Planning for SEO before replatforming

Keyword research and site structure planning

Keyword research is the activity of analyzing and finding a list of valuable keywords for the purpose of SEO. This involves many steps from identifying and studying your audience and niche, creating a list of keywords, to using keyword research tools such as Moz, Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, and SEMrush to vet your competitors. You can learn more about conducting keyword research here.

The more you know about your audience, the easier it will be to do your research as well as create your content. If you don’t know who you should be targeting, you may not get the results you were hoping for.

With your keyword strategy in place, map your site structure so that it’s easy to find by search engines. Shopify already follows these best practices:

• Content follows a logical hierarchy of categories.
• Pages don’t use iframes.
• URLs use standard characters and simple, readable structure.

To make sure that your site structure is optimized for search engines:

• Optimize your online store navigation.
• Use descriptive filenames for your images: for example, mens-silver-aviator-sunglasses.jpg instead of IMG_00578.jpg
• Use descriptive link text for internal links: for example, Mens Silver Aviator Sunglasses instead of Click Here.

You can learn more about site structure here. 

Data entry and migration planning

The biggest challenge you’ll face migrating to Shopify is importing your existing platform’s data into your Shopify store.

If you’ve kept an itemized list of all of the products you have on your existing site including, SKUs, product title, product description, related images, and GTIN’s etc., then your migration and import process will be less complex. 

The first step is to get as much data out of your existing store as you can. Next, complete a thorough and detailed review of the data to analyze it against your keyword strategy. 

Once the migration is complete, audit the data by reviewing key product pages, site pages, and testing pre-existing links to ensure nothing transferred over in a broken state. 

If you’re planning to migrate to a new platform and, at the same time, update a lot of your content (especially titles, descriptions, meta titles, and meta descriptions) we recommend that you do it in stages. This reduces the amount of new information search engines need to learn, and minimizes the SEO impact on your replatform. 

Theme design for good on-page optimization

Prioritizing between performance and optimization for search can sometimes be a challenge, but there are some key things you should consider when building or selecting your theme:

• Design mobile-first, rather than building for desktop and optimizing for mobile later. Google prioritizes fast-loading mobile sites. Quite often, simple changes to configuration, processes, or code can make websites much faster, with few drawbacks.
• Use Shopify’s page speed report to identify how different areas of your theme perform. Faster site speed has been shown to improve SEO and customer experience
• To further troubleshoot your theme, use the Liquid profiling tool to identify where bottlenecks exist such as nested for loops that could slow down your page
• Avoid unnecessary apps that may slow down your page speed. If you’re unsure, create a backup of your theme prior to installing any apps. This lets you run comparisons and quickly test against prior versions.
• Consider using JSON-LD / structured data to better inform Google of your products and content. 
• Ensure your homepage, collection pages, products, blogs, and pages all have sufficient meta titles and descriptions. 
• Ensure images are given accurate alt tags. 
• Ensure that duplicate content has the appropriate canonical tags and hreflang tags where necessary. 

Further reading

• (Shopify) Optimizing your site for Site Structure
• (Shopify) SEO Web Design
• Shopify Partners Blog - SEO