of Shopify apps to avoid—and their alternatives—to help your store grow.

You’re likely wasting money on overpriced apps you don’t need. I’ve scaled hundreds of Shopify stores over the past ten years and one of the quickest improvements you can make for your store is to cut wasted expenses from apps.

These alternatives to overpriced apps are beginner-friendly yet do exactly what you need without wasting money.

Take Your Online Marketing To The Next Level

Successfully carrying out a single marketing campaign is not easy. Achieving this for multiple campaigns is even harder.

The good news is that by having these online marketing tools, you’re equipped for battle.These tools help you manage the work, but the real growth comes from a solid strategy behind them. If you want help building that strategy with SEO for your Shopify store, we handle organic search every day.

Your business may not be ranking in the top positions of search results because of common SEO mistakes. SEO is probably the hardest channel to master because it has migrated from a silo activity palmed off to a nerd that gets fed Coke in a dark room, to a profession that involves teams across development, design, content, and management that must work together.

I see small businesses make the most mistakes given their team-size limits what they can do, yet large businesses still screw up the fundamentals. Google itself admits to making SEO mistakes! Gary Illyes from Google describes how staff messed up hreflang tags, which set the language and region of a webpage, in Google’s own help center. “Someone was trying to target Los Angeles and thought using ‘LA’ as a country code would be great. It actually means ‘Laos’.”

Everyone makes mistakes—what matters is if you learn from them. Whether you make these SEO pitfalls from miss-information or lack of education, it’s time to fix them with this complete guide to educate you on what you should be doing.

The effort to get your SEO right is worth it. SEO has many benefits such as increasing brand visibility, organic traffic, and sales from search results. Once your website gets on the first page of Google, every jump in position sees your click-through rate from search listings increase up to 32% in the first position. You will be more prepared for the future since the SEO industry is predicted to grow at a rate of 14.4%, reaching US$1.6 billion by 2027.

I’ve kept the guide up-to-date with the most frequent hiccups made by marketers in SEO. This list has come from my experience training several people who have gone from knowing nothing about SEO to being world-class, auditing the SEO of Shopify stores every month, and helping people generally in SEO every week.

Whether you get an expert to tackle your website optimization or choose to do it yourself, here are the 11 common SEO mistakes to avoid and how to fix them.

1. Using Rankings as the Measure of SEO Success

Rankings as a metric by itself does nothing. If you rank high, does that mean you get traffic? If you get traffic, does that mean you get sales?

How to Fix It

You should instead use four metrics that are Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of good SEO:

• Organic traffic – Rankings are useful once they start bringing in traffic. You can rank #1 for many terms yet receive no visitors. Compare that to ranking #10 for a popular term and getting a sale from it everyday because your prospective customers heavily use the search query.
• Organic leads – Each keyword consists of a market. Track which keywords get you leads to optimize your website around those keywords.
• Organic revenue – If you have an ecommerce store, you have no excuse to not track revenue from organic search. It’s simple to setup through Google Analytics. See my Shopify and Google Analytics guide to get your Shopify store setup to track revenue.
• Multi-channel revenue contribution – If someone discovers your company through organic search, signs up to your newsletter, then later buys from you, track the organic contribution to the sale rather than attributing it purely to the newsletter. Organic search in this case should be acknowledged as a contributor to the bottom line. Google Analytics 4 does a good job at showing you multi-channel contribution.

With these four KPIs of SEO, you’re ready to do SEO well and avoid other common mistakes.

2. A Slow Website Speed

A slow website speed can make you lose traffic gained from search results. A recent survey carried out on online shoppers found that every fourth person would click off a page and abandon their purchase if a website takes more than 4-6 seconds to load, thus thwarting your SEO efforts.

53% of the customers said the acceptable time for a business page to load is 3 seconds at most. Therefore, if your website can load this fast, you can keep visitors longer on your page. Additionally, 21% of them reported that dealing with a website that loads slowly leaves them frustrated. While the survey is not qualitative user data, the impatience of users aligns with older classic statistics on speed.

Google has disclosed that its algorithm takes into account a website’s speed when deciding where to rank it on search results. A slow website speed can negatively affect your ranking.

If you’d like to review your website speed, use GTmetrix and Google’s lighthouse through web.dev.

How To Fix It

There are various steps you can take to improve your website’s speed and they include:

• Resize images. Unoptimized images slow down a website because they take more bandwidth to load. You can manually resize images in picture editing tools or use apps that automatically compress images uploaded on your website. Below, the image on the left with no compression is 30 times larger than the optimized version, and is likely to take 30 times longer to fully load. The large image isn’t used in a one thousand pixel height format to warrant its excessive dimensions.

• Choose image formats that are smaller in size. Use tools like Photoshop to test exporting the image in different formats. You will see size differences. An excellent example is JPEG, which takes up less memory compared to GIF or PNG for most images.
• Fix redirects. When visitors are redirected to another section or page of your website, that page takes longer to load since it waits for the server to respond to the redirect HTTP request. Get rid of as many redirects as you can by linking straight to the source. Screaming Frog is the best way to identify all internal links that redirect. Some redirects are necessary like shortened URL handles for offline promotions. Do away with ones you can avoid to increase your website speed.
• Compress JavaScript and CSS. Minimize the files to eliminate whitespace, use shorter names for variables, and prevent code-waste with efficient practices.
• Delay the loading of not critical scripts. If JavaScript is inserted inside the “head” tag, it may have to load before anything is seen in the browser. There are ways around this. Should a script be unnecessary for the loading of content above the fold, it may be non-critical and can be loaded before the closing “body” tag.
• Limit the number of apps you have. Not all apps affect Shopify speed. When it comes to increasing your website speed, less is generally more. Check your apps to remove any that are unused. If you discover apps that perform multiple functions, it’s best to use these instead of those that perform single functions since scripts may overlap. Eliminate apps to get the added benefit of saving money from unnecessary expenses.

3. Not Optimizing For The Right Keywords

The SEO mistake of not optimizing for the right keyword can happen when you target broad or generic keywords. Broad keywords have a lot of competition and so a small business has no chance of ranking for them. Sally in Longreach, Australia, who knits jumpers for women is not going to rank number one for “women’s jumpers”.

Another way you may also be messing up your SEO is by optimizing the wrong keywords. These can be words sprinkled in your articles or pages that are unrelated to what you do or the topic of the blog. Even worse, you can end up confusing visitors.

When you use the right keywords, you attract your target audience and make them stay long enough on your website to make a sale, visit another section of your website, or sign up to your newsletter.

How To Fix It

• Pay attention to search engine results pages (SERPs). Before you come up with content for your website, search that problem or question to see what information your potential competitors provide. The aim is to provide better or more information than them so anyone who visits your page leaves satisfied.
• Check the format that the pages ranking high are using to answer user intent. Is the information provided in the form of blog posts, product reviews, or how-to guides? Do they have a lot of images or videos? Since this is what is working, emulate the same format or adjust your keywords. You have no chance at ranking an article for “buy glass windows” if the top 5 search results are collection pages of stores selling glass windows.
• Understand your potential customer’s language. How would a potential customer type that in Google? Let’s say you supply “electronic nicotine delivery systems”, is that how your customer would search online? Unlikely. How about “electronic cig” or “electronic cigarette”? Definitely, yet what do you go for? Compare the terms in Google Trends. “Cig” is hardly used so you’d want to use the higher volume variant in your optimizations such as “Electronic Cigarettes Australia”. Listen to the words used by people who want what you have to sell.

• Conduct thorough keyword research to know realistically which terms you are likely to rank for. The “Keywords Explorer” in ahrefs is an amazing tool you can use to estimate the competitiveness of a keyword. The “Keyword Difficulty” rating gives an estimation of how hard it is to rank in the top 10 organic search results for a keyword on a 100-point scale.

• Use long-tail keywords. These keywords are longer, less competitive, and focus on specific qualities. Long-tail keywords get less web traffic and higher conversion rates increase since people find what they want. Not everyone searching a broad keyword has the same intent that lines up with the specific version. Too much search-engine optimization is done around a keyword before asking yourself if the content of a page genuinely serves people who search the keyword. In the example of Sally with her jumpers, she has a chance of ranking for “women’s jumpers longreach” or “women’s knitted jumpers australia” without having to get many backlinks and spending a lot of time improving her store’s SEO.

4. Unoptimized Title Tags And Meta Descriptions

Title tags are the second biggest influence of on-page SEO following good content. Meta descriptions are less important today than they were years ago, but mostly influence someone’s desire to click-through.

Google checks the keywords in your title to majorly determine what the page’s content is about. These keywords hold more water compared to the ones you put in your blog content or product descriptions. You define a title tag with a line of HTML in the <head> tag of a page:

<title>This Is A Page Title</title>

It commonly displays in the browser tab of a page and as blue text in Google search results.

Meta descriptions in search results are colored black and inform people what to expect on the page. So, if you leave it blank or write a poor one, it doesn’t fulfil this function. You can define a page’s meta description with the following code in the <head> tag of a page:

<meta name="description" content="Here is a description of a page. The text here will show in Google." />

Here’s a screenshot of a Google search result showing 3 titles in blue text and 3 meta descriptions in black text.

Google is likely to modify titles and meta descriptions that are not unique, fail to summarize the page, and provide no specific information to people searching. The SEO mistake of unoptimized title tags and meta descriptions forces Google to come up with a summary of your page, which isn’t ideal because you miss the chance to craft sentences that get a higher click-through rate.

How to Fix It

The good news is this common SEO mistake is one of the easier to correct. Best practices for titles and meta descriptions include:

• Relevancy. Write descriptive, keyword-rich titles readable by people. Make the description relevant to the page as well.
• Make titles and meta description unique to each page. It’s easier to be unique when you keep relevancy top-of-mind.
• Have your major keywords at the front of the title tag.
• Give titles a length between 50 and 60 characters and meta descriptions a length between 145 and 160 characters.
• Add potent benefits in the title to entice people to visit, though generally, look to include them in the description because of character limits. If you have any selling propositions like free delivery or a guarantee, include them in the description to attract visitors.

5. Unengaging Information

“Content is King” because not providing high-quality information is the fastest way to lose visitors.

Gone are the days when websites could publish poorly written blogs for the sake of having something on their website. It’s not enough to put keywords in your content since the information, and the way the keywords are used, need to make sense to the reader. If your competitors provide the helpful information or guidance your customers need and you don’t, then you can guess where people are spending their money.

Of course you want people to buy your products or services rather than only engage in your content. The belief that you should only get bottom of funnel people ready to buy, however, constrains your growth to the hundreds of multiples of people higher in the funnel not yet to ready to buy. When you satisfy people, you increase your chances of ranking higher on search results. When users spend time on your website, they may come back or even refer their friends.

How To Fix It

• Visit your website now then read over it pretending you’re a visitor. Ask, “Am I learning something? Do I get the information I need? Have I never read information like this on other websites?” If you said yes, yes, and yes, well done. If you said no once, rework the website. The common ecommerce SEO mistake uses the manufacturer’s description, which offers readers no unique information.
• Read over the top 4 Google search results of a query you want to rank for. These reveal where content gaps exist and opportunities for you to cover topics not already talked about, or to go into more depth about a topic, thereby creating a more useful article for the reader. You must give Google a reason to rank the content higher than what’s currently in the top 4 positions.
• Have fresh content on your website. Google and people appreciate this because the most recent information is usually more accurate. You can achieve fresh content by reviewing all content on a yearly basis and implementing a content strategy. You don’t need a blog. Good content can come from Shopify collections, product pages, and YouTube videos. If you want to blog for SEO, contrary to what a lot of SEO experts tell you, you don’t need to be writing every week in an effort to please Google. A high-quality monthly guide is better than weekly trash.
• Use supplementary materials to increase value. Supplementary materials help people get more out of the topic at hand like a how-to guide that has a text tutorial and a video for a practical question. Another complementary resource is infographics that can get backlinks. Our hreflang guide for Shopify includes a Shopify app plus a Google Sheet and tutorial to help merchants get their hreflang tags right. There are experts to follow on Instagram who specialize in data visualizations. Supplementary content ideas include:
  1. The “concept visual”
  2. Native video
  3. Ultimate guides
  4. Infographic guest posts
  5. Data visualizations
  6. Videos
  7. Flowcharts
  8. Explainer infographics
  9. Screenshots
  10. SlideShare slide decks
  11. Interactive content
  12. Visual collection
  13. Co-branded infographics
  14. Cartoons and comic strips
  15. Maps
  16. Blog post banners
  17. Templates like Google Sheets

• Provide key takeaways for the reader at the end of the article so they do not have to return to Google to search for more answers. Google tracks when users return to search results to find more information as it shows the user is not fully satisfied. You want the reader to click away fulfilled from their search.

6. Unfriendly URLs

An unfriendly URL is hard to understand, ugly, or big. Here are examples of unfriendly URLs:

• http://www.example.com/index.php?option=com_content=2&copy=1taskview&id+312&ltemid=43
• http://www.example.com/a/b/c/d/e/f/article1
• http://www.example.com/title-of-an-article-that-goes-on-forever-like-a-bad-movie-that-never-ends

Unfriendly URLs in Shopify tend to occur on filters of collections where parameters get appended to URLs that make no sense.

How to Fix It

Avoid unfriendly URLs with these simple rules for friendly URLs:

1. Keep them short.
2. Make them descriptive of the page.
3. Avoid deep URL structures. These include a lot of forward slashes.
4. Avoid query strings. These are variables after the question mark character (“?”) and may contain the ampersand symbol (“&”).
5. Use hyphens (a good webmaster practice) rather than underscores.
6. Logical and structured. For example, articles are in an article folder and products are in their product category. Shopify automatically does this for you.

7. Faulty Response Codes

Every webpage gives a response code. The most valid response code is a 200 as it means the request succeeded.

The 404 response code occurs when a page doesn’t exist, which creates a bad user experience. A 404 can be valid, but it is an SEO mistake when the page exists elsewhere or the link to a 404 existed somewhere on the website.

Redirects give various response codes as they guide a visitor to a page whenever you modify or remove content. Faulty redirects take users to the wrong page or generate errors.

Customers can be frustrated dealing with non-200 response codes and can leave your website altogether, therefore, increasing your bounce rate and reducing the amount spent on it. The end result is ranking lower on search results.

How to Fix It

• Google Search Console and Screaming Frog are the best tools to see all the response codes on a website. Below you can see a screenshot of a Screaming Frog crawl of Gym Shark’s website that contains many faulty response codes.

• Avoid changing your URLs where possible unless there’s a strategic reason or they’re being optimized.
• For broken external links, remove or replace them with working links. If people click on the links to access the website you’ve recommended and they get an error, it decreases trust.
• For faulty internal links, check if there’s a typo in the URL that is causing the error and fix it. This is sometimes the case with 404 errors.
• Google recommends using 301 redirects if you have permanently moved content to another page. Any native redirect in Shopify is a 301. Additionally, Google says you should have that redirect active for 1 year to give it time to register that change and apply it to search results. If the page move is temporary, a 302 redirect is more appropriate.

8. A Non-Mobile Friendly Website

How does every page on your website look on a mobile phone or tablet device?

59.3% of people access websites through their mobile phones. A non-mobile friendly website can cost you traffic and sales when people click off your website in preference to others that are easier to navigate. When visitors continue to leave your website, Google knows it doesn’t serve people and is less likely to place it at the top of search results.

A mobile-friendly website is even more important now. Google created a mobile-first indexing crawler in September 2020. Its algorithm gets snippets for search results from the mobile version of a page and mainly uses a websites’ mobile version to determine rankings.

How To Fix It

• Use device mode in Chrome to easily check how your website looks on all the major devices, from iPhones and Android tablets, to iPads and Nest Hubs.
• Conduct a Google Mobile-Friendly Test for ideas to make a page more mobile-friendly.
• Have a website design specifically made for mobile users using responsive design. When someone accesses your website from their phone, it adapts to the mobile layout and screen size. A responsive design is easier to manage as you update only one website.
• Get rid of large chunks of text on your website, especially the home page. It’s harder to format and read chunks of texts clamped together on a mobile phone compared to a computer. The goal is to make it easier for your customers to read the information they need.
• Use images that take up as little space as possible to maintain a good loading speed.
• Place buttons in the right place. Think about how you hold your phone and use your thumb to click a link or button.

9. Pages Not Indexing

The most common way a search engine discovers a web page is through crawling, where the search engine’s bot follows links on the web to find new pages and add them to their index. When your pages are not indexed, people cannot find them on search results. It is impossible to rank a page on Google unless the page is first indexed.

The Googlebot every second is searching the internet for new or updated pages. This is called “crawling”. After Google crawls your page, it analyzes what your website is all about, which is referred to as “indexing”. The “Page indexing” report in Google Search Console shows what content on a website is indexed and what is not indexed.

If you have created a page that has high-quality content, has an optimized title tag and meta description, is linked internally on the website, and satisfies user intent, you’ve given Google a great chance at crawling then indexing the page. From here, Google can show your page on search results.

You may be asking yourself how a page not being indexed is an SEO mistake that’s your fault. Although it is up to Google to index your page, some factors hinder this process and these are what you should fix.

How To Fix It

• If you just created a website or page, give Google some time to discover it. A new website can take up to 3 weeks to discover.
• Get rid of 404 errors and use 301 redirects instead. If some of your pages were ranking well in search and then you restructured your site or changed domains, check for these errors because they might have occurred during the move.
• Use high-quality content. If you’ve published duplicate content, Google may only index the original content.
• Solve the problem of manual actions on your website. If Google determines that you’ve gone against their quality guidelines, they can declare a manual action against your website. The result is your website can rank low or be taken off search results.
• Update your sitemap. An outdated sitemap makes it hard for Google to access your URLs, thus making it hard to accurately rank you in search.
• When you create a new page, see if it is linked to from another page on the website. If a page has no internal links, it is considered an orphan page and may not be found by Google. The search engine discovers most pages by following links. Internal links help indexation as well as rankings.

10. Hiring a Bad SEO company

There is a lot of bad SEO out there due to the ever-changing field and lack of regulation. If you pay for links, outsource to a cheap overseas company, hire an untrained intern, or try to save a buck, you often pay for it with no progress in rankings or even worse, a Google penalty.

How to Fix It

• Ask these 7 questions to your SEO company to figure out if they should do your SEO.
• Play an active role in monitoring results by tracking SEO KPIs mentioned at the start of this guide.

11. Not Understanding How SEO Works With Other Channels

Another common SEO mistake marketers and business owners make is failing to understand how SEO integrates with other channels or parts of a business. When you don’t make SEO part of your digital marketing strategy, you miss optimizing a channel that is already happening whether you choose to be intentional about it or not.

Let’s look at how SEO can work with other channels.

1. Social media: Engagement on social media often leads to people searching your brand in Google. A Facebook ad may not lead to a sale from the ad, yet it can from a Google search. You can build your presence on Facebook, Instagram, and to a lesser extent TikTok, by sharing blog posts. Videos on social media can be crafted to tease someone into searching Google or visiting a page made for SEO.
2. Paid search: Google Ads lets you see high-volume searches and good converting keywords that you can translate to your SEO keyword strategy. On the flip side, you can discover what keywords have poor commercial value before spending months chasing them or wasting thousands of dollars on poorly targeted content.
3. Referral links: You can find a way to share valuable information at an event or with people in your industry or community. By doing this, you’re building an audience of people who trust you. Perhaps you left a video testimonial for your accountant. An SEO expert will want to grab backlinks from these creative sources to help your SEO.

Aside from influencing and being influenced by other channels, SEO affects all aspects of a business.

1. Developers need to be guided by an SEO expert to improve page speed, shape the architecture of a website, craft a faceted filtering system that is SEO-friendly, and more.
2. Designers need to be guided by an SEO expert to create graphics that load fast and support existing content to improve its value.
3. Writers need to be guided by an SEO expert to produce content that’s backed in research, relevant, and better than anything previously published.

How To Fix It

You can correct this SEO mistake by:

• Reminding yourself of the truths shared above.
• Consider data from all your digital marketing channels when creating your SEO strategy. Refer to Google Analytics 4 to see how the organic search channel moves with other channels. TripleWhale is an incredible tool for Shopify businesses to understand how all marketing channels work together so they can profitably grow.

Fix These Common SEO Mistakes To Improve Your Ranking

Did you spot some common SEO mistakes you’ve been making?

If the answer is yes, you don’t need to beat yourself up about it. Even SEO experts slip up sometimes. The most important thing is you know the steps to fix these errors.

Now get out there and make your page rank better on search results.

If you’re looking to optimize your Shopify store for search engines, check out our SEO service.

To master Shopify SEO, I’ve got another great video for you. It took me 15 years to fix these 5 huge mistakes that destroy organic traffic of ecommerce stores and other websites.

When my brother Matt was looking for work, he knew nothing about SEO so I wanted to see how fast he could become world-class if he avoided these 5 huge mistakes. So I hired him at Digital Darts. In 6 months, he is growing stores by himself, which took me 15 years. Watch how:

You’re looking for an expert SEO company in a pit of hundreds self-professed experts. How do you pick the right company to get more traffic and sales so you don’t waste time or money? You ask the right questions!

A lot of SEO companies have a minimum 6-month contract so discovering an unwanted surprise in the first month of the relationship can be costly. Due diligence can be hard. Everyone claims to be good at SEO when all they do is read some blogs, change title tags, and sprinkle a few keywords into content. The good news is you can dig deeper with the right questions to discover how much air is in the head of most agencies.

I’ve delivered good SEO results to companies for over 10 years. I am tired of hearing stories from prospects ripped off by bad SEO companies who decreased their client’s visitors.

The article will give the most potent questions you can ask so your aligned with your SEO agency. I could give you more questions, but they do not amount to much. Wisdom knows what matters. These 7 question will help you through the nuances of SEO to reap the rewards of doing SEO right. Anyone who asks these questions will communicate authority as the person you speak with thinks “this person knows what they’re doing.”

Successful people ask better questions, and as a result, they get better answers.Anthony Robbins

1. “Will you share with me all that you do?”

It’s common for SEO companies to hide what they do to keep a mysterious aspect to their work. They do not share what they do because they either do very little or engage in unethical tactics like black hat SEO.

A company should track the pages where your links are built, pages they’ve edited, content written, videos created, and other completed tasks.

Each month when working with Digital Darts, you get a report containing details of what was done. Emma Filliponi from Australia’s online fashion store Blue Bungalow loves this about working with us. “What I like most is the transparency in terms of what work is actually being done,” says Emma in her testimonial video. “It’s so common that people would work with a freelance SEO specialist who doesn’t want to have any face-to-face contact and you actually don’t know what’s being done to achieve those results. With Digital Darts, we’re in contact frequently during the month. I know exactly what’s being done. I can see the tangible results. It’s just so easy to work together and there’s no set contact hours that we have to abide by. I would recommend anybody who has a Shopify website who is wanting someone who is open and honest to work with Digital Darts.”

2. “Who will make technical changes to my website?”

You need to clarify who will make technical changes to your website since multiple parts of a website can affect SEO. Technical parts of a website that affect SEO include:

• HTTPS security certificate
• Image size, alt text, and file names
• Site speed
• Meta tags for indexation
• Canonicalization tags
• Schema markup
• Hreflang tags
• Title and meta descriptions
• Redirects
• Broken links
• Sitemap optimization

Most of these changes require a web developer. A lot paid social, SEO, or SEM companies are unable to make these changes or will charge extra to do them. Not knowing this before entering into an SEO contract can leave you feeling disappointed that your SEO agency is failing to deliver you tangible results.

The biggest mistake I see companies make in SEO is treating it like its own channel, such as Google Ads. The best performance in SEO comes when multiple teams or individuals across different roles work together. For example, your SEO guy who crafts a strategy with a writer on your team and later reviews each piece content to maximize it for SEO.

A company able to make most technical edits for SEO demonstrates expertise they understand the platform. I’ve heard many stories from Shopify merchants who spoke with search engine optimization experts that have head knowledge of what to do in Shopify, but struggle to do it. SEO consultants may not know the intricacies of Shopify, leaving you unable to execute.

Moreover, being aware of who makes the changes lets you make a better apples-to-apples comparison when judging the price of agencies.

3. “How will you talk with me?”

Are you after weekly updates? Maybe a monthly update works for you? There’s no right answer to this question.

What matters is you get on the same page with communication so your expectations are met. Clarify what reports you’d like.

If your expectations don’t align, talk it through with them. Like a good relationship, you may end up shifting from your original position to meet in the middle as you learn something you requested will only take time, lead to nothing fruitful, and detract from the deliverables.

4. “Do you do black, gray, or white hat SEO?”

Black hat SEO is a set of practices that are in violation of Google guidelines. The practices can cause Google to penalize your domain in search results, making it impossible to rank on the first page. Not many agencies are in this bucket, but I’ve seen a few large ones do black hat.

There are harmful on-page and off-page tactics.

On-page black hat tactics can involve doorway pages where a large numbers of pages are created while the only variable changed is a keyword or two. Doorway pages are common in businesses that target cities who’ll duplicate the same piece of content across pages but swap out the name of the city. Another on-page black hat tactic is hidden text links. A large number of links are added to a page for either link exchanges or internal link building. To avoid harming the user experience, the link color is made the same color as the background to hide it.

Off-page tactics are more common than on-page in black hat SEO. The off-page ones to avoid are link schemes such as public blog networks, low-quality directories, and link exchanges. Google says if you pay for links, identify them with the rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" attribute.

Aside from black, there is gray hat and white hat. The terms evolved from Western movies where a white hat differentiated the good guy from the bad guy who wore a black hat.

Gray hat SEO describes ill-defined strategies in the eyes of Google. It is slightly risky because of its unclear nature, but not necessarily wrong. 500 Google algorithm updates a year can bite gray hat tactics. Not many will tell you they do gray hat and instead label it has white hat.

White hat SEO is seen as pure. It involves a lot of high-quality content creation, community management, and marketing strategy. Expect to pay four-to-five figures a month for this type of SEO.

All black, gray, and white tactics can work. The question is: what risk do you want to deal with? If you want to build a legitimate business that lasts, avoid black hat SEO to help you sleep at night knowing your business online is safe. Know what type of SEO you’re getting into and its risk.

5. “What’s your best link building method?”

“You do link building, right?” A link building strategy is essential to rank your website on the first page of Google for popular search terms.

Links in the eyes of search engines are like votes. A store with more quality votes has a greater chance at improved ranking. Not all links are equal.

Answers to be careful for include forums, article directories, and directory submissions. These are okay to do when done together as part of a whole strategy, but if that’s their best link building method, they’re living in 2008.

There are wrong methods of link building, but no one best method. Look for ethical methods that make sense to you. Ethical methods are good ways for your SEO company to attract links to boost your rankings.

Link building methods I like to use for clients include: reaching out to manufacturers to get listed on their stockist pages, public relations with journalists, directory submissions, blogger collaborations, and outreach to webmasters who manage resource pages.

6. “How do I recover from the penguin update?”

This is more so a tactic rather than a specific question. Once you’ve filtered through a list of SEO companies, organize to meet those you hope to work with. Be respectful by going through their sales process otherwise a sales person may not respond. Once your happy with how things are progressing, ask to speak with the person who would provide the service. Ask SEO questions like:

• “What’s the difference between 301 and 302 redirects?”
• “How would you handle on-page SEO for a multi-lingual site?”
• “What influence does meta descriptions have on rankings?”

Know the answer beforehand so you can judge their response. Listen for uncertainty, but don’t mistake it for nerves.

Many call themselves SEO experts but cannot answer these questions. They may give you an excuse then get back to you once they do online research. It’s fine if they don’t know the answer to a question. You can do great SEO without knowing everything off the top of your head since it is a large discipline. What matters is this piece of the conversation becomes another part of your due diligence.

7. “What SEO results have you achieved for clients?”

The most important question to ask is the results the agency has achieved for their clients. This can save you tens of thousands of dollars in a relationship that goes nowhere.

When you ask about the results achieved for clients, listen for the type of results. You want to hear results that are specific and measurable like increases in organic traffic, sales, and rankings. “We loved working with [x]” is a positive comment, but not one that shows results.

Another way to trust results more is if they are shared by the business owner in a video. Videos are a verifiable proof that the business owner stands behind what they say since they’re speaking. It’s why we spend thousands to shoot videos with clients. Anyone can makeup a text comment for a testimonial on a website, and unfortunately, many agencies do even though that’s illegal.

You can take the question to the next level by contacting past clients of the agency. Be aware that their clients or ex-clients may get contacted a lot so not everyone will reply.

Another variant of the question that takes it to the next level is finding when a project hasn’t gone as planned. Any revelation to this question is the tick that they’re transparent.

I hope these questions help you avoid the common pitfalls business owners make in working with SEO agencies. Ask the questions to select a good partner so you spend your marketing budget wisely. You can generate an enormous amount of sales from organic search.

I’m happy to answer any questions you have about SEO and Shopify. Get in contact.