Team up with an award-winning SEO agency that has more than a decade of experience in the Shopify platform. We will efficiently resolve technical SEO issues, start working on on-page SEO tactics, and help you put together an off-page SEO plan to improve your online rankings.
WebCitz is a long-term Shopify SEO agency specializing in optimizing Shopify websites. We typically help Shopify website owners optimize their search results for both local and national exposure. The SEO packages we recommend will depend on your target market being local or national, as well as the competition across your target phrases. Before we start any serious content building or inbound linking, we like to make sure your Shopify website is mobile-friendly, fast loading and has clear conversion paths. Without a solid framework in place, your Shopify website will be doomed from the start since you'll just spend money to bring people to a poor-quality website. After the initial Shopify SEO work is complete, we start working to improve content, page structure, internal linking and a wide-range of other factors. The SEO industry isn't lacking in individuals and companies claiming to be experts in search engine optimization, but you likely found our website from a Google search result. It is also quite possible you aren't even located in the same city as our company, even though we are a 100% USA-based company that doesn't outsource. The same way we were able to capture your interest in our Shopify SEO services is how we will help you capture your own potential customers. If it works for us, we can make it work for you!
You are in complete control of your SEO budget. Answer a few simple questions about your business and our SEO cost calculator will show you how affordable our SEO services can be for you. We are happy to work with any budget as long as expectations are realistic for how much can be accomplished each month. You can always modify the budget for your SEO campaign. This SEO calculator helps you understand the factors involved in calculating an estimate for your SEO services.
WebCitz does not have fixed-rate prices for Shopify SEO services. If you are interested in hiring our team to perform your Shopify SEO, we will work with you to determine the proper mixture of on-page, off-page, and technical SEO services.
We are happy to recommend a monthly budget for your Shopify SEO services after determining your goals, but ultimately it comes down to working within your SEO budget. If our recommendation exceeds your SEO budget, our team can still work with your company if you understand the results will come at a slower pace. If you can afford a higher budget than our recommendation, we will be able to deliver faster results by performing more SEO work within your Shopify SEO campaign each month.
Shopify SEO services typically focus on search engine optimization for Shopify websites, which may include SEO services specific to the Shopify platform. Despite the fact that a Shopify store offers some useful SEO features such as a blog and the ability to create 301 redirects, it can also introduce issues such as duplicate content that could affect rankings. The following are some of the most common Shopify SEO recommendations:
When it comes to SEO, duplicate content is one of the most pressing issues Shopify has created. When two URLs contain the same or similar content, it is considered duplicate content. The problem is that search engines might not be able to determine which of the two pages should be considered the canonical version. In addition, many times link signals are split between pages.
The following are some examples of how Shopify creates duplicate content:
This problem is created by Shopify within their product pages. Shopify stores can render their /products/ pages at two separate URL paths by default:
Shopify addresses this issue by ensuring that all collections/.*/products/ pages contain a canonical link to the corresponding products/ page. Observe how the URL in the address differs from the "canonical" field.
While this certainly helps Google consolidate duplicate content, the internal linking structure presents a more alarming issue. Shopify will link to the non-canonical version of all of your product pages by default.
Furthermore, we have seen Shopify link to non-canonical versions of URLs when websites utilize "swatch" internal links that point to other color variants.
As a result, Shopify builds your entire site architecture around non-canonical links by default. This creates a high-priority search engine optimization problem, since the website is sending Google conflicting signals:
However, the URLs that we link to most often do not correspond to those we wish to rank in Google.
In general, canonical tags are respected, but Google treats them as hints rather than directives. This means that you're relying on Google to make a judgement about whether or not a page is duplicated each time it crawls it. It is better not to leave this up to chance, especially when dealing with content at scale.
Fortunately, there is a relatively easy fix for this that requires adjusting the product.grid-item.liquid file.
Several Shopify sites have also been observed to duplicate content due to the site's pagination. More specifically, the first collection page of a particular series is duplicated. Once you are on a paginated URL in a series, the link to the first page will contain "?page=1"
However, this will almost always result in a duplicate page. A URL with "?page=1" will almost always contain the same content as the non-parameterized URL unless additional actions are taken. This again can be remedied through a modification to the liquid files.
It is Shopify's default setting to generate a robots.txt file for your store with a number of prewritten "Disallow" commands. In most cases, Shopify's default robots.txt rules are sufficient for most store owners.
The following areas of the website will not be crawled by Shopify:
It is possible, however, that you may need to adjust the robots.txt file as Shopify stores become larger and more customized. The good news is that Shopify now offers the ability to update the robots.txt file as of June 2021.
The store owner must create a robots.txt.liquid file and then create custom rules to specify any changes in the Shopify robots.txt file.
The following steps can be followed by store owners to create a robots.txt.liquid file:
This should create the Shopify robots.txt.liquid file. By adding liquid code to your robots.txt.liquid file, you can then add rules. It is not difficult to add this code, and Shopify does a good job of explaining how to do it in their official documentation. These steps should allow you to have much greater control over which URLs are crawled by Shopify.
Shopify automatically generates a sitemap.xml index file at the URL path "domain.com/sitemap.xml". Accordingly, Shopify's sitemap.xml index file will automatically link to child sitemaps containing URLs of the following page types:
The sitemap.xml file will be dynamically updated as new pages are added or removed from the site. In general, the Shopify sitemap.xml is ready to use out of the box and does not require any modifications.
It is important to be aware that Shopify will include any published pages in the sitemap.xml file. The major problem we see is the inclusion of pages that are published but no longer linked to on the site in the sitemap.xml file. The purpose of crawling your sitemap.xml is to identify instances of published pages that are included in the sitemap but are not important for search engines to crawl.
The Shopify platform allows you to use redirects out-of-the-box, which is terrific. It can be used to consolidate old/expired pages or any other content that no longer exists. You may do so by visiting the following location in the Shopify admin area:
It is important to remember that you will need to delete a page before you can implement a redirect on Shopify. As a result, you must be certain that you will not be using the page in the future.
To import redirects in bulk, we recommend Matrixify.
In general, Shopify does a good job with structured data. Many Shopify themes include "Product" markup, which provides Google with key information about your product, such as its name, description, price, etc. Most themes take care of this for you, since structured data is probably the most important element of any e-commerce site.
It would be beneficial for Shopify sites to add structured data to collections pages as well. To accomplish this, it is necessary to add the Product structured data to each individual product link in the product listing page.
In addition, if you plan to use Shopify's blog functionality, you should use the "Article" structured data type. This is a great schema type that tells Google that your blog content is editorial in nature. Of all informational content schema, "Article" seems to be the one that Google may prefer since it is mentioned in their official documentation. The "BlogPosting" schema is also a type of structured data that can be added to your Shopify blog.
We regularly add breadcrumb internal links with BreadcrumbList structured data to Shopify sites. Having breadcrumbs on an e-commerce website is vital, since they provide users with easy-to-use internal links that indicate where they are within a site's hierarchy. These breadcrumbs can also assist Google in understanding how the website is structured. In general, we recommend adding site breadcrumbs to Shopify sites and marking them up with BreadcrumbList structured data in order to assist Google in understanding those internal links.
Having a developer on hand can be helpful if you wish to implement structured data. This will ensure that your site will always have these schema elements.
If your development resources are limited, we recommend Schema App Total Schema Markup. Structured data types, such as Product and BlogPosting schema, will be incorporated on the appropriate webpages of the site. Additionally, OfferCatalog schema will be added to every product within a category page.
We hear a lot of complaints about Shopify's slow loading times. However, in comparison with other e-commerce platforms, Shopify performs quite well. As a default feature, Shopify uses the Fastly CDN and leverages browser caching, which gives you a solid performance foundation.
Below are the things we will generally advise our clients to do in order to improve performance:
When searching for the most experienced SEO experts, it is important to review each SEO agency for communication, availability, past results and client satisfaction. This will help ensure proper expectations are set from the beginning of the project, which will give you the most experienced chance for long-term SEO success. You will find WebCitz to be one of the highest rated SEO providers in the USA! Check out how we've been able to help companies implement white-hat SEO strategies.
When looking for the best SEO experts in the United States, it is important to review each SEO agency for communication, availability, past results and client satisfaction. This will help ensure proper expectations are set from the beginning of the project, which will give you the best chance for long-term SEO success. You will find WebCitz to be one of the highest rated SEO providers in the USA! Check out how we've been able to help companies throughout the United States implement white-hat SEO strategies.
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