How do you SEO your Shopify Homepage?

Shopify is the MOST Popular Website Platform of Top Companies

In a study by a SimilarWeb spinoff, SimilarTech, the organization found that over 640k of websites were using Shopify for their ecommerce needs out of 3.1 million sites.  While woocommerce was used by more site owners, the alternative was responsible for  "smaller sites" vs. Shopify being the preferred choice by serious players in ecommerce. 

On Page Optimization Recommendations for your Homepage 

Frankly, whether you're a shopify site or a woocommerce one, you need to optimize your homepage with the standard elements including:

On Page SEO Optimizations for your home:  

• homepage title optimization - representing the page
• meta description  - giving people reason to click
• headers - related to your keywords
• page content - unique value
• images - giving google extra signals
• schema/rich snippets
• mobile friendly
• indexability 

Off Page SEO for your homepage: 

• Backlinks - building your credibility through external influences
  -Anchor text density of backlinks
  -Referring domains
  -Quality of link sources
  -Citations/brand mentions
  -Social metrics
• Internal linking - building your "credit" within your own site/navigation

Technical SEO Recommendations for your home: 

• Speed - the faster, the better
• Security - nobody wants to be taken advantage of
• HTML, JavaScript & CSS usage
• Crawling
• User friendliness
• Canonical tags 
• Hreflang tags 

If you need further explanation & help with your ecommerce needs, we're happy to help you as the Premier Shopify Ecommerce SEO Agency.  Contact us today for a proposal.  

Search Engine Optimization for your Shopify Homepage

Are there specific optimizations you have to carry out for a Shopify site? 

Fortunately, some of the SEO you need to do on your homepage is already baked into Shopify.  For example, the technical SEO item "canonicalization" is auto-generated to make sure you have an individual target for each of your page's content.  With google's "deduplication system" in their algorithm, you'll want to prevent duplicate content throughout. 

"Searches on Google may find thousands or even millions of matching web pages. Some of these may be very similar to each other. In such cases, our systems show only the most relevant results to avoid unhelpful duplication. Learn more about how deduplication works and how to see omitted results if desired, when deduplication happens.

Deduplication also happens with featured snippets. If a web page listing is elevated to become a featured snippet, we don't repeat the listing later on the first page of results. This declutters the results and helps people locate relevant information more easily."

~Google Search Central (source)

Having this automatically done for you takes care of this step. 

Shopify sites have sitemaps and robots.txt files also automatically generated.  

Lastly, the themes automatically generate title tags -- so having your store name to pull into the title will be a step ahead of any business that uses another platform and defaults to "home" or other undescriptive or non-targeted keyword(s) that don't help your visibility at all.  

Now, with that said, you will want to strategize and apply some of the recommendations we share about homepage titles for better SEO.  

Is SEO different for homepages built out in Shopify? 

As you know, you can add keywords you're targeting into your Shopify pages in the following: 

• Page Titles
• Image ALT Text
• Meta Descriptions
• Page Content

For detailed instructions, view the following video explaining how you can implement these 4 elements.  Do note, the video does talk about much more to SEO your Shopify store.   

How to set a Shopify Homepage Title? 

As you now know, if you didn't, the homepage title could be critical to the success of the site.  To change it from the automatically generated title, you: 

1. Navigate to the "Online Store" from your Shopify Admin. 
2. In "Online Store," click on "Preferences." 
3. Add the new "Homepage title" and "Homepage meta description" in their respective fields

And for recommendations on the homepage title, we give important strategies here.