Make Your Online Store Stand Out in Search Results – Tips and Tricks for SEO in Shopify
A strategy ensures that you’re on the right track—that you’re working toward relevant and realistic goals—and that all your efforts align with your goals.
When you're developing an SEO strategy (or evaluating your current one), there are many questions you need to ask and consider from every angle.
A common misconception is to opt for every SEO measure. It is, rather, a non-choice—a non-strategy.
I mean, an SEO strategy is about assessing which measures make sense for the specific situation—not just pulling every cool SEO trick out of the toolbox all at once.
That’s why we’ve put together 19 questions you can ask yourself, your (marketing) team, your SEO agency, or maybe even just your cat.
Get a Handle on All the Basics – E-commerce SEO for Dummies
Before you dive into more complex technical SEO practices like canonical tags and structured data, you first need to have a solid grasp of all the basic SEO elements on your online store. It’s a bit like a contractor building a house—he doesn’t start thinking about minute aesthetic details until he’s poured the foundation and built the framework.
But what do I actually mean by “basic SEO”—or “e-commerce SEO for Dummies,” as I’ve somewhat arrogantly chosen to call it?
By this, I mean the basic, hands-on SEO steps that you absolutely must be able to check off your list if you want to have any hope of getting your online store to rank well in search results.
Basic SEO for Your Online Store
- Correct H tags on your homepage and collection and product pages
- Unique meta/page titles and meta descriptions (meta tags) on the homepage and key collection and product pages
- ALT tags
The items listed above are some of the first things Google scrutinizes when determining search result rankings. So be sure to optimize them.
What are H-tags?
An H tag (or header) is a piece of HTML code that defines a section of text as a heading. In this way, it tells Google what a webpage is about—just as headlines and subheadings in a news article tell readers what the article and its individual sections are about.
H tags come in several levels—from H1 to H6, where H1 is the most important and H6 the least important. And just as a newspaper article will have one main heading and several subheadings, a subpage on your online store should have one H1 and, ideally, several H tags of lower levels.
- The H1 is the landing page’s “angle”—it describes and frames the page’s overall theme
- The H2s provide detailed but important information
- The H3s are nice to know, but not necessarily need to know—and so on
If you'd like to learn more about H tags and how to use them, click here.
How do you create H tags in Shopify?
You don't need to be an HTML whiz, a coding expert, or a web guru to create H tags in Shopify. Shopify has a user-friendly and simple text editor that makes it easy to insert, edit, and tag text on your collection and product pages.
To tag "H"s in the description of a collection or product in Shopify, do the following:
- Click on Products > All Products or Collections
- Search for and click on the collection or product you want to edit in
- Copy and paste, or type your text into the text box
- Select the desired heading level from the " Formatting " drop-down menu ("Heading 1" corresponds to H1, "Heading 2" to H2, and so on)
When you select a piece of text and, for example, click “Heading 2,” the formatting will change so that Google recognizes it as an H2.
Please note that Shopify will often automatically assign an H1 tag to the text in the title field. So, to avoid having multiple H1 tags, as a general rule, do not assign H1 tags to headings in the text field itself.
What are meta tags?
You’ve definitely come across meta tags before. Meta tags are pieces of information that appear in search engine results and describe the content of a website or a specific page. A meta tag consists of an SEO title (also called a page title or meta title) and a meta description.
It looks something like this:
How do you create meta tags in Shopify?
You can do this in the text editor as well. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the text editor and click " Edit SEO for website."
Next, you can enter your page title and meta description. Below, you’ll see the text editor used by one of Amplify’s online store customers, who sells makeup. Here, I’m editing the meta tags for a collection page featuring blush.
Tip: Want to make sure your meta tags aren't too long—and also encourage potential customers to click through to your online store? Then try the Amplify meta tags tool.
What are ALT tags?
ALT tags (also known as ALT text or alternative text) are text in the source code that tells Google and other search engines what an image is about. Google is pretty “smart”—but not smart enough to understand images. That’s why even the all-knowing search engine needs a little help understanding the images on your online store. After all, the more Google knows about a collection or product page, the higher the likelihood that your online store will rank well in search results.
And this is where ALT tags come into play— in the most literal sense! So be sure to add relevant ALT tags to your images.
If you have a very large online store, writing ALT tags for all your images can seem like an overwhelming task. Fortunately, with AI automation workflows (Programmatic SEO), you can generate and upload several thousand ALT tags all at once!
How do you create ALT tags in Shopify?
- Click on Products > All Products
- Search for the product or collection you want to add an ALT tag to
- Click on the image you want to tag in the " Media" section
- Click " Add Alternative Text"
- Enter your ALT tag
- Click " Save Alternative Text"
Voilà: Now Google knows what the image is about. And that increases the likelihood that the search engine will understand what the rest of the page is about.
You can (and should) add ALT tags to all the images on your collection and product pages. But remember to give them unique ALT tags.
For example, if your online store sells tools, you shouldn’t give all your hammers the ALT tag “hammer.” Instead, create variations such as “hammer,” “carpenter’s hammer,” and “rubber mallet” if you need to add ALT tags to multiple products within the same category.
ALT tags won’t be visible on the online store itself. But they will be visible in the source code—and that’s exactly where Google looks. Below, for example, you can see the source code for the aforementioned “blush” collection page. Here, Google can see that an image has been assigned the ALT tag “blush.”
Write unique collection and product descriptions
I can’t stress this enough: Content is king on the web—and that goes for your online store, too. Sure, H-tags, metadata, and ALT tags are an important part of Google’s vocabulary. But Google is also pretty good at understanding everyday human language—so good, in fact, that text is one of the most important factors in Google’s algorithm when the search engine ranks results.
Let’s say you have a collection page for red shoes on your online store. You have plenty of products here—but no text explaining that you sell red shoes. Google will therefore have a hard time understanding that the page is about red shoes. Because even if you’ve got the basics of SEO down, Google will still rank pages with detailed descriptions higher.
In other words: If you want your online store to be visible on Google, you need to get to work and write user-friendly SEO content for your product and collection pages. And copying text from your competitors is a big no-no. Google penalizes duplicate content with poor rankings.
However, online store content isn’t just important for SEO—it’s also important for your customers. Having an online store without product information is like having a brick-and-mortar store where the staff can’t be bothered to tell customers about the products.
Tip: Do you get sweaty palms at the thought of a blank text document—or do you just find writing copy for your online store to be a tedious chore? If so, you might find it helpful to structure your copy using the following template—it makes it both easier and faster to craft and write online store copy:
- Introduction to the Collection or Product
- Buying Guide
- Benefits and Advantages of the Products
- Answers to common questions about the product—this is where Answer the Public can be worth its weight in gold
- Benefits and Advantages of Shopping at Your Online Store
- Call to action – what do your customers need to do to get their hands on the product?
Tip: At Amplify, we have professional copywriters who are happy to help you write engaging, SEO-friendly, and user-friendly content for your online store. But if you’re just looking for inspiration on how to write good web copy, I highly recommend reading the following post:
Create landing pages for important keywords—the filter feature doesn’t help your SEO
Shopify has an excellent filtering feature that makes it easy for your customers to narrow down their product choices based on personal preferences. On a collection page featuring red shoes, for example, you can set up filters so your customers can sort by criteria such as brand, model, or price.
And that certainly benefits your users— but not your SEO! The problem with the filter feature is that you ’re not taking advantage of the SEO potential that comes from creating separate collection pages for each filter parameter.
Let's say, for example, that you run an online wine and spirits store. You've created a collection page featuring wines and set up filters so your customers can search for their favorite wines based on parameters such as:
- Type: Red, white, rosé, or sparkling wine (etc.)
- Country of Origin: French, Italian, or Spanish wine (etc.)
- Region: Burgundy, Amarone della Valpolicella, or Rioja (etc.)
- Grape variety: Cabernet Sauvignon, Malbec, or Merlot (etc.)
- Price: Under 50, under 100, under 200 (etc.)
- Alcohol Content: Non-alcoholic or alcoholic wine
The page is optimized for the very broad and generic keyword “wine.” This means that the H tags, metadata, ALT tags, and text on the page are optimized so that the page will appear in search results when people Google “wine.” And filtering options do not change that.
(Keep my last comment in mind. I'll be coming back to filter functions in the next section.)
This means that, for example, you won’t show up in search results for high-volume keywords such as “red wine,” “Italian wine,” “Amarone della Valpolicella,” “Cabernet Sauvignon,” and “non-alcoholic wine.” As a result, you’ll miss out on a lot of potential traffic and revenue.
According to the SEO tool Ahrefs, “non-alcoholic wine” is searched on Google no fewer than 1,500 times a month, and it’s relatively easy to rank in the top 10 for this keyword.
This yields the following equation:
- High search volume + low difficulty = low-hanging fruit!
That’s why you should, of course, have a landing page featuring your selection of non-alcoholic wine. And you should, of course, optimize that landing page based on my first two tips. That way, you’ll increase your chances of being found for the search term “non-alcoholic wine” countless times. And there’s good reason to do so, with 1,500 potential customers a month.
But does that mean you should choose landing pages over filters? The answer is a resounding no! The filter feature in Shopify is crucial to the user experience of your online store—and user experience (or UX) also affects SEO. So filters and landing pages are by no means mutually exclusive—on the contrary, they complement each other.
Bonus Tips for Those Who Sell Well-Known Brands
If you sell well-known brands in your market, you should strongly consider creating landing pages for high-potential keyword combinations that include both generic product categories and specific brands.
For example, these could be:
- Hästens beds (monthly search volume: 400) for the online store that sells beds
- Nike running shoes (monthly search volume: 1,100) for the online store that sells sports equipment
- PH lamps (monthly search volume: 2,500) for the online store that sells lamps
If you're unsure which keyword combinations you should focus on, conduct (or have someone conduct) a keyword analysis. It will tell you which keyword combinations have high potential.
Get a handle on canonicals on pages with a filter function
As mentioned, Google penalizes duplicate content with lower rankings. But this doesn't just apply to content from your competitors—it also applies to your own content.
But what exactly do I mean by that? After all, why would you copy your own content? Obviously, you wouldn’t use the same text, images, ALT tags, meta tags, and H tags for two vastly different products or collections. Let me go back to Shopify’s filter feature for a moment to explain what I mean.
In the image below, you can see a screenshot of a product page on an online store that sells beauty and health products. Note that the product quantity is set to 200 ml by default.
Shopify has assigned the following path to the product page (the part of the URL that comes after the domain name):
/collections/iles-formula/products/iles-formula-serum
But now take a look at what happens to the path when a customer uses the filter function to select the 1000 ml version of the product:
/collections/iles-formula/products/iles-formula-serum?variant=33744616914989
Because of the filter, the URL is now being expanded. This is potentially problematic because the new URL essentially tells Google that a new product page has been created. And the “new” subpage is completely identical in content to the original—and therefore counts as duplicate content!
This is a particular risk on collection pages with many filter parameters (such as the wine online store mentioned in the previous section), where you can end up with as many URLs as there are filter combinations.
So how can you prevent Shopify’s otherwise excellent filter feature from hurting your Google rankings?
The answer is canonical tags and canonical URLs!
What is a canonical tag?
A canonical tag (or canonical tag) is a piece of code written as follows:
- <link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.webshop.dk/collections/produkt/”>
Et canonical tag bor i <head></head>-sektionen i din webshops kildekode og kan blandt andet bruges til at definere canonical URL’er.
What is a canonical URL?
A canonical URL (or canonical web address) is the URL that has been designated as the “master” of a set of duplicate pages—for example, the numerous “duplicate” pages created by a filter function (from the search engines’ perspective).
Or, in Google's own words:
A canonical URL is the URL of the page that Google considers to be the most representative of the duplicate pages on your website.
Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters: Search Console Help
In other words, a canonical URL is the version of a page that Google should crawl.
However, it is important to tell Google which URL is the canonical one—otherwise, the search engine will choose a random version on its own.
Modern e-commerce platforms like Shopify automatically assign canonical tags to your pages when you create collection and product pages. Therefore, as a general rule, you don’t need to assign canonical tags to your desired canonical URLs.
But I’d still strongly recommend that you double-check that your online store’s canonical tags are set up correctly—especially if you’re using an e-commerce platform other than Shopify. That way, you’ll avoid these three (nightmare) SEO scenarios:
- Duplicate content!
- That Google crawls a less relevant version of the page
- Google crawls hundreds of filter-generated URLs on your website, gets confused, and instead displays a competitor that has its canonical tags in order in the search results
How to Check Canonical Tags on Your Online Store
You can check the canonical tags on your Shopify online store in one of the following ways.
1. Look at the source code
- Open any collection or product page in your browser (on desktop—does not work on mobile or tablet)
- Right-click anywhere on the page, then click " Investigate"
- The page's source code will now open in a new window
- Press Control/Command + F to search the source code, and type “canonical”
If the page's URL has been assigned a canonical tag, it will be indicated in the URL after the yellow highlight.
Prøv nu at bruge filterfunktionen, så URL’en ændrer sig, ligesom i eksemplet fra før, og gentag samme proces. Nu skulle du gerne få samme resultat, når du kigger i kildekoden – URL’en efter <link rel=”canonical” href= skal altså være uændret til trods for filteret. Det betyder nemlig, at den oprindelige URL er angivet som kanonisk.
And then everything is fine—Google will only take the canonical URL into account.
2. Check it with an SEO crawler
If you want a more general overview of the canonical tags on your site, you might want to use an SEO crawler like Screaming Frog. This will give you an overview of all the canonical tags on every subpage of your online store.
I won't go into more detail about the application here, since you can read much more about it in the post“Seven Tips for Improving Your SEO with Screaming Frog.”
3. Check the `theme.liquid` file in the Shopify admin panel
Endelig kan du kigge i theme.liquid-filen i <head></head>-sektionen i admin-panelet i din webshop.
- Click Actions > Edit Code under Web Store > Themes
- Select theme.liquid and search for “canonical”
- If everything is okay, you should see the following (see the yellow markings):
Ligger der ikke allerede et canonical tag i <head></head>-sektionen? Så kopierer du blot følgende kodestykke ind i sektionen:
<link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical_url }}">
For more information about canonical URLs and tags on your Shopify online store, we recommend following Shopify’s guidelines and best practices.
Give Your Page and URL Structure a Health Check
The site structure of your online store should make it easy for your customers to find what they're looking for. This will also make it easier for Google to find your online store.
In a supermarket, you don't expect to find cat food in the produce section, just as you wouldn't look in the meat section if you need a power strip.
Similarly, you should make sure your online store is organized into “categories” that make it easy for your customers to find the product they need—and, just as importantly, make it easy for Google and other search engines to crawl your online store.
Therefore, make sure your site structure is simple and easy to navigate. Ideally, it should look something like this:
- Homepage > category > (subcategory, if any) > product page > product
The site structure is important—but so is the URL structure. Your URL paths should correspond to your site structure. In other words, they should be as simple as possible. For example, the URL for a product page featuring men’s shoes should look something like this:
- www.webshop.dk/collections/herresko
Shopify automatically generates URLs when you create collection and product pages, so the path will be identical to the name of the collection or product. So if you’ve named the collection “men’s shoes,” Shopify will automatically assign the page the path /collections/men’s-shoes.
If you still want to change the URL manually for SEO purposes, you can easily do so in the "Web Address" field in the " Edit SEO for Website " section for each individual product or collection.
Use schema.org—structured data makes you visible in the SERP
Have you ever noticed that some of the results on Google's search results page (SERP) are more detailed than others?
For example, in the search result below from the bicycle shop Saxil Cykler, you can see both the price and the in-stock status of the popular Hövding bicycle helmet. This way, Google users get more information than just the SEO title, URL, and meta descriptions—which is the information that’s normally displayed in a search result (snippet).
A search result like this is called a rich snippet. It helps your online store stand out in search results—partly because it visually distinguishes itself from the other results, and partly because it provides potential customers with relevant information about a product even before they visit your online store.
And that benefits the user experience, SEO, and click-through rate.
How do you get a rich snippet?
You can do this using structured data.
Structured data is HTML that tells Google and other search engines exactly what a website is about. My colleague Peter has already written an excellent introduction to structured data, so I won’t go into detail about what structured data is here. But it might be even more interesting to know what it does —and, not least, what it can do for your online store’s visibility in search results.
It takes some technical know-how to structure data on your own, but fortunately, there are tools available to help—such as this Schema Markup Generator. Here, you can choose a Schema.org markup that suits your business type. If you have an online store, it makes sense to choose “Product.”
You can then specify various parameters you want to share with Google and potential customers—for example, inventory status and price, as shown in the example above. Based on the parameters you specify, the markup generator will generate a JSON-LD script. You can then test and implement your schema code in your online store’s source code (typically in the collection.liquid or product.liquid file).
You can use structured data for many different purposes—for example, to display reviews in search results so your customers know whether your online store is worth visiting.
Of course, this requires that you encourage your customers to leave reviews for your business on Trustpilot, Google, your own online store, and other platforms—and, of course, you’ll want those reviews to be positive.
For example, here I have structured a schema (the most universal vocabulary in the field of structured data) for displaying reviews:
<script type="application/ld+json">{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org\/","@type":"Product","name":"","image":"","aggregateRating":{"@type":"AggregateRating","ratingValue":"5","ratingCount":"299"}}</script>
When we talk about structured data in the context of online stores, it’s dynamic. If a product sells out in your online store, the inventory level will also change in the structured data—provided, of course, that you’ve set it up correctly and in accordance with the guidelines.
The same applies to the price of your product if it goes on sale or is discounted. This means you don’t have to change anything manually, which saves you a lot of time.
Blogging Frenzy!
If you’ve read my post“Why Your Business Should Write Blog Posts,”you already know five good reasons to write blogs with tips and tricks about your products. If you haven’t read it, I can briefly summarize what a blog on your online store can do for your SEO:
- You engage customers early in the buying journey
- You'll be found through long-tail keywords
- You'll increase your chances of getting backlinks
First, you engage customers early in the buying journey. Your potential customers may not even realize that your products can meet their needs. That’s why you need to give them a little nudge in the right direction. And blogging about your products is a great way to do that.
This way, you guide potential customers through the decision-making process.
- For the makeup retailer, this could be helpful advice on how to apply makeup that lasts
- For the wine merchant, this could be helpful advice on how to choose wine to pair with a meal
- For the health store, it could be a post about the benefits of collagen powder
That’s exactly why a blog is also the perfect platform for being found based on the keywords people use when they search Google for a solution to a problem. These are typically what are known as “long-tail keywords” —that is, longer, highly specific search terms. For example:
- Breathable raincoat with a high water column rating
- Dietary supplements for skin and nail care
- Breathable running socks with compression
In the early stages of the buying journey, people aren’t actually looking for products—they’re looking for solutions to their problems.
You may well have a health-related online store that sells collagen as a dietary supplement. But your potential customers won’t find your online store if they don’t know that collagen is an important component of the skin and that collagen powder can therefore help firm up the skin.
So, you might want to write a blog post about skin care, talk about collagen, and link to a relevant product page.
It also gives you plenty of opportunities for internal link building, which further strengthens your SEO. And speaking of link building: If you write really good, informative blog posts, there’s also a chance that other websites will link to your site—in other words, you’re laying the groundwork for strong backlinks.
Here's how to create and edit a blog in the Shopify admin:
- Click on Online Store > Blog posts
- Click " Manage blogs"
- Click " Add blog"
- Name the blog
- Blogging Frenzy!
Would you like to learn more about SEO for Shopify online stores?
Are you a little too busy running your online store to play at being an SEO specialist? Or does optimizing your online store for search engines seem a bit too complicated?
Then contact Amplify at 70 60 50 28, or email me directly at ak@amplify.dk
Learn Even More
Whether you're a generalist or a specialist in marketing, our experts have put together a number of helpful tips for you on our blog.
