SEO Checklist: 50 Tips to Optimize Your Website (2026)

Google processes more than five trillion searches per year, making search one of the biggest drivers of online brand discovery and answers. But the search engine results page (SERP) is changing fast, with AI overviews influencing how and whether people click. A Semrush analysis of more than 10 million keywords found that terms triggering AI overviews grew rapidly at the beginning of 2025 before settling in at around 16% of all queries. 

“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.

SEO checklist: How to improve your results

• SEO basics checklist
• Keyword research checklist
• On-page SEO checklist
• Content checklist
• Technical SEO checklist
• Off-page SEO checklist
• Local SEO checklist
• Ecommerce SEO checklist
• Advanced SEO checklist
• AI SEO checklist
• Bonus SEO tips

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 receives more than 27% of all clicks. While it may take some time, even new sites can rank on Google with this SEO checklist.

SEO basics 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. These are foundational steps that are mostly one-time setup tasks. 

1. Set up Google Search Console

Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool that helps website owners monitor their organic Google traffic, track search performance, and uncover issues that could prevent their site from ranking.

Head to the welcome page to create your Google Search Console account. Verify your domain to confirm you own the website. Learn how to verify your Shopify domain to use Google services.

2. Set up Bing Webmaster Tools

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 sign-up page, then add and verify your website to appear in Bing search results.

3. Submit a sitemap

A sitemap tells Google and other search engines about your site’s most important pages and gives valuable info about them.

Most ecommerce platforms and content management systems (CMSs) automatically generate a sitemap that lists your website’s pages, including all Shopify stores. Access your Shopify store site map by typing in the name of your online store, followed by “/sitemap.xml,” for example, “myshopifystore.com/sitemap.xml.” 

If you’re using WordPress’s content management system, install the Yoast SEO plug-in to create a site map. 

Once it’s complete, submit your sitemap to Google through GSC and to Bing through the webmaster tools accounts you just created.

4. Set up Google Analytics

Google Analytics shares data about how visitors interact with your website. Once installed, you can segment store visitors to monitor how they engage with your website after arriving through a search engine. You can later use these segments to deliver targeted marketing campaigns based on their site habits (and other qualities). 

Set up a Google Analytics account and add your web property. Then, add a data stream by inserting the Google tag ID into your Shopify, WordPress, or other CMS-hosted website.

5. Check that your site is indexed

A search engine must index your site before it can appear in search results. The quickest way to see whether your site is indexed is through a site search (i.e., by searching “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.

6. Consider SEO tools

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:

• Moz is an affordable option that offers a full SEO marketing suite, including excellent keyword research tools.
• Ahrefs is a complete suite for SEO audits, research, tracking, and more.
• Semrush is another SEO tool for tracking keywords, exploring competitor sites, and more.
• KeySearch.co is an inexpensive tool for simple keyword research.

Free SEO tools:

• Surfer Chrome plug-in generates free search data and content guidelines.
• Keyword.io is a free tool for keyword suggestions.
• Screaming Frog is for identifying crawl errors on your site.
• MozBar is for on-the-go SEO research.
• Google Ads Keyword Planner is for searching keywords for ad campaigns.

If you’re just learning about SEO for the first time, you may want to start with free tools, then invest in paid tools once you have a better understanding of SEO. Once you have a specific SEO goal in mind, that will help you decide which tool will help you the most.

Shopify online stores have built-in SEO features that automatically add canonical tags to pages (to prevent duplicate content from appearing in SERPs), generate an XML sitemap, and generate title tags including your store name on Shopify-owned themes. 

Keyword research checklist

Keyword research uncovers the words and phrases your target audience is searching for. Here’s how to find them so that you can target relevant keywords on your website. 

7. Conduct keyword research

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 sell gifts, for example, your seed keyword might be “best gifts for moms.” 

When shortlisting keywords, pay attention to:

• Search volume. How many people search for the keyword each month? Ranking for a high search volume keyword can bring thousands of people to your site if you appear in the SERP for it, but competition can be fierce.
• Keyword difficulty. How easy will it be to rank for your chosen phrase? Keyword research tools weigh factors such as page authority, search volume, and backlinks to give a difficulty score out of 100. The higher this score, the harder it is to rank. 
• Commercial viability. Does the keyword match what you’re selling? For example, it might not make sense to target “candle holders” if you sell only candle-making kits. 

8. Analyze competitors’ keyword rankings

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 your competitors are ranking for and show you the position each URL holds for each keyword. 

9. Map search intent for each 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. To do this, you can look at the search engine results page to see which pages are ranking for the keyword. Or you can use an SEO tool like SEMRush or Ahrefs.

When looking at the SERP, see if the ranking pages are informational articles, category pages, product pages, resources, or something else. Use this to map keywords to content types. Each page on your site—product pages, categories, blog posts, homepage—can rank for different long tail keywords.

Here’s how to put this into practice for an aromatherapy shop that sells:

• Lemon essential oils
• Lime essential oils
• Grapefruit essential oils
• Lavender essential oils
• Glass bottles for essential oils
• Roller bottles for essential oils
• Spray bottles for essential oils 

You can 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 checklist

On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual pages on your website to increase their search visibility. 

Preparing individual pages to rank takes time and effort. After all, you’re competing with already-established brands. Follow this on-page SEO checklist to ensure your webpages are maximally optimized.

10. Optimize heading tags

A heading (H1) tag is a page’s main headline, and should include its target keywords. Search engines use H1s to understand page context. 

The best practice is to include just one H1 per page. For example, the H1 for your product called Lemon Drop Bliss—a product people searching for lemon essential oils might like—could be “Lemon Essential Oil.”

Check your preferred platform to see how it handles page titles. Many will automatically use the page title as the H1 tag. For instance, Shopify page titles are the default H1 tag for pages created through Shopify. Verifying ensures you don’t accidentally duplicate or omit tags.

Tip: Headings should be descriptive and serve as useful anchors for users that are scanning a page to find the part that answers their question or matches their intent. Ask yourself: Is each heading serving as a useful signpost for a user to find what they’re looking for quickly?

11. Write compelling title tags

Appearing in search results is only part of the job. You also need to convince users to visit your page over others’. Title tags—the blue clickable links that appear in the SERP—help you do this.

Here are some tips for optimizing title tags:

• Write compelling page titles for humans. Clearly describe the page content in compelling, click-worthy language that includes important keywords.
• Keep your title tag under 60 characters. Backlinko found that title tags with 40 to 60 characters have the highest click-through rate.
• Include valuable keywords near the beginning. Encourage searchers to click your result and prove to search engines your site reflects a searcher’s intent by frontloading the main keyword in your title tag.

12. Optimize your meta description

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 page content and be compelling enough to drive clicks.

Include your target keywords and strongest copy at the very beginning of your meta description, and avoid going over 160 characters—research from Moz indicates many meta descriptions get truncated at this point. 

13. Include a keyword in your page URL

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.

To serve the search engines and human visitors reading your URL, follow these best practices:

Make readable URLs

✅ https://yourdomain.com/pink-socks

🛑 https://yourdomain.com/index.php?24551=p44=?

Use hyphens not underscores

✅ https://yourdomain.com/pink-socks

🛑 https://yourdomain.com/pink_socks

Include target keywords

✅ https://yourdomain.com/mens-yellow-socks

🛑 https://yourdomain.com/polkdotsocks-yellow-white-for-men

Ultimately, keep your URL structures simple and easy to understand. 

That said, if you’re already generating SEO traffic at your current URL structure, it’s not worth updating it for “SEO benefits”—doing 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).

14. Write descriptive alt text for images

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.

15. Add schema markup

Schema markup helps Google understand your website content. It structures data so that 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 automatically generates 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. 

Content checklist

The better your content, the likelier your visitors will stay, engage, and buy.

Use this SEO content checklist to optimize your website content.

16. Create a content marketing strategy

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 wise. Here’s how: 

• Consider where your audience is. If your target market is searching on Google, great. But they might be elsewhere—TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, YouTube, etc. Use audience research tools like SparkToro to discover where they are, then create content to meet them there. This is becoming increasingly important, as social media and video content is cited more frequently in Google.
• Brainstorm customer questions. Consider the questions customers will ask about your products or product category. 
• Use keyword research tools to match questions with search terms. Always pair your content ideas with the actual terms people use. Use tools such as AnswerThePublic, Google Autosuggest, or Keywords Everywhere to ensure a match.
• Help customers get more value from your products. What types of content will help your customers use your products? For grocers, the answer might be recipes; for florists, it could be tips for prolonging floral freshness. 

17. Format content for readability

Make it easy for readers to find what they need by keeping your copy clear, concise, and organized. Although Google rewards long content—the average Google top 10 result contains 1,447 words—these structural tactics will prevent overwhelming your readers with a wall of text: 

• Add a table of contents and an FAQ. Include jump links to help readers navigate your page and improve your chances of landing in Google’s featured snippet.
• Use multimedia. Include infographics, videos, or charts to break up text.
• Break sections into scannable chunks. Add subheadings to help readers scan, and use bullet points within sections to break text into digestible bites.
• Diversify short sentences and paragraphs. Use Hemingway to help vary your copy.

Although higher word counts correlate with higher rankings, quality is far more important than quantity. Don’t add hundreds of words of fluff that customers don’t need. 

18. Fix duplicate content

Duplicate content occurs when similar content appears on two different URLs, making it difficult for search engines to determine which page to rank.

If you own an ecommerce business, for example, don’t use manufacturers’ descriptions verbatim. Instead, writing your own product descriptions lets you 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. 

19. Create specialized collection pages

A landing page is a single URL that covers a single topic in depth. Landing pages help you categorize information and streamline how readers find what they want from your site. Optimizing your landing pages for relevant keywords and formats will improve their placement in 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.

“You can add several products, including the ones that are difficult to rank for directly. 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.”

20. Optimize for video and visual search

Visual discovery is growing faster than text queries, especially for mobile shopping. Google reports that its visual search tool, Lens, processes 20 billion visual searches per month, with about 25% shopping-related. Here’s how to optimize your photos for search:

• Take pictures from multiple angles. Showcase your products by including close-ups of texture, labels, and scale. 
• Follow Google’s SEO image guidance. Use HTML image elements, supported formats, fast-loading assets, and strong image landing pages.
• Add descriptive alt text. Ensure your words match the images shown. 
• Add VideoObject structured data. This helps Google find and display your videos in SERPs. 

Technical SEO checklist

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.

21. Create an internal link strategy

Internal linking is one of the most important SEO marketing tactics. It involves linking from one page to others within your own website. Linking 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. If not, it’s orphaned—which means it isn’t accessible to users or search crawlers.

22. Optimize anchor text

Anchor text is the clickable text over a link. Search engines use this microcopy to understand a page and which search terms should represent it in the SERP.

Anchor text doesn’t need to be perfect. Anchors are seen in the context of the words that surround them, so they don’t need to contain 100% of the context, just be reasonably descriptive.

Analyze your anchor text by considering if a reader would know what the page is about just from reading the anchor text. If not, how could it be clearer or more specific.

Here’s some examples of different types of anchor text for a post about blogging tools:

• Exactmatch: e.g, “blogging tools”
• Partial match: e.g, “small business blogging tools”
• Related terms: e.g, “tools for bloggers”
• Branded terms: e.g, “Shopify blogging tools”
• Page titles: e.g, “Best blogging tools in 2026”

23. Build a global navigation menu

A website’s navigation holds the most important links in your online store. These links tell visitors and web crawlers which pages are important, providing easy paths to specific sections such as your blog, product pages, or landing pages.

Common types of navigation links include:

• Single-bar navigation. All links live in one bar and are limited.
• Double-bar navigation. Primary and secondary links live in the navigation bar, stacked above each other.
• Dropdown navigation. Designed so that when a user hovers over the navigation link, a list of links drops down.

It’s good practice to link to your most important collection pages (and, if one or two products are particularly popular, to their product pages). 

Stanley, for example, has a generic “Shop” dropdown bar, while placing its bestselling Quenchers on a separate, easily accessible tab. 

24. Check if your store is mobile-friendly

If your pages load slowly on mobile devices or your site isn’t mobile responsive, Google is less likely to recommend it in its search engine rankings. All pages need to be readable on mobile and desktop, since mobile devices account for over half of all organic search engine visits in the US. 

Every theme on the Shopify Theme Store is mobile friendly, but you should still test across multiple devices and browsers. But just because your website is responsive, doesn’t mean all the content appears as it should. Go through your website to ensure all your important content appears correctly on mobile.

“We do notice that most people shopping on GOGO are on their phones as opposed to desktop or tablet, so we do try to make images that look the best on a phone,” says South Van Der Lee, president and designer at GOGO Sweaters. 

Ask friends and family to do the same, and to screenshot or summarize their experiences navigating the site on their smartphones.

25. Ensure your store is fast

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 do it. Run your site through PageSpeed Insights to get Google’s recommended performance-enhancing tweaks.

Other things that may be slowing your site down are large image files, and extra apps or plug-ins you aren’t using. Shopify automatically resizes images to avoid this issue.

“We just launched on the new Shopify 2.0 site, blazing fast, way faster than our old site. The site was so fast and instant in the background that the search button didn’t actually need to be used, because the filtering was already happening live so fast,” says Sean Reyes, founder at Shock Surplus.

26. Fix broken links

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 encountering dead links.

27. Improve your Core Web Vitals

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:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). Measures loading performance. LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the first page starts loading.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP). Measures interactivity. Pages should have an INP of less than 200 milliseconds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Measures visual stability. Pages should maintain a CLS of less than 0.1.

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 2.8 times faster than stores on other platforms, on average. 

Off-page SEO checklist (a.k.a. link building)

When another website links to yours, it signals to Google that the linking site trusts your site. 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.

Link building success can depend on the niche or industry your website operates in. Watching your competitors to see what’s working in your industry may help, along with the following ideas.

28. Analyze a competitor’s backlink profile

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 their pages made them worthy of links?

Look for trends you can apply to your site: if competitors are getting lots of journalistic mentions, why? What kinds of content earn them backlinks from 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.

29. Write guest posts

One of thebest ways to build backlinks is to focus on partnerships: Identify potential partners and determine how you can provide value to them. 

If you know a beauty blogger who regularly reviews the type of skin care products you sell, a simple introduction can be the start of a mutually beneficial relationship.

Alternatively, search for websites that actively seek external contributors and offer backlinks in exchange for content.

Find guest posting opportunities using the following search terms:

• [niche] + “write for us”
• [niche] + “contribute”
• [niche] + “guest post”

30. Secure press mentions

Journalists are always looking for news to cover. Building relationships with them helps secure press coverage on authoritative sites, which in turn builds strong backlinks to your website. 

Simple tips to secure press coverage include:

• Entering awards or competitions
• Distributing press releases
• Promoting social causes
• Sending samples of your products to writers
• Responding to journalist requests through platforms like Qwoted or Help a B2B Writer

“I would highly recommend, if you’re a pre-launch product, to work the PR angles as hard as you can, make that a big chunk of what you do throughout the day,” says Ryan Close, founder at Bartesian. “Reaching out to all the big publications and agencies and sending them information, visuals, assets, and just saying, ‘Hey, here’s something we’re working on if you want to write a story.’"

31. Reclaim brand mentions

If you’ve already picked up some traction, consider using a brand monitoring tool to find “unlinked” mentions of your store or products. Then, 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. 

Local SEO checklist

If you have a brick-and-mortar business, local SEO is essential. It helps customers in your area discover your business’s retail locations. Here’s how to make the most of it.

32. Set up a Google Business profile

Google Business is an excellent free SEO tool for local businesses. It helps customers find you across Google Search and Maps.

First, search for your business on Google to see if a profile exists, then claim it. Or you can add a new one by heading to the signup page, where you’ll enter basic information such as your business name, category, location, and contact details. 

Next, verify your business details and respond to reviews. Google will determine the verification method, which can be a live recording, phone call, or even snail mail. Finally, optimize your Google Business page so customers can easily find and connect with you. This involves:

• Representing your business consistently. For example, using the same business name and description online and in real life. 
• Updating important information. Keeping your address, hours, and contact information up to date.
• Providing visuals. Posting photos that help shoppers understand what to expect. 

• Choosing the fewest necessary categories. Google cautions against selecting every category that might apply to your business. Instead, focus on one to three essential ones.

• Maintaining one profile. You only need one per business, or you risk confusing customers and damaging your local SEO efforts.

Also, treat reviews as an ongoing part of profile management. Replying to reviews shows customers their feedback is valued. Responding to positive reviews encourages customer loyalty, and responding to negative ones demonstrates accountability and engagement. 

33. List your store on major directories and platforms

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:

• Facebook
• Apple Maps
• Google My Business
• LinkedIn Company Directory
• Bing
• Yelp
• Better Business Bureau
• Foursquare
• Yellow Pages
• Angi (formerly Angie’s List)

34. Fill out your Contact Us page thoroughly

For brick-and-mortar businesses, a 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 customers to a closed store because you didn’t update your hours.

35. Consider city-specific landing pages

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 building a separate website for each location.

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 it’s worth the effort, as Google penalizes bare-bones, unhelpful pages. 

Allbirds is an ecommerce website that applies this local SEO strategy. If you’re searching for contact information within the UK, you’ll be redirected to the localized landing page for its London store.

Ecommerce SEO checklist

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.

36. Optimize product pages for search

A search engine’s goal is to direct users to the most relevant, helpful, and reliable information. Strong ecommerce SEO comes from optimizing titles, headings, images, product data, and product descriptions. 

Write unique SEO copy for each product page on your website, including variants. Use bullet points, highlighted text, and heading tags to help shoppers find what they need quickly, which supports search performance.

Some basic SEO actions to take:

• Match shoppers’ search intent. Write a clear, unique page title and on-page headings that reflect their search intent. 
• Add a strong meta description. Summarize the page and include top keywords.
• Use structured product data. Including this machine-readable code on your product pages helps Google better understand your products and display richer results. 
• Add data to image files. Embed images with standard HTML, use responsive and high-quality images, and add descriptive file names and alt text so Google can discover and surface them in search results. 
• Use canonical tags. Consolidate very similar or duplicate product URLs to help Google understand and prioritize your main product page.

Product descriptions also offer opportunities 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:

• Cotton leopard print jeans
• Ladies’ leopard print jeans
• Women’s leopard denim jeans

Avoid stuffing the page with these terms. Instead, use them contextually to describe products, materials, fit, or style. 

Learn more about how to use answer engine optimization to drive traffic to your ecommerce website.

37. Structure collection pages strategically

Use collection pages to target broad terms like “women’s jeans,” since shoppers often want to compare multiple options. Create a simple click path from your main menu to categories and subcategories, then to individual products, ensuring each category page links to the product pages so Google can easily crawl your catalog. 

Then, for each collection page:

• Target one primary keyword in the title and H1
• Add a short intro that helps buyers choose
• Link to key subcategories and best sellers

Finally, keep filters easy for search engines to crawl and limit or block faceted URLs (URLs generated by users’ filtered searches, e.g. “/jeans?color=leopard&size=30”) when they create too many low‑value pages. Many ecommerce platforms, including Shopify, do this by default.

38. Handle out-of-stock and seasonal products

Out-of-stock or seasonal products can still earn traffic, especially if they’ve gone viral.

When a bestseller isn’t available, keep the URL live to let shoppers know when it will return. Show the item status on the page and use structured data to display availability statuses such as out of stock, pre-order, on backorder, etc.

You can also ask shoppers to sign up for an alert when the product is available again. 

If a product is officially discontinued, let the URL return a 404 or 410. Only redirect when there’s a relevant alternative. 

39. Collect customer reviews

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 well received. Plus, if you’ve added schema markup, the review ratings can appear in the SERP, giving searchers another reason to click your listings over 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. 

40. Add high-quality product visuals 

Take advantage of Google Images results by uploading high-quality product visuals—including videos, pictures, and GIFs—to your product pages.

An important factor in ecommerce SEO, product images can also influence organic visitors to buy when they visit your website.

Remember to follow image optimization best practices for all media: compress image files, name files appropriately, and consider using a content delivery network (CDN) to ensure fast load times.

Advanced SEO checklist

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. These tasks build on the fundamentals you accomplished in the SEO basics checklist above: 

41. Optimize for zero-click searches

Google is no longer a directory that simply connects users to websites that address their queries. Data show that “zero-click” searches—where users enter a query and receive an answer directly from SERP features—are increasing.

 Instead of clicking through to sites, users are getting their answer from: 

• Featured snippets
• AI overviews
• “People Also Ask” sections

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 those for general SEO. Share helpful content, improve formatting, and use schema markup to help Google find answers to direct questions that support zero-click queries.

42. Configure SEO reporting dashboards

The only way to check whether your SEO strategy is working is to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) such as:

• Organic traffic
• Search visibility
• Keyword rankings

Present these on an SEO reporting dashboard to make sense of your numbers and identify opportunities. 

43. Optimize advanced schema for rich results

An advanced schema helps Google understand a page and make it eligible for rich results, though Google doesn’t guarantee they’ll appear. Choose Google-supported schema types from the search engine’s Search Gallery and implement them only when they match what users see on your page.

Many ecommerce platforms, including Shopify, take care of this by default.

Some good schema options for commerce businesses are:

• Product. Makes your product pages eligible for rich results with price, availability, and ratings.

• Review snippet. Can show star ratings and sometimes a short review snippet in search, when used according to Google’s review guidelines.

• BreadcrumbList. Helps Google understand your hierarchy and show breadcrumb paths (a navigational tool) in results.
• Local business. Describes your store’s name, location, and contact details, helping Google represent your business in local search and or knowledge panel results.

Validate pages with the Rich Results Test and fix any errors. Monitor Google Search Console rich result reports and validate fixes after deployment.

44. Implement international SEO correctly

Ecommerce stores use hreflang, aka sitemap localization, when they publish different URLs for the same page, each targeted to a different language or region. 

For example, a store may host/en-us and /en-gb versions, or an English and German version. This practice is important when pages are similar across markets, sharing the same language but differing by region, because hreflang clarifies that they are localized variants. 

📚 Read more: How To Use International SEO To Make Your Website Global

45. Use AI to scale content creation

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 to artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as Shopify Sidekick, Jasper, and ChatGPT to keep up. 

Google originally discouraged site owners from producing AI-generated content. However, it recently reversed that stance, stating that “appropriate use of AI or automation is not against our guidelines”—so long as the content is relevant, useful, and helpful.

Use cases for AI include first drafts of:

• Product descriptions
• Blog post introductions
• Page titles or headings
• Content outlines

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.”

AI SEO checklist

Some 50% of consumers today already use AI-powered search, and it’s expected to impact $750 billion in consumer spending by 2028, according to McKinsey. 

Do you have a strategy for generative AI engine optimization yet? Here are a few items to check off your list, if not. 

46. Structure content for AI citations

Build your pages so facts are easy for crawlers to extract. Use consistent formatting like lists to help display product specs and facts, and pair questions and answers together via an FAQ section where it makes sense.

High-quality images and videos also add clarity to written text. Lastly, use internal links to point to the best supporting pages so related context is easy to discover and attribute. 

47. Monitor AI Overview impact on your traffic

You can’t track AI visibility in Google Search Console just yet. Clicks from AI features like AI Overview and AI Mode are included in overall search traffic. Impressions count only when the link is scrolled into view or expanded. But there is no filter to segment AI Overview versus classic organic traffic. 

However, you can use other tools, such as Semrush and Ahrefs, to track visibility and correlate it with GSC traffic data. You can also leverage GSC as a proxy detector to find queries and pages where impressions are stable, but click-through rate (CTR) drops, especially on informational queries that are AI-prone. 

Bonus SEO tips

Looking to get even more results from your SEO strategy? Here are three bonus SEO tips.

48. Invite influential creators to produce content

To improve the credibility of organic search results, Google frequently updates its algorithm, but demonstrating “EEAT” remains essential. EEAT stands for experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, and 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:

• Professionally recognized qualifications (i.e., dentists for a toothpaste-related website)
• A substantial social media following around a given industry or topic
• Bylines in relevant publications

49. Diversify content formats

Search engines reward sites that format information in easily digestible ways, and that doesn’t always mean producing text. Google pulls different content formats in its main search results page—including pictures from Google Images and videos from YouTube.

50. Improve the user experience

As you build your site, always consider the connection between the user experience and search optimization. As search technology improves, these two things move in lockstep, meaning the easiest way to please a search engine is to please the people who use it.

Use this SEO checklist to optimize your website

While search continues to evolve, one thing that remains consistent is why anyone searches at all: to learn, discover, and recall.

The only timeless SEO strategy is providing searchers with what they’re looking for. Search engines, particularly Google, reward websites that achieve this. The vast majority of strategies in the SEO checklists above—fast-loading websites, interesting content and copy, clear page and image descriptions—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.