Shopify SEO Guide: Rank No. 1 on Google and Grow Traffic

SEO Shopify is the process of optimizing an online store on the Shopify platform to improve search rankings, increase traffic and raise the conversion rate. So what are the benefits of Shopify SEO, and how do you do it right? With over 10 years of experience in SEO across many industries, MONA Media will share effective strategies and tips for Shopify website SEO in this article, to help your store break through on revenue.

Why do Shopify SEO?

In reality, as many as 67% of users only click on the first 5 results on Google. This means that if you optimize properly, you can get your Shopify SEO to the top and become customers’ first choice, which opens up effective sales opportunities. Some standout benefits businesses get from Shopify SEO are:

• Increase quality traffic: According to research by Wolfgang Digital, organic search results from SEO can account for up to 35% of total traffic and about 33% of revenue for online stores. This shows that SEO is an effective marketing channel that brings visitors with clear needs who are actively searching for specific products or services.
• Sustainable, long-term results: Unlike paid advertising channels such as Facebook or Instagram, Shopify SEO keeps drawing potential customers to your site steadily over time. This raises profit and reduces your dependence on short-term ad campaigns.
• Increase visibility and competitive advantage: When your website appears in the top positions, the chance that customers see it goes up significantly. Even if you already have steady traffic, continuing to optimize SEO can help you gain more traffic, and so get ahead of competitors in your industry.

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How to do Shopify SEO to reach the top of Google effectively

To help your Shopify store jump in rankings and grow revenue, a business needs to carry out a well-structured SEO strategy plan. Here is how:

Apply technical SEO tips

SEO Technical is an important foundation that keeps your website running smoothly, friendly to search engines and good for users. Here are the key tips you cannot skip when doing Shopify SEO:

Register your business’s own domain name

By default, Shopify provides a subdomain in the form of storename.myshopify.com, but to look professional and make SEO more effective, a business should register a custom domain. Google favors custom domains over subdomains, so this gives your website a big advantage. In MONA’s experience, you should choose a short, memorable domain that clearly reflects your brand, which makes it easy for customers to find you and builds trust with Google.

A custom domain costs quite little, from only 10 to 20 USD per year. After registering, the business needs to connect the domain to its Shopify store and set it as the primary domain. Also make sure you use it consistently across all marketing and communication channels to strengthen your brand identity.

If you want to use a different domain as your primary domain instead of the one Shopify chose, just follow these steps:

• Step 1: Click Setting on the left side of the screen.
• Step 2: Click Domains.
• Step 3: Click the domain you want as your primary domain and choose Set as primary.

Optimize your Shopify website structure

A clear structure helps Google understand the content and hierarchy of your pages, which distributes internal links effectively and lifts overall rankings. You can build your Shopify website structure using one of these two common models:

• Homepage => Category pages => Product pages.
• Homepage => Category pages => Sub-category pages => Product pages.

Besides product and category pages, you also need to optimize essential pages such as About us and Contact us when doing Shopify SEO, because these pages build brand credibility and customer trust. You can also add a search box to help users find the products they need, which drives sales.

Increase your website’s page load speed

Users often leave a website after just a few seconds if it loads slowly, so page performance is always a top priority when optimizing Shopify SEO. You can improve speed by choosing a lightweight, easy-to-use theme, optimizing image sizes so they look good but load light, and removing unnecessary apps. Limiting heavy effects and sliders also helps the site run more smoothly and keeps customers longer, giving them time to explore your products.

Make sure your website is mobile-friendly

More than half of e-commerce traffic now comes from smartphones and tablets, so your website needs to work perfectly on every device. You can hire a professional responsive website design company like MONA to build an interface that automatically adjusts its size and layout, giving a smooth experience whether customers visit your Shopify store from a desktop, laptop or phone. When the experience is good, customers stay longer, which improves the conversion rate and sends positive signals for SEO.

Edit the robots.txt file and sitemap

Besides the Shopify SEO items above, controlling how Google crawls your website is also an important step.

• For the robots.txt file: This file lets you guide Googlebot, telling it which pages to crawl and which to skip (for example, the cart and checkout pages). Shopify creates a default robots.txt file, but if you have in-depth knowledge you can edit it to optimize further. However, this requires coding skills and in-depth SEO website expertise, because one small mistake can affect the whole structure of your website.
• For the sitemap: Shopify automatically creates a sitemap if your business uses the Shopify Basic plan, all you need to do is submit that sitemap to Google Search Console. This helps Google quickly index all your pages, from products and categories to blog posts, so they appear in search results. If you use a higher Shopify plan and have multiple international domains, you need to submit a sitemap for each domain separately.

Not every Google update is worth worrying about. What matters is knowing which ones really affect you. In this video, Huy shares the sources that help you tell important news from news that is just for reference.

Keyword research for Shopify SEO

In a Shopify SEO strategy, researching keywords is the key step that connects your website accurately with what customers are searching for. With the right keywords, a store not only gains quality traffic but also clearly improves its ability to sell. To do keyword research effectively, a business should pay attention to these three things:

Identify the keyword types:

Short-tail keywords such as “women’s handbag” have large search volume, often tens of thousands per month, but competition is quite high. In contrast, long-tail keywords such as “women’s crossbody bag” get only a few dozen to a few hundred searches, but they are specific and convert well. Combining both balances reach and the ability to close sales.

Understand search intent:

To choose keywords well, put yourself in the customer’s position to understand why they search. There are three common types of search intent:

• Navigational search: When users want to go to a specific website. For example: typing “Shopify” to reach the Shopify homepage.
• Informational search: When users want to learn about a topic. For example: “how to do SEO” or “how to get a website to the top“.
• Transactional search: When users intend to buy. For example: “Shopify development services” or “buy women’s handbag”.

Use supporting tools:

If you want to save time, consider using useful keyword research tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, Search Surfer or MozBar. These SEO tools can provide data on search volume and competition, and suggest related keywords. 

Once you have your keyword list, prioritize long-tail keywords. Even though their search volume is lower than short-tail keywords, they convert better, especially for new businesses.

In reality, keyword research is the foundation of every Shopify SEO campaign, but it is also the step where many businesses get stuck because they lack in-depth tools and accurate data. With over 10 years of experience delivering SEO services for more than 500 projects across many industries, the SEO experts at MONA Media have the knowledge, capability and expertise to help you reach your goals.

We will help your business filter a set of promising keywords and support you in building a roadmap for sustainable SEO, increasing your competitiveness from the very first steps. For a more detailed discussion, just click the button below, and the MONA team will contact you right away and give you a free consultation!

Optimize on-page SEO elements on Shopify

Once you have mastered the technical SEO tips and keyword research, the next step in getting your Shopify SEO to the top of Google is optimizing on-page elements (On-page SEO). This is the process of adjusting each individual page to improve its ranking and visibility on search engines.

Optimize the title and meta description

Title SEO and meta description are the first “window” of your website on the search results page (SERP), and they decide whether users click. To optimize effectively, you should:

• Write a short title, limited to 55 to 65 characters and include Focus keyword. Prefer clear, lean wording so users immediately understand the main content of the page.
• Write a meta description (containing the main keyword) of about 150 to 160 characters since this is the ideal length to summarize the content accurately and still be appealing enough to encourage clicks. 
• Each page needs its own title and meta description to avoid duplicates that confuse Google.
• Work your brand or slogan in skillfully to increase recognition and user trust.

Add keywords to the URL and slug

The URL and slug play an important role in helping both search engines and users recognize what a page is about. So when setting up URLs and slugs to optimize Shopify SEO, keep these points in mind:

• Include the main keyword in the slug to make the topic of the page clear.
• Use hyphens to separate words. For example: /products/laptop-gaming is much clearer and easier to read than /products/laptopgaming.
• Avoid stuffing too many keywords into the URL, because this can backfire, hurt the user experience and be rated poorly by Google.
• Avoid special characters and capital letters. Stick to lowercase to keep URLs tidy and easy to manage.

Add keywords to heading titles

A proper heading system makes content easy to read and understand, and raises the chance of ranking higher for your target keyword in SEO Onpage Shopify. When optimizing headings, businesses should follow these principles:

• Put the target keyword in the H1 and keep the title short, reflecting the main topic of the page. For secondary headings (H2, H3, and so on), you can flexibly use related keywords to avoid repeating the same keyword many times.
• For product pages, combine the product name with an appealing description (for example, “Legacy Short Sleeve Cropped Hoodie” has both a brand element and a clear description of the product).
• On navigation pages such as About or Contact, use friendly language that reflects the purpose of the page, for example: “Contact us” or “Call MONA now”.

Build rich snippets with product details and UGC

Rich snippets can make your product stand out on the search results page by showing extra information such as price, reviews and ratings, and can even raise the click-through rate by up to 30% (according to Search Engine Land). 

With Shopify, many themes already support structured data, but if you use a custom theme, consider installing an app such as Smart SEO or Schema Plus for SEO. At the same time, optimize user-generated content (UGC) such as product reviews and comments. This is the “proof” that helps customers trust your business more, and it also shows Google that your website always has fresh, relevant content.

Optimize images

According to Emarketer, 36% of shoppers return products because the images they saw online did not match reality. To avoid this problem, optimize your Image SEO on Shopify using MONA’s suggestions below:

• Choose the right format: You can use JPEG for product photos and PNG for graphics. Shopify also supports delivering images in WebP format to reduce file size while keeping the same quality.
• Reduce size sensibly: Images that are too heavy slow down page loading, so keep the resolution at 72 pixels per inch and use Shopify’s free tool to resize.
• Add to the sitemap: This helps images get indexed quickly and show up in Google Images search results.
• Optimize the alt attribute: Write a short image description that contains the target keyword, is easy to understand and accurately reflects the image.
• Use clear file names: Instead of IMG_1234.jpg, use “seo-service-mona.jpg” so Google can recognize it easily.

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Build a link system

There are two groups of links you need to care about when doing Shopify SEO:

• Internal links: These are links from one page to another on the same website. They help Google understand your site’s structure and hierarchy, and help users navigate to related products or articles. 
• External links: External link are links from your website to other websites. When you link to reputable, high-quality sites, Google sees your website as a trustworthy source of information. MONA’s advice is to avoid linking to low-quality or spam sites so they do not hurt your Shopify SEO.

Optimize off-page SEO

Below is a high-impact Shopify SEO guide distilled from the experience of SEO company MONA Media:

Build active links 

Building active links means you actively look for and create backlink from other websites. Some effective ways you can try are:

• Create backlinks from social platforms: Create accounts on popular social networks such as Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and LinkedIn, and register a Google My Business profile. Even without a physical store, this still helps you improve SEO Local and build brand awareness.
• Exchange backlinks carefully: You can exchange links with reputable websites that do not compete with you in your industry to increase the number of backlinks. However, be very careful, because Google may see this as manipulation and penalize your website.
• Guest post: Writing posts for reputable industry blogs is an effective way to reach a large audience and earn quality backlinks. To do this, look for blogs with a suitable readership, then pitch a useful topic related to your product.
• Take advantage of unlinked mentions: When your brand is mentioned on other websites without a link, contact them and ask them to add a backlink. This is a golden opportunity to turn ordinary mentions into valuable links.

Build passive links

Unlike building active links, passive links are backlinks you earn naturally. When your website or product or service is good and useful enough, other sites will link to you voluntarily without you asking.

So how do you encourage passive links when optimizing SEO Offpage cho Shopify?

• Create standout content or products that are easy to share widely on social networks and forums.
• Respond to reviews and comments promptly to keep your brand image positive.
• Build relationships with influencers and KOLs/KOCs to increase your chances of being mentioned naturally.
• Join forums and online communities and share useful knowledge instead of promoting yourself openly.

Use PR campaigns for Shopify

Besides building links, businesses can use the power of media to boost off-page SEO. A well-planned PR campaign gets your brand into the press, industry magazines or major media channels, which brings organic traffic and quality backlinks.

From MONA's experience, you can run a Shopify SEO PR campaign in 3 ways: 

• Publish press releases about new products, special events or notable achievements.
• Work with bloggers and journalists to tell an engaging brand story that spreads widely.
• Use online media channels to double your reach and grow brand awareness

A guide to Shopify SEO with a content marketing strategy

According to Salsify's 2024 report, 39% of shoppers prioritize saving money, 26% shop more carefully and 22% put off buying decisions. This shows consumers care more and more about quality and the long-term value a product delivers. To adapt, businesses need to use content marketing as a lasting way to build credibility and improve Shopify SEO.

Create a content blog for Shopify SEO

For Shopify blog SEO, keeping a high-quality blog helps search engines rate your website higher and lifts your rankings. An effective blog needs to:

• Give readers useful information by answering questions, sharing industry trends or explaining how to use your products.
• Include related keywords in the title, meta description and body so the blog is easy to find.
• Update posts regularly to send a “signal” that tells Google your website is still active.
• Promote the blog on social media, email marketing or forums to widen its reach.

Example: If you set up a fashion accessories store on Shopify, you can write a blog post like “5 ways to style a durable leather bag for office workers”. 

Optimize product page content

A 2023 Forbes survey found that 70% of online shoppers decide to buy based on product page content. That is why businesses must invest in every word when product category SEO on Shopify.

Based on the experience e-commerce SEO from MONA, you can optimize content for your Shopify product pages by:

• Writing clear, concise descriptions that highlight features and benefits. Don't forget to add Shopify SEO keywords to the description to improve rankings.
• Using high-quality product photos shot from different angles so customers get the most realistic view.
• Providing full specifications such as size, weight and material, so customers can make the right buying decision and you get fewer returns.
• Showing customer reviews to build trust and credibility.

Create SEO-friendly content for other key pages

Beyond product pages and the blog, other pages such as the homepage, About page and Contact page also need optimizing.

• Homepage: Add related keywords, give brief information about your brand and products, and include clear calls to action (CTAs).
• About us page: Tell your brand story and share your mission and values to build an emotional connection with customers.
• Contact us page: Provide complete contact details and a simple form so customers can easily reach you when they need to.
• Terms and policy pages: Explain the buying, shipping and return process clearly to build trust with customers.
• Checkout page: Optimize keywords in the title and meta, and make sure the steps run smoothly so the user experience isn't hurt.
• Partner and promotion pages: Add quality external links to boost your SEO credibility.

Use video and other media to improve SEO

Today video is not only a visual tool but also an important factor in Shopify website SEO tactics. A product demo clip, a how-to guide or a real customer review can build stronger trust than any written description. Businesses can also use behind-the-scenes video to be more transparent, or use graphics and infographics to share information in a short, memorable way.

More importantly, optimize the title, description and tags, and distribute the video on platforms like YouTube or Vimeo to widen your reach. Combined well with blog content and CTAs, video improves the user experience, raises conversions and helps Shopify SEO reach the top lastingly.

One approach many sellers in Vietnam are running in parallel: keep Shopify to test the market, and at the same time build a self-owned online store on WooCommerce so you don't depend on platform fees or algorithms. MONA has a ready-made package WooCommerce online store design for this approach.

Notes to keep in mind when optimizing Shopify SEO

To make Shopify SEO work and get your online store to the top of Google quickly, keep the following in mind:

• Integrations Google Analytics: This is the website analytics tools free, which helps you track user behavior and traffic sources. With it, you can measure how your SEO campaign performs and adjust in time.
• Connect to Google Search Console: This platform shows which keywords bring traffic, which pages Google has indexed, and technical errors that may affect rankings.
• Choose a mobile-friendly theme: Shopify has a library of responsive themes. Still, businesses should test on several devices or use the Mobile-Friendly Test tool to make sure customers get a smooth experience.
• Remove password protection: If your store is password protected, Google can't crawl and index your product pages and Shopify blog SEO posts. Make sure to turn this off so search engines can access and rank your content.
• Consider a paid plan: Shopify's paid plans not only give you more optimization tools and features but also remove the Shopify branding from your website, making it look more professional and trustworthy to customers.

Shopify SEO optimization is more than installing tools or fixing a few technical details. It takes a long-term strategy and a deep understanding of user behavior. That is also why more than 500 businesses in Vietnam and abroad have chosen MONA Media. 

With modern SEO methods and technology, we deliver an overall solution that helps your Shopify website reach high rankings, grow traffic steadily and turn visits into real revenue. So if you need a dedicated, capable Shopify SEO partner to get there, call MONA on the hotline 1900 636 648.

SEO Shopify is not a race won overnight but a long-term strategy that takes patience and constant updates. We hope this detailed Shopify SEO guide gives you enough knowledge to start taking your store to the top of Google. If you want to save time, cut costs and get a solid Shopify SEO strategy, contact MONA Media for advice and to receive SEO price list with full details.