Like all merchants in the world, you are surely trying to bring as much targeted traffic as possible interested in your products to your e-commerce site.

And in all possible sources of traffic in web marketing, there is necessarily natural referencing , or free seo, which you have thought about or tried. But how to quickly unlock the main obstacles of your site to be well referenced ?

Even if this does not replace a good monthly seo service in good and due form, these easy-to-implement optimizations, even if you are not too technical, can give the little boost that goes well with your site and it. may allow you to pass in front of your main competitors.

Be careful, most of these modifications require a modification of the Liquid or CSS code of your e-commerce site. Only do this if you understand the risks for your store. Otherwise, ask your favorite e-commerce agency .

Indeed, even if Shopify is a well-designed and optimized solution for natural referencing, it is still necessary to refine your site a little to improve it on the SEO side. This is one of the many added values ​​of going through an agency like Pikka to create your e-commerce site: benefit from the best e-commerce advice and obtain a top-notch site from the start of your project. Because yes of course, all these optimizations are carried out in all the projects that we carry out within the agency.

So let's take a look at 5 tips and optimizations to quickly boost your Shopify's seo independently.

BOOSTING THE SEO OF YOUR SHOPIFY: INSTRUCTIONS

1) Use Ahref (free)

A hrefA href is perhaps one of the best seo tools on the market, it is in any case very well known. But did you know that a totally free version is available for merchants?

This free version, very hard to find on the site, is nevertheless beautiful and available if you are the official owner of the site.

Basically, A href gives you up to 10,000 crawl pages per month to analyze your site. At the rate of one crawl per week on your site, it is therefore 4 automatic SEO audits that can be carried out every month and give you a lot of information and advice to boost your SEO.

No need to install an application, no need to configure anything, this extremely simple manipulation should be “mandatory” for all self-respecting e-commerce managers.

A href will therefore analyze your site every week to tell you about broken links, titles that are too long, missing alt tags, etc.

Frankly, there's no point in doing an SEO audit with an agency if you haven't already used Ahref to audit your site.

The amount of information is just incredible and even worth registering. Well, you can only audit your site and if you have thousands of pages, it won't be a full audit every time.

Despite all this, using the free version of Ahref to identify the weak points in your SEO strategy and the structure of your merchant site is essential in our opinion.

And since we are nice at Pikka, the other tips in this article will certainly be useful to correct the main errors that Ahref may cause you to encounter.

To register for the free version of Ahref's "wemaster tools", go here: https://ahrefs.com/fr/webmaster-tools

2) Pay attention to product URLs

If you browse your Shopify site, you can see that the product urls are not always the same and may vary. But they vary depending on what and is that a problem?

So, the urls at Shopify can vary depending on the path taken by the user to arrive on the product sheet.

If, for example, you go to the “shirts” category and then to a product, there is a good chance that the web address of the product will be: “mysupersite.fr/collections/shirts/name-of-the-product“

Whereas if you arrive on the same product from the homepage or a blog page, you may have the following url: “monsupersite.fr / products / nom-du-produit “

This can be very useful for a whole bunch of navigation and UX functions but since that's not the subject of this article, I won't go into that.

On the seo side on the other hand, this was not a problem a while ago but since Google has become a little difficult with indexing (since September 2021 at least), it can sometimes be a problem for Google to find the right pages. and indexes.

Indeed, Shopify has done things well and only one product page exists, we call it the "canonical url". In this case, on all Shopify sites it is this url: "monsupersite.fr / products / nom -of the product "

But unfortunately, before Google knew how to “replace” the product URL to find the real page, the canonical page. Except that for some time, perhaps to save server resources, to annoy SEOs, to boost Google Ads a little more, we don't know exactly, Google no longer systematically does that.

So sometimes Google will simply consider that the page with “collection” in the url is not a “real” link to your product.

In short, without going into all the technical explanations, today there is a real advantage in “pointing” the product links directly to the canonical urls.

And for that, nothing could be simpler in Shopify .

All you have to do is modify the code of the collection page, more precisely that of all the collection page templates, to change the links that you will see like this:

{{ product.url | within: collection }}

{{ product.url }}

3) Modify the H1 in the logo

Another very classic site construction seo error on a “raw” Shopify site, ie without seo optimization by an agency for example, the H1 under the logo which is found on all pages.

Well, I don't understand that this can still happen and yet, even on Shopify's Dawn theme, the most powerful and the latest official theme, this error exists.

What's the problem ?

By default on many free and paid Shopify themes, your logo is displayed as an H1 and not as an image or simple text.

Unfortunately, interest in SEO is totally nil, even problematic. Indeed, even if it is not the most important rule in SEO but can be just the second: we only use one H1 per page.

Excluding a product or a blog post or otherwise, the H1 will in many cases be the target query you are aiming for. Or at least terms close to your target query.

So certainly not your logo or the name of your company or your e-commerce site.

This therefore creates in the vast majority of cases “duplicate” H1 errors and poor title structure on all your pages.

To be corrected absolutely. You can replace the h1 with a classic span and/or add a css class to it to design it a bit if needed.

To modify the H1, generally go to the “header.liquid” file in your Shopify back office and look for a line like

site name

4) Boost the SEO text description at the bottom of the page

Well, we now have a slightly cleaner site, well monitored for seo and with fewer major errors. Time to do some content! And yes, content is king on the web for referencing.

But how do you add content properly on Shopify, especially on the collections that are used to position yourself on key queries? Well by adding a second text specially designed for natural referencing ! And this is where metafields, one of Shopify's strengths but so underutilized, come into action.

We are therefore going to create a metafield and display it at the bottom of the page to place an SEO text there to better reference the collection pages. And since it will be at the bottom of the page, you can write as much content as you want, it won't bother the user! Good news, this technique is of course compatible with an infinite scroll on the collection page. The best of ux and seo in short for you eshop.

Of course, the text will have to be different on each collection because if you copy the same text, it could cause more problems.

To find out how to do this and in order not to overload this article oriented seo tips, you can read our dedicated article: How to add a second seo text on categories on Shopify?

5) Do not index product filters

Well, you now have a better structured site for SEO, more content on the important pages, but there is still another problem to deal with: reducing the number of pages that Google comes to read on your site.

This concerns a large number of sites regardless of the e-commerce solution . But not all Shopify sites are affected. So how do you identify if this trick is for you or not?

It's very simple: do you have filters on your collections pages? To choose products by size, color, shape, material or other?

Product filters are an amazing UX invention for quickly accessing the right product but can be a pain in the ass. There are countless Magento1.9 sites that, for example, had to review their entire filter system to optimize their SEO.

On Shopify, it's simpler but sometimes you have to take care of the problem.

So, if you use filters on your site, you have to see that each filter will create a new url but also each filter combination.

So you have a number of potential URLs that explode each time you add a filter.

And bad luck, these urls can "poison" the quality of your site in the eyes of Google by creating pages with very low value. We sometimes talk about zombie pages.

In short, to get rid of it, there is a radical method. in two different ways.

We will simply prohibit Google from surfing on these pages and indexing them.

Because yes, while you hope that Google will index your latest content with high added value, it will simply automatically index your thousands of filter pages… don't try to understand, I think even Google is confused.

In short, to optimize this, we will go directly to the code of your theme again.

You have to look for the theme.liquid file this time. It should be quite high in your file list.

You then have to look for the “” tag, we will add a piece of code just before.

Here is the piece of code to add:

{%- if current_tags %}{% endif -%}
It should look like this:

Remember to save your theme and absolutely check that the blocked pages are the right ones! If the manipulation is poorly carried out, it is potentially all the seo of your site which can be seen impacted. Do this only if you have fully understood the changes made.

With this, Google will focus on your “interesting” pages and your crawl budget will be directed towards your real SEO goals.

HOW TO CONTINUE SEO OPTIMIZATIONS?

These first optimizations are the ones that we recommend the most at Pikka during the seo audit of a commercial site or in our monthly SEO support.

To go further, there are obviously still many things to do that we will detail in future articles so subscribe to the newsletter at the bottom of the page, remember to follow us on social networks and contact us via the form if the SEO is the central topic for your Shopify strategy this year!