Shopify SEO

Shopify: simplifying the world of e-commerce

Just like hard work is the key to success in life, it won’t be an understatement to say that e-commerce is the key to success for businesses, in fact, instant success if you tick the right boxes. One such crucial step is to avail the help of a platform that will allow you to set up your online business in no time, with ease.  Talking about eCommerce platforms, Shopify is the first and by and large the most popular name that comes to our mind, and rightly so, because Shopify has over the years nurtured its brand image in the marketplace on the back of its impressive services.  Today we will look to explore Shopify SEO from the inside, covering everything ranging from what it is, to what services it offers, how it can be the game-changer for your business, and what your business needs.

What is Shopify?   To start with, we should know the purpose this platform serves. Shopify is a platform that offers businesses to set up their online business and sell products and services online.  Shopify offers a one-stop solution for your entire business needs, ranging from setting up the business, managing the business, promoting and selling your products and services, shipping of products, and customer management.  Obviously, you will have to pay for such services and the layers of services will keep on adding with the increase in the quantum of money you are willing to invest in their plans.

Understanding how Shopify SEO works to your advantage!  Shopify is designed in the most user-friendly manner one could think of, the user will be allotted a control panel from where he can manage his entire website at his fingertips. Managing the website, customizing product listing, adding new products, processing orders all could be achieved from there.  To begin with, you will have the option to choose from thousands of free-to-use and paid templates for your store. A subscription with Shopify means they will take care of everything related to web hosting, SSL certificate, downtime response time. Their customer support is amazing, they are available 24/7, you can reach them over call, email, or live chat.

Shopify SEO Optimization Strategies:

Below we will look to explore some comprehensive yet easy to adapt checklist that will ensure that your Shopify site appears in the search results because coming up with a robust Shopify website is a thing but driving organic traffic that too through SEO is a lot different.

Registering your Shopify store: 

You need to make google aware that you have created your Shopify website. For that, you need to register your website on Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. This is a practice that is neglected by many webmasters, but you must adopt it.  How to add a site to Google Search Console.

Submitting your Shopify Store’s Sitemap:

This is where the benefits of Shopify start to unveil. Every website owner needs to submit an XML sitemap of their store with Google Search Console. Shopify provides you with an auto-generated site map without you doing any of the hard work. In Shopify, The URL for the site map is: www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

Always use an SSL certificate: 

You might have noticed some websites with HTTPS://’ as a prefix to the site address, these are the websites that use SSL certificates. Search engines are more sensitive towards the sites that use SSL certificates as they provide a sense of security.  To your advantage, Shopify provides this feature with their subscription. All you need to do is to activate it.  Activating the SSL certificate from your Shopify store’s dashboard: Channels > Online Store > Domains.

Ensure that the load time is the minimum possible: 

It’s a well-known fact that fast-loading sites are given a preference in the search results, and even the users tend to bounce when the website is slow to load.  Tips to ensure that your Shopify store loads quickly:

• Use tools of the likes of Tiny Png, such tools reduce the size of the images you upload to Shopify.
• Get rid of the Shopify apps you are not using.
• Try not to use image sliders.
• Must use Accelerated Mobile Page(AMP) in your Shopify posts. They help in displaying the fast loading version of your Shopify pages and posts.

Benefits that Shopify brings to your Business: Simple and easier to use: Shopify receives lots of praise for its user-friendly interface, once you have made your mind to set up your online store, you are almost there! You don’t need to mug up over servers for hours, Shopify brings everything under one roof for you.  All the steps for the setup process are logically structured and any prudent person would not require too much brainstorming to understand and follow them.  However, in case you are still experiencing some out-of-the-box issues, there are overly detailed video guides and helping documentation available at your disposal.

It is Secure and can be relied upon: When you are running an online store, you are dealing with sensitive personal data of your customers, which they have provided you in good faith. Such details include address details, account passwords, and most importantly credit card details.  Thus your site needs to be always online and responsive. Shopify will ensure that all pages load quickly, and because it provides hosted solutions, it ensures that the server is up to date and looks after server maintenance at all times. Shopify takes the help of an SSL certificate for your website to encrypt all the data of your website and make sure that all such data is passed through a secured connection.

Takes care of all the technical barriers: You don’t need to be a tech-savvy person or an IT genius to launch your website on Shopify. Shopify makes it feasible for a proud person to set up an online store in hours. Not just an online store, but an online store that is fast, secure, and faster than most of the counterparts. Hosting provided by Shopify is among the fastest and uptime is almost 100%. Shopify deals with all the traffic glitches that are faced by your website and routes them efficiently.  When you choose Shopify as your e-commerce provider, your prime focus should be on increasing your sales and not worrying about the technicalities relating to site management, and up-gradation.

Mobile friendly: It’s not a hidden fact to anyone that people are more on their mobile devices than on desktops. Site visits through mobile devices are much higher than from the desktop, and this trend is expected to continue and the margin will only increase in the future.  A website that is not optimized for the mobile view is not preferred by users and thus they either don’t visit the website or leave it soon after opening it.  Shopify understands this well, almost all the themes that are available on the website whether free or paid are optimized for mobile view. The website is responsive to mobile searches and contains a free built-in mobile commerce shopping cart, which makes your website look great on mobile devices.  The app store of Shopify:  Yes! Shopify has its app store. These apps are developed keeping in mind the fact that every Business has its own salient needs that cannot be addressed at once. These apps are designed to plug in with your Shopify website and perform the desired function.  These apps are specially dedicated to serve individual Business needs that are subject to a great degree of variability. Shopify has provided most of these apps free of cost, however, some of them are available on a pay-to-use basis.  Here are the most popular apps that can be used in tandem. 

• Referral Candy: as it’s pretty clear by the name that this app has something to do with referrals. This app offers goodies to customers in exchange for referrals made by them. It is a brilliant marketing app for Businesses that are still in the growth stage in their product life cycle.

The app features automatic referral reminders, automatic award delivery on fulfillment of conditions, it provides customers with the option to choose between a range of awards. This app is a paid one and is available at $49/month.

• Plugin SEO: this Shopify app is a one-shot solution for entire Search Engine Optimization related issues for your website.

This app automatically detects and suggests ways to remove all the SEO-related problems with your website. These problems can be in the form of issues in Meta description, page titles, the focus keyphrase, load time, and structure.  The best part about this app is that it is completely free to use! Moreover, it provides you with code applying which you can get rid of some general problems with ease.

• Print: have you ever received some cool merchandise like coffee mugs, T-shirts, photo frames, etc, that are part of some promotional campaign. That’s exactly what Printful brings to your website. It takes orders on your behalf and manages everything from inventory to delivery of such merchandise.

Start selling with Shopify! I’m sure you must be tempted to join Shopify by now, what are you waiting for, join Shopify 14 days of the free trial plan, and take a feel of the awesome services offered by Shopify. What’s even great is that you don’t even have to provide any credit card details to start this free trial. You just need to provide basic contact details and some general questions about your Business.

Sign up with Shopify: Visit Shopify and create your Shopify account to get started, you will be asked to choose a unique name for your business. A few general questions about your business, your contact information, answering the question that whether you have products, and that’s it you’re done, your account is created.

Set up your online store:  Right after signup you will be directed to your store admin screen where you have to customize your website. Customization will include adding products to your domain, setting up the payment process, shipping procedure, etc.

Select a cool theme:  With ‘cool’ we meant a theme that goes with your business. Shopify has its theme store from where you can choose from the lakhs of themes available. These themes are developed by Shopify developers and receive regular updates. Moreover, you can modify these themes to a great extent as per your choice that too without going into coding.  Themes are available both as free and paid, for beginners we recommend free-to-use themes as there are awesome themes that can be customized to give your online store a befitting look.

You can visit the Shopify theme store at, Shopify themes Adding products to your store: This is a crucial element because ultimately it’s the products that you will sell to earn revenue.  On the navigation bar to the left side of the screen, you will find the ‘Add a product’ section under the ‘ Products’ menu. You must add all the products you wish to add to your store and provide exhaustive information about the products.  Don’t worry you can always edit the information later on. Upload vibrant images of your products and when you are done click on ‘save product’. Later on, you can manually group such products into different categories for ease of accessing.

Get a Domain name for your website: This will serve as the unique address for your website on the internet. Now there are two ways to get it, either you can procure it through Shopify and the charges will be added to your plan, or alternatively, you can purchase a domain from any of the hosting providers like Salesforce, Hostinger, HostGator, etc.

Setting up payment gateway: A payment gateway is where you take payment from your customers via different payment options. You need to be extremely cautious while selecting the payment options. You should keep a track of the factors like transaction fees, card types, off-site checkout, and customers’ preferred mode of online payment.

How much do Shopify charges?  Shopify has kept in mind the Business needs of different Businesses, as per their scale of Business and ability to invest upfront. Shopify has 5 popular plans which are listed below-

• Shopify Lite is available at $9 per month
• Basic Shopify comes at $29 per month.
• Shopify is available at $79 per month
• Advanced Shopify will cost you $299 per month

• Shopify Plus provides you with choosing the services you wish to avail of, and the pricing will be based on it.

here are some important things you should be mindful of:

• Paying upfront makes you eligible for a discount of 10% when you are paying for one year, and the discount rises to 20% when you pay upfront for two years.

Shopify SEO recommendations for 2021:

• Use keywords in your content with the intention of providing information and not just promoting the keyword.
• Look for any duplicate URLs in the linking architecture and remove them.
• Add data in the format: Product,” “Article,” & “BreadcrumbList”
• Your page titles must contain the focus keyword you are promoting.
• Compress images using TinyPng or crush.pics.

Frequently asked questions:

Is Shopify the best E-commerce platform at the moment?  Shopify is definitely amongst the topmost e-commerce platforms available at present. It has gained a compelling brand image for itself in the marketplace and is trusted by a large pool of users. It is the most recommended platform of the present time, the reason being the seamless service on top of top-notch built-in features and not to forget the all-important app vault.

Is Shopify trusted by any big brands?  Of course yes, Shopify is not only popular among the new players or the emerging ones, even the established businesses also have their bid of faith in Shopify. Since its start in 2004, Shopify has gained a huge customer base including famous brands like Budweiser, WaterAid, New York Times Shop, Bulletproof, The Economist, etc.

Do I need to enter payment details for the available free trial?  No you don’t! Shopify provides you with the 14 days free trial without asking for any payment details from you. At the end of 14 days or when you make up your mind to set up your business with Shopify, you can select the most suited plan for yourself and make the payment.