Search Improvements On The Shopify App Store

Shopify is always looking for ways to make it easier for merchants to find the right apps for their business, and that includes making sure that searching the Shopify App Store serves up the most relevant and useful results possible.

While we never stop making improvements behind the scenes, we wanted to let you know about some notable search updates shipping this week that may impact where your app shows up in search rankings and how much traffic your app listing gets.

Tapping into behavioral data

Starting February 27, our search algorithms will be folding in more data about how merchants interact with results after they search. In other words, apps that merchants find most relevant, given what they’re searching for, will rank higher overall.

Extensive testing has shown that incorporating this new behavioral data markedly improves the relevancy of results for merchants. And while other signals, like term-matching, still inform results, keyword stuffing will now have less of an impact. Over time, this should promote the evolution of better, more readable descriptions across apps.

Search now has a built-in mechanism for helping smaller trending apps show up higher in results. It will dynamically increase the ranking of apps that are gaining traction, especially if they are high quality. 

We're also improving the relevance of the ads merchants see, which could lead to changes in the performance of some campaigns.

Search ranking will be more dynamic than it was previously. If you monitor this closely, you can expect more day-to-day variability than before.

Developer best practices

As a developer, there’s nothing you need to do to prepare for optimization updates like these. But there are things you can do to improve your app’s overall search performance. These include:

• Building a great app that merchants love to use. The very best apps can even be awarded Built for Shopify status, which leads to better placement in search results along with other upsides. Learn more about building Shopify apps in our guide.
• Write a top-notch app listing that clearly communicates what your app does, how it helps the merchant, and what makes it unique.
• Optimize your app listing for search with a thoughtful balance of useful, relevant keywords.

Ongoing improvements

We’re always working on new ways to make it easier for apps like yours to be discovered and for merchants to find the right apps at the right time. 

In the future, we plan to continue updating the Shopify App Store design and its underlying algorithms as we learn more about what helps developers and merchants succeed.

We’re excited for what the future holds for our app partners and how search can continue helping merchants to find the right apps and unlock their business goals faster.

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This article originally appeared on the Shopify Web Design and Development blog and is made available here to educate and cast a wider net of discovery.