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Google processes more than 16.4 billion searches per day, with search contributing around 68% of all trackable website traffic.
“SEO is an excellent form of inbound marketing, where the consumer has a need and finds you for the solution,” says Greg Bernhardt, an SEO strategist at Shopify. “SEO is about positioning your web content to communicate the relevance and value of your offering to search engines, who can then better pair the search they receive with the solution you offer.”
So, how do you optimize your website for SEO? Whether you’re running a blog or an online store, this ultimate SEO checklist will walk you through the entire process.
For your business to succeed, you need to get your website as high up on the search engine results page (SERP) as you can—the first result for a given Google search gets 27.6% of all clicks in 2025. While it may take some time, even new sites can rank on Google with this SEO checklist.
Simply buying a domain and setting up a website doesn’t make that site SEO-ready. Here’s a basic SEO checklist to get you started.
Google Search Console is a free tool that allows website owners to monitor their site’s organic Google traffic, track search performance, and discover issues that could prevent their site from ranking.
Head to the welcome page to create your Google Search Console account. Verify your domain so Google can be sure you own the website before it provides you services. Learn how to verify your Shopify domain to use Google services.
Bing Webmaster Tools is a free Microsoft service that lets you add your store to the Bing crawler. Open a free Bing Webmaster account by going to the signup page, then add and verify your website to appear in Bing search results.
A sitemap tells Google and other search engines about your site’s organization.
All Shopify stores automatically generate a site map file, which lists your website’s individual pages. If you’re using WordPress’s content management system, install the Yoast SEO plug-in to create a site map. Shopify store owners can access their site maps through www.yourstore.com/sitemap.xml.
Submit your sitemap to Google, and submit to Bing through the Webmaster Tools accounts you just created.
Google Analytics shares data about how visitors interact with your website. Once installed, you can segment overall visitors to monitor how they engage with your website after arriving through a search engine.
Set up a Google Analytics account and add your web property. Then, add a data stream by inserting the Google tag ID into your CMS-hosted website, such as Shopify or WordPress.
Your website needs to be indexed by a search engine to appear in search results. The quickest way to see whether your site is indexed is through a site search (i.e., site:yourdomain.com).
If nothing shows up, your site isn’t indexed yet. Bear in mind that indexing can take a week or more after submitting the sitemap and that Google can’t crawl or index password-protected pages.
Stores running on a free Shopify trial are crawled and indexed, but you must upgrade to a paid plan after the trial or your store will be deindexed.
Keeping up with algorithm changes, rankings, and competitor keywords is challenging but necessary for online businesses. There are good paid and free SEO tools you can use to meet search goals. You’re already one step ahead by setting up Google Search Console and Analytics.
Paid SEO tools:
Free SEO tools:
Shopify online stores have built-in SEO features that automatically add canonical tags to pages (to prevent duplicate content from showing in SERPs), generate your XML site map, and generate title tags including your store name on Shopify-owned themes.
Running an ecommerce store?
The Google Merchant Center lets you upload your product data so items can appear in Google Shopping results, free listings, and other Google channels. Shopify users can install the Google & YouTube app to easily keep their product catalog synced with the Merchant Center. Taking these steps will increase product visibility within search results, driving more potential customers to your store.
Keyword research uncovers the words and phrases your target audience is searching for. Here’s how to find them, so you can target relevant keywords on your website.
Use keyword research tools from Moz, Ahrefs, or Semrush to identify which words your target customers use when searching for products or services like yours. They’ll present you with a list of keywords based on your seed keyword. If you’re selling gifts, for example, your seed keyword might be “best gifts for moms.”
When shortlisting keywords, pay attention to:
You can learn a lot about SEO from competitors who’ve already done the background research to identify keywords.
Enter your competitor’s URL into an SEO tool, such as Semrush or Moz. The software will pull a list of keywords that your competitors are ranking for and tell you which position each URL sits at for the corresponding keyword.
Now that you’ve got a list of keywords to target, shortlist phrases your target audience is most likely to search for and determine the search intent for each. Then, map keywords to content types. Each page on your site—product pages, categories, blog posts, homepage—can rank for different long tail keywords.
Let’s put this in practice for an aromatherapy shop that sells:
You might decide to make a collection page for citrus essential oils (lemon, lime, grapefruit) and another for essential oil bottles (glass, roller, spray). You could also write articles that target long-tail keywords related to questions regarding essential oils, for instance, a story on uses for lavender essential oil.
On-page SEO means optimizing individual pages on your website with the aim of increasing their search visibility.
Preparing individual pages to rank takes time and effort. After all, you’re competing with some already-established brands. Follow this on-page SEO checklist to ensure your webpages are maximally optimized.
Heading (H1) tags are the main headline for a page and usually contain the page’s main keywords. Search engines use them to understand the context of a page.
Best practice is to include just one per page. For example, the H1 for your product called “Lemon Drop Bliss”—a product people searching for lemon essentials oils might like—could be “Lemon Essential Oil.”
Note that Shopify page titles are the default H1 tag for pages created through Shopify.
Appearing in search results is only part of the job. You also need to convince users to visit your page over the other options. Title tags—the blue clickable links that appear in the SERP—help you do this.
Best practices for optimizing title tags are:
A meta description is the small snippet of text that appears below your title tag in the SERP. The copy you write here should clearly describe the content on the page and also be compelling enough to click.
There’s no exact character count for showing or truncating meta descriptions. However, research from Moz indicates many meta descriptions are cut off around the 155 to 160 character mark.
Include your target keywords and strongest copy at the very beginning of your meta description, and avoid going over 160 characters.
A universal resource locator, or URL, tells search engines about the content on your page. Include your target keyword but otherwise keep URLs short and sweet by avoiding filler words.
Since both search engines and visitors read your URL, you’ll want to follow a few best practices:
✅ https://yourdomain.com/pink-socks
🛑 https://yourdomain.com/index.php?24551=p44=?
✅ https://yourdomain.com/pink-socks
🛑 https://yourdomain.com/pink_socks
✅ https://yourdomain.com/mens-yellow-socks
🛑 https://yourdomain.com/polkdotsocks-yellow-white-for-men
Keep your URL structures simple and easy to understand.
That said, if you’re already receiving SEO traffic from your current URL structure, it’s not worth updating it for “SEObenefits”—this can actually tank search engine traffic. If you must change it, set up redirects from the old URL to the new one. Shopify usually does this by default (and will tell you when it’s doing so).
To ensure your photos appear in image results, name each image file something descriptive (i.e., don’t name an image “83798.jpg”).
Write descriptive alt text explaining the picture, too—a best practice that helps search engines understand image content and makes it accessible to people who are blind or visually impaired.
Schema markup helps Google understand your website content. It structures data so page information can appear directly in SERPs, which can increase click-through rates and website traffic.
In the example below, Couplet Coffee uses schema to display its five-star rating and customer reviews.
Shopify assists by automatically generating product schema for merchants. To go the extra mile, apps like Judge.me collect customer reviews and display an aggregate rating, as in the Couplet Coffee example above.
Need help? Check out this schema guide or talk to a website developer.
As Jake Munday, co-founder of Custom Neon, says, “Relevant, interesting, useful, or even fun content on your site actively encourages visitors to hang around longer, ultimately helping to improve search engine rankings.”
Let’s walk through an SEO content checklist to help optimize your website content.
Developing and executing a full-fledged content marketing strategy can take months, so it’s important to prioritize. Starting with your product and collection pages is a best practice. If you’re whizzing through this SEO checklist fast, use these exercises to get started:
Although higher word counts correlate with higher rankings, quality is far more important than quantity. Don’t add hundreds of words of fluff if customers don’t need it.
Duplicate content is when similar content exists on two different URLs, making it difficult for search engines to determine which of the two pages to rank.
If you own an ecommerce business, for example, don’t use manufacturers’ descriptions verbatim. Instead, writing your own product descriptions reduces duplicate content and provides an opportunity to apply your brand voice and sales strategies. All content on your website should be original and unique.
If you can’t avoid duplicate content on dynamic pages, use canonical URLs to tell Google which page to prioritize, and noindex and nofollow tags to tell Google not to index specific pages.
A landing page is a single URL that covers one topic in great depth. Landing pages help you categorize information and streamline how readers find what they want from your site. Optimizing your landing pages for keywords and format will improve their placement on SERPs.
Ilia Mundut, founder of Heftyberry, explains, “A lot of the time, it is hard to rank number one for a particular product, especially when sites like Amazon and Etsy often take the first place. The solution is creating product collections optimized for a low-difficulty keyword.”
Ilia puts this into practice using the example of large plastic bathtubs. “You can add several products, including the ones that are difficult to rank for directly,” Ilia says. “This collection page may also have a description that will rank for informational keywords.
“Create backlinks for these collections, create blog posts that internally link to them to establish topical authority—and you have a money machine.”
Rank higher on Google
Use this free SEO checklist to optimize your website and content. Learn how to rank for relevant search terms so more shoppers discover your store first.
Technical SEO isn’t easy, but it is essential for getting your website to rank. Follow this technical SEO checklist to ensure a good user experience for your readers and accessibility for search engine crawlers.
Internal linking is one of the most important tactics in SEO marketing. It involves linking from one page to another within your own website. Linking pages of specific topics to other pages with relevant content helps search engines recognize your topical authority, categorize your content, and rank your pages. Ultimately, internal linking can improve your search engine rankings.
If you’re using this SEO checklist for your ecommerce store, show related products when a visitor is on your product pages. If you’re optimizing a blog, internally link to other pieces that dive deeper on a specific topic, as this link does by pointing to another Shopify SEO guide.
You must also ensure that every page on your site is accessible from your homepage or within a few clicks of it. If not, it’s orphaned—which means it isn’t accessible to users or search crawlers.
Anchor text is the clickable text over a link. Search engines use this microcopy to understand the context of the page link, and which search terms it should appear in the SERP for.
Diversify your strategy with a balance of anchor text types. If you’re optimizing a blog post about blogging tools, for example, use the following anchor text on links pointing to it:
A website’s navigation holds the most important links in your online store. These links tell visitors which pages are important, giving them an easy way to get to specific sections such as the blog, product pages, or landing pages.
For SEO, your global navigation links tell crawlers the important pages on your site.
Common types of navigation links include:
A good practice is to link to your most important collection pages (and maybe product pages too, if one or two products are particularly popular).
Stanley, for example, has a generic “Shop” dropdown bar, while placing its bestselling Quenchers on a separate, easily accessible tab.
If your pages load slowly or your site isn’t mobile responsive, Google is less likely to recommend your website in its search engine rankings. All pages need to be readable on mobile and desktop.
Every theme on the Shopify Theme Store is mobile friendly, but do a sense-check and load your website on multiple devices and browsers. Ask friends and family to do the same, and to screenshot or summarize their experiences navigating the site on their smartphones.
A search engine’s ultimate goal is to provide searchers with the best results for their queries, so site speed is a ranking factor for both desktop and mobile searches.
Sending users to frustrating, slow-loading websites would undermine a search engine’s recommendations—which is why they don’t send users to them. Run your site through PageSpeed Insights to get Google’s recommended performance-enhancing tweaks.
Search engines index websites through bots that “crawl” a website and its pages. A crawling error happens when a bot tries to reach a specific page or site but fails. If you receive any error alerts, address them immediately.
Use Google Search Console to check for crawling errors or broken links. When a page on your site becomes inactive—which can happen when you remove a product or when a blog post becomes outdated—you can redirect that page to another page on your site. This will prevent visitors from ending up on dead links.
Google Core Web Vitals (CWV) measure the user experience (U/X) of your website. They are a good indicator of your website’s SEO performance and include three main components:
The easiest way to improve Core Web Vitals for your online store is by getting a good ecommerce platform to manage content delivery. Shopify stores are the fastest in the world, loading 1.8 times faster than stores on other platforms.* 
When another website links to yours, it tells Google that the linking website trusts your website. This is how you build domain authority (DA)—a key metric in how competitive your website is when trying to rank for certain keywords.
Search engines such as Google use the number, quality, and relevancy of links to specific pages or websites as ranking factors. Use this link-building checklist to build high-quality links to your website.
Tools like Moz’s Link Explorer and Ahrefs Site Explorer let you explore your competitors’ off-page links. From there, you’ll need to determine the context of those links: Why did these sites decide to link to your competitors? What about the page made it worthy of a link?
Look for trends you can apply to your site: if competitors are getting lots of journalistic mentions, why? What kind of content earns them backlinks in respected outlets? If you can understand what potential backlink partners are looking for, you can create content that appeals to them and earn their high-quality backlinks.
One of the best ways to build backlinks is to focus on partnerships and determine who you can provide and share value with.
If you know a beauty blogger who regularly reviews the type of skin care products you sell, for example, a simple introduction can be the start of a mutually beneficial relationship.
Alternatively, search for websites that are actively seeking external contributors and will provide backlinks to your website in exchange for providing content.
Find guest posting opportunities using the following search terms:
Journalists are always looking for news to cover. Creating relationships with them helps to secure press coverage on authoritative sites that build strong backlinks to your website.
Simple tips to secure press coverage include:
If you’ve already picked up some traction, consider using a brand monitoring tool to find “unlinked” mentions of your store or products. You can politely ask the writer or publication to turn the brand mention into a link.
Ahrefs offers this feature within its Content Explorer. Set up alerts so that whenever someone talks about your brand online, you can reach out and ask them to convert the mention into a link.
If you have a brick-and-mortar business, local SEO is essential. It helps customers in your area discover your business’s retail locations.
Google Business is an excellent free SEO tool for local businesses. It helps customers find you across Google Search and Maps.
Start by heading to the signup page, where you’ll enter basic information such as your business name, category, location, and contact details. Once finished, optimize your Google Business page so customers can easily search for and connect with you.
Web directories can improve your website’s searchability, but you need to choose wisely.
The top 10 directories most likely to impact your rankings are:
For brick-and-mortar businesses, your Contact Us page is important for building trust and attracting local customers.
A contact us page provides shoppers with your name, address, and phone number. This is crucial for local SEO because Google values consistent, accurate information for searchers. Be sure to update the page with any changes. The last thing you want to do is send someone to a closed store because your opening hours haven’t been updated.
If you have physical locations in multiple cities, consider creating a unique landing page for each region. This makes it easier to rank for individual market areas without having to build a separate website for each place.
As part of your local SEO checklist, create location-specific copy for each landing page. Granted, this tactic will take time and resources, especially if you have several locations. But you want to avoid creating barebones, unhelpful pages that may lead to Google penalizing your website.
Allbirds is an ecommerce website that applies this local SEO strategy. If you’re searching for contact information from within Britain, you’ll be diverted to the localized landing page for its London store.
If you want to start an online store, SEO is one of the most sustainable ways to drive potential customers to your website. Here’s the checklist to follow when optimizing an ecommerce store.
A search engine’s goal is to direct users to the most relevant, helpful, and reliable information. Product descriptions are the ideal place to communicate your products’ value.
Write unique SEO copy for each product page on your website, including variants. Use bullet points, highlighted text, and heading tags to make product content easier to digest. This improves the user experience—a known ranking factor in many search engine algorithms.
Product descriptions also provide the opportunity to include long-tail keyword variations and help Google better contextualize your product pages. For example, if you’re selling women’s leopard print jeans, use long-tail variations such as:
It’s unlikely search engines will recommend your site in SERPs if they doubt your expertise, credibility, or trustworthiness.
Make a conscious effort to collect customer reviews and display them on relevant product pages to show Google—and potential buyers—that your products are genuine and enjoyed by others. Plus, if you’ve added schema markup, the review ratings can appear in the SERP, giving searchers another reason to click your listings over a competitors’.
Shopify apps like Yotpo and Judge.me can automate this process. They can also trigger automated emails that ask customers to review products after their orders arrive.
Take advantage of Google Images results by uploading high-quality product visuals—including videos, pictures, and GIFs—to your product pages.
An important factor on your ecommerce SEO checklist, product images can also influence organic visitors to buy when they visit your website.
Remember to follow image optimization best practices for any media: compress image file sizes, name files appropriately, and consider using a content delivery network (CDN) to ensure fast load speeds.
SEO is a fast-paced industry. Here’s a cheat sheet of tasks you can do to stay ahead of your competition in the SERPs.
Google is no longer a directory that connects users with websites addressing their queries. Studies show that more than half of Google queries are “zero-click” searches—meaning the user types in their query and gets their answer directly from SERP features such as:
At first glance, this sounds like bad news for website owners. In reality, Google needs to pull content from somewhere, and it credits publishers when it does—as demonstrated in this AI Overview for the phrase “what is dropshipping”:
Best practices for appearing in these zero-click placements are the same as general SEO best practices. Share helpful content, work on your formatting, and use schema markup to help Google uncover answers to direct questions that lend themselves to zero-click queries.
The only way to check whether your SEO strategy is working is to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) such as:
Present these on an SEO reporting dashboard to make sense of your numbers and identify opportunities.
Content is the foundation of many SEO strategies. If your website content isn’t worth viewing, you’ll struggle to appear in the results for your target audience’s search terms.
With intense pressure to produce content, some website owners are turning toward artificial intelligence (AI) tools like Shopify Magic, Jasper, or ChatGPT to keep up.
Google originally discouraged site owners from producing AI-generated content. However, it recently did a 180 on that stance. Its guidelines now state “appropriate use of AI or automation is not against our guidelines”—so long as the content is relevant, useful, and helpful.
Use cases for SEO include first drafts of:
However, this advice comes with a word of warning. Noah Kain, owner of Noah Kain Consulting, says, “SEOs are going to be leveraging ChatGPT and other AI tools to become more efficient, but I’d warn people to not lean on these tools for too much content.
“The brands that go the extra mile to create unique and valuable content will stand out from the brands that get lazy and lean on AI tools too much.”
Looking to get even more results from your SEO strategy? Here are three bonus SEO tips.
In a bid to make the organic search results more credible, Google announced an update to its algorithm. E-E-A-T, which stands for experience, expertise, authoritative, and trustworthiness, is a ranking factor that measures content creators’ credibility.
Make your content more credible by inviting third-party experts to contribute, such as people with:
Search engines reward sites that format information in a way that’s easy for customers to digest. That doesn’t always mean text. Google pulls different content formats in the main search results page—including pictures from Google Images and videos from YouTube.
As you build your site, always consider the connection between the user experience and search optimization. As search technology improves, these two things march in lockstep, which means the easiest way to please a search engine is to please the people who use it.
While search continues to evolve, one thing that remains consistent is why we search at all: to discover things we want or recall things we’ve seen.
The only timeless SEO strategy is to provide searchers with what they’re looking for. Search engines, particularly Google, reward websites that achieve this. The vast majority of what we’ve included in the SEO checklists above—fast-loading websites, interesting content and copy, clear page and image descriptions—are things that make searchers’ lives easier.
Need extra help? Hire a Shopify expert to assist with your search marketing strategy. Or download an SEO plug-in for your website in the Shopify App Store.
An SEO checklist is a list of optimizations you can perform in order to increase your website’s chances of ranking in a search engine.
SEO is an ongoing marketing process. Websites constantly need to be refreshed and re-optimized in order to meet search intent, prove to Google your site is relevant, and target keywords your audience is searching for.
Yes. Content management platforms like Shopify and WordPress, and the SEO plug-ins that integrate with them, make it easy to DIY your SEO approach.
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