SEO Tips For Shopify Plus

1. Optimize your image alt text for Shopify product pages, blog posts, and anywhere you insert photos. 

• 5-8 words for an image alt text is considered best practice
• While your first priority should be describing and providing context to the image, try to include primary and secondary keywords to improve your keyword frequency.
• Keep descriptions clear
• Don’t use the same keywords for all images. They may be similar, but change up the wording—use variations.

• Include your keywords in the file name of the image. Instead of promo1.jpg,change this to aviator-sunglasses-for-men.jpg.

2. Navigation links matter

• Links in the header navigation get more weight than ones in the footer. Move any information-related pages like “Return Policy” or “Contact Us” to the footer to make way for more conversion-focused links in the header.

• Breadcrumb navigation is a list of links that show a customer what page they’re on and any pages "above" a store's content. It also helps Googlebots better understand the website hierarchy. 

3. Content is King - Invest in Your Blog

An important part of your SEO strategy is content writing. It's important to invest in solid information and blog posts that are relevant to keywords you are trying to rank for. Simply, this means writing blog posts that answer questions about the eCommerce products that are being sold by your store. For example, if you're selling sunglasses, we might want to write an article that explains how important it is to protect your eyes from the sun? What are the benefits of sunglasses? What are the alternatives? etc. That helps you gain share of voice and become a domain expert in the broader eyeglasses market. We recommend publishing about 5-10 blog posts per month around your topic, which will help move the needle for SEO. 

4. Press Articles

Backlinks (also known as “inbound links”, “incoming links” or “one way links”) are links from one website to a page on another website. The more backlinks that you receive, the more trustworthy you are to search engines and the higher you will rank across all of the keywords that you are aiming to rank for. Articles or mentions in important publications, like NY Times, Goop, Forbes, etc. are what you should be aiming for. Recency is a very important factor in SEO. According to Gr0: "If you don't have any new links in the past year that tells Google that you're not that relevant anymore."

5. On-Page Optimization

It's important to optimize your Shopify store for readability and speed. Site speed is a crucial component in optimizing your site. Title tags, headings, and meta descriptions of every page should also be well-researched and thoughtfully named. If you are a sunglass business, the homepage title tag should have “sunglasses” in it. Here are some items to consider:

• You can edit the title tags, meta tags, and meta descriptions to include your keywords.
• You can edit the alt text for product images to include your keywords.
• You can make sure your file names include your keywords.
• You can choose the URLs for blog posts, webpages, products, and collections.

Here are some great examples of brands who utilize on-page optimization through their blogs:

• Kayla Itsines: https://www.kaylaitsines.com/blogs/news
• MVMT: https://www.mvmtwatches.com/blogs/the-mvmt
• Fellow Products: https://fellowproducts.com/blogs/learn (moved blog FROM Wordpress)
• Boll and Branch: https://www.bollandbranch.com/blogs/content (products pulled in through a consistent tag scheme)
• 100% Pure: https://www.100percentpure.com/blogs/feed#cover

5. Recommended Apps to Boost SEO from the Shopify App Store

SEO Manager: Includes an SEO scan, meta content tools, keyword suggestions, Google search console connection, and search analytics. It identifies your broken links and automates the fixing process. It also offers comprehensive help documents to further your understanding of SEO.

SEO Booster: This app helps optimize unlimited images, meta tags, URLs, JSON-LD schema, sitemap according to Google's guidelines to improve SEO ranking & drive organic traffic.

SEO Doctor: Presents you with a real-time diagnosis of your store’s SEO health. Allows you to edit metadata and images, as well as on page content. Their page scan gives you clear bullet points for things you did well or where you can improve. It also includes a useful image compression function.

Smart SEO: This app generates meta tags and alt tags for your store. It provides
structured data in JSON-LD format to let search engines know the structure of your Shopify  store in greater detail. They have over 700 positive 5 star reviews in the store, here is a review from a customer: 

Yoast SEO: This is the quintessential SEO app, they are the biggest app for wordpress websites. They help get sophisticated Schema.org markup added to your online store and assist with your SEO and readability so that you can optimize product page, blogs and collections that rank in search results.