Online shopping has become an increasingly popular form of retail, allowing consumers to shop from the comfort of their own homes. Shopify stands out as a leading name in the E-commerce industry, renowned for its robust shopping cart security, consistent uptime, and round-the-clock support. It is also fully optimized for search engines, which significantly impacts merchant success on the platform. To understand the significance of Shopify SEO, consider some compelling statistics and facts that highlight its impact on merchant success and illustrate how various digital marketing strategies can be applied effectively in e-commerce.
The first outcome of excellent SEO services is growing organic traffic. In 2024, Shopify.com had record traffic of 2.71 billion visits. This is a 4X increase from when we first published this in 2020!
The number of vendors on Shopify is growing simultaneously with the number of potential customers. This means that while there is a bigger potential customer pool, the competition is also getting more challenging by the minute. For this reason, vendors are researching how to optimize Shopify SEO more than they ever have before.
Shopify is The Most Popular in English-Speaking Countries
The vast majority of Shopify’s audience comes from the largest English-speaking countries, according to some of the latest surveys. Let’s take a closer look at Shopify SEO in numbers to see the breakdown of their audience. As many as 36.62% of all Shopify users come from the US alone. Other audiences include the UK at 5.78%, Canada at 5.74%, Australia at 3.92%, and India at 3.38%. While English is not the primary language in India, it is a second language in the region.
According to CapitalOne Shopping, Shopify has over 2.4 million unique sellers utilizing its platform, showing its widespread adoption among e-commerce businesses. This vast network underscores its role as a major player in the e-commerce sector. During the popular shopping events of Black Friday and Cyber Monday in 2023, Shopify merchants collectively made $9.3 billion in sales, marking a 24% increase from the previous year. This showcases Shopify’s ability to drive significant sales volumes during peak shopping times.
The Average Conversion Rate from Organic Traffic is 3.6%
To increase conversions, merchants use these Shopify SEO tips in order to drive more organic traffic. According to a LittleData survey from 2024, the average conversion rate on Shopify is merely 1.4%.
However, this is all conversions across the platform. In terms of the conversion rate on organic traffic, the number goes up to 3.6%. This is almost three times the value. The main reason for this could be the fact that the majority of these people already qualify as easy pickings (in terms of marketability).
Average Time Before Full-Page Loads is 4.9 Seconds
The average time before the full-page loads on Shopify is 4.9 seconds. However, the delay until the content becomes available is just 2.3 seconds. Why is this so important? First of all, people online have a very limited attention span. Loading time can drastically improve with the help of technical SEO. Onsite optimization of your marketplace is counted amongst some of the Shopify SEO best practices. According to some estimates, you have between 2 and 9 seconds to capture someone’s attention online. Other surveys indicate that your audience might start leaving if the page fails to load in 4 seconds.
Image Optimization Is Still Relevant in 2024
All E-commerce platforms rely on images to enhance their categories. However, high-resolution images and images in some uncommon formats may slow down your loading speed. This is why one of the rules of Shopify SEO for beginners is to always optimize images. Factors which matter are:
- Dimensions and product angles
- File size
- File type
- Thumbnail optimization
- Viewport sizing
- Proper use of sitemaps
- Testing images before use
The thing worth keeping in mind is that this effort is a combination of making the product presentable and not allowing the size of the image to slow you down. It’s about achieving the same effect by using fewer resources.
Shopify Struggles with Duplicate Content
One of the toughest challenges that Shopify faces is the problem with duplicate content. Why is this such a big issue? Well, by default, Shopify allows each product page to be rendered in two different URL paths. These URLs can be canonical and non-canonical.
- Canonical URL path: /products/
- Non-canonical URL path: /collections/.*/products/
Still, this is not interpreted as duplicate content. There are three reasons why a page is classified as duplicate. First, it can be an actual duplicate of a product page. Second, it has an identical description of a product. Lastly, the platform can get ‘confused’ by two different versions of the page. Optimizing your site structure for SEO is always a high priority. However, the Shopify URL structure for SEO requires a bit more finesse. First, the content on pages needs to follow a logical hierarchy of categories. Characters used in every URL need to be standardized. When making internal links, anchors need to be descriptive. The same goes for file names of images. At the end of the day, every Shopify merchant is responsible for their own store’s navigation. This way, search engines will have an easier job of finding all of your content.
The Importance of Meta Descriptions
Writing a meta description isn’t exclusive to the SEO on Shopify, but it is still relevant for driving organic traffic. There are two hard rules to writing a good meta description on Shopify. The rules are – it needs to be shorter than 155 characters, and it needs to contain a focus keyword of the page. This leads to superior SERP, better traffic, and a higher conversion rate. As far as some useful tips for writing these descriptions go, there are two or three things to pay attention to.
First, you should start with a question or a dilemma that the visitor has. Second, you need to promise an answer and increase its trustworthiness by using an authoritative title. Examples of this are expert, specialist, or veteran. You can also imply or mention that the answer is a result of a survey or an elaborate scientific process. Since this is a matter of technical SEO writing skills, hiring professional writing services can drastically improve your SEO effectiveness.
Electronics and Technology Are the Most Appealing Categories on Shopify
From the standpoint of Shopify SEO, it’s also relevant to mention that the majority of Shopify users show interest in the category of computers, electronics, and technology. As far as subcategories go, the most popular ones are programming and developer software, as well as graphics, multimedia, and web design.
Due to their popularity, these categories are also the most competitive and the hardest to rank in. Therefore, merchants interested in joining these fields need to invest more heavily in their digital marketing strategies.
Making Your Pages Quicker to Index
SEO experts use structured data (or schema markup) to make their pages easier to crawl, organize, and display content. Any page online has two types of audiences – humans and search engines. In order to be understood by websites, you need to use language that these bots understand. By communicating to them via the proper form of data, you can get indexed quickly and get ranked a lot sooner. This, however, can be a double-edged blade.
While working on their pages, people often restrict access to the site through the robots.txt file. Sometimes, if they forget to revert the process, their pages may remain invisible to Google bots. As you can see, some examples of bad Shopify SEO are merely a result of a mistake rather than a faulty or inefficient SEO tactic. This is also why the approach to onsite SEO needs to be thorough and systematic.
Shopify SEO Takes Patience
One of the biggest problems that those new to Shopify SEO encounter is the lack of immediate results. Search engines index sites regularly; however, your site won’t be indexed right away. The simplest way to speed up this process is to independently submit a sitemap to Google Search Console, thus saving everyone’s time and effort. There are some other factors that may explain why your store isn’t indexed already. So, before you just assume that your efforts aren’t giving results, you need to make a Shopify SEO checklist with some potential complications. For instance, you might have recently migrated from another platform. While it’s not impossible to keep your rank even after the migration, this requires a lot of work involving technical SEO processes that you may have failed to complete, such as a 301 redirect plan. Having a password on your online store may be another obstacle.
In Conclusion
As this platform keeps expanding, staying competitive will keep getting harder. This is why the only way to remain competitive is to learn how to use and utilize Shopify SEO properly. The rules of technical SEO are quite similar to other platforms. The biggest technical difference is the one regarding canonical and non-canonical URL paths. The rest, consisting of a proper meta description, adequate image optimization, and SEO outreach, is the same as any other E-commerce platform. If you are not sure how SEO can help your Shopify website thrive – we are happy to help!
Contact us today and schedule your consultation.
