Out of the box, the Shopify ecommerce platform offers a handful of integrations and settings that help ensure your site has proper SEO.

Shopify Homepage Meta Tags SEO

In order to have good, foundational SEO, you need to ensure your meta tags are properly structured and target the appropriate keywords.

Your homepage meta tags are quite possibly the most important meta data on your site, so be sure to take your time, do your research, and get your homepage title tag and homepage meta description right.

In your Shopify Admin, navigate to:

Online Store > Preferences

The very first section is where you can update your homepage title tag and your homepage meta description.

shopify homepage title tag and homepage meta tag

Simply fill out the field with your meta tag information.

For the Homepage title field, you can follow this format:

{Keyword 1} – {Keyword 2} | {Brand}

Make sure you are descriptive, succinct, and relevant with your title tag. The more simple the better. If you need ideas on how to structure your title tag, check out some of your competitors and emulate what they are doing.

For the Homepage meta description, you’ll want to expand on what your site offers to customers. Answer the questions: What’s great about your products and why do people love it?

While Shopify’s admin says you have a max of 320 characters, keep in mind Google only displays about 160 characters in most cases, so if you want all your description content to be seen, be sure to keep it to around 160 characters.

Shopify Website Social Media Metadata

Located in the same section just below the homepage SEO section you can see a place to set your website’s social media meta tags. These are the tags that will display in Facebook, Instagram, and other sites like Twitter when your URL is shared.

In this section, you’ll see fields for a feature image, website title, website description, and your URL.

While these don’t have a direct SEO impact on your organic rankings, it can help to have these as close to your actual site tags to keep messaging the same across several platforms.

Shopify Google Analytics Integration

This section indirectly impacts SEO by allowing you to track how your users are interacting with your site, which will allow you to make adjustments to improve your site’s SEO.

Additionally, you can enable Enhanced Ecommerce to track purchases and other ecommerce related activity on your site.

Simply copy and paste your Google Analytics tracking code into that field and Shopify will automatically add it into the header upon page load.

Managing Your Redirects

If you are regularly changing pages, migrating from another site, or moving content around, you need to stay on top of your page redirects.

Broken pages send signals to Google that your site isn’t easy to crawl or that content is missing which can hurt your SEO.

From the redirect dashboard you add individual redirects or import several redirects in bulk. The process for add individual redirects is painfully simple.

Paste the old page URL and the new page URL in their respective fields and click “Save Redirect.”

For bulk imports, download Shopify’s CSV template, update it with your own redirects and upload it back to your site. You can learn more about importing redirects here.

Customizing Your Theme

The ability to quickly and easily customize your theme is great way to increase your SEO knowledge about your own site’s performance, how it is showing in search and more.

One of the biggest benefits of data is that it allows you to improve your SEO so the more integrations you have that bring actionable valuable data, the better your site will perform in search.

You can access your theme code by going to:

Themes > Actions > Edit Code

From there, you have access to Shoipfy theme files which are in a coding language called “liquid.”

In order to add more tracking and integrations to your Shopify site’s header, you’ll access the theme.liquid template and paste whatever tracking scripts you need between the <head> tags.

Some integrations that we highly recommend to improve the SEO of your Shopify store include:

  • Google Tag Manager
  • Google Analytics
  • Google Search Console
  • Bing Webmaster Tools
  • Crazy Egg
  • Optimizely

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