Shopify Blog SEO: A Complete 2023 Guide

If you've optimized your Shopify store for SEO but don't have a blog, you're missing out on 100,000s in traffic and sales.

• You can't rank for informational searches that could lead to sales.
• You're limiting your traffic potential most searches on Google are informational.
• You're not building topical authority, which helps your product pages rank higher in Google.
• You're not funneling in top-of-funnel traffic to your email list.

On top of this, we see many stores approach Shopify blog SEO in the wrong way. Costing them even more money.

This guide will give you a step-by-step process on optimizing your Shopify blog's SEO the right way.

How does a Shopify blog help SEO?

Millions of brands have used blogging as a marketing strategy for years, as it allows you to build an audience, gain trust, and strengthen customer loyalty.

Furthermore, when done right, it’s more affordable than paid ads and guarantees long-term success. 

However, it’s easier said than done.

Why?

Some Shopify merchants publish two 500-word blog posts monthly, fill them with keywords, and wait for thousands of organic traffic to be generated. 

We’re no longer in the early 2000s.

Things are different now due to the stiff competition. You must go the extra mile if you want to achieve better results.

We’ve studied successful Shopify blogs that yield tremendous results, and here are some of the typical traits. 

• Write high-quality and insightful blog posts that hit customer pain points.
• Ensure all posts are SEO optimized.
• Distribute posts on multiple platforms.
• Collect leads through emails and text for lead nurturing.

A perfect example of a brand that has invested in its blog SEO is deathwishcoffee.com - a brand that sells some of the world’s strongest coffee.

At the time of writing this post, the site receives 177k organic traffic, according to SEMrush.

The massive organic traffic is a result of deathwishcoffee.com transforming its blog into a robust and credible education hub that ranks for high search intent keywords on all things coffee.

For example, one of their best-performing articles ranks for the keyword “coffee staining” and has a global search volume of 7300.

The blog post "DIY: STAIN WOOD WITH COFFEE IN 4 STEPS” is at position one.

According to research by Backlinko, the first google search result has a click-through rate of 27.6%. This means that deathwishcoffee.com might receive approximately 2014 organic visitors from that one article.

Combine the traffic from all the top-ranking articles, and that’s how they record such splendid organic traffic.

That’s not all.

They’ve incorporated a strong SMS and email marketing campaign to capture leads who’ve landed on one of their blog posts.

There’s also a pop on every blog page that offers 15% off for your first order if you give out your phone number.

They’ve also put a signup page below every article to encourage readers to sign up for their mailing list.

This is a perfect example of blogging done right. 

Don’t stop at creating articles to rank high and attract organic traffic. There is a lot to do after you hit publish. 

For example, you can repurpose into other forms of content or distribute on other platforms. 

Furthermore, you want multiple methods of acquiring the reader’s information to nurture them further.

Is Shopify blog good for SEO?

Shopify does have an inbuilt SEO feature to help you optimize your content for better ranking.

It will automatically take care of basic SEO stuff, including

• Adding auto-generated canonical tags to pages to prevent duplicate content from appearing in search results. 
• Automatically generating sitemap.xml and robot.xml for your website.
• Generating title tags that include your store name. 
• A Yoast-like function that allows you to optimize key elements like meta descriptions, title tags, and URLs.

All these elements are available in the same place. Simply scroll down to the “Search Engine Listing Preview” to make any changes.

While we appreciate the tool's excellent SEO features, the blog section is pretty much neglected.

Why?

It mainly focuses on general blog functions but doesn’t go deeper to help you optimize your posts for better ranking. 

Here are some functions you can do with the Shopify blog feature.

• Manage comments
• Schedule a publish date
• Create blog excerpt displays
• Organize your blog posts using tags
• Invite readers to subscribe to your email list
• Promote featured posts

So where does that leave us?

Using Shopify for blogging is okay, but if you’re serious about creating a brand name with your blog, you must use a third-party blogging tool.

But there’s another roadblock when using a third-party tool for blogging in Shopify.

• You must install a blog from other platforms as a subdomain inside Shopify. So instead of the blog domain being “yourwebsite.com/blog,” it will be “blog.yourwebsite.com,” which has disadvantages in SEO.
• You’ll likely lose cart information since you’ll be working across two platforms.
• It will be confusing to maneuver through the two sites due to the different log-ins. Plus, you’ll have different designs and themes that may confuse customers.

The only solution is to use a Shopify blog builder app. The app is a full-suite blog incorporated into your Shopify store.

The advantage of Shopify blog apps is that it gives you an experience of both worlds.

You can use it to optimize your page for organic traffic while still promoting your Shopify products from the same platform, which is a win-win. 

Using a Shopify blogging app for SEO

Bloggle is a Shopify blog app builder that enables you to create SEO-optimized blog posts for your Shopify store. 

It differs from other Shopify SEO apps that mainly dwell on SEO analysis, reports, or backlink management.

The tool aims to give you a unique blogging experience that you can’t get with Shopify’s native blog feature.

Here are some SEO benefits of Bloggle for your Shopify store.

Intuitive blog page builder

The blog page builder is where the magic happens.

You use the page editor to create your posts. No worries if you don’t know how to use it. The platform offers many blog templates you can quickly optimize to your liking.

You can also create customized blog templates if you want a consistent blog design for all your articles. 

Furthermore, you get 21 elements on the page builder to boost the user experience for readers. For example, you can add titles, dividers, tables of content, Klaviyo forms, social shares, and more.

Collect leads from your blogs.

According to SEMrush, the average bounce rate for e-Commerce is 20-45%. So you risk losing half of all your Shopify page visitors.

Image source

But there’s something you can do to make sure you still have their information.

With Bloggle, you can create sign-up forms to collect visitors' emails. And since it integrates with Klaviyo, creating effective newsletters and SMS campaigns is easy.

Bloggle ensures there are no cracks where leads can slip through once they appear on your website. 

Embed Products in blog posts

Most Shopify stores that use blogging to engage customers put a link to their product’s page right below the article, like this.

Imagine what could happen if you embedded the products right in the middle of the article. To most people, it won’t make much of a difference.

But here’s an astonishing stat from sumo done back in 2018. They analyzed 650,000 articles and found that only 20% of readers read the articles to the last paragraph. Furthermore, most of the readers only scanned through the articles.

This means one thing.

Your Shopify page visitors aren’t guaranteed to scroll down to the bottom of your blog post. So it’s wise to introduce your product at the start of your article or somewhere in the middle where they are likely to see it.

With Bloggle, you can embed an image of your product right in the middle of your article and link it back to the product page. This increases engagement rates and boosts conversions.

In addition, the tool gives you advanced video integration components like YouTube, Vimeo, and many more video hosting apps.

How to improve SEO for your Shopify blog

Shopify’s main limitation is that it lacks a robust SEO system to create optimized articles.

That’s what Bloggle is built for, thanks to a powerful feature - an SEO score checker.

If you’ve used the Yoast SEO tool before, you’ll be excited to meet Bloggle’s SEO checker.

Like Yoast SEO, the SEO checker will scan through your blog post and give it a general SEO score and SEO suggestions on how to optimize the post.

You can access the SEO checker from the right side of the blog page editor once you have finished writing your article.

For example, some suggestions include SEO title and meta description word frame, recommended word count, SEO formatting, number of focus keywords, and where alt tags should be added.

Your work is to implement those suggestions to achieve an already optimized blog post.

Shopify blog SEO guide

In this section, we’ll go through some of the best Shopify blog SEO practices you can implement on your store.

1. Find your focus keyword

Doing keyword research for Shopify stores is quite different from other websites because of the particular audience.

For Shopify stores, you might want to give more bias on transactional keywords, which searchers use when they want to buy something.

For example, if you are selling baby clothes, one of the transactional keywords you can tackle is “baby diapers.” 

However, you’ll find that though some keywords might appear transactional, they are also informational ones. 

A good example is “best wireless headphones,” which gives you these results.

All the first page results link to informational articles. This means that Google noted that the search intent fits people looking for informational posts about the product before making a purchase.

However, this doesn’t imply that you shouldn’t target those keywords.

Since you’re already blogging inside your Shopify store, these keywords would be perfect for the bottom-funnel (BOFU) posts.

To get high search intent keywords, use SEO tools like SEMrush or Ubbersuggest (the free option works out great).

Don’t know where to begin? 

Experts advise that you start by searching for a product you sell to get the highest-ranking competitor. Run the website on SEMrush to find other keywords that it’s ranking for. Copy those keywords and use them to write your next blog posts.

2. Write high-quality blog posts

Once you find profitable keywords, the next stage is creating content to attract readers to your site.

But you don’t want to add another blog to an already populated Google. Your aim is to develop relevance around your niche. You want people to think of a specific product and your Shopify store.

For example, if you’re a beer enthusiast, you must have heard of Northern Brewer, an e-Commerce brand selling home brewing starter kits.

Since they are in a unique niche, the company has focused more on education and has an entire section dedicated to just that.

Anyone looking to start making “DIY” beer would use the blog as the best educational resource.

As a result, they receive a whopping 196K monthly organic traffic.

So it’s not just creating another blog post. It’s about creating a unique experience that answers your customers’ pain points. 

To create high-quality content, write articles with an unusual point of view. By this, we mean taking advantage of your research skills and creativity.

For example, you can reach out to SMEs in your niche and ask them questions. Use their quotes in your blog posts. Or you can engage your audience with exciting personal anecdotes. The possibilities are endless.

3. Add keywords to meta titles, descriptions, and alt tags

Meta tags and alt tags don’t have a significant impact on helping your article rank. 

However, a well-written meta description can encourage readers to click on your article when they come across it, which improves your CTR.

Things to remember when writing tags include:

• Keep meta descriptions short, around the recommended 160 characters
• Include your focus keyword in meta descriptions and titles.
• Add a CTA to create a sense of urgency
• Make it engaging and unique to readers

4. Remove of duplicate content

There’s no limit to the number of pages you can have in your Shopify store.

But that freedom may become disadvantageous as Google could index the wrong page, which hurts your overall SEO rankings. 

This is because Google algorithms often try to index pages 2 or 3 instead of the collection’s homepage.

Luckily, detecting whether a page is duplicated is simple. Look at your URLs and check if they have 2, 3 or 4 as the last digits. 

Here’s an example. https://www.example.com/collections/all-items?page=3

To fix this problem, try to no-index the duplicate pages. Shopify has an automatic function known as a canonical tag which does the task automatically.

5. Build backlinks and internal linking

Google rewards credibility as it shows that your page is helpful to readers.

The best way to make your site credible is by getting numerous backlinks to your store. The more backlinks you have, the more Google will rank your posts.

A lot has been said about backlinking, but it all starts with building relationships. 

Some people may build a list of a thousand companies, get key decision-makers and their emails, and send them a cold email asking for a backlink.

Sure, that might work, but the success rate is relatively low. You might end up with three links after sending 1000 cold emails.

Instead, focus on creating relationships. Let people know about your brand on social media platforms by sharing helpful content. Engage with their content. Once you’ve built a relationship, reach out with a request for a link exchange.

Internal linking also comes in handy for on-page SEO. Ensure you have links from your blog post to your collection, homepage, or other articles. Internal linking boosts your on-page SEO, which positively affects ranking.

6. Use lots of visuals

The modern reader doesn’t want to consume huge chunks of text.

So it’s wise to split your blog posts with visuals like product images, infographics, videos, and GIFs.

The benefit of visuals to SEO is that it increases user engagement and accessibility to your website. Furthermore, you can add alt tags to some images, ranking your article better based on the description.

When adding visuals, keep in mind the image size. A large-sized image will slow your site down, which also has some SEO repercussions. Many SEO tools can help you resize your images to the recommended frames.

Get started with Bloggle

Shopify blog SEO is different from other websites because you’re trying to create helpful content while promoting your product.

Therefore, the goal is to ensure that you focus on high-search intent keywords that rhyme with your product. Once done, create helpful blog posts that meet customers’ pain points.

But with Bloggle, the experience is less painful. You get a full-suite blog builder app that keeps your SEO checklist in mind.

You can give Bloggle a free trial today and see it in action. No credit card required.