Unlock Lost Sales: A Shopify Store Owner's Guide to Conquering Technical SEO
After launching my Shopify apparel store, I eagerly awaited the flood of traffic and sales.
But only a trickle of visits and occasional sales came through. I had completely neglected one crucial aspect that impacts any e-commerce site's success - Shopify website development services focused on technical SEO.
As a self-taught store owner lacking an engineering background, technical SEO felt intimidating.
Terms like crawl budget, site architecture, and indexation status made my eyes glaze over.
But considering 75% of search engine users don't venture past the first page of results, failing to optimize my Shopify store for discoverability proved extremely costly.
Top 12 Technical SEO Wins for Shopify Stores
With Google now indexing mobile-first, I discovered my site performance lagged painfully on mobile devices. Some product pages took over 6 seconds to load! To fix this, I enabled deferred loading in my theme settings so images below the fold load lazily. I also compressed all images and enabled caching through my CDN.
Impact: Mobile speeds increased by over 100% and bounce rates declined by 18%
2. Eliminating Duplicate Content
I had no idea that product description content duplicated across product variants was diluting my opportunity for unique search rankings! Using the SEO app Merchant Words, I scanned my site and eliminated redundant content across colors/sizes.
Impact: Unique page content better targeted long-tail keywords.
Instead of messy product URLs with excessive parameters, I streamlined them for better crawling prioritization. I also truncated titles to about 60 characters max.
OLD: mystore.com/products/brown-leather-jacket?color=brown&size=large
NEW: mystore.com/brown-leather-jacket
Empty or duplicate alt text on product images meant lost opportunities for image search optimization. With an assistant, I systematically optimized alt text, using targeted keywords.
5. Optimizing Page Speed with Apps
After implementing theme tweaks, I turned to apps to further accelerate page speeds. Auto-minify HTML and deferred JavaScript loading were low-hanging wins.
6. Site Architecture Re-Design
I discovered issues with my site architecture preventing spiders from easily crawling interconnected pages. By better organizing content types into distinct sections, spiders can better index each page “neighborhood”.
7. Eliminating Orphaned Pages
Using my SEO app, I discovered over 50 pages indexed by search engines but no longer linked to my navigation. By redirecting them to relevant content, search engines remove these “orphans” from results.
Fixed broken backlinks from affiliate sites
Optimized page title lengths
Enhanced on-page content with keywords
After 12 months of tackling this technical SEO checklist, my site's search visibility and conversion rates continue to rise. I'm no longer leaving easy money on the table due to discoverability issues!
With the right dedication and tools, nearly any Shopify store owner can unlock significant bottom-line gains through ongoing technical SEO improvements.
Don't let website technicalities continue sabotaging your Shopify store's success as I did! Feel free to DM me if you need any help getting started with your SEO game plan!