Shopify SEO Tips: Optimize Your Store for Search [LNIM135 Transcript]

by | Apr 17, 2017 | Internet Marketing Podcast Transcripts | 0 comments

Shopify SEO Tips: Optimize Your Store for Search [LNIM135 Transcript]

If you have a Shopify store and you are wondering why Google is not sending you any traffic, the answer is almost certainly that you have not done the SEO work. The good news is that most ecommerce stores completely ignore SEO, which means a little effort goes a long way. In this episode, I walk through four proven Shopify SEO tips that you can use today to start getting free organic traffic to your store.

What You'll Learn in This Episode

  • How to write product listings that Google actually wants to rank
  • Why 150-300 words minimum per product description is essential for SEO
  • How to use the PASTOR copywriting method for product pages
  • Why the Shopify blog feature is your secret weapon for organic traffic
  • How to optimize your title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs in Shopify
  • A practical approach to building backlinks for ecommerce pages
  • How to use tools like Ahrefs to analyze your competition

Episode Summary

Mark opens this episode with a discussion about leveraging trending news and events to create buzz for your brand. He uses the example of Burger King's clever Google Home hijacking ad campaign to illustrate the power of newsjacking. The core idea is simple: find something people are already talking about and connect it to your brand. Holiday promotions, trending products, and major news events all present opportunities to ride the wave of existing attention.

The main topic dives deep into four actionable Shopify SEO tips. The first and most impactful tip is to write strong, detailed product listings. Mark points out that most Shopify store owners, especially dropshippers, simply copy over the sparse product specs from their supplier. Weight, dimensions, maybe a color option. That gives Google nothing to work with. Mark recommends aiming for substantial product descriptions and suggests using the PASTOR copywriting method to structure the copy. Start with the pain the customer is experiencing, amplify the consequences, tell a story about how the product solves it, include testimonials or review highlights, present the offer clearly, and close with a call to action. Following this framework makes it easy to write compelling copy that serves both the customer and search engines.

The second tip is to use Shopify's built-in blog feature. Many store owners do not even realize Shopify has blogging capabilities similar to WordPress. Mark recommends targeting keywords with high commercial intent that are not directly about your product. If you sell eye cream, write articles answering questions like “how do I prevent wrinkles” or “what is the best wrinkle cream.” These informational articles attract visitors from Google, build domain authority through external links, and pass link equity to your product pages through internal linking. Mark notes this content creation can be easily outsourced through platforms like Upwork.

The third tip covers technical SEO basics within Shopify. Every product page has three critical elements you need to optimize: the title tag, the meta description, and the URL slug. Out of the box, Shopify pulls the first few hundred characters of your listing as the description, which might include irrelevant details like shipping weight or stock status. Instead, write a compelling meta description that gives searchers a reason to click on your listing over the competition. Make sure your target keywords appear in both the title tag and URL slug.

The fourth tip is building backlinks to your product pages. Mark recommends using Ahrefs to analyze what links your ranking competitors have. In many ecommerce niches, product pages competing for the same keywords have surprisingly few backlinks, which means even a handful of quality links can make a significant difference. He suggests two main approaches: leaving helpful, value-driven comments on relevant blogs and forums with contextual links back to your products, and purchasing guest post placements from reputable outreach services. The key is quality over quantity, and never using blog networks or spammy link schemes.

The episode also includes a segment on a free Product Creation Masterclass from ConvertKit covering product planning, creation, testing, and launch over four weeks.

Key Takeaways

  • Most ecommerce stores neglect SEO entirely, so even basic optimization gives you a competitive edge
  • Product descriptions should be substantial and written using copywriting frameworks like PASTOR, not just copied from supplier specs
  • The Shopify blog is a powerful but underused tool for attracting organic search traffic
  • Target informational keywords with commercial intent on your blog, then link internally to product pages
  • Optimize your title tags, meta descriptions, and URL slugs for every product page
  • Do not rely on Shopify's default meta description, which pulls from the first characters of your listing
  • Use Ahrefs or similar tools to analyze competitor backlink profiles before building your own
  • A few quality backlinks to product pages can dramatically improve rankings in low-competition ecommerce niches
  • Content creation for your Shopify blog can be outsourced affordably through Upwork

What's Changed Since This Episode

Mark recorded this in early 2017, and Shopify SEO has evolved dramatically since then. The four core tips in this episode remain solid, but the landscape around them has shifted in important ways.

The biggest change is the rise of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). Google's AI Overviews now appear for many commercial search queries, pulling answers directly into the search results page. For Shopify store owners, this means your product pages and blog content need to be structured to answer specific questions clearly. Adding FAQ schema markup and using question-based subheadings throughout your content significantly increases your chances of being featured in AI-generated summaries.

Collection page optimization is now recognized as a high-potential SEO opportunity that most Shopify stores still overlook. Your collection pages (category pages) can rank for broad commercial keywords if they include unique descriptive content, not just a grid of product thumbnails. Adding 200-400 words of helpful context to collection pages is one of the highest-leverage Shopify SEO moves available in 2026.

Mark's advice about product description length still holds, though the minimum bar has shifted. In 2026, product descriptions of 150 to 300 words are considered the minimum for SEO viability. The 1,000-word target Mark mentions is excellent for high-priority products, but even getting to 200 words puts you ahead of most competitors who are still using bare-bones supplier copy.

Shopify's built-in SEO features have improved substantially. The platform now generates automatic XML sitemaps, handles canonical tags, and offers better structured data support out of the box. Shopify Magic, their AI-powered toolset, can help generate product descriptions and blog content as a starting point. The Dawn theme and newer Shopify themes are optimized for Core Web Vitals performance, which is now a confirmed Google ranking signal.

Image optimization has become more important than Mark discussed in this episode. Alt text on product images, compressed file sizes, and next-gen image formats like WebP all contribute to both accessibility and search rankings. Core Web Vitals, particularly Largest Contentful Paint, are directly affected by image optimization on product pages.

The backlink building advice remains sound, though the specific services Mark mentions may have changed their offerings. The fundamental principle that a few quality, contextual links outperform dozens of low-quality ones is more true than ever.

Full Episode Transcript

Below is the complete transcript from Episode 135. Mark covers news about the Burger King Google Home ad campaign, a free Product Creation Masterclass from ConvertKit, and then dives deep into four Shopify SEO tips.

One of the cool things about having your own digital product for sale online is that this is a low cost, high margin thing that you can do, a revenue stream that you can add to your business. Once you have a product for sale online you can sell that product forever, for as long as the information in the product is valid, as long as people are interested in it. You can spend the effort to create this product and these things usually are very inexpensive to create and that can provide a passive revenue stream in your business for years and years.

In fact, most people know, that's the way that Pat Flynn got started. Last month Pat Flynn made $250,000 in a single month. He had some product launches in that. He got started way back in the beginning selling an ebook and was making a few thousand dollars a month at that time.

That can be you. There's no reason that you can't start a digital empire or grow your current digital empire with the creation of products. To be honest, product creation often seems pretty overwhelming to most people.

The ConvertKit team's stated goal is to teach everyone everything that they know, which is pretty cool, I love that and that's kind of the way I roll around here. They're having a four week masterclass that is completely free. Obviously, it's ConvertKit, so they're hoping that at the end of that masterclass you will want to get an account with ConvertKit. That's their angle on this, because you are going to need an email auto responder. But, there's no reason that you can't use your existing auto responder or some other auto responder for the kinds of things that they're going to teach in this class.

This Week in Internet Marketing News

I just had to share with you this kind of amazing TV commercial from Burger King where they actually hijack one of these devices in your home that talks back to you. In this case, it was Google Home. I want to warn you that I'm going to play the ad here and it's going to set off your device. It's nothing terrible, but if you have one of these automated home devices from Google, the Google Home, I'm going to make it talk.

That is so absolutely cool. I thought this is kind of a neat marketing thing that you can apply in your business and I wanted to talk to you a little bit about that as a marketing tip based on what's going on in the news.

Obviously what Burger King has done here is they have tried to leverage the excitement around these devices like Google Home and they've done something funny which is normally considered pretty annoying, they've set off a bunch of these devices to advertise their product for free. Basically what happened in homes all across the United States is that people with the Google Home device their device activated and the device read the Wikipedia page about the Burger King Whopper.

As you may have imagined, the objective of this marketing campaign is probably not just to turn on a bunch of Google Home devices, but really what they're trying to do is get media coverage from the stunt. And that absolutely happened, there's no question about that. I'm talking about it on my podcast, there are over 100,000 views of the 15-second YouTube video that I just played, people are talking about this on social media websites and search engine marketing websites, so it's a very effective marketing campaign.

The thing that they did was they found one thing that was going on in the world and they leveraged it so they could talk about their brand. This kind of idea of leveraging one thing to cause buzz about something else that you're doing is a very powerful idea in marketing and it's definitely something that you should always be thinking about, almost no matter what kind of website that you have.

A buddy of mine has a pharmacy website, we've talked about this before, it's called HelpfulPharmacist.com. Over at Helpful Pharmacist every year there is an event in the pharmaceutical space where the FDA encourages people to turn in their expired prescriptions. Every year when that event is happening, HelpfulPharmacist.com will run an article about that, promote it on social media, and leverage that media event. That's a very direct example.

I think a third really obvious example that you see all the time is people with holiday promotions. If there is a big holiday going on you can take advantage of that holiday by tying that into your brand. We could write an article for Valentine's Day that was the Top 7 Affiliate Marketing Tips for Taking Advantage of Valentine's Day. We could come up with something to take advantage of the holiday to increase the chance that something will go viral.

Shopify SEO Tips

My main topic this week is one that was suggested to me by one you inside of the Late Night Internet Marketing Facebook group. Jose Maldonado came back and said, “I'd love to know more about SEO for Shopify stores.” I thought that was an absolutely fantastic topic for a podcast because that's something that I know a bit about and I'm currently building a Shopify store.

There are four really strong solid tips that I can offer you for SEO for your Shopify store that I think will help you quite a bit as you try and get some more traffic to your Shopify store for free. The first two tips are content related.

The first tip is to make sure that you have a really strong listing. A lot of times what I see in Shopify stores, especially for people that are drop-shipping, is they'll copy over the few pieces of product information that are available to them from the drop-shipper, which is usually very terse. Things like the weight and the size of the product. There's no real descriptive content in the listing that helps people understand the product and gives Google something to chew on.

In an ideal world you're going to want your product listing to be on the order of 1,000 words. I know you're all thinking, “Oh my god, I have 500 products on my Shopify store. How am I going to do that?” Start with your most popular products, or the ones that you're most interested in seeing listed in search, and start writing copy for those.

The question I always get is, “What do I write?” The answer to that question is to use the PASTOR method.

You talk about the pain that people who need the product are experiencing, the reason why they would want it. You amplify that a little bit, you talk about the problem that your product solves and why someone should want to have that product. Allude to stories that support that narrative. Pull them through the copy with some reference to someone who has had the product before, or a possible scenario where the product could be good. Pull them through the copy and talk about testimonials or ways that the product has been used, how it helped you, or how it helped someone.

Then make sure that the benefits of the offer, the benefits of the product, what you're offering and why it's great are listed there. Make sure inside of the copy you're talking about taking the product home today, order the thing today.

Go through the PASTOR method and you'll get to 1,000 words really quickly.

You want to be a little careful. Don't put just any old 1,000 words in there and don't push the sales button so far down the page that adding the copy actually decreases your conversions because the buy button is way far down the page. Many Shopify themes are well designed to handle plenty of copy while still staying optimized for conversions.

A second content tip is to take advantage of the blog feature of Shopify. Some people don't even realize it, but Shopify has the ability to create blog posts just like WordPress.

The thing that I would target for Shopify are keywords that have high commercial intent but aren't directly related to your product. Let's say you have a product in your store that solves a particular problem. You're selling an eye cream that reduces wrinkles. What questions are people that need to buy eye cream asking about in Google? They're typing things like, “How do I prevent wrinkles?” and, “What's the best wrinkle cream?” There's all this opportunity to answer helpful content questions and you can create that content on your Shopify blog.

Then at the end of the article you can say, “We have exactly the cream that you need right here in our store,” and provide an internal link from that article to the sales page inside your Shopify store. That does two things. One is it increases the authority of your blog. You'll also pass link juice to your Shopify listing when you make that internal link. The second thing that it does is it actually attracts visitors from Google to that page and drives traffic over to your Shopify sales page.

So recommendation number two is definitely to take advantage of the blog feature in Shopify and create great content. This is something that can be easily outsourced to Upwork. You can go over to Upwork.com and post a listing that says, “I need five 1,000 word blog posts on wrinkle cream. Here are the five topics and the five main keywords.” You'll get an enormous number of bids and you'll be able to get that content created for a very reasonable price.

The third recommendation for Shopify store SEO is a little bit along the lines of the technical things. Shopify has some built-in SEO gadgetry that allows you to specify the title tag, which is the title of your product, and the SEO description, which is what helps people that find your listing in search decide to click on, and the URL.

You want to make sure those three things are optimized for search; the page slug for your product, the page title for your product page, and the description. In the case of the product page title, the listing title that shows up in search, you're going to want to make sure that contains the keywords that you're trying to rank for with your product.

For the description you're going to want to use copywriting techniques to make that compelling. Give people a reason to click on that. People that are searching for your product are having to choose between a page full of listings on Google, that description is your chance to entice them to click even if you're not the very top listing on the page.

Just straight out of the box Shopify pulls out the first few hundred characters of your listing. That may not be what you want at all, that may be the weight of the product or the fact that you're temporarily out of stock. You don't want that. What you want is some carefully crafted words that help people click and go to your store.

I think the fourth thing that you want for Shopify SEO are links back to your site, particularly back to your products. I think one of the more effective things you can do to get a handle on this is to use a tool like Ahrefs to understand what your competition is doing.

A lot of times what you'll find, particularly for ecommerce, is that if you look at who is ranking for the search term that you're trying to win, those product pages that you're competing with don't have a lot of links back to their pages either. This is great news for you because a few quality links back to your product page will go a long way.

Typically there are two really good places that you can get links. One is links that you leave around the internet in response to a question about your product area. If there is a blog post somewhere about the thing that you care about and you can tell the story about how this product you happen to be selling is the best one and share a link to the page in a way that doesn't offend the owner of the blog post, that's great.

You can do the same kind of things in forums and to some extent places like Reddit. Although, be really careful about that, because in every case you want to be leaving a ton of value behind prior to leaving your link.

I definitely recommend if you're wanting to improve your SEO, take a look at building a few backlinks. Understand where your competition is getting their links and check out those sources. That can make a super huge difference in your ranking results.

Wrapping Things Up

That's it for this week. I hope that you are having big plans for how you're going to take advantage of something that is going on in the media this week or this month, maybe create a piece of content. If you have a Shopify store or you're thinking about creating one, I hope these SEO tips were super helpful for you.

If that's not exactly you, pass this podcast along to someone who can use it. I really appreciate that, sharing is caring, and I love all of the love you guys give me.

Until next time, I hope you have an awesome week.

Resources Mentioned

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