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How to Optimize your Shopify Homepage SEO?

Last updated: March 01, 2024
This article has been written and researched by our expert Avada through a precise methodology. Learn more about our methodology

Sam

Author

Daniel

Researcher

The homepage is the face of any online store with a detail introduction about the products and brand to boost the business. SEO plays an important role in increasing traffic and sales because of the relevance to the search query.

Because of modern living space, the amount of time that a visitor spends to go across a website just from 10 to 20 seconds. Therefore, it is necessary for online merchants not only to create a beautiful design on their homepage but also user-friendly with a navigated search engine which allows the customers to find what they need easier. That is the reason why Shopify Homepage SEO is so crucial for online shops too.

The homepage with a set of coded instructions will make your shops strongly impressed for both existing and new customers. In order to encourage the user’s shops, there are some tips to plan with Shopify Homepage SEO to sell products and collect the customer’s email subscribers. The Shopify store owners can discover by reading this article How to optimize your Shopify Homepage SEO?.

What to include in your Shopify store Homepage?

As the customers always have a preference to visit an interesting and user-friendly homepage, the online sellers enable adding these bouncing tools to boost the Homepage SEO to attract more customer’s attention to the outstanding homepage.

There are some tips to maximize the Homepage page effectiveness, which are listed below. You can continue reading to increase sales effectively.

Shopify homepage SEO

Inspiring content

Inspiring content

First of all, content is king means that it is essential for online sellers to create quality content to make their shops more valuable for shoppers. Especially when Shopify store owners want to design a website that is above the fold, which means that their homepage can refer to what visitors want to see before scrolling.

The number of people who decided to stay on your homepage after five first seconds will be one of the successes for online merchants. On the Homepage, the things that lie above the fold will be the first landing impression so that it is essential for them to consider which information they need first and how that accompanies the rest of their homepage. Moreover, whether this information can influence the shopper’s decisions or not.

The decisions which can be made by audiences on this homepage are:

  • Make a purchase right after going to the Homepage

  • Scroll down to read more information below the fold such as video, reviews, a video, etc about the products.

Almost the online sellers need to grab customer’s attention by attractive headlines, persuasive subtitles and visual images to make them feel delightful. More importantly, website designers are also required to brand their names to approach more new visitors. Other options for online merchants to capture attention, such as navigating banners on the Homepage, is to advertise special occasions or offers for the visitors. That is a good idea to make them stay longer and longer to discover about your shops as well as products.

Images

To emphasize the homepage, there is a stunning way that is adding with designed images. The online buying decisions depends a lot on not only on what information that online merchants show on the homepage but also the pictures that the shoppers can see about their products. Moreover, a Homepage with beautiful images will make their customers feel more satisfied and appreciate the professionalism of a page.

The visuals are the best choices to draw attention from online shoppers and promote a new product. These images will help them to capture more leads as well as have better sales because the primary purpose is revenue. Other online sellers can choose to add slides advertising which easily group of products and have high-quality photos. Including a slideshow on the Homepage would be great for users to boost their products. Based on the Shopify store owner’s priority, they can choose among a wide selection to promote the Homepage. However, you should limit with no more than three slides.

Clear navigation

Scientists said that the human’s memory remembers by chunking, the information is broken down into smaller mental units. Therefore, the more simplicity that page has, the stronger the navigation is. This sentence can be contradictory for online sellers because you need to add more information and images when you want to attract attention. On the other hand, you also need to make your Homepage quick enough so that customers will not leave your page because of the waiting time. It means that it is essential for Shopify store owners to keep their loading page as fast as possible.

First of all, the Header navigation is suggested to be straightforward and set up with all priorities. On the Homepage, according to the expert from Orbit Media Studios -Andy Crestodina, there highest number of navigation links should be seven. If there are too many navigation options on a site, it is cluttered and overwhelming for any readers so that they can drop off or even they can take the wrong path. An excellent method is prioritizing your navigation links and they should be arranged from left to right by their importances level. Another choice for online sellers is finding the professional suports to have the best header navigation.

In addition, Sub-navigation is also a useful tool to organize the products and pages. Especially when you have a lot of products and collections, using the mega menu or a drop-down menu makes the users focus on your main collections and create sub-navigation. When adding the different links on the Homepage, it is necessary to recheck whether customers are off the path to conversion or not. Unless these links can boost your conversion, you just add them to the footer instead.

Call to action

When the customers come to the page, they are interested in the information and your image but how to lead them to buying decisions. The tip to create more sales is call to action button. This tool is essential and practical for any online merchants because it is hard to ignore and easy to set up. Just need to be short and suitable, the call to action can be an exit sign on a highway.

The main goal of the Homepage should link to push the customers to later buying process. By calls to action need to promote the latest collection or watch a video to learn more about your products. But on the Homepage with a lot of information, it is not easy for online shoppers to know about this button. The online sellers can stand out this button by unique design such as surrounding borders to make them pay attention to this call to action right away when they click to the Homepage.

When they click call to action button, you have more opportunities to have more information or drive them to make a purchase. Let’s enjoy the increase in sales after that.

Shopping cart

Shopping cart

One of the factors that lead to real sales is the shopping cart, where online sellers can give up. Therefore, on the homepage, the eCommerce entrepreneurs should ensure creating the user-friendly shopping cart which allows all customers can easy to approach. Moreover, a shopping cart is easy to find will be necessary for a Homepage.

It is sometimes called a slide-out cart, a homepage with a sticky shopping cart is available in any Shopify themes. Therefore, it is easy for even beginners can keep this cart available on the screen. Usually displayed in the top-right corner, then Shopify store owners can attract all customers to attend this button with the bold, eye-catching.

In addition, the online sellers can add the notification to remind customers about their current products on the cart. And even can push them to continue the selling process as well as competent better, you can display the number of items currently in the customer’s cart as well as complete their checkout.

When shoppers come to a Homepage and get lost because they can not find out what they want to buy, they will run away. An easy-to-find search bar that replaces complex navigation will be the best choice. Considered as one of the most important factors to help customers to find out their needed items, the search bar like minimal navigation or a sticky cart cam boost the number of customers or the sales. In addition, a search bar is especially helpful for shops with lots of content and too many different products to explore.

The easier online shoppers can look for the products that they want, the more revenue that Shopify store owners can earn. The smart search bar will be the best choice for any users to satisfy their customers with customizable functionality. The search query will be the answer for the online sellers to directly lead them to suggested products, collections, etc on the Homepage. By this tool, the Shopify buyers can save a lot of time, and the sellers also can create more money.

Optimize your Shopify Homepage for SEO

Optimize your Shopify Homepage for SEO

Shops with good On-page SEO will be more effective for any merchants to increase their customer’s satisfaction as well as boost the sales; of course, it is required the shop to be easy to navigate for search engines. Optimizing the Shopify Homepage is necessary to make their content understandable as possible for the search engine as well as customers. Different from physical shops with shelves, labels, Shopify stores need to be well-organized with clear sections.

In contrast, bad on-page SEO will be complicated and the mess up with a lot of products and information without labels and scattered haphazardly.

URL

Because it is not easy to see the URL on some mobile devices or desktops, some entrepreneurs ignore this SEO tool. If the URL is easily navigated by search engines, the Shopify Homepage is more understandable, and they can have higher rankings on Google.

There are some tips to optimize the URLs:

Describing the content of the page on URLs.

The default name of URLs is not good for the SEO; therefore, Shopify store owners should change it and make it’s content more obviously. For example, products/black-studded-leather-dog-collar is much better than /products/ds2389asdniuanusd

Including effective keywords

The keywords are the key to achieve more organic traffics. Therefore, store owners should create their page’s content with good keywords. This is the primary goal of SEO for the URL. However, among diverse keywords, online merchants should choose the best quality words to boost their uniqueness as well as their popularity. In the example, we can list down some keywords such as black, studded, leather, dog, collar, but they need to be separated with a dash -.

Length

Excessively long URLs will be a bad idea for online merchants. The suitable length is one of the most important things, and it requires people to think about two main factors such as deep folder structure or stuff in keywords. There is a suggestion that the keywords from the left to rights should carry less weight, so some of them try to lengthen their URLs. But, in fact, when the URL has a deep structure, it is ok for you to set up the short URL like /products

It is not necessary to stuff in keywords, even when it can dilute the URL’s value because it can be flagged or spammy. It is a great idea to make it simple with a sentence to describe the page content.

Page title

On the webpage, you will see an HTML tag in the <head> which is the <title>. A page title will appear not only on the heading of a page but also on social media when you shared your brand, which plays an important role in SEO your stores. To keep the title stand out compare with millions of competitors, there are some tricks:

Creating the uniqueness

Among millions of shops on Shopify, your shops are necessary to be outstanding. With a unique page title, your stores will have more chances to appear with high rankings when the shoppers search. In addition, if the content of pages can be shared on the title, it is easy for the customers to find your shops out by search engines.

Page Description

Search engines work with the functionality to find out the things that suitable for which the shopper enters so that it is better for you to have more containing their content on the title page. Describing the title with its content would be a good choice to maximize SEO when the results link has more information about their expected products.

Containing good keywords

The keywords in the page title are essential for online merchants to match with the customer searching for. Good keywords are effective to bring more traffics to your page. Moreover, when your shops have more decent number of times a month, the ranking will be boosted dramatically. The page contains more keyword phrases also should avoid straplines or too broad keywords.

Suitable Length

Even though the ideal length is nuanced, search engines just frequently display more or less than 70 characters. The search engine usually counts the width with the number of pixels rather than the number of characters. There is a tip that keeps the page titles under 70 characters and tries not to cut off them with ellipses (…). By not too long title, the customers, as well as search engines, easily find you. However, with diverse screen widths, flexible lengths, and formats, online sellers can have success. There is a notice that different characters are in different widths; for example, character i is narrower than character w.

A title per page

If the online sellers have more than one title on a heading page, there is a risk that they can be ignored by search engines. In addition, maybe just one of them is arbitrarily selected. Therefore, the best choice is only the most effective page title will be shown on the page title.

Headings and Sub-Headings

The primary heading or H1 is the text in <h1> HTML tag. This heading should have more subheadings such as<h2>, <h3>, <h4> etc. These subheadings are usually in different styles from the paragraph text. The themes can be larger and bolder so that the search engines can easily understand them than other texts on the paragraph. Therefore, the heading or subheading enables contributing more SEO weight than any plain paragraph texts.

Especially, the subheadings allow the users to divide their page into separated topics so that it will help the readers more get the points and attract more customers to come to shops. The shop owners can apply these practical tips to make their shops more customer-friendly.

  • Include multiple subheadings for one heading, We know that a <h1> heading will describe a page’s content. It is the general idea for a product, blog title or subject of a post. The subheadings which can be an effective SEO tool split up a page into separate topics and sections. Therefore, the Shopify store owners should include their subheadings into each heading. These subheadings should describe multiple key features of the product in different paragraphs of text underneath.

The subheadings that online sellers can choose such as <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, etc. There is no exact rule for which of them carry more SEO weights. Just utilizing this subheading logically on the page and make them more meaningful.

  • Select words on a heading and subheadings HTML Although it is not difficult to build up a heading with multiple subheadings, the online sellers cannot put all their text on a page into headings. In contrast, they can be ignored by search engines. Therefore, for SEO, it is better to create heading as well as subheadings with a single sentence to represent their content.

Alt tags

The image alt tag is usually in this format of HTML <img> element. These tags are usually invisible for visitors until they hover the mouse over that image or some cases that they used special software.

Search engines will look for keywords that fit with customer’s searches. The individual image in their image search with Alt tags also becomes an effective tool to boost the rankings and sales so that it is essential for online sellers to know some tips to optimize with Alt tags.

Create Uniqueness

When the search engine witnesses a lot of images having the same alt text, it will ignore these texts. That means the online sellers can not find you easily on a platform with million shops like you. That is the reason why they should have unique alt texts for different images to boost the SEO value. Although your website does not have many images, the image alt text should have a unique alt.

Add the image description

The images alt text is necessary to be added with the specific description such as colors, materials, etc. These alt texts will easily boost SEO should accurately describe the image as specifically as possible. ‘Cheap dog collars’ is not as good for SEO as ‘Black studded leather dog collar’.

Containing good keywords

Besides having a unique alt text, the descriptions of these images should have good keywords. They can help the search engines can easily find out your stores. Furthermore, these good keywords can approach more to customers in terms of SEO.

Having a suitable length

The longest Alt text is just in a sentence. In addition, it is recommended that online sellers need to write naturally in the texts and these keywords should not be listed and separated with commas such as “Dog collar, leather dog collar, black dog collars”.

Meta Description

In the <head> of a webpage, the meta description and HTML tag description is usually in the <meta name="description" content=""/>. The meta description is invisible for the visitors at all on the page, but it plays an important role in the process of SEO. Sometimes meta descriptions also appear on social media when they are shared.

To encourage searchers to press your search result instead of other competitors, adding an attractive meta description is the best choice to do that. There are some tips for online sellers to increase the SEO by Meta Description.

Create the uniqueness

The uniqueness is essential for every meta description on the site. By generating some unique text from the page contents, the search engines can do everything left to boost your ranking. Depending on the different purposes, online sellers can decide which meta description will be displayed that matches better with what the customers have searched for.

Include the only one meta description

On the head of your page, just one meta description should be displayed. When there is more than a meta description, a search engine ignores them and just arbitrarily selects one.

Describe the content page

The content page will be necessary to be shown to boost SEO. The meta description cannot be the same text in the entire site, but it can describe the specific page.

Containing good keywords

The reason why there are a lot of customers coming to the page, the useful content that matches all they need. It isn’t compulsory to include too many keywords. Writing naturally in sentences will be much better than listing down keywords.

Especially, the keywords are often bold when they match the user’s search so that including that phrase that attracts more customers will be the best choice for any online sellers. If the visitors are looking for specific things, the keywords will lead them to your search result, which increases the traffic as well as the shop’s sales.

Having a suitable length

If the meta description is more than 160 words, the search engines will truncate it. The best method is expressing all of the compelling descriptions within 160 characters. Just focus on what the customers really want to search and the majority of search results.

Navigating with your shop, as well as discovering pages with the internal links, search engines will be the free tool to lead all the customers coming to your shops. Internal links with keywords in texts are so helpful for Shopify store owners to optimize the search engine. Furthermore, it keeps their customers staying longer on the sites. To boost its SEO, there are some techniques such as:

Clear structure in the navigation

The top navigation bar and the links in the footer should be the first level of pages in the Shopify shops. For example, the individual collection, blog and key pages, and then the next levels could be the individual product and small blog posts. The number of levels of navigation should not be more than two because it can lose the key to your SEO. The ideal levels should be two to navigate your shop and indexed pages.

Within the page content, besides the internal navigation for links, Shopify store owners also can optimize by utilizing liberal links. By linking liberally, SEO could be boosted dramatically. In addition, the related products, collections, and blog content on the product pages will be linked together to let their customers stay longer and boost sales.

The link text or Anchor Text is considered as a tool to be pushed by the customers. By the text in HTML such as text: <a href=’/text-text’>text</a>, the search engine can easily find out your shops; therefore, it can boost the sales.

Rank higher with good content

It is simple but essential for online merchants to build up quality content to have better SEO. For example, the SEO will be improved with the unique title and meta description for the blog post or video.

Moreover, the updated SEO content easily boost to have higher rankings. When the content of a post or any video changes, it is essential for online sellers to update these titles and descriptions.

Shopify Home page is a special and main page for a website. As the most powerful page, the clear path will lead them to the site. Moreover, the text navigation links have importances boost SEO. Creating a unique and effective SEO homepage brings a lot of visitors to the home page. When the customers coming to the Homepage, it can save a lot of time for them to find out the exact products they want by linking the product pages with this page. Especially, when you want to increase the sales of specific products, it is important to link those pages to help them find these products easily.

However, there are many online sellers who do not utilize this link to optimize SEO. It is not difficult to make them invisible to potential customers who are looking for them. By linking with the top of the homepage via text navigation, online sellers literally support visitors and help themselves increase sales. Another option is including a search box.

Optimize homepage meta description

Optimize homepage meta description

The page builders can want to optimize their appearances and increase the traffic by using ads, videos, etc. But one of the free and most effective to have more organic search results are coming from the homepage meta description.

Considered as a meta tag that summarizes the content of a website, meta description plays an important in SEO. The normal length for this homepage meta description is from 155 to 160 characters. The meta description is followed by the code as <meta name="description" content=,.

The search result which results from the meta description will allow engines to easily find out your shops. Although it is not the factors to get a higher ranking, meta descriptions enable enticing customers to click to the page. Therefore, the tool is effective for on-page SEO.

What is a good home page meta description?

The definition of a good home page meta description is deceptively simple page. The page that allows the customers have a brief overview about the the site’s content and a compelling reason for them to click the title tags. The limit of the meta description 155 characters so it just likes a long tweet.

The good descriptions will attract a lot of curious customers who are looking to click to these links without thinking a lot about them. But it is not easy for any online sellers to know how to write down the good quality meta descriptions. Below we listed down three main important things for any online sellers.

No more than 155 characters

It is optional for online sellers to choose how many words in their shop’s meta description but the best choice is 155 characters. Just by focus on the key points as well as the most important things on your sites so that the meta description will be the best.

Think about the customer

The good descriptions need to satisfy and attract more customers coming to the shops. Therefore, it is much better if online sellers can describe what their products bring to their customers. Focusing on what the customers wants and needs is the smart decision to improve the SEO as well as boost sales.

Keep repeating

According to research, the time that customers spend on the first time coming to an online shop is just under 5 seconds, so that it is hard for them to impress their customers. To impress them, there is a necessary message that is conveyed and repeated in the meta description.

How to edit homepage meta description on Shopify?

After reading all the tips on this article, you have a better understanding of the importance of homepage meta description on Shopify. However, for unprofessional page builders, especially for Shopify beginners, it is difficult to apply these tips.

Now you can release it by focusing on answering this question what makes a searcher to click on your title tag. Moreover, the shop owners can build their meta description with explanations to customers their questions such as :

  • What products and services are you offering? The answer to this question is simple for any shop owners, they know what they are selling. Let make them clear and understandable for any visitors.

  • Why should they buy from you? What questions need you to make your customers understand more about your products. Just show your customers about your uniqueness and competitive advantages compared to other competitors. Then, online sellers should convey these advantages multiple times on the meta description. That is the best way to drive your brand on the Shopify platform.

However, this progress takes time so it is necessary for online merchants to be patent and make a long-term plan for their brand. If you are struggling in the first time grand opening, just let your customers discover and talk to people about your business. By formulating a good description, it can expose many customers as an elevator pitch.

Conclusion

Shopify Homepage is usually ignored by Shopify store owners in terms of SEO, but the successful online sellers should take more consideration with this tool. Any eCommerce site with this tool can have better design and better SEO keywords. Therefore, the Shopify store owners can boost their sales by their Homepage.

Our above article How to optimize your Shopify homepage SEO? with multiple tips to increase the SEO. We hope that it will be useful for you. If you have any questions related to this topic, feel free to leave a comment below.

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Sam Nguyen is the CEO and founder of Avada Commerce, an e-commerce solution provider headquartered in Singapore. He is an expert on the Shopify e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems. Sam loves talking about e-commerce and he aims to help over a million online businesses grow and thrive.