How To Optimize a Shopify Store To Rank Higher In Google (SEO)

SEO has come a long way from the Wild West days of keyword stuffing and white-text tricks. 

In 2025, it's a whole different game.

There's a sweet spot between what users see and what Google needs to understand your store better. 

Think of it like the foundation of a house - nobody sees it, but it needs to be solid. 

These behind-the-scenes tweaks don't mess with your customer's experience; they just help Google understand what you're all about.

The Two-Brain Approach to Shopify SEO

1. The Human Brain: What your customers actually see and experience
2. The Google Brain: The technical stuff that helps Google understand your store

Look, optimizing your Shopify store might seem overwhelming at first. But here's the reality - it's just about understanding two things:

• How search engines process information
• How real people search for what you're selling

Once you get these two perspectives aligned, everything else falls into place.Why Should You Care About SEO?Two brutal truths:

1. Most internet traffic comes from organic searches, not paid ads. If you're ignoring SEO, you're leaving money on the table.
2. Living off paid ads alone is like being on life support - stop paying, and your store flatlines. Plus, those acquisition costs hit your credit card fast and hard.

According to recent data, 62% of users never even click past the first page of Google, and a whopping 60% of all clicks go to the top three results.This means ranking on page two is basically worthless. You either need to commit to getting to the top, or not bother at all. There's no middle ground here.The good news? Any Shopify store can rank well with the right strategy and persistence. It's not about who has the biggest budget - it's about who provides the best answer to what people are searching for.Shopify SEO: 6 Steps to Rank HighNow, having said all that, how do we actually implement SEO for your Shopify store? Step 1. Keyword ResearchThink of keywords like a bridge between what you sell and what people are searching for. But here's the catch - going after broad, obvious keywords is usually a waste of time.Let's break this down with a real example:Say you're selling sneakers. Your first instinct might be to target "sneakers" as your keyword. Good luck with that - you'll be fighting Nike, Adidas, and every major retailer out there.Smart SEO isn't about competing with giants. It's about finding your perfect corner of the market.Instead, you might target "high top waterproof sneakers" or "vegan basketball shoes." These longer, more specific keywords (we call them long-tail keywords) are:

• Less competitive
• More likely to convert
• Actually match what your customers are searching for

Understanding Search IntentHere's where most Shopify stores mess up - they ignore search intent. Let's look at two different searches:

1. "best running shoe material for marathons"
   
   1. This person wants information
   2. They're researching, not buying (yet)
2. "buy Nike running shoes"
   
   1. This person has their credit card ready
   2. They know what they want

The key? Match your pages to the right type of intent. Don't try to sell to someone who's just looking for information.So, as you're doing your keyword research, you can think of your keywords falling very broadly into two buckets for SEO: you have short-tail keywords and long-tail keywords. Short-tail keywords are more general and usually about two to three words in length. For example, "buy basketball shoes." Short-tail keywords will usually have a lot of people searching them, but they're usually very competitive as well, which makes it hard to rank for. Long-tail keywords, on the other hand, are four words or more in length, and they tend to be a lot more specific. For example, "buy white retro basketball shoes." Long-tail keywords usually have fewer people searching them, but they tend to be less competitive as well. And because they tend to be so specific, if you actually sell exactly what the person searched for, they're much more likely to convert and make a purchase.So, selecting the right keywords is crucial for your SEO strategy. If you choose a keyword that's too competitive, you might waste tons of time and money and take forever to rank. And if you choose a keyword that doesn't closely match your product or what the user is searching for, then even if you do rank, you're not going to get much value out of that traffic. So, now that we understand how keywords work, let's take a look at how to actually do effective keyword research for your Shopify store. Again, this topic could easily have several lengthy videos of its own, but this will be a quick guide on an effective keyword research methodology just to get you started.Finding Your Money KeywordsThere are two ways to do keyword research:

1. Guess what people are searching for (terrible idea)
2. Use actual data (smart move)

The Tool SituationHere's the deal with keyword research tools:

• Premium Options: SEMrush, Ahrefs
  
  • They're expensive (like $100+ per month)
  • But they're comprehensive as hell
• Budget-Friendly: Ubersuggest
  
  • Free or cheap
  • Gets the job done for beginners

Pro Tip: Sign up for a one-month premium tool subscription, do all your research, then cancel. You'd be surprised how much you can get done in just a few hours.What These Tools Tell YouEvery keyword has two crucial numbers:

1. Search Volume
   
   1. How many people search for this monthly
   2. Higher isn't always better (we'll get to why)
2. Competition Level
   
   1. How hard it'll be to rank
      
      1. This is where the money is made or lost

Let's make this real with an example:

Say you're selling hoodies. Instead of targeting "hoodies"

‍

You might find "anime hoodies" 

Search volume gives you an idea of approximately how many people are searching for a particular keyword each month. 

Generally speaking, the more, the better. 

However, keep intent in mind. 

It might be better to target a lower search volume keyword if the intent is transactional versus informational because a person with transactional intent is more likely to make a purchase. 

So, even with less search volume, you can get more sales. 

Level of competition gives a rough idea of how hard it'll be to rank for that particular keyword. 

How does it determine the level of competition? 

This is a pretty big oversimplification, but broadly speaking, different domains have different levels of SEO strength. 

Each tool gives this a different name, so broadly speaking, if a domain is extremely strong, they'll find it easier to rank for keywords even if it's not super relevant to them. 

That's why Forbes and Business Insiders seem to rank for everything because they have a very strong domain. 

However, you can outrank a stronger domain if your website is more relevant to that particular keyword.

What do I mean by relevance? 

It's basically being extremely focused on a particular keyword. 

So, let's say, for example, you sell coffee pods and your entire website only talks about coffee pods and it only sells coffee pods. 

It doesn't sell ground coffee or instant coffee or tea, just coffee pods. 

Your website is therefore highly relevant to the topic of coffee pods, and so that can make it more likely for Google to rank you well for the keyword "coffee pods" because it's all you're about and you're more likely to provide what a searcher is looking for if they're searching for coffee pods. 

So, when choosing your keywords, you want to first make sure that they're relevant and then strike a balance between having a high search volume and a low level of competition so that you can actually rank for that keyword.

To make it more clear how we actually go about doing this, let's look at an example. 

I highly recommend watching this portion of the video:

Step 2. Mapping Keywords to Your Store

Once you've made a list of your target keywords, their level of competition, and search volume, you want to map them out to the various pages on your site. 

If you want to maximize the number of keywords that you're ranking for and therefore the amount of search traffic that you can acquire, try to target a different keyword with each page of your site. 

For example, if you try to target the keyword "hoodies" with every single page on your site, you're not going to get four pages ranking on the first page of Google.

Usually only one page has a chance of ranking for each keyword, so don't have your pages competing for the same keyword. 

Each page a different long-tail variation to target. 

You might have a collection page that targets "zip-up hoodies," and one of the product pages might target "neon zip-up hoodie."

Now, for the most part, we've been talking about matching your product and collection pages to transactional keywords. 

While we won't get into it much here, there's also an opportunity to build an entire content strategy around informational keywords. 

You can build blogs and informational pages on your website specifically to rank for those. So, say you sell organic chocolates; you can also create content around informational searches like "is organic chocolate healthier?" 

Usually, a much smaller percentage of this traffic will make a purchase compared to users with transactional intent, who are searching something like "buy organic chocolate," but it can still be valuable for building brand awareness and also increasing your relevance for the topic of organic chocolate.

Step 3. Technical SEO

Let's talk about the stuff happening under the hood of your Shopify store. This is where most stores either win big or shoot themselves in the foot.

Technical SEO is all about making sure that the user has an exceptional experience on your website. 

Google's robots will crawl your website to evaluate that user experience, and if they feel like that user experience is poor, they'll lower you in the search ranking. 

Conversely, if you address a lot of these technical issues, you can get a quick bump in your search rankings. 

Now, technical SEO is an incredible in-depth topic, so here we're just going to cover some of the main things that you can do that are reasonably easy to apply.

1. Page Speed

Number one is your page speed. 

A slow loading page is generally a negative user experience, so that'll hurt your search ranking.

One of the biggest things that you can do to address this is optimizing your images. 

The images on a page are often the things that slow down the page load time the most, and you can compress the images to substantially reduce the file size while barely sacrificing any quality. 

So, optimizing these images can usually be a quick win. 

You'll also want to limit the amount of apps and plugins that you have on your Shopify site. 

A lot of these can come with some heavy code that needs to be loaded each time, so you want to make sure that they're worth it. 

Another thing to keep in mind is that a lot of times when you install a Shopify app, it'll inject some code into your theme file. 

The issue is that in a lot of cases when you delete the app, that code is not removed, so this can over time lead to code bloat where there's all this extra code that's being loaded every time, which is not actually adding any value. 

Usually you'll need a developer to help clean that up.

2. Mobile-first design. 

You want to optimize the page load time but also the user experience for mobile. 

Yes, you probably use and design your website on a computer, but the majority of users are going to be from mobile devices, so you want to optimize the experience for mobile first.

3. Limit duplicate content. 

It's common for certain content to appear over and over, especially on your product pages, but try to limit how much this happens because it can sometimes confuse Google, and they'll limit the visibility of one page thinking it's basically a duplicate of another page. 

Related to this is that you want to remove any low-value pages that don't really matter to any users on your website.

4. Create a logical internal linking strategy. 

You want to make sure that the website links together in a way that makes it very easy for a user to navigate and gives them a good browsing experience. 

That means that there also shouldn't be any orphan pages, or pages that aren't linked to by any part of your website. 

Either link to those pages or remove them entirely. 

Be sure to also use relevant anchor text when linking between pages. 

Anchor text is the highlighted text that a person clicks on to go from one page to the next. 

Ideally, this anchor text should match the keyword that the page is linking to is targeting. This is good for the user experience and also reinforces to the search engine what that page is about.

5. Connect your website to Google Search Console. 

Even though this may sound technical, it's probably the easiest step on the list. 

By connecting your website to Google Search Console, you'll make it much easier for Google to crawl and index your website. 

Google will also highlight any technical errors that it's perceiving on your website, which could be hurting your search rankings, and then you can go and correct those. 

You'll be able to see some very interesting data from Google about what keywords your pages are ranking for and how much organic traffic you're getting from those keywords.

Now, there's a lot more we could talk about in technical SEO that's either too technically advanced for this video or it's stuff that Shopify automatically takes care of to SEO optimize your website, so for now, let's just move on to on-page SEO.

Step 4. On-Page SEO

While technical SEO is more about giving a user a great browsing experience, on-page SEO is a bit more focused on reinforcing to Google what keyword a page should rank for. 

Search engines look at certain on-page factors to determine what keywords are relevant for each page. 

There's a long list of these factors, but here we'll run through some of the major ones and quickly explain each one.

1. Content is King

Number one is quality content. 

This just means that each page should provide value to the user. 

Google's gotten much better over time at guessing whether a user would find a page valuable or not, so in general, just focus on creating content that's interesting, to the point, accurate, well-written, and covers the topic thoroughly.

2. Page title 

This is that title that appears in the Google search results and is also at the top of the tab of your browser. 

You want to make sure that the page title includes your target keyword but is also well-written so that it's interesting enough for a person to click on when they see it on the Google search page. 

You also want to keep the length to approximately 55 to 60 characters so that the entire title appears on the Google search page and it's not truncated.

3. Headers

Each page on your site is probably going to have a bunch of headers on them, so you'll want your keyword or some variations of it to appear within those headers. 

Usually, you want the exact keyword to appear in the main header or H1 tag as it's called in the code.

4. Keyword variations 

It can be awkward for the exact keyword to appear over and over on a page. 

That's especially the case if you're targeting a long-tail keyword. 

Having "retro neon green zip-up hoodie" appear over and over can seem a little bit weird, so using keyword variations can make it seem a little bit more natural.

5. Body content

Similar to above, you want to make sure that your keywords are sprinkled throughout, but don't force it and make it seem natural by using keyword variations.

6. Meta description

This is that tiny paragraph of text that appears beneath each result on the Google search page. 

Generally, you want to make sure that it's well-written so that it's interesting enough for a person to click on that result, but you'll also want to try to include your keyword because Google sometimes highlights the keywords if it appears in the meta description. 

This can really help your click-through rate if a person searches something and then they see those words highlighted in your search result.

7. Image alt text

Whenever you upload images to a page, in the back end, you're able to add some text to explain what that image is. 

Adding your keyword here not only reinforces the topic for the page but it can also help that image rank in Google image search for that keyword.

8. URL slug 

This is the portion of the URL that appears after the last backslash that is specific to this page. 

Generally, you want to keep this short and try to include your keyword. 

You also want to try to keep the slugs vague enough to make them reusable. 

For example, if you created a piece of content called "The Best Running Shoes for 2022," you wouldn't want to put the "2022" in your URL slug. 

The reason being is that next year you can just update that page to be "The Best Running Shoes for 2023," however, you can't update the slug.

While there is obviously a lot more that goes into on-page SEO, hopefully, these quick tips will give you a lot of bang for your buck while you're trying to SEO optimize your Shopify site.

And now, finally, we move on to off-page SEO. 

Step 6. Off Page SEO

Off-page SEO is generally all about building backlinks. 

Backlinks refer to when another domain or website links to your website. 

While the importance of backlinks can vary over time, the general premise is that the more backlinks you have, the more it's an indication that your website is actually a valuable one. 

As usual, there's a lot of depth about the strategies for building backlinks, but we're going to try to cover it very quickly.

So, in general, the more high-quality, relevant backlinks that you have pointing to your Shopify store, the better you'll rank on the search engines. 

High-quality backlinks generally refer to those that come from other strong domains. 

That means that a link from The Wall Street Journal is generally more valuable than one from some random blog. 

The relevance of a backlink usually refers to whether that backlink is coming from a website that's relevant to your topic. 

For example, if you sell coffee pods, getting a backlink from a website that talks about coffee is more relevant than a website that talks about fashion.

Now, there's a ton you can do to get these backlinks, but to get started, first make sure that your link to your website from all of your socials as well as from business directories. 

Also, try to develop relationships with journalists and bloggers so that they can write about you and your business and link to your website as well. 

You can also offer to write guest posts for other websites. 

This usually provides a link back to your website as part of the author's bio. 

You can also go and try to be a guest on podcasts, which will help your personal brand, help increase awareness for your business, and usually get you a link as well.

There's plenty more that you can do, but this topic is quite a deep one, so we'll leave it at that. 

Working on SEO for your Shopify store can seem overwhelming at the beginning, but with the right strategy, it can be a really great investment. 

Appearing at the top of Google search not only provides you a lot of valuable traffic long term, but it can provide quite a bit of clout in the eyes of a user that your website is a trustworthy one. 

On top of that, once you've reached the top of Google search, it becomes a lot harder to get dethroned by a competitor. 

It's a bit of a snowball effect because once you're at the top, it becomes easier and easier to get more backlinks, which just solidifies your position.

Want to Actually Know Where Your Money's Making Money?

Here's the thing - SEO is just one piece of your marketing puzzle. 

But if you're running ads, doing email marketing, AND working on SEO, you need to know exactly which channel deserves more of your budget.

If you're tired of guessing which eCommerce marketing channel actually drove that sale (was it the Facebook ad they saw last week, or your SEO efforts from last month?), check out our deep dive on ecommerce attribution: