The top 10% of Shopify stores earn an average of $10,866 per month. If your store isn’t featured in the top league, there’s only one way in – more traffic. More traffic to your store means more eyeballs on your products means more sales.
But there’s one small problem. Getting quality traffic to your store in 2025 is expensive, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing. If you do know your way around, you’ll know know that search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most cost-effective ways to send targeted traffic to your store.
Of course, that’s often easier said than done, especially in the wake of Google’s ever-evolving algorithmic updates. But don’t panic. We created this Shopify SEO checklist to simplify the process for you. It takes an in-depth look at the steps you need to follow to optimize your store’s search engine rankings and earn more money.
So let’s get into it.
Why Having a Shopify SEO Checklist Matters
Shopify store owners seen an average conversion rate of only about 1.3%. That means that for every 1,000 people that visited Shopify stores last month, there were around 13 sales.
It goes without saying that to increase your sales volume, you’ll need to first drive traffic to your store. SEO could be the difference between getting 1,000 and 10,000 monthly visitors to your store. With a 10x traffic increase, you could keep the same 1.3% conversion rate and go from 13 to 130 sales monthly — without paying extra for advertising.
The only problem is that your competitors also see the value in SEO. So, simply sticking to the basics (e.g using the right keywords on your site), won’t give you the 10x results search engines want.
That’s why creating and executing a customized SEO strategy is so important. It can help you beat the competition on organic search results, which should increase your profits even if your conversion rate stays the same.
Your Shopify Store’s SEO Checklist
Google’s unforgiving algorithm for recommending relevant websites makes it important to be methodical about improving your store’s SEO. That’s why creating and executing personalized SEO strategies is so important. If you take each step in the following checklist seriously, you should see markedly better search engine results by the time you reach the end of it. Let’s begin:
1. Complete an ecommerce SEO Audit
An ecommerce SEO audit evaluates how well your store is optimized to show up in search engine results, including thorough keyword research to identify the most effective search terms.
Your audit will reveal important information about all of the different factors that come together to determine your search engine rankings, such as:
- Technical and on-page SEO issues
- Website structure problems
- User experience concerns
- Gaps in content and opportunities for growth
- Insights into how your SEO relates to the competition
The whole process can take days, or even weeks to get through – plus ecommerce SEO audits can be expensive. They can cost anywhere from $650 to as high as $14,000.
However, you can save time and costs by leveraging automated SEO tools if you don’t want to fork out for an ecommerce SEO expert.
2. Leverage SEO Tools for Research
For less than $150/month, you can leverage powerful tools to do the heavy lifting. These tools will help you or your ecommerce SEO expert to figure out what your store needs to do, to start getting more traffic from search engine results.
There are a variety of tools you can use to do this. Here are four you should know about.
Google Search Console
Created by the biggest search engine on the planet, you can’t ignore Google Search Console when it comes to SEO data. Integrating Google Analytics can help you track website traffic, sources, sales/revenue, and user behavior. You can also use it to find performance issues, and figure out which keywords and content types bring the most people to your store.
Google Search Console is free to use, so take advantage of it. Keep coming back to look at your data as you make other SEO changes. Your dashboard will tell you if your changes were effective or not. keyword research tools
Ahrefs
If you’re looking for an all-in-one SEO tool, Ahrefs is a great — but expensive — option. Your monthly subscription gives you access to a number of powerful tools to help with:
- Analyzing your top competitors’ SEO keywords
- Discovering the keywords your customers search for
- Auditing and optimizing your website
- Discovering new ideas for content and link opportunities
- Tracking your SEO ranking progress over time
Pricing starts at $129 per month and goes up to $449 for the most advanced package. However, subscribing for just a few months could be all it takes to improve your SEO results.
Semrush
Semrush is another company that offers an all-in-one SEO toolkit. It’s really effective at identifying the keywords your Shopify store should target. You can also use the toolkit to run technical SEO audits and analyze backlinks, among other functions.
The cost is very similar to Ahrefs — starting at $129.95 per month and going up to $499.95 for the most advanced package. But there’s so much overlap between Ahrefs and Semrush that you should choose just one.
MOZ
MOZ is another popular SEO toolkit with similarities to Ahrefs and Semrush. It offers some free tools to get you started, including:
- A basic keyword explorer
- Domain analysis tool
- Competitive research
- Link explorer
These free tools can be a good way to start exploring your site’s SEO. They’ll help you get your bearings before you invest in a higher-priced premium toolkit like Moz Pro.
Moz sells several advanced toolkits that focus on different kinds of SEO. For example, Moz Local can be a great way to attract customers in your area to a physical store, if you have one. The company also has a content marketing toolkit. This helps you find content gaps, generate topic ideas, and leverage advanced keyword data to create material that ranks.
3. Set Up Your Store’s Technical SEO Infrastructure
With your keyword research done, you probably have an overview of what keywords your store needs to attract search engine crawlers. But discovering target keywords is only one pillar of an effective SEO strategy.
Optimized technical infrastructure is also another important factor for ranking in search engines, mainly because of how search engines find and indexes websites.
For instance, Google’s crawl bots automatically look for new web pages. These bots need to find and index each page on your Shopify store before they can appear in any search results.
But crawl bots can’t always find every content page in your store. This causes some of your pages to never appear in search results. To avoid this, you need to beef up your SEO infrastructure to make it easier for the crawl bots to find and index your web pages.
What does ‘beefed up’ SEO infrastructure look like, then?
A store with well-optimized site structure will have every webpage located just a few clicks away from the homepage. It will include internal links on each webpage to make them easier for crawlers to find.
Tip: Use tools like PluginSEO to help you find and fix pages with broken links automagically.
An effective site structure also uses meta tags to adequately describe the content on each page and improve search engine visibility. It will also probably have had a XML version of its sitemap submitted to Google which speeds up the time taken for crawl bots to find and index new content.
Tip: You too can submit an XML version of your sitemap to Google.
Website Speed and SEO
Another important element of technical SEO is website speed. If your web pages take forever to load, visitors get impatient and leave your site in droves (aka “bounce”). A high bounce looks bad to Google, so ultimately a slow site can hurt your SEO rankings.
Speeding up your Shopify website and appeasing the search engine gods requires a series of simultaneous events – enabling caching, reducing redirects, enabling compression, among others.
Tip: Use a Shopify Plugin like Plug In Speed to do the heavy lifting for you.
3. Leverage Powerful Shopify Apps for SEO
In 2024, optimizing your store’s SEO doesn’t need to be a tedious, manual task. There are various powerful, purpose-built apps that integrate with your Shopify store and quickly improve your SEO performance for a fraction of the price of an SEO expert. Some of these are are free while others charge one-time fees or monthly rates.
For example, Plug In Speed is a Shopify SEO app that optimizes your Javascript, CSS, and images for speed. It can reduce load times, which studies show should increase your conversion rate.
Plug In SEO also automatically checks for SEO problems, guides you on fixes, identifies new keyword opportunities, and guides you through other SEO optimization recommendations.
As you navigate through your store’s SEO journey, don’t neglect Shopify’s organic features. Use target keyword title tags, collection pages, meta descriptions, and even sitemaps to improve your SEO and increase your search volume. These changes may feel minor, but make enough of them and your SEO results can get better quickly. Don’t forget to optimize your meta descriptions to improve click-through rates and provide a compelling first impression.
4. Work on Your On-Page SEO
Now let’s take a closer look at some of your most important opportunities for improving your SEO, on-page.
Explore Niche Keywords
Keywords are extremely important for getting your online store noticed by Google and other search engines. Your goal is to have your web page appear whenever someone searches for a phrase that’s relevant to your products.
For example, if you sell vintage clothing and your Shopify store appears in search results whenever someone searches for “vintage clothing”, your organic search traffic and (subsequently sales) sales would likely increase tremendously.
The challenge however is that common keywords like “vintage clothing” are very competitive and difficult to rank for. To get around this, target niche, loong-tail keyphrases instead. For example, target “vintage 1960s clothing” instead of the more general “vintage clothing”.
Keyword research tools like Ahrefs and Semrush will help you to figure out which niche keywords and phrases you should try to rank for.
Tip: When writing your meta description, include your niche keywords to improve your chances of ranking!
Get Reputable Links
Google considers a variety of factors when deciding where to place your content in its search results. One is whether any other reputable websites link to your web pages. Google thinks of these external links as votes in favor of your content’s quality.
That’s why it’s smart to try to get your content featured on other websites. Sometimes, getting these features (aka backlinks) is as easy as asking for a reciprocal linking partnership. other times, sites ask you to pay a fee before they share a link to your Shopify store.
Optimize Content Quality
Finally, make sure that you post quality content that aligns with what a website visitor would expect. For example, if someone searches “1960s vintage clothing” and finds a link to your Shopify store, they should go directly to 1960s clothing — not your home page.
This matters because people tend to just leave sites that don’t have the content they want. This will increase your bounce rate, which tells Google that your store doesn’t address the search intent of target keyword search queries.
5. Perform Another SEO Audit and Adapt
As you work your way through this checklist, consider completing another SEO audit. This can show you how much progress you’ve made and suggest where further work may still be required. This will also help you monitor your performance on search engine results pages.
Continue performing SEO audits over time as well. SEO is constantly evolving and audits help you understand whether your store is gaining or losing ground.
Fix Your Shopify SEO Quickly With Plug In Useful
Let’s face it, SEO is really complex. It takes a lot of effort to build a Shopify store that can rank well on Google on your own. That’s why Plug In Useful exists. Our mission is to create simple apps that make it easier to boost your SEO performance and sell more products through Shopify.
Take a closer look at our Shopify SEO app to learn more about how we can help you take the next step toward your revenue goals.
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