Shopify SEO guide: what actually matters, according to Google

Good Shopify SEO comes down to three things: let Google reach your pages, write unique titles and useful page content, and link your pages together clearly. Shopify already handles most of the technical part, so your time is best spent on content.

What Shopify already does

According to Shopify’s SEO overview, your store automatically gets canonical tags, a sitemap.xml and a robots.txt. The sitemap updates itself when you add a product, a collection, a page or a blog post. You do not need an app for any of this.

What is left to you

Titles and descriptions

Google recommends a unique, clear and concise title for each page, one that describes its content. Avoid vague titles like “Home” and do not stack keywords. Write a short, unique meta description too: Google may use it as the snippet under your title.

Words your customers use

Think about what a buyer would actually type. A beginner and an expert can search for the same product in different words. Use those words naturally in your titles, headings and descriptions, without repeating them for the sake of it.

Useful, original pages

Copying a supplier’s description puts the same text on many sites. Google’s guidance on helpful content favors pages made for people that show real knowledge of the subject. Our guide to writing a product page shows what to include.

Images with descriptive alt text

Google uses alt text and the surrounding text to understand your images. See our guide to writing alt text for Shopify images.

Clear internal links

Google finds pages through links. Every important page should be reachable through a normal link, with anchor text that says where it leads. Link collections to products, and blog posts to the products they discuss.

What you can ignore

• The keywords meta tag: Google does not use it.
• A magic word count: Google says there is no ideal length.
• Keywords in your domain name: they have almost no effect on ranking.
• Tricks to look fresh: changing a publication date without changing the content is a warning sign, not a shortcut.

How to check your work

Add your store to Google Search Console, submit your sitemap and use the URL inspection tool on your key pages. Remember that your store must be published without a password: Google cannot index a page it cannot open. Our launch checklist covers this step.

Forgefont offers an SEO-optimized site as an option: all the copy on your site is optimized following Google’s official documentation. Add it when you configure your store.