Shopify as a platform does a lot of the SEO work for you, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t do things on your end to improve on some of the work they’ve done. You can still tweak your titles and meta-descriptions to make your site more visible and target high search/buying intent keywords. There are also things that you can do with your navigation and other on-page elements. Let’s take a look at a few actionable SEO tips for Shopify websites.

Optimize Your Images

One of the biggest mistakes people make with Shopify is not adding ALT text to their images. Some people do that out of sheer laziness while others don’t know how to add ALT tags or don‘t understand their importance.

Alt tags will increase the amount of readable content you have on your pages and will make your site easier to categorize and find on search engines. Alt tags will also allow your users to see what images are about if they can’t load for some reason. Always take the time to add highly relevant tags to your images.

Another thing you want to watch out for is the size of your images. The smaller the file size is, the faster the site will load, and this will allow you to score points with search engines. You can make the image file sizes smaller without compromising their quality by either compressing them or using a smaller format. If you’re using PNG images, for instance, then you could choose jpeg images instead.

Clean Up Your Navigation

SEO is as much about keywords and incoming links as it is about user experience and one of the factors that influence user experience the most is navigation.

You need to make your navigation as clean and efficient as possible. You not only have to make sure that it’s clear and categories are clearly demarcated, but you also have to make the path from the home page to products as easy as possible.

The optimal navigational structure should be homepage > product categories > product page. The shorter the path the better. This will remove confusion and improve many of your engagement metrics, so if your current structure is more convoluted, you need to fix it right now.

Submit Your Site Map

A lot of people don’t know what a site map is and those who do often don’t take the time to submit them because they assume that Shopify stores will always get indexed.

But submitting your site map will do more than simply get your site indexed. It will also tell Google exactly which pages need to be crawled regularly and updated. So, take the sitemap generated by Shopify and submit it to Google’s search console. You should submit to the Bing Webmaster Tool as well.

There are tons of things that you can do to make your Shopify site perform better on search engines. Follow these few tips and look for other ways to optimize your site both for search engines and human visitors.