You can use search engine optimization, or SEO, to improve the search engine ranking
for your store and help customers find your products.
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One way to optimize your store’s SEO is by adding keywords to your store pages.
A keyword is a specific word or phrase that describes the content of a page.
Keywords are the words that people might enter in search engines when searching for products
or businesses like yours.
For example, a person might search for a black t-shirt in Canada.
The keywords in this search would be black, t-shirt and Canada.
To make your store appear higher in the search results, try to find out which keywords your
customers might use to find your products, and use those keywords in your content.
You can use online tools to get keyword ideas and to find out how often a keyword is used
in a search.
This example shows the extension “Keywords everywhere” which shows the keyword search
volume, cost per click and competition data.
See the description for links for keyword search tools.
After you’ve identified your keywords, it’s time to add them to your store.
The first task is to set a title and description for your online store.
From your Shopify admin, click Online Store, then click Preferences.
The title and meta description is what customers see for your online store in search results.
Start by entering a title using keywords that relate to your business.
For example, AlyAthletics sells fitness clothes and athletic accessories for women.
The keywords here are fitness, clothes, athletic, accessories and women.
So a descriptive title could be “Fitness clothes and athletic accessories for women”.
The title will appear as a clickable link in search engine results.
Next, create a meta description taking the same steps.
A meta description is the brief bit of text that shows in search engine results after
the title you just created.
Again, you want the description to use keywords that describe your store’s business while
featuring highlights of what a customer can expect if they click.
This example mentions featured products and sizes available while also using natural,
readable phrases.
When you’re done, click Save.
Editing the page title and meta description is something you can do for all pages in your
Shopify store.
To do this on a product page, click Products.
Then click on a product title.
Scroll to the area titled Search engine listing preview, and click Edit.
By default, the SEO preview appearing here is pulled from title and description at the
top of the page.
You can edit the page title and meta description using keywords that are specific to this product.
In the URL and handle section, you can edit the web address.
In most cases, you won't need to make changes to the web address.
If you do make changes, then make sure that you set up URL redirects from the old web
address.
Next, you want to add keywords to your store images.
Search engines can read the text in your content, but can’t read the images.
You can use descriptive alternative text, also known as alt text, to help search engines
find your content.
Alt text is also an important accessibility feature for people who have visual impairments.
If you’re on a product page, hover over the image and click the three dots, then Edit
alt text.
Use readable phrases that describe what appears in the image, not what you want someone to
think about the image.
For this product, blue polyester t-shirt is entered.
You can set alt text for a product image, collection featured image, or a blog post
featured image.
To edit a collection’s image, click Collections.
Then open a collection to edit.
Beside Collection image, click Edit, then click Edit image alt text.
From here, enter keywords using the same steps as outlined before.
Click Save to finish.
If you have any blog posts, take the same steps to edit those images.
You also want to add keywords to the main heading at the top of the page - also known
as an H1 header.
Shopify automatically uses the title that you enter here to generate the H1 header for
the page.
Search engines use H1 headers to determine what the page content is about.
When you enter a page title, include your main keywords so the H1 header automatically
includes them.
The steps listed in this video can be done on multiple pages in your Shopify store.
Be sure to edit titles, meta descriptions, headers and images all throughout your site
for best results.
It’s important to remember that changes made in Shopify do not immediately reflect
in search results.
Google periodically updates search engine results by crawling websites for new content.
You see these changes after Google has crawled your pages to index them again.
To speed the process up, you can submit your sitemap to Google.
Watch the video “How to submit a sitemap” to see step-by-step instructions.
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