More than 2.6 million ecommerce businesses in the U.S. use Shopify (according to Kinsta), so you’re in good company. Shopify offers a few specific features you can use to optimize your brand’s SEO. In this article, we’ll share three tactics for how to improve SEO on Shopify.

‍Is Shopify good for SEO?

Yes, Shopify is a good choice for an SEO-friendly website and ecommerce platform. Shopify includes out-of-the-box features that are helpful for SEO, such as mobile-friendly design, customizable metadata, headings, product details, product collections, the ability to add pages and blog posts, and more. Not sure what some of these things mean? That’s OK — we’ll go into detail below.

Shopify SEO tips: 3 tactics to use on your Shopify site

First and foremost, SEO for Shopify is still SEO. Shopify owners should understand impactful SEO strategies just like any other brand, regardless of their content management system (CMS).

A few specific Shopify features make this optimization easier. 

How do I optimize Shopify for SEO?

1. Use Shopify collections. Create collections for product categories that customers search for on Google.

2. Write blog posts. Take advantage of blog functionality to answer top customer questions.

3. Use pages to build easy internal links without cluttering your navigation or design.
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Shopify SEO strategy 1: Use collections

Summary: Create a collection (under “products”) for each product category that people search for on Google. For example, “orange trail runners” and “waterproof trail runners.”

Why? For ecommerce businesses, customers are likely searching for products with specific modifiers, like color, price, material, attribute, and more. Examples include:

• Gold watches.
• Pink leggings.
• Suede loafers.
• Waterproof hiking shoes.

Shopify’s collections make it easy to create categories to group your products in ways that reflect what people search for on Google. This is one significant way that SEO for Shopify is made easier with out-of-the-box functionality.

How to optimize for SEO on Shopify collections

When you create each collection, be sure to include the category keyword (such as “waterproof trail runners”) in each of the following areas:

Here’s what this looks like in the backend:

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Important note

You must also add these collections to your site navigation (main or footer navigation), or execute tactic two in order for Google to discover, index, and rank your collections.

Shopify SEO strategy 2: Use Shopify pages for easy internal links

Summary: Create easy internal links to collections and blog posts without cluttering your design or navigation.

Why? Internal links help search engines find your content, and search engine crawlers find content by following links. If you have just created several new product collections (as was recommended in tactic 1), then you need Google and other search engines to be able to find those pages, otherwise they will never rank.

In my decade-plus of SEO experience, as well as from information put forth by industry leaders like Search Engine Journal, internal links can also provide small ranking boosts for keywords you’ve optimized for (see Search Engine Journal’s POV here). 

In the example below, G-SHOCK has many different watch collections, primarily based on color and material. Without this page linking out to each collection, search engines would not have a way to find them. While creating a visual category page like G-SHOCK may take weeks and additional graphic design resources to create, you can easily create a version of this in Shopify using the “pages” section in the backend.

How to use Shopify pages to build internal links

Note: We do not need this page to rank in organic search, so keyword optimization and search engine listing information is not as important.

         1.  Create a list of all the collections you want to link to. Include any blog               posts addressing the top questions you get.

         2. Organize the list of links into categories, like:
                    •Shop by color.
                    •Shop by material.
                    •Shop by feature.
                    •Frequently Asked Questions ( to link out your blog posts).

        3.  Update your list of links so that the link text (or anchor text) is               the product category/keyword. For               example (https://gshock.casio.com/us/products/type/gold-digital-               watches/ becomes Gold digital watches.)
        4.  Create a new page in Shopify (under Online Store in the left-hand                navigation)
        5.   Name and title the page “Shop by category” (or any other name that                reflects what the user can expect from this page).
        6.   Paste your organized list of “Shop by” links onto this page                and publish.
        7.   In the footer navigation or the main navigation on your site, add a                text link to your “Shop by category” page. (The footer navigation is                often preferred as that keeps it out of the way and helps declutter                the main navigation.)

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Shopify SEO strategy 3: Take advantage of the blog functionality

Summary: Use a Shopify blog to not only rank on Google for questions your customers are asking but also to build internal links (which benefits the other pages you want to rank).

Why? Not only are your customers searching for specific products, but they are likely also Googling questions they have while shopping. Plus, consuming educational content makes a customer 131% more likely to make a purchase. This makes an even greater case for blog posts.

Here are three ways a blog can support SEO for Shopify.

How to use a Shopify blog to boost SEO

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The blog editing interface and its search engine listing section will look very similar to the collection editing interface in the previous section.

Additional support: Shopify’s native blog is located under the Online Store of the left-side menu in the backend. Here are Shopify’s instructions for adding a blog

These three Shopify SEO tactics are the first initiatives I plan for every new Shopify SEO client. These tactics will help you improve SEO on your Shopify site with minimal effort by using Shopify’s built-in, out-of-the-box features.