Shopify Technical SEO Tips to Boost Your Online Store

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SEO can be crucially important to how well your Shopify site does. Mastering Shopify SEO techniques can help your business to get as much from Shopify as possible. 

URL Structure and Managing Redirects 

In Shopify, URL structure, site structure, and structured data are critically important. 

URL structure makes it easy to navigate your site for search engines and visitors alike. 

The good news is that URL structure is easy to master. All you need to do is to make sure that it’s easy to read, describes the page, maintains consistency, is entirely in lower case, and is to the point. 

Moreover, you don’t have to deal with much of it – all you have to do is modify the slug. 

When it comes to managing redirects through Shopify, there are a couple of questions to ask. 

Namely, is your store already live at the time you’re changing URLs?
Or, alternatively, are you migrating to or from Shopify? 

If the answer to either of those questions is “yes,” then you’re probably going to want to go with Shopify’s option to create a 301 redirect automatically. That way, in the redirect manager, you can manage every single redirect that’s added. 

Keep in mind, this can lead to some hard, possibly mind-numbing work. 

With redirect manager, you’ll be unable to use RegEx (“Regular Expressions”) to set up redirects. 

That means you’ll either be importing them after you generate them yourself or complete them one by one. This can be a lot of work, but it can pay off, too. 

Structured Data 

One more way to make your Shopify site stand out that much more to search engines is to make certain your data is structured properly. 

If you’ve been reading to this point, it’s entirely possible that you filled in thousands of redirects by yourself. 

Thus, we want to make as much of this as easy and as automatic as possible. 

So, when it comes to structuring your data for Shopify, we recommend Schema.org. 

Put in all of the product and company info the right way, and if you do so, any support for Schema markup will be taken care of automatically, on account of it being embedded in your theme. 

Schema markup isn’t present? Use an app. That way, you’ll have real control in regards to the markup added to your pages. 

Speaking of structured data, that describes Twitter Cards and Open Graph, too. It’s easy to ignore these, but they let you handle what snippets are seen when folks share your URLs on their social media feeds. 

Fortunately, Shopify is pretty good about automatically taking care of a lot of this. While you’ll want to make sure your Twitter Card and Open Graph data are done right on your product pages as well as your collection, Shopify can do that while drawing from your set product properties and collection. 

Making the Most of Shopify’s Site Structure 

The built-in functionality of Shopify’s menu management isn’t exactly the same as the site structure you may find on other sites. 

To take care of it simply go to the Shopify admin console, then to “navigation,” and finally click on the “add menu” button. 

From there, you can set up some parent-child collections by utilizing menus that are nested. 

When you’re setting up site structure on other sites, you might think of logical, simple escalation. Someone might start with “pants,” and then find their way to “kids,” “men’s,” “women’s,” etc. 

Instead, create “collections.” 

So, in your Shopify, you can make collections of “kid’s,” “men’s,” and “women’s.” Then, you can further break them down to “fitness,” “leisurewear,” “jeans,” “formal,” etc. 

Now, the thing about these collections is that they’re all equal right now in Shopify’s backend. 

The next step then is to put the subcategories (“fitness,” “leisurewear,” and so forth) beneath the main categories (“kid’s,” “men’s,” “women’s.”) You can set this up by going through Shopify Admin, to Online Store, and finally to Navigation. 

A Fast Enough Page 

Shopify does a good job of making sure its pages are fast. 

But, unfortunately, there are ways to slow your own Shopify page down. 

Specifically, people tend to do it by uploading images that are too big, installing far too many apps, or just making your theme too cluttered. These might seem like small things, but they can severely slow your Shopify site down. 

A good rule of thumb: use as few apps as possible. If you need one, hey, you need one. But, using many can slow… your… Shopify… site… down. 

If possible, build a customized Shopify theme from scratch. That way, you’ll know everything that’s in it (just like if you’re cooking your own food.) 

That said, you aren’t out of luck if you do buy a pre-existing theme. That said, if that’s what you do, travel light – get the most lightweight theme you can. Then, there’s the least possibility that will negatively affect your page speed. 

Crank up Google Tag Manager and put all your tracking scripts in there. That way, you’ll drastically cut down on how many requests pages make. 

Lastly, big images can lead to big slowdowns. Compress your images (as Shopify won’t do it for you) and make certain you’ve resized them to the required dimensions. Following any and all basics with images can seem, well, basic, but it can help your page to load that much faster. 

Javascript on the Client-Side 

You want to make search engines’ crawling and indexing process as simple and fast as can be. 

To that end, we recommend a prerendering solution or server-side rendering. 

Search engines really don’t devote many resources to rendering javascript, because it takes up a lot. Indeed, that’s one of the reasons it can take a long time for search engines to really crawl through your entire store (and ultimately index it). 

So, you want to expedite the process as much as possible. 

Don’t rely on JavaScript tending, so keep client-side options in mind whether you make your own Shopify theme or are buying one that already exists. 

A Shopify SEO Expert Team 

The above are just some of the ways to get the most out of your Shopify site. 

Shopify SEO can be sensitive. 

A few changes here or there can make all of the difference in the world. 

Here at Website Depot, we’ve helped businesses from practically any industry to succeed with Shopify and so much else. 

For a free consultation, you can talk to our team at (888) 477-9540.