How Shopify has built-in SEO and why SEO is better than other Shopify online stores

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is critical to the success of any online store. Ranking high in search engines like Google is often one of the most effective ways to attract organic traffic – which can lead to increased sales without the high cost of paid advertising. Being a leading e-commerce platform, Shopify has a number of built-in SEO features that make it easier for store owners to optimize their online stores for search engines. But what makes Shopify's SEO so strong, and how can it be an advantage compared to other online store solutions?

In this blog post, we'll dive into why Shopify's built-in SEO features give store owners an advantage, and why Shopify can be better than other online store solutions when it comes to SEO.

1. User-friendly technical SEO structure

One of Shopify's greatest strengths is its user-friendly platform, which comes with many built-in SEO benefits right from the start. This includes an SEO-friendly technical structure, which can be challenging to set up manually on other platforms.

Some of the main SEO frameworks that Shopify offers are:

• Automatically generated XML sitemaps : Shopify automatically creates XML sitemaps, which help search engines understand the structure of your website and find all relevant pages. This is essential to ensure that your pages are indexed and ranked by the search engines.
• Clean URL structure : Shopify has a URL structure that is easy for search engines to read. For example, your product pages will have clean and understandable URLs that include the name of the product (eg /products/product-name), making it easier for Google to understand the content of the page.
• Responsive Design : Google favors websites that are mobile-friendly, and all Shopify themes are automatically optimized for mobile. This ensures that your online store provides a good user experience on all devices, which is also an important ranking factor.

By offering these built-in features, Shopify makes it easy for online store owners to focus on content and sales, without having to worry about the complexities behind the technical SEO structure.

2. Speed ​​and performance

Website speed is a critical factor for SEO. Google uses load time as a ranking factor, and slow web pages can cause visitors to leave your store before it has loaded. Shopify has optimized the platform for fast loading times, and online stores built on Shopify benefit from this performance without the need for advanced technical tweaks.

Advantages of Shopify in terms of speed and performance:

• Optimized Hosting : Shopify offers fast, reliable hosting, including a global CDN (Content Delivery Network). This ensures that your online store loads quickly regardless of where your customers are located.
• Fast page access : Shopify themes are optimized for fast loading, which helps improve both user experience and SEO rankings. By choosing the right theme, store owners can ensure that the website not only looks good, but also loads quickly.
• Built-in image optimization : Shopify ensures that images load quickly by automatically compressing them without sacrificing quality, which is important for both SEO and user experience.

These performance improvements give Shopify a clear advantage over some other online store platforms, where optimizing speed often requires manual effort and third-party tools.

3. Easy handling of metadata

Metadata such as page titles and meta descriptions are essential for SEO as they help search engines understand the content of your pages and give users a preview in search results. Shopify makes it easy for online store owners to customize this metadata on every page in the store.

Benefits of Shopify's metadata management:

• Easy access to editing page titles and meta descriptions : Shopify gives you the ability to customize page titles and meta descriptions for all product pages, category pages, and blog posts. This means you can tailor your SEO information to attract more visitors.
• Automatic metadata suggestions : For store owners who don't have time to manually write metadata for each page, Shopify will automatically generate relevant titles and descriptions based on the products' names and categories. While it's best to customize this information, automatic generation ensures that all pages have at least basic SEO coverage.

By providing an easy-to-use solution for metadata, Shopify makes SEO work easier, especially for those who are not experienced with search engine optimization.

4. Built-in blogging function

One of the best ways to attract organic traffic is through content marketing, and Shopify comes with a built-in blogging feature that makes it easy to publish SEO-friendly content. Blogging can be an important part of your SEO strategy as it helps attract visitors based on keywords and provides valuable information to your customers.

The benefits of Shopify's blogging feature include:

• Optimized for SEO : Blog posts on Shopify have the same SEO tools as product pages, so you can easily add titles, meta descriptions and keywords. This helps your content rank better in search engines.
• Internal Links : Shopify makes it easy to embed internal links to product pages directly in your blog posts, helping search engines discover and understand the connection between your products and the relevant content.
• Automatic URL structure for blog posts : Each post gets an SEO-friendly URL, making it easier for Google to index your content.

A good blog can act as a powerful SEO driver by attracting new visitors and building trust through informative content.

5. SEO friendly across devices

In today's market, mobile traffic is one of the biggest sources of visitors for online stores. Google now prioritizes mobile optimization as a ranking factor, and Shopify is designed to be fully responsive. This means that your online store will look good and work flawlessly, regardless of whether it is opened on a mobile phone, tablet or computer.

With Shopify you get:

• Responsive design with no extra effort : Shopify themes are built to be mobile-friendly from the start, so you don't have to spend extra time and money developing a separate mobile version of your store.
• Better ranking on mobile : Google has introduced "mobile-first indexing", which means that they primarily consider the mobile version of your website when determining ranking. With Shopify, you are guaranteed a mobile-optimized online store, which gives you a competitive advantage when it comes to SEO.

6. SEO App Integrations

Although Shopify has a number of built-in SEO tools, store owners can also take advantage of various SEO apps available in the Shopify App Store. These apps can help you automate and further improve your SEO efforts.

Some popular SEO apps for Shopify include:

• Plug In SEO : This app analyzes your online store and makes recommendations for improving SEO. It also helps resolve technical issues that may affect your SEO rankings.
• SEO Manager : This app provides more advanced SEO settings for your Shopify store, including the ability to edit your robots.txt file and implement structured data, which can help search engines better understand and rank your content.

These integrations make Shopify a highly flexible platform that can be customized to meet specific SEO needs.