As more and more people are shopping online, optimising your Shopify store for search engines is more relevant than ever. With 2024 bringing new SEO trends and updates, making sure your Shopify store is showing up in the search results can help you drive more traffic to your eCommerce business.
Here are five SEO tips for Shopify store owners in 2024 from Paul Gordon.
1. Optimize Your Shopify Site Speed
Site speed is a core SEO and user experience ranking factor. A slow Shopify store can push away potential customers with high bounce rates, poor conversion rates and a demotion in rankings if Google picks up on the poor page experience. In 2024, site performance is going to be even more important, as Google looks poised to ramp up its focus on page experience signals like Core Web Vitals.
These tips for site speed include: Use only the absolute minimum quantity of large, uncompressed images that you can. Limit the number of bloated Shopify apps you use. Use one of the fastest, most responsive Shopify themes available. Use Google PageSpeed Insights and other tools to diagnose and fix load times.
2. Implement Schema Markup for Rich Results
Adding schema markup (structured data) to your Shopify store helps search engines better understand your content and publish rich snippets (product price, ratings, availability, etc) in search results. Rich results can increase click-through rates (CTR) and improve your visibility.
Shopify, for example, makes it easy to implement schema markup for product pages directly, either through Shopify’s own schema or through manually entering JSON-LD structured data via theme files. The correctness of your markup can be checked via a tool like Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.
3. Optimize Product Pages for SEO
Your Shopify store’s product pages are among its most important components. You can help to improve your position in search rankings by enhancing product titles, descriptions and metadata with related keywords, while always avoiding keyword stuffing and using natural language.
User intent will also play a big part in future SEO rankings. Create long, detailed product descriptions that answer the questions customers ask most often. Add quality images and alt text that provides more information to search crawlers, and make sure URLs are clean and descriptive.
4. Focus on Mobile Optimization
If most of your customers are browsing your Shopify store on their mobiles, as more and more online shoppers are, then it’s not really an option: your Shopify store needs to be mobile-optimised. And it’s getting even more important thanks to Google’s new mobile-first indexing, where the mobile view of your site is treated as the canonical version of your site for ranking in search results.
Pick a mobile-responsive Shopify theme and run regular spot tests on your mobile site for UX, loading speeds and ease of navigation; keep checkout processes simple; and avoid pop-ups that could negatively impact your UX and SEO.
5. Build High-Quality Backlinks
Backlinks still among the most effective ranking factor for SEO. Getting backlinks (links from other sites to your Shopify store) is one of the main factors tell search engines that your store is valuable and relevant for a given keyword. While the fair quantity of backlinks still play a major role in ranking higher in search engines, it is the quality that will be more important in 2024 than quantity.
If you want to build backlinks, try to pursue guest blogging, collaborating with influencers, or reaching out to industry publications. Create content that’s valuable in its own right but can easily be shared. If the content is good, links will come naturally. Finally, monitor your backlink profile with an SEO tool to ensure that your links continue to be high-quality.
What we can predict is that SEO in 2024 will continue to develop, so it pays to optimise site speed, put your content schema markup on the pages, make your site mobile-friendly, and create backlinks from other high-quality sites. Keep an eye on the latest SEO trends and refine your strategy – this is the best way to ensure your Shopify store stays ahead of the competition for years to come.
