Shopify SEO Theme selection for your Shopify store is only a minor element of an SEO strategy, but it’s a smart place to start. Here are 13 ways of keeping an eye on it. This all-in-one eCommerce platform makes starting, growing, and running an online business simple. People can find your store organically on Google, Bing, and other search engines if you design it with SEO in mind.
Shopify themes allow you to personalize your store and make it genuinely one-of-a-kind. But which is the most effective Shopify SEO Theme?
There’s more to consider than appearances when choosing a theme. In this blog, you’ll discover how to select an SEO-friendly theme to increase your chances in search results.
13 SEO-Friendly Shopify SEO Theme Design Characteristics
Many designers may advertise their themes as SEO-friendly, but what exactly does that imply? Here are key things to look for in your Shopify theme to ensure that it is appropriately optimized.
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Mobile-friendliness and responsiveness
A responsive design allows for device compatibility. With a responsive design, your shop will render properly whether your audience is using a smartphone, desktop, tablet, or another device. Mobile-friendliness is important to search engines, and a responsive design is essential.
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Theme Speed and agility
A well-optimized theme loads quickly, increase time on page/reduces bounces, and aids crawlability. Look at the theme’s demo to see whether it specifies how quickly it loads. You may also run a speed test on the demo page at:
- PageSpeed Insights
- Web.dev.
- GTMetrix.
The speed of a website is mostly determined by its coding to keep your site fast if you optimized themes.
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HTML Markup That Is Valid
Valid HTML will have no effect on SEO as long as the site renders properly. However, correct HTML can aid with some of the most crucial parts of SEO, such as:
- Compatibility with browsers.
- Crawl speed.
- User interface.
When your site has proper HTML, even Google Shopping Ads perform better. If you’re not using valid HTML, you can potentially damage your site if you use hreflang. In short, proper HTML is always preferable for your theme. Check yours with the Markup Validation Service.
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Featured/Rich Snippet Support
Featured snippets extract structured data from a website and present it in their own specific boxes in Google’s search results. These snippets include:
- Possibility of ranking higher in search results.
- Increased use of “no-click” searches.
- Content Marketing Can Help You Grow Your Business
With this all-in-one content marketing toolbox, you can improve your online presence, reach new customers, and increase revenue. While there’s no assurance that a featured snippet from your site will appear in Google, adopting schema markup increases your chances. Look for a Shopify theme or app that adds product schema, FAQ snippets, video object snippets, breadcrumbs, and other markups to your site automatically.
Shopify also refers to snippets as reusable code that appears on several pages but not throughout the entire site. As you’re writing a theme, make sure you know the difference between search snippets and those utilized in coding a theme.
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Metadata is customized for Shopify SEO Theme
Metadata can help your site rank higher in search engines, and the ability to customize metadata is a useful feature in any theme. The following are some key tags that should be customizable:
- Canonical.
- title tag
- meta description
- Open Graph
- alternative text
Custom metadata is a valuable resource that you may utilize now and in the future.
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Integrated Social Sharing
Because billions of people worldwide use social media, social sharing should be incorporated into the subject. Visitors that are able to share your material or items can create a lot of traffic, links, and even sales.
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Sitemaps in Shopify SEO Theme
Search engines can find all of your site’s pages using auto-generated sitemaps, whether they’ve just been added or aren’t linked from any of your site’s pages. The good news is that Shopify creates a sitemap for each store automatically.
According to Shopify, “On the Basic Shopify plan, only your store’s primary domain has a created sitemap file and is search engine discoverable. You can utilize the functionality of the international domain to create region-specific or country-specific domains if you’re on the Shopify, Advanced Shopify, or Shopify Plus plan. Sitemap files are generated for all of your domains when you use foreign domains. Unless they redirect to your major domain, search engines can find all of your domains.”
So, if you don’t see sitemaps listed as a feature of a theme you’re considering, don’t worry you’ll be able to create them with any theme. Because they don’t repopulate with each new page added to your store, you might want to find an app to assist you to keep them up to date.
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Product Customization Made Simple
Your product pages must be unique and tailored to your target market. One approach to making your product pages stand out is to customize them with the following abilities:
- Call-to-actions should be placed strategically.
- Experiment with different product placements and layouts.
- Verify that the product schema is correct.
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Navigation options
Above-the-fold navigation features make navigation as simple as feasible. Search engines will be able to locate your most important pages and crawl them as rapidly as possible. Although navigation may not appear to be an important aspect of SEO, it is an important component of good architecture that can boost crawlability and user experience.
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Support for Language and Translation
A theme that supports language and translation, as well as hreflang, can make a big difference in your users’ experience. The use of hreflang will aid search engines in displaying to consumers the proper version of a website based on:
- Your preferred language.
- User’s current location.
As your company grows, language and translation assistance will become more crucial. It will be much more crucial to adapt to visitors who speak a variety of languages when your Shopify site begins to sell internationally.
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Image Optimization
If the images on your store are too large, they will slow down your site, affecting usability and search rankings. The photos in your theme should be optimized. The Shopify CDN takes care of a lot of the works like:
- Images are cached to reduce load time.
- Resizing photos to make them more responsive
- All photographs were lightly compressed and converted to the web-standard 72dpi.
- Images in the WebP format are served.
However, you should familiarise yourself with how to add and update alt text in your Shopify theme.
This is especially crucial for product images because you don’t want to disappoint customers with accessibility needs, and alt text also helps search engines interpret the image content. WCAG, 508, and ADA compliance should be on your checklist because accessibility has an impact on your website’s reputation and user experience.
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Options for User-Generated Content
User-generated content (UGC) is critical for building brand awareness and buzz around your website. There are numerous UGC choices, including:
- Customers can contribute to your site’s questions and answers.
- User feedback is welcome.
- Reviews.
When people can assist you in creating organic content, the content they contribute is typically beneficial to your SEO efforts. Customers, for example, may have inquiries that demand an answer.
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Support for Shopify SEO Theme
Support may not be directly linked to your site’s search engine optimization, but it can:
- Provide assistance with customization.
- Fix the theme’s errors and bugs.
- Pay attention to suggestions for future feature additions.
Will they be available if their theme has a bug and if support is slow and unresponsive? A reputable theme creator will provide top-notch support to address all of your problems and inquiries.
Additional Tips to Help You Optimize Your Shopify Store with Shopify SEO Theme
If you’re new to Shopify and want to optimize your store for SEO rapidly, you can do a number of things by completing the following:
- Title and meta-description optimization
- On your website, publish weekly health reports.
- Keep an eye on your website for broken links.
- File size reduction.
- Take care of your schema markup.
- Use your target keywords in the titles and descriptions of your products.
Use lightboxes or pop-ups to boost sales by using timed pop-ups and limiting pop-ups.
Final Thoughts
Shopify makes it as simple as possible to sell things online. A theme is only a small component of your SEO strategy, but it is a simple method to start your online store.
If you follow the guidelines above, you’ll be able to choose a Shopify theme that will assist you in improving your store’s SEO. If you still have any queries in selecting themes or if you’re looking for designers to customize your theme you can contact our Shopify developers.