Google just announced a significant update to structured data that e-commerce sites will likely find very beneficial. The new feature allows for the marking up of individual variants within a product group. For example, if you sell T-shirts in various colors (green, blue, red) and sizes (small, medium, large), you can now detail all these variants within structured data. This advancement is particularly powerful for scaling up the process.

John Mueller’s announcement provides a high-level overview of what this update entails. E-commerce professionals are encouraged to review this post for more in-depth information.

The implementation of this update hinges on a key documentation feature. In the provided documentation, Google offers specific examples of how to mark up product variants. For instance, when marking up a Woolwinter coat, the recommendation is to use ‘type: ProductGroup’ instead of ‘type: Product’. The rest of the fields, such as description and URL pattern, remain largely unchanged. However, you’ll need to specify the ‘varies by’ schema type, indicating all attributes by which the product varies, such as size and color.

For every variant within a product group, a new product structured data must be provided, detailing attributes like SKU, GTIN, and image. By specifying variants by color and size, this method allows for a detailed representation of each product variant, such as a green and small winter coat or a light blue and large one.

This update opens up exciting opportunities for e-commerce sites by enabling the markup of a wide range of product variants across different attributes at scale. It enhances the likelihood of products being eligible for popular products on Google and improves signaling to Google about the content available on a website for highly specific, transactional keywords.

E-commerce sites are highly recommended to explore this new structured data type. Adopting it could allow for rapid and scalable markup of product details, providing Google with a wealth of data and potentially improving search visibility for a wide array of products.

Product Variant Schema: How To Implement ProductGroup Structured Data is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

At Go Fish Digital, we work with a lot of Shopify clients and have developed our own internal framework for how we perform SEO on Shopify. As a result, over the years we’ve started to really get a feel for the tools and apps that we prefer working with. While Shopify’s app marketplace might not contain as many options as WordPress plugins, there are still plenty of Shopify SEO tools that are at your disposal to make your life easier/

Related Content:

• Technical SEO Agency
• Ecommerce SEO Agency
• Shopify SEO Services
• Franchise SEO Agency
• Enterprise SEO Services

In this post, we’ll talk about some of our favorite tools to use with the platform. This includes some Shopify tools and apps that are native to their ecosystem as well as general SEO tools that we find ourselves using with our clients over and over again.

What Are The Best Shopify SEO Tools?

The best Shopify SEO tools are:

1. Ahrefs
2. Schema App Total Schema Markup
3. Crush.pics
4. Lazysizes Library
5. Shopify Redirection
6. Search Console
7. Screaming Frog
8. STAT
9. Google Analytics
10. Rewind Backups

Below, we’ll take a deeper dive into each one.

1. Ahrefs

Shopify SEO Tool Best For: Keyword research, backlink analysis, competitive research

Of all the Shopify SEO tools we couldn’t live without, Ahrefs is certainly up there. Ahrefs provides a great suite of SEO tools that includes keyword research, backlink analysis, rank tracking, competitive research, content gap analysis and much more. This is a tool that we use daily for our Shopify clients at Go Fish Digital.

One of the strongest components of Ahrefs is in its keyword research functionality. Let’s say we’re doing keyword research for a client in the apparel industry and they’ve identified Bombas as a competitor. Since we’re most interested in our Shopify site’s category pages, we want to find keyword opportunities where Bombas’s category pages rank well. Finding these keywords could be highly beneficial as they are more likely to convert since Google has identified the keywords as transactional.

Using Ahrefs, we can perform a search for “bombas.com/collections/” to show us all of the queries their category pages rank well for. Note how the “Prefix” option is selected here.

Then by looking at the “Organic Keywords” report, we can see the keywords that drive the most traffic to their category pages. This will then show us all of the different category page keywords where Bombas is ranking well.

These are great opportunities as these are keywords where a /collections/ page is ranking, thus more likely to drive site conversions. If these keywords are relevant to our site’s products, we can then start to add them to our tracking tools.

Ahrefs also has great backlink analysis tools. One of my favorites is the “Best By Links” report, which shows you a domain’s most linked-to pages. If you filter this report to show the 404 pages with the most backlinks, you might be able to find link reclamation opportunities. This is especially powerful if you’ve migrated to Shopify from another platform and might not have redirected all of your backlinks.

For instance, in this example we can see how Dress Barn migrated from another platform (possibly Magento) to Shopify. However, they could redirect some of these old URLs to reclaim lost link equity.

Overall, Ahrefs provides a fantastic suite of tools for Shopify owners. While it is a paid solution, it provides one of the best values in terms for how many tools you get for the price. With an Ahrefs subscription, you’ll have a lot of what you need to start SEO on Shopify sites.

2. Schema App Total Schema Markup

Shopify SEO Tool Best For: Structured Data

Structured data on Shopify can actually be quite the headache. One of the issues with structured data is that there are many fragmented sources that will try to implement structured data on your store. Oftentimes, both the theme and various third party apps will add schema to the site. For instance, both your theme and Yotpo could be adding “Product” structured data like the example below:

This isn’t the ideal way to implement structured data. Ideally, your structured data will be consolidated so that only a single instance of each schema type is available. This helps better outline exactly what the content of your page is about.

Fortunately, the Schema App Total Schema Markup is a great Shopify SEO tool and makes adding structured data very easy. Once you install the app, it should automatically add the following structured data to your site:

• Organization: Home page
• OfferCatalog: Category pages
• Product: Product pages
• BlogPosting: Blog posts

The OfferCatalog schema is a really nice touch as it allows for markup to exist on your category pages which most sites don’t really have. This marks up every single product on your category pages and gives Google additional information such as their name, price and availability.

As well, Schema App can also be configured to filter out duplicate schema from Shopify’s themes via the “Microdata Filtering” section. This can make it even easier to clean up the redundant schema.

Overall, we really love this app for adding structured data to Shopify sites. One thing that you might consider if you have a developer is to have them implement structured data instead of doing it through an app. This will help save you from paying a monthly service fee just to have structured data on the site. However, if you don’t have these resources, this app is the way to go.

3. Crush.pics

Shopify SEO Tool Best For: Image compression

It’s no secret that Shopify stores are going to use a lot of images. In general, the more SKUs you offer on the store, the more images there are going to be. Of course, a common recommendation to improve site speed is to optimize images. However, when you’re dealing with larger Shopify stores, this can be quite difficult to do at scale.

Crush.pics is a great Shopify SEO tool that automatically compress all of your site’s images. Simply install the app and Crush.pics should start compressing all of your Shopify domain’s images. It will also automatically compress all new images that are uploaded to the store. Using this app is a great way to apply at least some level compression to all images that are used on the site.

4. Lazysizes Library

Shopify SEO Tool Best For: Lazy loading

Another way that you can further optimize the images on your Shopify site is by implementing lazy loading. Lazy loading occurs when images of a page only load once a user has scrolled to them in the viewport. This helps save a user’s browser bandwidth as all of a page’s images don’t load immediately, so they’re only served what they need to see.

Instead of using an app to implement lazy loading, we really like to use the lazysizes library. This library works extremely well with Shopify and is generally very straightforward for a developer to implement. By using lazysizes, you can easily implement lazy loading functionality on your Shopify store.

5. Shopify URL Redirects

Shopify SEO Tool Best For: Redirects

Shopify makes redirecting URLs really easy out of the box. In order to implement redirects, you don’t need to download any special app to do so. Instead, you can do this natively in Shopify by navigating to Online Store > Navigation > View URL Redirects

In this tool, you’ll be able to see all of the redirects that have been implemented on Shopify. As well, you can easily add new ones by selecting “Create URL redirect”:

This is fantastic for cleaning up old and outdated URLs. For instance, if you have recently migrated from another platform, you might consider using the URL redirects tool to ensure that your old URLs are properly mapping to your new ones. You can even bulk upload URLs to redirect using a CSV file.

Please note that in order to implement redirects on Shopify, you must completely delete the URL first. This means that if the page is still active on Shopify (even if it isn’t published), you cannot implement the redirect. You must first delete the page.

6. Google Search Console

Shopify SEO Tool Best For: Crawl analysis, Keyword research

Throughout the years, Google Search Console has been a tried and true tool for SEOs everywhere. Search Console offers a wide variety of reports that can be useful for both technical and contextual SEO. Since store owners will gain value from all of its different reports, Search Console is an essential Shopify SEO tool.

One of the most popular reports in Search Console is the “Performance” report. This report shows you what keywords users are using to find your site and how many clicks/impressions each keyword is getting. This can be really valuable information to have, especially for revenue-generating pages. For instance, in the Performance report, you can filter down to URLs that contain “/products/” in the URL slug. This will show you the top keywords where you product pages are generating the most clicks and impressions:

Very quickly, you’re able to see potentially valuable keywords that are mapped to your pages that generate revenue for your site. As well, you can pull a similar report for category pages by filtering down to see pages with “/collections/” in the URL. These are fantastic keywords that you can then track and optimize for.

Another report of Search Console that’s worth pointing out is the “Coverage” report. This is a fantastic section of Search Console that shows you which URLs Google is crawling and whether or not it is including them in the index.

If the URL is not getting indexed, Google will give you some level of detail as to why it’s excluding it such as “Alternate page with proper canonical tag” or the infamous “Crawled – currently not indexed“. By using this report you can start to check for some technical SEO issues around crawling and indexing:

• Are URLs that should be indexed getting excluded?
• Is Google able to crawl URLs that it shouldn’t be crawling?
• Are low quality pages getting included in the index?

We recommend that Shopify store owners dig into this report to analyze how you site is being handled, especially if you have a large store. The insights you pull from Search Console’s Coverage report can be really valuable to understanding how Google is processing your site’s content.

7. Screaming Frog

Shopify SEO Tool Best For: Technical SEO analysis

What “best SEO tool” list is complete without Screaming Frog? It’s a go-to in the arsenal of the vast majority of SEOs. However, there’s a very good reason for it. It can really help identify technical SEO issues and opportunities in so many different ways.

Why is Screaming Frog such a great Shopify SEO tool? Here are some of the ways we use it:

1. Perform a site crawl to identify duplicate content created by Shopify such as product pages that use the /collections/.*/products/ URL path. Identify if there are any internal links to these duplicate pages and work with a developer on eliminating them.
2. Analyze the crawl to see how many internal links are pointing to key pages such as your site’s products pages. Consider implementing elements such as “Related Products” internal links if you’re not finding a lot of internal links.
3. Connect Screaming Frog to PageSpeed Insights to get benchmark site speed data. After you’ve made changes, compare your benchmark metrics to the new ones.
4. Analyze the anchor text used to link to key pages such as your product and category pages. Sometimes category pages might not be using descriptive text to reference product pages.
5. If you’ve migrated to Shopify, use Screaming Frog to confirm that all of your old URLs correctly 301 redirect to the new ones.
6. Crawl Shopify’s sitemap.xml file. Identify pages that are non-indexable and consider deleting and redirecting any outdated ones.

For instance, here’s an example of some of the duplicate /collections/.*/products/ pages on The Economist’s Shopify site. We can easily find them with a Screaming Frog crawl:

And that’s only scratching the surface. There’s a whole host of ways you can use Screaming Frog with Shopify sites. If you plan on doing any technical SEO analysis for Shopify (or eComm in general), this is a must-have. Of course, Screaming Frog can also be used for other eCommerce platforms, such as improving Magento SEO.

8. STAT

Shopify SEO Tool Best For: Rank tracking

In terms of a rank tracking solution, STAT is one of the best on the market. STAT is unparalleled in terms of the ranking data that it collects. STAT will track your keywords daily, which gives you a lot more insight in to how your rankings are trending over time. Additionally, you can use keyword segmentation, to isolate your rankings by different groups of keywords.

For example, with a Shopify site, you might create keyword segments within STAT that track your different categories of products over time. If your store sells running shoes, you might set up keyword segments for categories such as “womens running shoes”, “mens runnings shoes” and “trail running shoes”.

Using STAT, you could then see ranking trends over time for those specific categories. Here’s what our “women’s running shoes” segment might look like. We can see that in general, rankings for these keywords have been trending upwards.

However, looking at our “men’s running shoes” segment, we can see that rankings appear to be trending downward. We might want to look at optimizations that we can apply to those specific pages:

STAT is definitely more of an enterprise-level tool so it comes at a bit of a cost. If you’re a smaller business, you might consider using another rank tracking solution such as Moz Pro, Ahrefs, or SEMRush. You may also be able to access STAT data through an agency partner (we use STAT at Go Fish Digital for example).

9. Google Analytics

Shopify SEO Tool Best For: Website analytics

Of course, you’re going to want to track more than rankings. Both organic traffic and organic revenue should serve as core KPIs for your Shopify SEO campaign. In general, there’s no easier way to track this data than by using Google Analytics. As the most popular Web analytics platform, Google Analytics provides you with robust data that you can use to measure the success of your campaign. As well, Google Analytics is completely free to install and use.

One of our favorite KPIs to track is YoY organic traffic. For instance, if you want to see how your store performed the week of Black Friday as compared to the previous year, you can easily do so using Google Analytics. Simply create a segment for “Organic Traffic” and then use a comparison timeline to compare organic traffic to the previous year. Using an example, we can see how this website generated a lot more organic revenue as compared to the week of Black Friday during the previous year.

This is just one of the many insights to your site’s data you’ll be able to get with Google Analytics. Google Analytics is an absolutely must-have Shopify SEO tool for any store.

10. Rewind Backups

Shopify SEO Tool Best For: Website backups

As we all know, SEO isn’t just changing words on a page anywhere. It requires coordination with multiple teams from design to developers. When new functionality is added to your site such as schema, UX changes, or new page designs, things don’t always go as planned. This is why it’s essential that you have some sort of backup solution. Even just knowing that you have this will make implementations feel like much less pressure as you can always revert the site back to its previous state. While it’s not strictly an “SEO” tool, this Shopify app will make your life a whole lot easier and much more stress free.

Once installed, Rewind Backups is pretty easy to use. You can choose the different types of pages you wish to restore including blogs, pages and images. Overall the existence of this app on your store will give you a peace of mind that’s well worth it.

Conclusion

Using the Shopify SEO tools and apps above, you should be well equipped with the technology you need to start improving rankings on your site. While no single tool can immediately improve your SEO without research and implementation from an analyst, they can help give you insights that you might not have had otherwise. If you have any questions on the best tools or our Shopify SEO services, feel free to reach out to us!

Other Shopify SEO Resources

• Shopify Speed Optimization
• Improving Shopify Duplicate Content
• Shopify Sitemap.xml Guide
• Shopify Robots.txt Guide
• Shopify Structured Data
• Shopify Plus SEO
• All Shopify SEO Articles

The 10 Best Shopify SEO Apps & Tools 2024 is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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• Dentist SEO Agency
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Related Article:

• The 8 Best Digital Marketing Strategies For Dentists

Below you can find our playbook for how to improve the SEO of dental websites.

1. Research Your Dental SEO Keywords

When starting your dental SEO campaign, the first step that you’ll want to take is to perform keyword research for your business. Keyword research is simply the process of identifying the keywords that your potential clients could be searching for when looking for services that you offer. For example, a dentist in Miami, FL the following keywords may be important to their business:

1. miami dentist
2. dentist in miami
3. family dentist miami
4. teeth whitening services miami
5. cosmetic dentistry miami

You must be identifying the most important keywords that users could be searching to find your dental practice. You’ll want to inventory all the different services that you offer to perform research to see if users are searching for terms around them. To find these terms, there are several different tools that you can use:

1. Google Search Console
2. Google Keyword Planner
3. Moz Keyword Explorer (Paid)
4. Ahrefs Keyword Explorer (Paid)

The most important one to start with is your Google Search Console account. Once logged in, you can navigate to the “Performance” report. Here you should be able to see data on the actual search terms that users queried to find your dental practice.

Manually review search terms that you think align with your core service offerings and add them to a spreadsheet. After you’ve collected all the relevant ones you can find, consider using the other tools above for additional research. Keep adding terms to your spreadsheet until you believe the list accurately reflects the majority of your service offerings.

2. Track Your Keywords

Once your keyword research list is complete, you’ll want to be sure that you’re tracking your keywords. Keyword tracking is software that monitors where your keywords are ranking in the search results. For instance, our Miami dentist could track the term “dentist miami” and see that she ranks in the #3 position.

By utilizing keyword tracking, your business can accomplish two different goals:

1. Monitor ranking positions for individual search terms
2. Review aggregated rankings to understand the overall SEO health of your site

For individual keyword rankings, this can give you insights on specific pages to optimize. For example, if you see that our rankings have dropped for “miami teeth whitening” over time, then you can prioritize changes to that specific page.

The other advantage of tracking keywords is getting a pulse on overall SEO health. Most keyword rank tools will show you how you’re performing across all keywords over time. This data can give you insights into how your site is trending. Are overall rankings improving, staying the same, or declining?

These insights can be valuable to help you understand the overall direction of your dental practice’s SEO. If you see that things are improving, you’ll know that your current strategy and initiatives are on a good path. If not, you might want to consider reevaluating the actions you’re taking to improve things.

To track keywords, you’ll need some type of software to do so. Most solutions are paid but many have reasonable costs and small business plans. Below you can find some of the most popular choices for keyword tracking:

1. Ahrefs
2. Moz Pro
3. SEMRush

3. Improve Local SEO For Your Dentistry

Now that you’ve researched and are tracking your core keywords, it’s time to start making changes to improve your visibility in the search engines. The very first step that you’ll want to take is your practice’s “local SEO” presence.

When users are looking for a product or service that they can get in a specific geographic area, local SEO becomes a major factor. Generally, the most prominent part of local SEO is the “map pack results”. These are results that appear that contain the names, addresses, phone numbers, and map listings of local businesses. Here you can see a map pack result for “dentist miami”.

Of course, because we specified the exact location that we were looking in, Google is showing us businesses in that area. However, Google will often show local results, even when the location isn’t specified. For instance, a user in Miami Beach might see search results like this when just querying the term “dentist”.

This is because even though we didn’t specify a location, Google implicitly understands that we’re looking for a local business. Therefore, it shows local businesses in the search results by default. This means that your site could be capable of ranking well for broad search terms such as “dentist” or “dentist near me”.

To improve your visibility in these results, you’ll want to take action to optimize your Google Business profile.

Google Business Profile Optimization

For anything to be eligible to rank in the map packs, you’ll need:

1. A Google Business profile
2. Proper categories set
3. Proximity near the location you want to rank

If you haven’t claimed your Google Business profile, you’ll want to take that step immediately. Fortunately, Google has provided documentation that makes this a fairly straightforward process.

1. Navigate to Google Maps
2. Search for your business name
3. Choose “Claim this business” and follow the steps

By claiming your business, you’ll now be able to directly make edits to your Google Business profile. This will allow you to control important information such as your name, address, and hours of operation. Be sure to review all of these elements to ensure their accuracy. It’s very common to see issues such as incorrect business hours. Inaccurate information like this could lead to frustrated patients or even lost business opportunities.

The next step that you’ll want to take is to set proper Google Business categories. If you don’t have categories that line up with the keywords users are searching for, your business won’t be able to appear in the local SEO results. It’s imperative that you fill out these categories as comprehensively as you possibly can.

For example, here are categories for an Orthodontist that also offers dental and implant services.

While the categories you choose will depend on your specific business, below are some good options for dental providers to consider choosing from:

• Dentist
• Cosmetic dentist
• Pediatric dentist
• Dental implants provider
• Dental clinic
• Orthodontist
• Dental hygienist
• Emergency dental service

By claiming your Google Business profile and optimizing your categories, your business will be in a much better position to perform well in the local results. Now you can consider more advanced local SEO tactics such as improving citations, local backlinks, and generating business reviews.

4. Create Dental Practice Area Landing Pages For SEO

Your dental practice likely has multiple different services. Different services might include dental implants, teeth whitening, same-day services, etc. A dental SEO initiative that you’ll want to check early on is that you have landing pages created for each service that you offer. This is important for several reasons:

1. Customers can read specific information about exactly what your practice provides for each service
2. Search engines will be able to rank those pages for keywords users search around them. A user searching for “emergency dental services” might see your “Same Day” page rank in Google as opposed to your home page

For example, this site appears to offer emergency services but it does not have a dedicated “Emergency” page created on their site.

This could be a missed opportunity as creating this page could help their site improve visibility for terms such as “emergency dentist Miami”. This is likely a very high intent search.

Below you can see examples of services that you would want to create a dedicated landing page on your site:

1. Teeth Whiting
2. Dental Implants
3. Bridges
4. Veneers
5. Bonding
6. Dentures
7. Invisalign

You’ll want to be sure that most services you offer have a mapped landing page that talks about them in-depth. If you’re unsure of which pages to create, consider reviewing competitor websites to see what types of pages they have created.

5. Build Local Backlinks

One of the most important components of SEO is building links to your site. Links from other sites act as “votes of confidence” that your domain contains quality material and is worth referencing. Broadly speaking, the more links you have pointing to your site from trusted sources, the easier it will be for your site to rank well in the search engines.

For local sites, a great way to get started with this initiative is to find local sources of influence and identify ways to build backlinks. In the vast majority of communities, there are local newspapers, clubs, charities, food blogs, businesses, and other organizations that would make for good opportunities.

There are a few benefits of going after local links specifically. Generally, they’ll be easier to acquire. You’ll most likely be dealing with smaller organizations where it is easier to get in touch with the person who runs the website. As well, your ties to the local community will make your partnership a more natural fit. Local links can also be an important step in showing search engines that your site is relevant to a particular geographic area.

Going back to our Miami example, it looks like a local publication runs a “Best Dentists” list that ranks the top practices in the area. This could be a great opportunity to get a relevant local link and help drive customers directly from the article.

Local sponsorships can also be another great path to go. Plenty of events and organizations would take sponsors from local businesses. For example, this dental practice is sponsoring a local board game event on Meetup.com. In return, they’re getting a link back.

There are many different places where you can look for local links. Some of the best include:

1. Events
2. Partner businesses
3. Meetups
4. Clubs
5. Charities

If you’re looking to go deeper here, this is a great guide from Moz that will give you very actionable advice on how to build links in your local area by using events.

6. Use Dentist Structured Data

A great way to improve Google’s understanding of your site is to utilize structured data. Structured data is code that can be placed on a particular page to improve Google’s understanding of what the content is about. While Google is very adept at understanding a page’s contents, this can give the search engine an additional layer of confidence.

While there are many different schema types, the most relevant one for dental practices is “Dentist” structured data.

Within the “Dentist” schema, you can tell Google very specific things about your practice. You can provide Google with information such as:

1. Business name (name)
2. Phone number (telephone)
3. Address (address)
4. Hours of operation (openingHours)
5. Social media profiles (sameAs)
6. Google Maps link (hasMap)

Below is an example of structured data that you could use on your site.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Dentist",
  "name": "Your Name",
  "image": "www.exampleimage.jpg",
  "@id": "",
  "url": "www.example.com",
  "telephone": "111-111-1111",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "10 Maple Drive",
    "addressLocality": "Miami",
    "addressRegion": "FL",
    "postalCode": "33101",
    "addressCountry": "US"
  }  
}
</script>

Generally, structured data is best implemented by a developer. If you worked with one to create your site, consider asking them to add this structured data to your home page. If you’re more technical, you could generate a custom one using the Schema Generator and add it to the site via the template or a tool like Google Tag Manager.

7. Review The UX Of Your Dentistry Site

Another great review that can significantly impact your dental SEO performance is reviewing the overall user experience of your site. By and large, Google wants to rank sites that make it easy for the user to find the exact content that they’re looking for. You’ll want to review your website and look for any opportunities to make your site easier and help get users to the information they want.

While many different factors go into a site’s user experience, here are some elements that you should ensure your site has:

1. Clear calls to action
2. Pages that inform key decision-making factors (insurance, payment)
3. Landing pages for specific dental services
4. A fast website experience
5. Straightforward navigation paths
6. Strong imagery that captures the value proposition of the page
7. A clean design that allows for a readable website
8. Internal search functionality

For example, when we navigate to this site’s home page we can see that there are two obvious calls to action presented to the user. In the above-the-fold content, you’re immediately provided options to either get more information on “Financing” or “Membership”. This makes it very clear what the next steps are for the user.

This is another good example of a site UX that provides users with a strong user experience. Directly in the site navigation, they outline important pages that users will want to interact with before making a decision. Here they can see what services are offered, insurances accepted, and payment options.

By clearly outlining these critical pages, it makes it easier for users to discover the information and make a decision on whether or not this dental provider is the best for their personal needs.

Dental SEO Conclusion

There are a lot of opportunities to improve your dental site’s search visibility. By understanding core principles such as your site’s keywords, local SEO and UX best practices, you’ll put your site in a much better position to perform well in the search engines. While dentist SEO can be a longer-term play, the results can definitely be worth it as your site can more consistently generate traffic and new patients.

SEO For Dentists: An SEO Guide For Dental Practices is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

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However, the challenge with long tail keywords is that they might not be immediately obvious. Upon doing some initial keyword research, you may find that the bulk of the terms you uncover are higher volume and higher competition “head” queries. In order to find these wonderful long tail keywords, you may need to dive a little deeper.

How To Find Long Tail Keywords:

Here’s how to find long tail keywords:

1. Integrate Search Console with Data Studio
2. Review Google Ads data
3. Look at high performing forums
4. Scrape Google Autocomplete
5. Utilize internal search data

Below, we’ll go more in depth in each one of these methods.

1. Use Data Studio To Find Long Tail Keywords

My favorite methodology of finding long tail keywords is by using Google Data Studio. This strategy works great if you have a larger site but haven’t been able to access all of your query data in Search Console. One of the biggest frustrations of many SEOs is that Search Console limits you to 1,000 queries in their export.

However, a little known fact is that you can actually get a much larger export from Search Console by using Data Studio instead. Larger datasets mean you’ll have more opportunities to mine for long tail queries.

Here’s how to create a Data Studio report that provides more of your Search Console queries:

1. Open up Google Data Studio
2. Click on Create > Report
3. In Connect to data search for “Search Console”.
4. Find your site and choose “Site Impression” & “web”
5. Remove “Google Property” from “Dimension”
6. Click “Add Dimension” and select “Query”
7. Add any additional “Metrics” that you like (Impressions, Site CTR, Average Position)

Now you should have access to a much larger number of queries from Search Console. Here you can see that I have access to 150,000+ queries in this report.

This process allows me to go much deeper into finding long tail keywords in my research. Armed with this data, I can mine individual topics to find low competition terms.

For instance, let’s say that I wanted to create more content around iPhones and identify some easy to compete for keywords. I could create a simple filter that shows me “iphone” queries above 100 impressions.

Next I could sort in ascending order to find low competition queries that have few impressions. One keyword I found was “retrieve deleted text messages iphone without backup”

When reviewing the SERP for this keyword I can find that the competition isn’t overwhelming and there are no branded results from apple.com present. This might make a good opportunity to create new content for a very specific issue that users are having.

2. Review Google Ads Data For Long Tail Keywords

I’ve said many times that PPC data is extremely underutilized by SEOs. It’s one of the only places where you can still find conversion/revenue data at the keyword-level. By ignoring these insights, SEOs are missing out on opportunities to better understand what queries are driving qualified traffic and where there are gaps in the SEO strategy.

Many PPC campaigns bid on a large variety of keywords. Combine this with Google’s changes to the broad match modifier and it’s a recipe for finding a lot of long tail queries within your PPC data.

Currently, in Universal Analytics, the “Search Queries” report makes these terms very easy to find by using filters to drill down to lower volume queries. How you do this will depend on how much traffic you generate from Google Ads but here’s a general process that I use:

Universal Analytics

1. Navigate to Google Analytics
2. Go to Acquisition > Google Ads > Search Queries
3. Click “advanced”
4. In this example I filtered by queries between 20-200 sessions with more than $500 in revenue

If you’re using GA4, the following process should help you identify these keywords with Google Ads data.

Google Analytics 4

1. Navigate to Google Analytics
2. Go to Acquisition > Overview
3. Find the card with your Google Ads campaigns and select “View Google Ads campaigns”
4. Select the “Session Google Ads campaign” dropdown and select “Session Google Ads query”

From there you can identify longer tail terms associated with revenue-generating queries from Google Ads. This is an extremely powerful way to find low competition keywords that have conversion potential.

3. Review High Performing Forums

Another strong way to find low competition terms is by analyzing forum sites. Forums provide a great resource for users to ask questions and get answers for very specific problems that they have. Since many users often have the same problem, these forum questions are often mapped to long tail queries and can end up ranking in the SERPs. However, these forum results can generally be easily surpassed by a well-written and optimized article.

For example, if you’re in the home improvement space, you might see forum questions from doityourself.com ranking well from time to time. This is a community where users can ask questions about common issues they’re having with their DIY projects.

To find long tail keywords at scale, we can run this forum through a tool like Ahrefs to find instances where a forum thread might be ranking well. We might also want to drill down to specific topics that we know we want to focus our content around.

In this example, I found opportunities where the forum is ranking well around “garage” keywords by following these steps:

1. Open up Ahrefs
2. In the search bar, add the URL prefix in (https://www.doityourself.com/forum/). Ensure “Path” is selected.
3. Select the “Organic keywords” report in the left sidebar
4. Perform a search
5. In the “Keyword” dropdown, select “contains” and then your target topic (“garage” in this example”).

Here we can see a list of queries where a forum page is ranking well.

We can then review the SERPs for these queries to verify there’s weaker competition for these long tail phrases. Here you can see that there are two forum threads ranking in the top three results. This means there’s a prime opportunity for new content to be created as an article may be easily able to outperform these forum threads.

If you know of a forum in your industry that you’ve seen appear on the first page, it’s typically a good idea to analyze what queries that forum ranks for. You can leverage that knowledge to create your content for those same topics. While the forums vary by industry, broader ones to target would be sites like Reddit and Quora.

4. Scrape Google Autocomplete For Long Tail Keywords

Google Autocomplete is probably one of the fastest ways to quickly generate content ideas that are mapped to long tail keywords. This is because autocomplete tries to make query suggestions based on what previous users have looked for. As a result, you can quickly get a lot of suggestions around very specific topics.

Going back to the iPhone example, when I enter “how to connect iphone to tv”, you start to see that Google suggests some pretty specific queries. I could start reviewing these topic ideas and see if any would be a good fit for our content strategy.

Of course, the most powerful way of doing this research is to utilize some type of tool that scrapes Google Autocomplete. This is an extremely fast way of getting a lot of query suggestions that could make great long tail keywords to target.

When using Google Autocomplete, a great strategy can be thinking of the core topic that you want to find long tail keywords for and then using question modifiers before the topic. Some of the most common question modifiers include:

1. How
2. Why
3. Can
4. What
5. When
6. Does

There are a variety of tools out there that scrape Google Autocomplete but I recommend using one called Keyword Sh!tter. It uses a really simple interface and is extremely straightforward to use.

Here I just entered three seed keywords to scrape Google Autocomplete:

• how to connect iphone to tv
• how to connect iphone to car
• how to connect iphone to ipad

Within a minute I already have 500+ different queries that it found from Google’s Autocomplete.

You can then export the data and run it through your search volume tool of choice. Here, I simply took the terms and ran it through Google’s Keyword Planner. You can then use “Avg monthly searches” as a gauge to determine what types of queries you think would make great long tail keyword opportunities.

5. Find Long-Tail Keywords In Internal Site Search Data

If your site generates a large amount of traffic from internal search, this is another good place to check for long tail keywords. This strategy generally works the best if you’re an eCommerce site and you’re looking to identify specific category pages that are mapped to low competition keywords. If users are commonly using this feature, you might be sitting on a lot of data that’s work checking out.

You can use the following process to find this data in Google Analytics:

Universal Analytics

1. Navigate to Google Analytics
2. In the left sidebar go to Behavior > Site Search > Search Terms
3. Click “advanced”
4. Create your filtering criteria. Here I looked for search terms that generated at least $1,000 in revenue with fewer than 200 unique searches

This will show you a report of internal queries that aren’t searched that frequently but still contribute to a considerable amount of revenue. Of course, the individual criteria that you use will be determined by how frequently people utilize and convert off your site’s internal search functionality.

While internal search data can be useful for identifying longer tail keywords, there are some drawbacks to this method. Generally, users don’t get too specific when using internal search. A user is much more likely to look for “skinny jeans” than “size 10 black skinny jeans” using internal search. Most eCommerce sites will have a faceted navigation that will allow the user drill further down into the product attributes that they’re looking for. However, if you’re looking for longer tail keywords, internal search data shouldn’t be ignored!

With all of this information in mind, you should be well equipped to start finding long tail keyword opportunities for your site. By utilizing these methods, you should be able to identify lower competition queries that better connect with some of your most prominent users.

How To Find Long Tail Keywords is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

SEO on eCommerce sites can be extremely challenging. eCommerce sites can have massive amounts of pages due to factors such as large inventories, faceted navigation, and robust site functionality. Due to the size of these sites, SEO becomes a much larger challenge as solutions oftentimes need to be scaled across thousands or millions of URLs.

Related Content:

• Ecommerce SEO Agency
• Shopify SEO Services
• Franchise SEO Agency

At Go Fish Digital, we run into our fair share of eCommerce sites and I thought it would be helpful to show you our eCommerce SEO checklist. While there are a lot of items on this checklist below, here are some of the highest priority items:

Our Ecommerce SEO Checklist:

• Set up Ecommerce Tracking
• Check Google’s Index Coverage report
• Review the site’s log files
• Limit JavaScript rendered content
• Map out the site architecture
• Scale internal linking
• Audit faceted navigations
• Use global title tags & meta descriptions
• Perform keyword research
• Reclaim broken backlinks

You can review the entire checklist below to see how we analyze eCommerce sites.

Table Of Contents

1. Analytics
2. Crawling & Indexing
3. Website Architecture
4. Keyword Research
5. On-Page SEO
6. Site Performance
7. Backlinks
8. Guides By Platform
9. Ecommerce Tools

1. Analytics

Proper analytics are essential to the success of any SEO campaign. This is especially true for eCommerce sites. Due to their size, these sites often collect enormous amounts of data around traffic, engagement, rankings, conversions and more. This data can be a key driver for many digital and external marketing initiatives. For these reasons, it’s imperative that your site is tracking as much clean data as possible.

1a. Google Analytics

• Ensure Google Analytics is installed and tracking properly. You can confirm this by filtering down to your session and confirming a single session in Real-Time reporting.

• Implement Ecommerce Tracking to track revenue in Google Analytics
• Create other goals in Google Analytics: email subscriptions, cart adds, account sign-ups
• Set up event tracking for other key user actions: video plays, CTA clicks
• Enable Site Search tracking to monitor internal site searches
• Turn on Enhanced Ecommerce reporting
• Create filters to remove any internal traffic or bot traffic from getting reported

1b. Google Search Console

• Ensure that a property has been created and verified for Google Search Console
• Submit your sitemap.xml

2. Crawling & Indexing

You can have the best content in the world, but if it isn’t getting crawled and indexed, users won’t be able to discover it in the search engines. Generally, eCommerce sites have more robust functionality than standard sites and this functionality can cause large scale issues with how your site is crawled and indexed. There are a good number of elements that impact these initiatives on your website.

2a. Site Crawl

• Perform a crawl of the site using Screaming Frog. If the site is extremely large, you may need to set up a virtual machine using AWS to crawl from the cloud.
• Monitor to see if the crawl can finish. If it appears it cannot, there may be significant cawl budget issues.
• Review any internal 3xx/4xx status codes. If global elements are creating these then consider fixing these issues first.
• Check for any instances of non-indexable URLs (“Noindex”, “Canonoicalised”, “Blocked by Robots.txt”. Determine why these are not set to be indexable pages and if any adjustments should be made.
• Save the crawl. This will allow it to be easily uploaded at a later date.

2b. Sitemap.xml

• Check to see if your site is generating a sitemap.xml. If not, create a new sitemap.xml file.
• Crawl the sitemap.xml.
  • Ensure that all key pages are included
  • Remove any non-indexable pages (3xx, 4xx, canonicalized, ”noindex”)

• If the site utilizes a sitemap index file, ensure that all child sitemaps are grouped into clear categories (Brands, Products, Categories, Blogs, etc). If the child sitemaps will be large, consider splitting them up into additional sitemap index files.

2c. Robots.txt

• Check to see if the site is generating a robots.txt file. This should be located at example.com/robots.txt
• Review the “Disallow” commands. Are these commands accidentally blocking content that should be crawlable or have a large number of backlinks pointing to them?
• Check that the robots.txt is blocking the crawl of URLs that shouldn’t be indexed (i.e. parameterized URLs).
• Ensure a link to the sitemap.xml is present in the robots.txt

2d. Index Coverage Report

• Identify the primary crawler of your website in Google’s Index Coverage

• Check the “Excluded” report for URLs that should be getting indexed. Higher priority statuses include “Crawled – currently not indexed”, “Discovered – currently not indexed”, “Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user”.

• Check the “Valid” report for URLs that shouldn’t be getting indexed. The “Indexed, not submitted in sitemap” status can be good to audit for these URLs.

2e. Log File Analysis

• Review the log files from the site. This can be done with tools such as the Screaming Frog Log Analyser.
• Note the most frequently crawled URLs on the site. Are there high priority landing pages that are missing from the most frequently crawled pages? If so, determine ways to improve their internal linking and accessibility.

• Identify any URLs that are getting crawled that should be (i.e. parameterized URLs). Adjust the site’s crawl settings to block the crawl/indexation of these URLs.
• Fix any commonly crawled 3xx/4xx status codes.
• Identify orphaned content that has been crawled but does not receive any traffic.
• Review the log files for any other crawl data that stands out. Screaming Frog has a great guide to log file analysis.

2f. JavaScript Audit:

• Turn off JavaScript in your browser and manually review key page types. Note which global content elements are dependent on JavaScript to load. You can also use the View Rendered Source extension to compare the original source code to the DOM.
• Use Google’s URL Inspector to render these pages. Check to ensure Googlebot is able to crawl and index these elements.
• For content you’re unsure is loading properly, use “site:” search operators to check Google’s index for that content.
• For key content that is unable to be indexed, consider eliminating JavaScript dependencies.

2g. Faceted Navigation/Sorting:

• Check for faceted navigation. Manually review to see if this navigation is generating a large number of URLs.

• Use the “site:” & “inurl:” search operators in Google to determine if parameterized URLs are getting indexed.
• Review crawl directives associated with URLs generated by the faceted navigation (canonicals, “nofollow” tags, robots.txt, URL parameters report). If the log file analysis shows that undesirable URLs are still getting crawled, adjustments may need to be made to these crawl directives. This post provides a great guide on how to adjust those crawl directives and the pros and cons of each option.
• Monitor the site’s crawling and indexation prin Search Console once adjustments have been made.

3. Website Architecture

When Google crawls large sites, it’s extremely important that it’s able to access and understand all of the URLs it’s encountering. Having an intuitive website architecture is essential for ensuring that Google is able to access all of your product listing and product description pages. As well, intelligent architecture allows Google to properly categorize your content into logical parent and child categories. Here is how we typically review a given site’s architecture.

3a. Navigation:

• Ensure that all of your key category pages are included in your navigation. This will allow Google and users to easily access them.
• Review the naming conventions used in the navigation. Ensure they’re optimized for your target keywords.
• Review how many total navigation options the site has. Ideally, the navigation will provide users with links to the most useful categories without “flattening” the architecture too much.
• Review the categorization of navigation. Ensure that subcategories are properly grouped into logical parent categories.

3b. Internal Linking:

• Identify product listing pages that use infinite scrolling. Ensure that any infinite scrolling is SEO-friendly.
• Review the paginated internal linking. Consider adding a link to the last page in the series if one isn’t present. This makes it easier for Google to crawl products deeper in the site architecture.
• Review the site crawl to find pages that are deep in the architecture of the site. If certain groups of pages consistently have crawl depths of 4+, consider adding internal links to them.
• Remove tracking parameters from any internal links

• Ensure product description pages utilize “Related Items” internal links. This will naturally improve Google’s crawl to other product description pages and help improve conversions and user engagement.
• Create an HTML sitemap that lists all key product categories. This will provide an additional step of ensuring that key product listing and description pages aren’t too deep in the site architecture.

4. Keyword Research

Like any site, it’s important to understand the keywords that are most likely to generate revenue for your company. By understanding and properly prioritizing your keywords, you’ll know which SEO initiatives and content are most likely to move the needle in terms of revenue. Here is a great process to find the most valuable keywords for your site.

• Create a new spreadsheet that will be your “Master Keyword” sheet.
• Export your keywords from Search Console’s “Search Results” report. Add keywords that generate the majority of your clicks/impressions.
• Navigate to the “Search Queries” report in Google Analytics. Identify keywords that generate the majority of revenue from Google AdWords. Add these keywords to the “Master Keyword” sheet.

• Use tools such as AHREFs to perform a content gap analysis of you and your competitors to determine keywords where they’re ranking well and you’re not. Add any core keywords to the “Master Keyword” sheet.
• Map all keywords to associated landing pages on your site. Ideally, there will be a 1:1 match between a particular keyword group and an individual landing pages
• For keywords with no associated page, consider creating a new one to be mapped to that keyword. This may be able to be done by using existing content created by the faceted navigation or the site’s internal search data.
• Upload all of your keywords to your rank tracking solution of choice.

5. On-Page SEO

Of course, on-page SEO is still highly relevant to eCommerce sites. This means ensuring that you’re sending strong on-page signals for your relevant keywords. The primary difference between standard sites and eCommerce is that any on-page changes will need to be made at scale. The following process can help you find templated solutions to optimize your product listing and product description pages.

5a. Meta Data

• Optimize all of your page category and product title tags. If your site is large this may need to be done programmatically.
• Optimize all of your page category and product meta descriptions. Once again, if your site is large, this may need to be done programmatically.

Product Listing Pages

• Ensure that the product listing page represents logical overall categories that users would be searching for. Consider consolidating categories that are too similar or splitting up categories that are too different.
• Review the individual product information listed on product listing pages (pricing, reviews, description, etc). Should additional content be included on the product listing page to give users even more information?
• Audit your product listing pages to ensure that individual products match the category they’re in.

• Research if using an intermediary category page is a good fit for certain product listing pages. These pages act as content hubs for more broad categories and don’t include links to description pages.

Product Pages

• Ensure that all product pages have unique descriptions. This will help avoid duplicate content from getting indexed by Google.

• Review product pages to ensure that key information is included. This could include pricing, datasheets, shipping and return information. Consider programmatically adding any important information that is missing from product pages.
• Create a policy for how unavailable products should be handled. Ensure products that don’t exist return 404 status codes or products that have changed URLs properly 301 redirect.

5b. Structured Data

• Add “Product” structured data to all product pages. This schema should mark up key information such as the name, price, and rating.
• Add “Article” structured data to all of your site’s blog content.
• Navigate to Search Console’s “Enhancements” report. Fix any URLs with “Errors” reported.
• Verify that all structured data validates properly using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.

5c. Mobile SEO:

• Run the site through Google’s Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool to verify it is compatible with mobile devices.
• Resize your browser to check to see if the site is responsive or adaptive. Responsive sites will resize with the browser. Adaptive sites will only resize when the page is refreshed
• Browse the site manually on a mobile device. Note any UX improvements that could be made. Common adjustments include improved internal search, navigation, product & category page design.
• Compare the desktop and mobile versions of the site. Note any differences in content, navigation or usability that could impact the UX or crawl of the site. You can use Merkle’s Mobile-First Index Tool to help with this.
• If the site has any mobile URLs (m.example.com), ensure they have a rel=alternate tag that points to the corresponding desktop URL.

6. Site Performance

Site performance is important for more than just SEO. The speed of your site determines the UX for all of your digital marketing initiatives including paid, social, email and more. Improvements to your site performance not only improve user engagement but have been shown to have a direct impact on the revenue the site is able to generate.

6a. Benchmarking

• Get benchmark performance metrics from Google PageSpeed Insights. Use Batch Speed to quickly pull data around a large sample of URLs.
• Run competitors through Batch Speed as well.
• Compare benchmark metrics to competitors: First Contentful Paint, Time To Interactive, Time To First Byte

6b. Improvements

• Defer render-blocking JavaScrit code until later in page load
• Improve database query efficiencies for pages with high TTFB metrics

• Run Chrome’s Coverage Report to find files with large quantities of unused code. Consider eliminating or reducing in size.
• Resize and compress large image assets on high priority pages.
• Lazy load image assets on product listing pages.
• Audit JavaScript files that could be contributing to long load times using Chrome’s Performance report. Consider removing or replacing with a lighter-weight option.

7. Backlinks

Backlinks are still a key component of Google’s algorithm, so it’s important to ensure that your site is driving as much authority as possible. eCommerce sites have a lot to consider in this regard as rotating inventories, previous development work, and historical site changes can impact the equity the site is receiving and distributing. Often times, your equity can be unclaimed, lost or diluted throughout time.

• Use tools such as AHREFs, Moz, or SEMRush to analyze the site’s backlink profile.
• Compare the site’s linking root domains to competitors. This can give you an idea of how authoritative your site is compared to theirs.

• Locate URLs returning 302 status codes with a large number of backlinks. Adjust these URLs to return 301 redirects to pass more link equity to the destination URLs.
• Locate URLs returning 404 status codes with a large number of backlinks. 301 redirect these URLs to live pages on the site to reclaim any lost link equity.
• Using AHREFs or Moz, create reports to find unlinked brand mentions. Reach out to any site that mentions your company but does not link to the site.

8. Guides By Platform:

One thing to think about for your eCommerce SEO is the platform you utilize. Each platform might have a different set of SEO considerations.

Here are some great guides for some of the most common ones:

• Shopify SEO
• Magento SEO
• WooCommerce SEO

9. Ecommerce SEO Tools

We utilize a large number of SEO tools on a day to day basis. Below, you can find the ones we think are the more relevant to eCommerce sites.

Crawlers

• Deepcrawl
• Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Crawling/Indexation

• Search Console URL Parameters Tool
• Index Coverage Report
• Robots.txt Tester

Log File Analysis

• Screaming Frog Log File Analyser
• Botify

Site Speed

• Google PageSpeed Insights
• BatchSpeed.com
• Chrome’s Coverage Report

Structured Data

• Structured Data Testing Tool
• Search Console Structured Data Reports
• Merkle Schema Generator

Backlink Analysis

• AHREFs
• Moz Link Explorer

Due to their size, eCommerce sites present their own unique set of challenges. However, by following the above checklist hopefully provides you with actionable items to improve SEO. Do you have any other items that are on your eCommerce SEO Audit Checklist? If so, feel free to drop them in the comments below!

The Best Ecommerce SEO Checklist is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

For this reason, we developed our own Shopify SEO checklist. This checklist will walk you through some of the basic things that we look for when optimizing Shopify stores to improve their SEO. To best use this checklist, go through each item and ensure that you’ve reviewed it at least once. It’s even best practice to review some of these items multiple times (such as On-Page SEO). Hopefully, this checklist provides you with more clarity on some of the most important things we review on Shopify sites.

Related Content:

• Technical SEO Agency
• Ecommerce SEO Agency
• Shopify SEO Services
• Franchise SEO Agency
• Enterprise SEO Services

You can find our Shopify SEO checklist below!

Basic Setup

1. Install Google Analytics

The very first thing to do on your Shopify store is to install Google Analytics. Google Analytics is most SEOs analytics tool of choice as it will allow you to measure core KPIs such as the amount of traffic and revenue that come from organic. As well, Google Analytics will give you a huge amount of data that allows you to see information on traffic sources, user devices, engagement metrics and much more.

Once you have created a Google Analytics account, you can connect it to Shopify by going to Online Store > Preferences > Google Analytics and adding your Google Analytics account ID.

2. Set Up Google Search Console

Like Google Analytics, Search Console is another foundational tool that most SEOs use every day. By using Search Console, you’ll get access to a lot of great data for SEO such as queries used to find your site, crawl & indexation issues, Core Web Vitals performance and much more.

Head over to Search Console’s website and create an account. If you already have Google Analytics set up you should be able to gain access to your Search Console data by using Google Analytics as a verification method.

3. Submit Your Sitemap.xml To Search Console

While you’re in Google Search Console, you should submit your sitemap.xml. Doing this will allow Google to have direct access to your site’s sitemap.xml file so it can more easily find key content.

To submit your sitemap.xml in Search Console, go to Index > Sitemaps > Add a new sitemap. There you should be able to add your sitemap.xml URL path which should always be “sitemap.xml” on Shopify sites.

4. Perform Keyword Research

Another thing you’ll need to do before starting your SEO campaign is understanding your site’s core keywords. Without doing this, you won’t know which terms to focus on optimizing your site for. Obviously, you’ll want to focus on keywords that have the highest chance at driving revenue for your store.

There are many ways to approach keyword research such as:

1. Writing down what terms you think people would be using to search for your products
2. Reviewing competitor sites to see what keywords they’re using
3. Using Google Ads data to find what keywords already drive revenue for your store
4. Analyzing the “Search Results” report in Search Console to see what queries already drive traffic to your store

Whatever method you choose, I’d recommend gathering as much data as you can and then cutting the list down to 100-300 of your highest priority keywords. Of course, bigger Shopify stores will require bigger keyword lists.

5. Track Your Keywords

While Google Analytics & Search Console will provide traffic/click data, they won’t provide you with great insights on how your keywords are ranking over time. Now that you’ve identified the keywords that you want to rank for, you’ll want to go ahead and use a solution to track those keywords.

Tracking keywords will provide you with two different types of insights:

1. How individual keywords are ranking over time
2. How your site as a whole is ranking over time

There are plenty of different rank tracking tools out there that you can use. We use STAT at our agency but below are some other very popular options:

1. Ahrefs
2. Moz
3. SEMRush

Shopify On-Page SEO Checklist

6. Optimize Your Category & Product Page Title Tags

One of the easiest things you can do to quickly improve your Shopify store’s optimization is to simply go through your store’s title tags and ensure they’re optimized. Since you’ll generally want to focus on key pages first, it’s best to review your collection and product pages immediately. These are the pages that are most tied to site revenue so they’re the most important to start with.

When optimizing your title tags, you’ll want to ensure that you’re using the target keywords for that particular page directly in the title tag. This sends strong on-page signals to Google about what the topic of the page is about.

7. Ensure URLs Have A Clean Structure

While Shopify has some limitations on how your URLs are structured, I recommend ensuring any new paths you create are well-optimized. A well optimized URL is generally:

1. Short and readable
2. Contains core keywords
3. Easy for users to understand the content of the page

Below are some example of how URLs for a collection of “Mens Dress Pants” could look:

OK:/collections/the-best-mens-dress-pants-23/

Good:/collections/best-mens-dress-pants/

Great:/collections/mens-dress-pants/

I much prefer the shorter and cleaner URLs that are easy to read while still using your primary keywords. Fortunately, the nature of how Shopify prompts you to create collection pages does generally result in more optimized URLs on the platform.

8. Identify Internal Linking Opportunities

Internal linking is another great way to improve the SEO of your Shopify store. Internal links help Google find content that’s deeper in your site architecture much easier. As well, it helps better distribute authority and improves the overall user experience of your customers.

The best place to start looking for internal link opportunities is on your Shopify blog. Start by identifying blogs that reference key collections or products on your store and add internal links to those relevant pages. This will help optimize the destination pages as well as make your blog posts have stronger calls to action for transactions.

For example, you can see how Gymshark links to this collection page in this blog post.

Of course, there are many other ways to find internal linking opportunities. Other ways to improve the internal linking of your store could be:

1. Adding “Related Products” sections on product pages
2. Linking to subcollection pages from collection pages
3. Linking to related collections from collection pages

9. Improve Your Website Navigation

Another high priority initiative to look at right away is reviewing your site’s navigation and looking for opportunities to improve it. Your site navigation is one of the primary ways that Google and users navigate through your site. For this reason, it’s one of the key components of your site. When reviewing your navigation you can ask yourself:

1. Are users able to get the information that they’re most likely looking for?
2. Are all my key collections & products easy to get to by using the navigation?
3. Are competitors structuring their navigation differently?
4. Does my navigation function well on mobile devices?

Shopify Technical SEO Checklist

10. Perform A Crawl Of Your Site

From a technical perspective, one of the first things you should be doing is performing a crawl of your Shopify store. A crawl will emulate how Google and other search engines navigate through your site and can be used to identify any high priority issues. At Go Fish Digital, Screaming Frog is our tool of choice for performing site crawls.

When performing these crawls, I primarily look for things such as:

1. Unoptimized title tags on key pages
2. Large amounts of 4xx & 3xx status codes
3. Canonical tag issues
4. Non-indexable URLs that may contribute to crawl waste

Cleaning up these things can improve Google’s efficiency when it crawls and indexes your website. As well, based on your site crawl, you can then start to prioritize more of these technical SEO items later down the Shopify checklist.

11. Check Your Robots.txt File

The next thing to check is your Shopify’s robots.txt file. By default, your store will have a robots.txt at the URL path “domain.com/robots.txt”. This file comes with commands that give Google instructions about what it can and cannot crawl. By default, things such as your checkout, cart and internal search are all blocked.

For the vast majority of stores, Shopify’s default robots.txt rules are enough to ensure Google stays away from problem areas.

However, this isn’t always the case. Stores that have had more customization done to them may need to add additional rules. Common situations to adjust the robots.txt include when a store has a faceted navigation or uses different internal search URLs than the default. For more information, you can check out our guide on optimizing the Shopify robots.txt file.

12. Crawl Your Sitemap.xml File

It’s also best practice to crawl your Shopify’s sitemap.xml to ensure that everything looks good. The sitemap.xml is a file that tells Google and other search engines what the key pages of your site are. Similar to the robots.txt file, Shopify creates this out of the box which is great! Shopify will create a sitemap.xml index file with child sitemaps for:

1. Marketing pages (sitemap_pages_1.xml)
2. Collection pages (sitemap_collections_1.xml)
3. Product pages (sitemap_products_1.xml)
4. Blog posts (sitemap_blogs_1.xml)

With Screaming Frog, you can change the crawler to “List” mode and then select Upload > Download XML Sitemap. This will start a crawl of the sitemap.xml. I’ll generally look for any pages that are returning 404/3xx status codes or low quality pages.

Generally Shopify’s sitemap.xml is pretty good and there’s no need for adjustments. However, sometimes I’ll find low quality pages contained in the sitemap.xml as the page might be published in the Shopify admin but not linked to on the site.

13. Ensure Category Pages Link To Canonical Products

One of the big technical SEO issues that Shopify presents out of the box is duplicate content. On many Shopify stores, collection pages will link to duplicate product pages by default. If you navigate to your product pages and they have /collections/ & /products/ in the URL, this is a duplicate page. These duplicate pages often contain canonical tags that reference the actual rankings page.

Here’s an example you can see on Tilly’s Brimmed Hat category page:

Category Page: https://www.tilley.com/collections/brimmed

First Product Link: https://www.tilley.com/collections/brimmed/products/ltm6-airflo-hat

Canonical: https://www.tilley.com/products/ltm6-airflo-hat

This means that every product link on all category pages are duplicate.

Fortunately, you can fix this by making adjustments to the product-grid-item.liquid file (note this might not be the same in all Shopify setups).

1. In the left sidebar, select Online Store > Themes
2. Select Actions > Edit Code
3. Find the “Snippets” folder, and select “product-grid-item.liquid”
4. Adjust the following code:

FROM: <a href=”{{ product.url | within: current_collection }}” class=”product-grid-item”>

TO: <a href=”{{ product.url }}” class=”product-grid-item”>

Learn more about fixing this by reading our guide on Shopify duplicate content issues.

14. Review Your Structured Data Implementation

Another extremely important technical SEO element of your Shopify store is your site’s structured data. Structured data is simply code that you can add to your site that gives Google and other search engines more information about the content of your page. The crawler will have to do less “interpreting” to understand a page’s content.

We recommend checking how your structured data looks on your different page types within Shopify. You can do this by running each page type through the Schema Markup Validator.

Below is our ideal structured data mapping by page type:

1. Home: Organization
2. Collection: CollectionPage / OfferCatalog
3. Product: Product
4. Blog: Article

Ideally, these different page types all contain one element of each type of markup. Of course, you’ll also want to ensure that key properties (such as “aggregateRating” on “Product” schema) are populated correctly. For more information, check out our guide to Shopify structured data.

15. Implement Lazy Loading

When looking to speed up Shopify sites, it’s good to check if images on your collection page are lazy loading. Lazy loading occurs when images only render after a user scrolls to them in the viewport. This ensures that users are only served the resources that they’re actually interacting with.

For Shopify sites, we love to use the lazysizes library in order to implement lazy loading. We find that this works really well with Shopify and is fairly straightforward for developers to implement. If you’re finding that your Shopify collection pages aren’t using lazy loading, this is a great resource to implement on your store.

16. Check For Indexation Issues From JavaScript

Depending on the complexity of your Shopify store, your content might be reliant on JavaScript in order to render for both Google and users. Especially if you have elements that utilize client-side JavaScript, we recommend auditing how Google is indexing the content. It’s possible that your website’s content could be under-indexed if Google is able to render all of the JavaScript on their end.

For instance, here’s an example of Lord & Taylor’s Boot Heels collection page.

Now here’s that exact same page with JavaScript turned off.

It’s possible that if this JavaScript is served client-side that Google might not be getting a complete picture of the content of the page. By performing the following checks, you can get a better idea of how completely Google is able to index the content:

1. Using the Developer extension for Chrome, turn off JavaScript and note which site elements are reliant on it to load
2. Perform a “site:” search for individual pages and look for example text on the page
3. Run the page through Google’s Mobile Friendly Testing Tool to see what content Google is able to index

My colleague Pierce Brelinsky wrote a fantastic article on how to diagnose JavaScript SEO issues if you’re interested in reading more.

17. Review The Index Coverage Report

Another great report for Shopify store owners to review is Search Console’s Index Coverage report. This report gives you details on how Google is crawling and indexing your website. For instance, Google might be refusing to index some of your URLs and you might not even know about it! For each URL Google crawls, it assigns statuses such as “Blocked by robots.txt”, “Submitted and indexed” and the mysterious “Crawled – currently not indexed”

As part of your Shopify SEO checklist, I recommend reviewing this report to ensure that Google is crawling and indexing your content correctly. I’ll generally look for things such as:

1. Are there URLs that should be indexed that aren’t?
2. Is Google crawling low quality URLs?
3. Are we blocking key content via the robots.txt
4. Is Google ignoring our site’s canonical tags

This can help give you more insights as to possible indexation issues your Shopify store might have. The larger your store, the more crucial this step is in the process.

Conclusion

With this Shopify SEO checklist in hand, you should be in a better position to understand the key items that you need to work on with your site. This checklist will work best if you return to it from time to time to ensure that you’re able to work through all of the different steps. While SEO can certainly be overwhelming, breaking it down into smaller steps can make your campaign feel even more achievable. If you have any questions about this checklist or our Shopify SEO agency services, feel free to reach out to us!

Other Shopify SEO Resources

• Shopify Speed Optimization
• Improving Shopify Duplicate Content
• Shopify Sitemap.xml Guide
• Shopify Structured Data & Schema
• Shopify Robots.txt Guide
• Shopify SEO Tools
• All Shopify SEO Articles

A 17-Step Shopify SEO Checklist is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

If you’re working on an eCommerce site, the robots.txt file is one of the biggest foundational elements of your site’s SEO. Ecommerce sites are generally much bigger than most sites on the Web and also contain features such as faceted navigation that can exponentially increase the size of the site. This means that these sites need to be able to more tightly control how Google crawls their site. This helps these sites manage crawl budget and prevent low quality pages from getting crawled by Googlebot.

Related Content:

• Technical SEO Agency
• Ecommerce SEO Agency
• Shopify SEO Services
• Enterprise SEO Services

However, when it comes to Shopify, the robots.txt has long been a gripe of the SEO community. For many years, one of the biggest frustrations for Shopify SEO has been a lack of control of the robots.txt. This made the platform more difficult to work with as compared to others such as SEO for Magento, where users have always been able to easily edit the robots.txt. While the default robots.txt does a great job of blocking crawlers, some sites require adjustments to this file. As more sites start to use the platform, we’re now seeing sites using Shopify get larger and more robust, requiring more crawl intervention by using the robots.txt.

Fortunately, Shopify has been doing a great job of improving the experience of their platform. As of June 2021, Shopify announced that you will now be able to customize the robots.txt file for your site:

User-agent: everyone
Allow: /
Starting today, you have complete control over how search engine bots see your store. #shopifyseohttps://t.co/Hz9Ijj5h1y

— Tobi Lutke (@tobi) June 18, 2021

This is huge news for SEOs and Shopify store owners who have been begging for years to adjust the file. It also shows that Shopify listens to the feedback that SEOs give them and are taking steps to improve the platform from a search standpoint.

So now that we know you can edit the file, let’s talk about how to make those adjustments and situations where you might consider doing so.

What Is The Shopify Robots.txt?

The Shopify robots.txt is a file that instructs search engines as to what URLs they can crawl on your site. Most commonly, the robots.txt file can block search engines from finding low quality pages that shouldn’t be crawled. The Shopify robots.txt is generated by using a file called robots.txt.liquid.

What Does Shopify’s Default Robots.txt Block?

When looking at your out of the box Shopify site, you might notice that a robots.txt file is already configured. You can find this file by navigating to:

domain.com/robots.txt

In this robots.txt file, you’ll see that there are already a good number of preconfigured rules.

The vast majority of these rules are useful to keep search engines from crawling unnecessary pages. Below are some of the most important rules in the default Shopify robots.txt file:

• Disallow: /search – Blocks internal site search
• Disallow: /cart – Blocks the Shopping Cart page
• Disallow: /checkout – Blocks the Checkout page
• Disallow: /account – Blocks the account page
• Disallow: /collections/*+* – Blocks duplicate category pages generated by the faceted navigation
• Sitemap: [Sitemap Links] – References the sitemap.xml link

Overall, Shopify’s default rules do a pretty good job of blocking the crawl of lower quality Web pages for most sites. In fact, it’s likely that the majority of Shopify store owners don’t need to make any adjustments to their robots.txt file. The default configuration should be enough to handle most cases. Most Shopify sites generally tend to be smaller in size and crawl control isn’t a huge issue for many of them.

Of course, as more and more sites adopt the Shopify platform, this means that the websites are getting larger and larger. As well, we’re seeing more sites with custom configurations where the default robots.txt rules aren’t enough.

While Shopify’s existing rules do a good job of accounting for most cases, sometimes store owners might need to create additional rules in order to tailor the robots.txt to their site. This can be done by creating and editing a robots.txt.liquid file.

How Do You Create The Shopify Robots.txt.liquid?

You can create the Shopify robots.txt.liquid file by performing the following steps in your store:

1. In the left sidebar of your Shopify admin page, navigate to Online Store > Themes
2. Select Actions > Edit code
3. Under “Templates”, click the “Add a new template” link
4. Click the left-most dropdown and choose “robots.txt”
5. Select “Create template”

You should then see the Shopify robots.txt.liquid file open in the editor:

How Do You Edit The Shopify Robots.txt File?

Adding A Rule

If you want to add a rule to the Shopify robots.txt, you can do so by adding additional blocks of code to the robots.txt.liquid file.

{%- if group.user_agent.value == ‘*’ -%}

{{ ‘Disallow: [URLPath]‘ }}

{%- endif -%}

For instance, if your Shopify site uses /search-results/ for the internal search function and you want to block it with the robots.txt, you could add the following command:

{%- if group.user_agent.value == ‘*’ -%}

{{ ‘Disallow: /search-results/.*’ }}

{%- endif -%}

If you wanted to block the multiples directories (/search-results/ & /private/) you would add the following two blocks to the file:

{%- if group.user_agent.value == ‘*’ -%}

{{ ‘Disallow: /search-results/.*’ }}

{%- endif -%}

{%- if group.user_agent.value == ‘*’ -%}

{{ ‘Disallow: /private/.*’ }}

{%- endif -%}

This should allow these lines to populate in your Shopify robots.txt file:

Potential Use Cases For A Shopify Robots.txt File

So knowing that the standard robots.txt is generally sufficient for most sites, in what situations would your site benefit from editing Shopify’s robots.txt.liquid file? Below are some of the more common situations when you might want to consider adjusting yours:

Internal Site Search

A general best practice for SEO is to block a site’s internal search via the robots.txt. This is because there are an infinite number of queries that users could enter into a search bar. If Google is able to start crawling these pages, it could lead to a lot of low quality search result pages appearing in the index.

Fortunately, Shopify’s default robots.txt blocks the standard internal search with the following command:

Disallow: /search 

However, many Shopify sites don’t use Shopify’s default internal search. We find that many Shopify sites end up using apps or other internal search technologies. This frequently changes the URL of the internal search. When this happens, your site is no longer protected by Shopify’s default rules.

For instance, on this site the internal search results render at URLs with /pages/search in the path:

This means that these internal search URLs are allowed to be crawled by Google:

This website might want to consider editing Shopify’s robots.txt rules to add custom commands that block Google from crawling the /pages/search directory.

Faceted Navigations

If your site has a faceted navigation, you might want to consider adjusting your Shopify robots.txt file. Faceted navigation are the filtering options you can apply on category pages. They’re generally found on the left-hand side of the page. For example, this Shopify site let’s users filter products by color, size, product type, and more:

When we select the “Black” and “Yellow” color filters, we can see that a URL with the “?color” parameter is loaded:

While Shopify’s default robots.txt does a good job of blocking page paths that a faceted navigation might create, unfortunately it can’t account for every single use case. In this instance, “color” is not blocked which will allow Google to crawl the page.

This might be another instance, where we might want to consider blocking pages with the robots.txt in Shopify. Since a large number of these faceted navigation URLs could be crawled, we might want to consider blocking many of them to reduce the crawl of lower quality/similar pages. This site could determine all of the parameters in the faceted navigation that they would like to block (size, color) and then create rules in the robots.txt to block their crawl.

Sorting Navigation

Similar to faceted navigation functionalities, many eCommerce sites include sorting on their category pages. These pages let users see the products offered on category pages in a different order (Price: low to high, Most relevant, Alphabetically, etc).

The issue this creates is that these pages contain duplicate/similar content as they are simply variations of the original category page but with the products in a different order. Below you can see how when selecting “Alphabetically, A-Z”, a parameterized URL is created that sorts products alphabetically. This URL uses the “?q” parameter appended to the end of it:

Of course this isn’t a unique URL that should be crawled and indexed as it’s simply the same products as the original category page sorted in a different order. This Shopify site might want to consider adding a robots.txt rule that blocks the crawl of all “?q” URLs.

Conclusion

Shopify’s robots.txt.liquid file allows SEOs to have much greater control over the crawl of their site then they once did before. While for most sites Shopify’s default robots.txt should be sufficient at keeping search engines out of undesirable areas, you might want to consider adjustments to it if you notice that an edge case applies to you. Generally, the larger your store is and the more customization you’ve done to it, the more likely it is you’ll want to make adjustments to the robots.txt file. If you have any questions about the robots.txt or Shopify SEO agency services, feel free to reach out!

Other Shopify SEO Resources

• Shopify Speed Optimization
• Improving Shopify Duplicate Content
• Shopify Sitemap.xml Guide
• Shopify Structured Data
• Shopify SEO Tools
• Shopify Plus SEO
• All Shopify SEO Articles

Shopify Robots.txt Guide: How To Edit The Robots.txt.liquid is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

It’s no surprise that we’re seeing more and more websites utilizing Shopify and Shopify Plus. While it’s easy to point to the pandemic as the event that has triggered this “eCommerce renaissance”, the data shows that it’s been going on well before that. Looking at Shopify Plus usage statistics on BuiltWith, we can see that the platform has been gaining popularity since 2017.

While we’ve previously written about our best practices for general Shopify SEO, we wanted to write a more specific guide for Shopify Plus SEO. While the underlying technology is largely the same, we generally see different types of clients adopting the Shopify Plus platform. These are generally larger brands with bigger marketing teams.

What Is Shopify Plus SEO?

Shopify Plus SEO is a set of search engine optimization adjustments to Shopify Plus sites. Shopify Plus SEO initiatives include removing duplicate product page links, reducing JavaScript-dependent content, faceted navigation adjustments and more.

Related Content:

• Technical SEO Agency
• Ecommerce SEO Agency
• Shopify SEO Services
• Franchise SEO Agency
• Enterprise SEO Services

Shopify Plus sites tend to have larger inventories, more customization, and utilize more complex marketing technologies. With this in mind, we wanted to detail our best practices for when working with these types from an SEO perspective and the common issues a Shopify Plus store might encounter.

1. Duplicate Product Pages

One of the biggest SEO issues we find on Shopify Plus websites is the existence of duplicate content. Duplicate content occurs when the same content can be accessed at two or more unique URLs. Shopify Plus sites have a variety of ways in which they create duplicate content.

The first is duplicate product pages. Oftentimes, category pages on Shopify Plus will link to duplicate product pages.

For example, let’s take a look at the Untuckit website. We can notice that navigating to one of their product pages from a category page, we find the “Flannel Manning Shirt” (now discontinued). We can see that the URL has both /collections/ and /products/ in the URL path:

https://www.untuckit.com/collections/flannels/products/manning

However, when we check the canonical tag of that particular page, we can see it points to another URL altogether. This URL only has /products/ the path: https://www.untuckit.com/products/manning

When we navigate to this page, we can see that it’s actually an exact duplicate of the URL listed above.

This creates an issue for Shopify Plus SEO. This means that the page that’s getting linked to from the category page is not the canonical URL. Instead, the category page is linking to a duplicate page that’s also capable of getting crawled/indexed.

As well, the larger issue is that this set up creates duplicate content at scale. Every single product linked to from category pages is a duplicate page. This means that Shopify Plus sites create a lot of potential duplicate content for important pages for SEO.

While the canonical tag is helpful to give Google consolidation signals for indexation, canonical tags are hints and not directives. This means that Google can ignore canonical tags and index the duplicate anyway.

Fortunately, there is a way to ensure that your Shopify Plus website’s category pages link to the correct product pages. By making an adjustment to the product-grid-item.liquid file, you can ensure that Shopify links to the correct product URLs on all of your site’s category pages. To learn more about how to fix this, you can read our guide on Shopify duplicate content.

2. JavaScript Rendered Content

Another major SEO consideration for Shopify Plus sites is JavaScript rendered content. Websites using Shopify Plus are more prone to having JavaScript crawling and indexing issues. This is because these stores generally carry larger inventories and are used by bigger brands. As a result, it’s more likely that developers have made adjustments or implemented JavaScript frameworks to deliver the content over the lifetime of the site.

While Google has gotten much better at crawling and indexing JavaScript over the years, this process still isn’t perfect. JavaScript SEO best practices still need to be followed for any site using the technology. If JavaScript hinders or outright hides content from getting crawled and indexed by Googlebot, this can have a deterrent effect on rankings.

For example, let’s take a look at Motherhood Maternity’s Nursing Bras category page. We can see that when we navigate to the URL, a standard category page is loaded. Here we can see the navigation, banner image, and product listings.

However, when turn off JavaScript, we see that the banner image and product listings are nowhere to be found:

In order to further inspect this, we can use “View Source” to see the raw HTML of the page. This will show us the content of the page that’s accessible to search engines before any JavaScript is executed. When searching around for products such as the “Average Busted Seamless Maternity And Nursing Bra”, we can see that it cannot be found on the page:

This shows us that JavaScript is required in order to properly load key content of the page as isn’t accessible in the raw HTML. This is an indication that we’ll want to further review if Google is able to properly index our product listings.

When looking at Motherhood Maternity’s organic traffic, we can see that it has sharply declined over the past couple of years.

It’s possible that Google is having trouble indexing the JavaScript content which could be a source of the traffic drops. Since they use the FastSimon technology, they might want to test if pre-rendering the content helps improve organic rankings.

If your site is on Shopify Plus, you definitely want to be auditing your usage of JavaScript and testing to see if Google can properly index any JS rendered content. My colleague Pierce Brelinsky has written a fantastic JavaScript SEO guide that will help walk you through the process.

3. Faceted Navigation

Another major SEO consideration for Shopify Plus sites is faceted navigation. As Shopify Plus sites are likely to have larger inventories, they’re more likely to have implemented a faceted navigation. This functionality allows users to easily sort and filter category pages across different criteria (Size, Price, Material) to find the products most relevant to them. Faceted navigation can be great for users who are trying to browse through a large variety of products.

However, faceted navigations can cause significant SEO issues by creating a large amount of duplicate content. In many setups, every facet that’s selected creates a new URL. These URLs can quickly add up to a huge number of pages. In a case study from Google, they found that their store with 158 products created 380,000 URLs! URLs created by the faceted navigation are generally duplicate or similar to the source page as they only contain sorted and filtered views of the root category page. This can create large duplicate content issues.

Using an example, we can see that very thing on the Women’s Eyeglasses category page on Bonlook.

This category page contains a faceted navigation that allows users to filter by different parameters such as Size, Gender, Shape, and more:

When selecting options from the faceted navigation, we can see that this changes the URL, creating a unique path for Google to crawl. When selecting the “Black”, “Female”, and “Cat Eye” options, we can see that this loads the following URL:

Notice how this content is very similar to the root category page. This could definitely be considered similar or duplicate content. If Google is able to index all of the parameterized pages created by the faceted navigation, this could lead to massive duplicate content issues.

Fortunately, this content is blocked by Shopify’s default rules in the robots.txt file. This prevents Google from crawling the many duplicate pages created by the faceted navigation.

However, if your Shopify Plus store uses faceted navigation, you’ll want to be sure to analyze if Google is able to crawl and index the large number of URLs that could be created. Oftentimes, we see that faceted navigations are not blocked by Shopify’s default robots.txt rules. This could lead to a large amount of crawl budget focused on low quality and duplicate pages.

4. Internal Site Search

Internal site search is another important part of Shopify Plus sites. As these sites have a large number of SKUs, it becomes critical for users to be able to use this functionality in order to quickly access the products they’re looking for on the store. If your store doesn’t have internal site search, we’d highly recommend adding it in a prominent location. Our data has shown that users who utilize internal site search can be much more likely to convert than users who don’t use it.

With internal site search, you need to be testing it to make sure that it’s not causing any SEO problems. The most common issue we find is that some Shopify stores can allow their internal search page to be crawled and potentially indexed. This could result in low quality pages in Google’s index that could impact the quality assessment of the rest of the site.

When looking at the Lord & Taylor website, we can see that they allow their internal search to be crawled. For instance, below we can see an internal search result page when looking for “Tote Bags.”

While this page is useful for users looking for Tote Bags, this is not a page that we would want to be crawled or indexed. Lord & Taylor already has created a Tote Bags category page that should be the primary ranking page for SEO.

However, when looking at their robots.txt file, we can see that Lord & Taylor does not block this page from being crawled by Googlebot:

As a result, Lord & Taylor might want to take steps to adjust their Shopify robots.txt file to block the crawling of their internal search pages. This will ensure that Google is not able to crawl through these low quality pages and potentially index them.

If you’re using internal site search, we recommend that you perform tests to ensure that Google cannot crawl your internal site search pages. If it can, we recommend creating rules in the Shopify robots.txt.liquid file to block Google from crawling them.

5. Structured Data

When working with any eCommerce site, structured data is an absolute must to consider. Structured data is a code that you can add to your website’s pages that makes it easier for search engines to understand the content of your page. Structured data can more directly tell search engines what the overall topic of a page is about as opposed to them having to interpret the content.

When working with Shopify Plus sites, we’ve found that many sites have inconsistent structured data. In most cases, elements such as the theme and Shopify apps automatically add structured data to the site. Unfortunately, most of the time we see that these technologies result in incorrect, incomplete, or duplicate structured data on the site.

For instance, here’s an example of a product page on Huel.com that doesn’t contain any structured data.

Overall, we recommend that Shopify Plus sites use the following structured data mappings. Please note that every page on your site should only have a single instance of each schema element:

1. Home Page: Organization
2. Category Pages: CollectionPage or OfferCatalog
3. Product Pages: Product
4. Blog Posts: Article

When it comes to implementation, you first need to check what structured data exists on each of your different page types. You can use tools like the Schema Validator to test this. You’ll then need to create a plan to ensure that the structured data mappings above get applied to each page type. This might involve working with a developer to remove some of the existing schema and then adding the proper mapped structured data.

If you don’t have developer resources, we highly recommend using Schema App Total Schema Markup to add schema to your Shopify site. This app does a fantastic job of implementing the mappings above and can also help you remove structured data added by the theme without the help of a developer.

For a deeper dive on Shopify Plus schema, you can read our Guide To Shopify Structured Data.

6. Site Speed

Performance is always something that’s top of mind for enterprise sites. Generally speaking, bigger brands that have larger marketing teams will have websites that end up getting slower over the long run. This is often because these sites are more prone to have different functionalities and technologies added to them over time. Analytics teams will add more tracking scripts and marketing teams request functionalities such as chatbots and animations. As a result, this can lead to slower performance on enterprise sites.

Data from HTTP Archive

The good news for Shopify Plus sites is that the Shopify is already pretty fast out of the box. Recent data shows that the Shopify platform generally has some of the best Core Web Vitals of any other popular CMS (WordPress, Drupal, Wix, etc). This sets up Shopify store owners in a great position for site performance.

Of course, there are always initiatives that can be done to improve site performance. A study from Walmart discovered that every one second improvement in site performance can result in a +2% conversion rate for your site. For this reason, Shopify Plus sites need to keep performance top of mind.

From our years of working with Shopify sites, we’ve started to develop frameworks to help speed up Shopify stores. Below are some of the techniques and thought processes we use to help improve Shopify Plus performance:

1. Audit Shopify apps and remove any unused or unnecessary ones.
2. Implement lazy loading using the lasysizes.js library
3. Ensure images are only uploaded at their display size
4. Use Crush.pics to automatically compress Shopify images
5. If starting a new store, find a lightweight Shopify theme

If you want more details on how to improve your store’s performance, you can read our Shopify Speed Optimization Guide.

Conclusion

While the SEO basics are the same between Shopify and Shopify Plus, the types of brands on Shopify Plus will most likely face more complex challenges. Larger inventories to manage, JavaScript frameworks, and increased technologies are all challenges that Shopify Plus stores are likely to face and store owners need to be aware of how these elements impact SEO. Hopefully this guide serves as a good starting point to helping improve your Shopify Plus store from an SEO perspective. If you have any questions about our Shopify Plus SEO services, please reach out to us!

Other Shopify SEO Resources

• Shopify Speed Optimization
• Improving Shopify Duplicate Content
• Shopify Sitemap.xml Guide
• Shopify Structured Data & Schema
• Shopify Robots.txt Guide
• Shopify SEO Tools
• All Shopify SEO Articles

A Guide To Shopify Plus SEO is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

There are a lot of elements that can impact your Shopify site’s SEO. One of these elements is the Shopify sitemap. Sitemap.xml files can be a bit confusing to Shopify site owners because they’re really not meant for their site’s users, only for the search engines that crawl and index their content.

Essentially, sitemap.xml files make it easier for Google, and other search engines, to discover your site’s content. Instead of having to rely on confusing site architecture, the sitemap.xml provides search engines with another avenue to find your site’s content. All things being equal, URLs within your sitemap.xml will get crawled more often and will provide canonical signals to Google so, ideally, your most important pages will be included in the sitemap.xml.

Related Content:

• Technical SEO Agency
• Ecommerce SEO Agency
• Shopify SEO Services
• Enterprise SEO Services

At Go Fish Digital, we work with quite a few Shopify sites and are familiar with how sitemap.xml files are generated by the CMS. To give you a better understanding of what they are and how to use them, we wanted to provide a reference guide for all Shopify sitemap.xml questions you might have.

Let’s begin!

Table Of Contents

• What Is A Shopify Sitemap?
• Where Can I Find It?
• What’s Included The Sitemap?
• Can I Edit The Sitemap?
• How Do I Submit My Shopify Sitemap To Google Search Console?
• Sitemap.xml Fetch Errors
• Indexed, not submitted in sitemap
• Resources

What Is A Shopify Sitemap?

A Shopify sitemap is an XML file that search engines use to find your website’s URLs. The Shopify sitemap is automatically generated and creates links to your product, category, blog, and marketing pages. The Shopify sitemap.xml cannot be manually adjusted.

Where Can I Find My Shopify Sitemap?

You can find your sitemap.xml by simply appending the text “/sitemap.xml” to the end of your root domain. Below you can see an example of how to access the sitemap for the domain “example.com”

https://example.com/sitemap.xml

What’s in the Sitemap?

Sitemap Index File

Once you’ve navigated here, you’ll be able to see your Shopify site’s sitemap index file. A sitemap.xml index file is a parent sitemap that contains links to all of your website’s sitemaps. These links are called child sitemaps and are generally categorized by page type.

In the screenshot below, there are four child sitemap links:

An example of a Shopify sitemap index file

Generally, Shopify will create four child sitemaps for the following page types:

• Product Pages (sitemap_products_1.xml)
• Collection Pages (sitemap_collections_1.xml)
• Blog Posts (sitemap_blogs_1.xml)
• Pages (sitemap_pages_1.xml)

This helps categorize your sitemap.xml into logical page groupings. If your site has a large selection of products, you may see Shopify create other child sitemaps in the index file. These additional child sitemaps will auto-generate once the initial child sitemap has reached over 5,000 URLs*:

*This has been adjusted from 10,000 to 5,000 after clarification from Shopify’s International Growth SEO Lead, Jackson Lo

sitemap_products_1 is close to 10,000 URLs. This creates a new child sitemap. 

Sitemap.xml files cannot be larger than 50,000 URLs. Creating these additional child sitemaps is Shopify’s way of staying under that limit.

Child Sitemap File

When navigating to a particular child sitemap link, you will see a list of URLs that belongs to that particular page type. This provides Google and other search engines with a large list of all of the URLs in that particular category. This helps them easily discover all of your site’s content without having to rely on your site’s architecture to do so.

When analyzing your Shopify child sitemaps, you’ll find that each entry may contain a few different elements:

• <url>: The URL of that particular page
• <lastmod>: The last modification date of the page
• <changefreq>: An estimate of how often the page is likely to change
• <image:loc>: The featured image of that page
• <image:title>: The title of the page the image is on

An example child sitemap entry

All of these individual entries in the child sitemaps should contain all of your site’s content.

Can You Edit Your Sitemap or Upload Your Own Custom One?

Unfortunately, as of the date of this post, you cannot upload your own sitemap.xml to Shopify and must use their autogenerated file. This has been confirmed by Shopify support. 

While this can be a bit limiting, overall we prefer autogenerated options for sitemap.xml files. If you’re using a custom static solution, this might not update your sitemap as new pages are added and removed from your store. This could be a big issue as inventory is constantly changing in eCommerce stores. Overall, however, we’ve found that Shopify’s autogenerated sitemap.xml is a good solution for our clients.

Google Search Console

How Do You Submit Your Shopify Sitemap?

You can easily submit your Shopify sitemap to Google Search Console in the following ways:

1. Navigate To Google Search Console
2. In the left-side bar, navigate to “Sitemaps”
3. Find the  “Add a new sitemap” form
4. Enter the text “sitemap.xml” in the “Enter sitemap URL” field
5. Click “Submit”

Google Search Console Couldn’t Fetch The Sitemap?

Unfortunately, this appears to be a known problem in the new Google Search Console that impacts users of CMS’s other than Shopify. It is commonly associated with a bug in Search Console and there aren’t any easy fixes that appear to be readily available.

If you do see this error occur when you submit your Shopify sitemap, be sure that your Search Console property is set up correctly. If you’ve set up Search Console using your myshopify.com subdomain, this might be the issue. Instead, create a Search Console property using your actual root domain.

“Indexed, not submitted in sitemap” In The Index Coverage Report?

If you use Google Search Console and any of its reporting, you may be familiar with the Index Coverage report. This is a fantastic tool that provides you actual data about how Google is crawling and indexing your URLs. This report provides you with great information about how Google is handling elements such as your canonical URLs, 404 errors, and URL parameters.

The Index Coverage Report also provides information about how Google is processing your sitemap.xml files. You can find this data in Search Console by going to Coverage > Valid > Index, not submitted in sitemap. For a few Shopify clients, we’ve found that Google will occasionally report URLs here:

Pages that are indexed but not in the sitemap.xml

Generally, we’ve found that URLs reported here aren’t high priority items to fix. Some common reasons we see Shopify reporting URLs as “Indexed, not submitted in sitemap” include:

• False positives: Oftentimes we find that the URLs reported here are actually contained in the Shopify sitemap
• /collections/all/ pages: Shopify doesn’t seem to include these and their paginated URLs in the sitemap.xml
• Pagination: Oftentimes we’ll see examples of pagination excluded from your sitemap.xml

If this is something that you want to explore more, here’s how you can identify issues:

1. Export all of the “Indexed, not submitted in sitemap” URLs in Search Console to an Excel spreadsheet
2. Crawl these using Screaming Frog in “List Mode”
3. After the crawl is complete, navigate to “Crawl Analysis” and click “Start”
4. Navigate to the “Sitemaps” report in Screaming Frog and find “URLs not in Sitemap”. This will show you all of the URLs that are excluded from your sitemap.xml

This should provide you with additional insights on the URLs that are actually indexed but excluded from your sitemap.xml file. We definitely recommend leaning on the data provided in Screaming Frog as opposed to Search Console as it’s more likely to give an accurate view of what’s contained in your sitemap file.

Conclusion

Hopefully, you now feel like you have a better understanding of your Shopify store’s sitemap.xml file and what its primary function is. While it may be confusing for users, your sitemap.xml file’s primary goal is to make it easier for Google to crawl your website’s content. This is especially important for eCommerce sites because Google can have a harder time finding the content on larger sites if it’s only navigating through its standard architecture. A sitemap.xml file provides protection against that by giving search engines a “home base” list to crawl through.

If you have any questions about sitemap.xml files or our Shopify SEO services feel free to reach out and let us know!

Other Shopify SEO Resources

• Shopify Speed Optimization
• Improving Shopify Duplicate Content
• Shopify Robots.txt Guide
• Shopify Structured Data
• Shopify SEO Tools
• Shopify Plus SEO
• All Shopify SEO Articles

A Guide To Shopify Sitemaps is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Related Content:

• Dentist SEO Agency
• Franchise SEO Agency
• WordPress SEO Services

Fortunately, at Go Fish Digital we have a lot of experience in providing digital marketing support for the dental community. While there are many different digital marketing channels that you can use, there are some that are a particularly good match for the localized nature of dental businesses.

What Are The Best Digital Marketing Strategies For Dentists?

The best digital marketing strategies for dentists are:

• Local SEO
• Traditional SEO
• Google Search Ads
• Local Search Ads
• Content Marketing
• Email Marketing
• UX Improvements
• Reputation Management

Below you can find more information on each one.

1. Local SEO For Dentists

In dentist digital marketing, one of the most important areas of SEO is the “map pack” results that you see in Google’s search results. These are a type of local SEO result that you see when searching for businesses that serve a particular geographical area. Oftentimes, you’ll see these results when you search for keywords that contain geographical information (city/town/neighborhood) or when users query terms like “near me”.

However, this isn’t the only time when Google will show local results. Even broader keyword searches will show them. Take this example of a search for “dentist” where you can see Google displaying dental practices in the immediate area.

This is because even though the geography isn’t specified, Google implicitly understands that users are looking for local businesses to solve a local need. Therefore, the search engine only shows results in that particular area.

This is an extremely powerful concept for dental businesses to understand. This means that your company could appear for very broad keywords such as “dentist” or “cosmetic dentist” in your local geography. In order to improve the chances that your business appears in these results, you’ll want to be sure that you’re implementing local SEO best practices. While there are a variety of strategies here, one of the best ones that you can implement is claiming and optimizing your Google Business profile.

Google Business Profile Optimization

Your Google Business profile is the single most important element of your dental local SEO strategy. Without one, your business won’t be eligible to appear in the map pack results.

The first step you should take is to claim your Google Business profile. To start this process, you’ll simply:

1. Search for your practice name on Google Maps
2. If you find your business address, you’ll select it and choose “Claim this business”

Once you’ve claimed your business, your next step is to ensure that you’ve properly set your business categories. If you don’t set your categories, you won’t be eligible to appear in the local results for keywords related to those categories. You’ll want to be sure that this is filled out as thoroughly as possible.

Here you can see categories set for an orthodontist business that also provides dental implants.

While the categories that you set will be completely custom to your business, here are some popular ones that you could consider choosing from:

• Dentist
• Cosmetic dentist
• Pediatric dentist
• Dental implants provider
• Dental clinic
• Orthodontist
• Dental hygienist
• Emergency dental service

Doing these steps to claim and optimize your Google Business profile will set you on a good path to ensuring that you have a strong local SEO foundation. Of course, you may need to take this even further and work on generating citations, reviews and local backlinks to your website.

2. Standard SEO

When performing dental digital marketing, you’ll also want to take steps to improve the “standard SEO” of your site. Here, “standard SEO” just means any results in Google that aren’t part of the “map pack listings”. These results won’t have an interactive map or business location pins.

Instead, they’ll look more like the default search results that you’re used to seeing.

These results aren’t influenced by the information in your Google Business profile or other signals like proximity to users. Instead, these results are more based on universal SEO principles such as quality of content, relevant landing pages and internal/external linking signals.

While there are many elements that need to be reviewed from an SEO perspective, one of the best initiatives that your dental practice can take is to ensure that you have dedicated landing pages for all the services that you offer. If your practice offers dental implants, sedation dentistry, and teeth whitening, you’ll want to be sure that you have dedicated pages for each service.

This will ensure that your site has specific pages mapped to your practice areas. Now these pages will be eligible to appear for high intent queries such as “dental implants near me”. Ensure that you inventory all your core services and ensure there’s a matching landing page for each one.

3. Google Search Ads

While SEO initiatives are an extremely lucrative way of improving your dental digital marketing in the long term, it can take time to see results. If you’re looking for immediate return, paid media advertising could be a good path for your practice. With advertising you’ll pay for prominent placements directly but will start seeing results as soon as your campaign begins.

One of the most popular forms of advertising is Google Ads search campaigns. With search campaigns, your practice has the ability to appear at the very top of the search results. Here you can see an example of Google ad results for the keyword “sacramento ca family dentist”

The most powerful feature of Google search ads is that you can choose exactly which keywords you want your results to appear for. For instance, if you want your dentistry to grow more clients for “Dentures” and “Sedation”, you can create campaigns where your results will only appear when users search for keywords related to those practice areas.

With search ads, you’ll be able to leverage the popularity of Google’s ad platform to drive traffic to the exact pages that you want. This helps you connect with customers at the exact moment that they’re looking for your services.

4. Local Search Ads For Dentists

Another way to enhance your dentistry’s digital marketing is to advertise directly on Google Maps using Local Search Ads. By utilizing local search ads, your ads are more integrated into the Google maps experience. This further encourages users to take vital actions such as making calls, requesting appoints or getting driving directions to your office.

Local search ads can often appear at the very top of the map pack, directly above the organic listings.

They can also appear directly in the Google Maps interface as users are scanning a very specific geographic area.

Local search ads will be dedicated by the optimization of your Google Business profile. Before starting them, ensure you followed the steps in the “Google Business Optimization” section to ensure that you have claimed and set all relevant categories for your local business page.

5. Content Marketing

Content marketing is another dental digital marketing strategy that your practice should consider.

Broadly, the premise behind content marketing is to create helpful and educational online resources. These resources help educate and solve the problems you users have, increasing their touch points and affinity for your brand. Over time, content marketing initiatives can help your company be the one that comes to mind when consumers of that content are eventually ready to become customers.

While content marketing can come in many forms, a blog is by far the most popular method. Here, you can write about your solutions to common customer problems that may tie back to your services.

For example, Donald Snyder Orthodontics wrote a specific guide on “Can You Whiten Your Teeth While Wearing Braces?”

As a result, this page generates 1,700 sessions a month for users looking for information on how to solve this specific problem.

Here’s another example of a dentist site that wrote an article on “No Toothbrush? No Toothpaste? No Problem“. This article dives into best practices for how to brush your teeth without toothpaste or toothbrushes and gives several helpful examples. As a result, they perform well in the search results for terms such as “brush teeth without toothpaste”.

Ideally, you’ll want to identify types of problems your potential customers are having and create content that helps solve those problems. From there you’ll create assets on your site that you can show prospective customers, can rank in the search engines or be utilized in your other marketing initiatives.

6. Email Marketing

For almost any business, developing an email list can be a great digital marketing strategy. Email marketing provides a lot of benefits that other digital marketing mediums don’t possess. Emails provide direct access to your core customers and your messaging is less likely to get lost in noisy feeds. Emails are also algorithm independent. Your visibility won’t be at the mercy of major tech companies that make changes to how their algorithms work. Email marketing can help you not only connect with new patients but help maintain your relationships with existing ones.

While how you utilize email will depend on your marketing goals, below are some campaigns that you could consider:

1. Dental health best practices & tips
2. Appointment confirmations & reminders
3. Company news
4. New service & product announcements
5. Internal promotions
6. New patient email sequences

If you’re interested in exploring more, Constant Contact has created a great guide for email marketing best practices for dentists.

7. User Experience Improvements

Reviewing the overall user experience of your site is another great digital marketing strategy for dental sites. This is an extremely scalable approach as UX improvements can help bolster the performance of all your channels. Traffic from search engines, advertising platforms, email marketing and other channels can all be positively impacted.

While there are many ways to think about UX improvement, here are some initiatives that you could look into:

1. Calls to action: Elements such as “Schedule Appointment” CTAs should be easily accessible and highlighted in the design
2. Mobile UX: Can users easily navigate the site and find key information on mobile devices?
3. Website navigation: Can users find key information such as insurance, services, photos, payment and more?
4. Site performance: Faster performance can result in improved conversions from a digital channels?
5. Site imagery: Do your key pages use strong images that clearly demonstrate the content’s value proposition?
6. Trust signals: Do you clearly highlight trust signals such as industry certifications, credentials and reputable organizations?
7. Competitive reviews: How does your UX compare to key competitors in the same market or even different geographies?

Improving the overall UX can be a fantastic way to improve the quality of each session. In turn, this improves the efficiency and performance of all digital channels that are driving traffic to your site.

If you feel that quite a few significant changes need to be made, you might even consider looking for options to completely redesign the site.

8. Reputation Management For Dentists

As your customers get closer to the point of narrowing in on your dentistry, it’s likely that they’ll perform more research online about your specific brand. They’ll want to find any information they can about other people’s experience with your office in terms of the staff, environment, professionalism, wait times and much more.

Generally, to perform this type of research, users will perform searches related to your company or individual practitioners. This is a critical point in the conversion path and could significantly influence whether a user turns into a long-term patient. You’ll want to be certain that you have a strong online reputation and users are mainly encountering positive information about your business.

For example, a user may have had strong interactions with your website by discovering it multiple times via paid advertising and organic results. However, upon looking further into your business, they may encounter negative results that put them off the path of conversion.

To audit your dentistry’s reputation, perform the following searches on Google:

1. Company name
2. Dentist names
3. Company + reviews

If you’re finding any negative results in those searches, you’ll want to take immediate steps towards improving your reputation.

For example, if you’re seeing Yelp pages with lower than 4 stars, you might consider improving Yelp reviews. If you’re finding negative stories or press around your company, you might even consider options to suppress negative search results.

Its also worthwhile to check your reviews on individual review platforms to ensure that users looking via those methods are seeing positive sentiments about your brand. The most popular platforms for dentists include:

1. Google
2. Yelp
3. US News
4. Healthgrades
5. Sharecare

If you’re seriously undertaking dental digital marketing strategies, don’t underrate this step. Ensure all of your hard work isn’t lost due to reputation issues that users could be finding in the search results.

Dentist Digital Marketing: The 8 Best Strategies is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.