SEO Checklist: 52 Website Optimization Steps (2027)

Showing up in search results puts your business in front of people who are already looking for what you sell. Google processes more than 5 trillion searches per year, according to a Google Ads and Commerce blog post. But search is changing fast. AI Overviews, AI-generated summaries that appear above organic search results, are a newer feature of the search engine results page (SERP).

A Semrush analysis of more than 10 million keywords found AI Overviews appeared for about 16% of queries by late 2025, after climbing sharply earlier in the year.

“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.”

This checklist covers the on-page, technical, and content changes that affect how a store or blog appears in search results. Treat it as an audit to run periodically, so you can catch issues before they affect search traffic.

SEO checklist: How to improve your results

The #1 organic result in Google search has an average click-through rate (CTR) of 27.6%, according to Backlinko’s analysis of Google CTR data.

This checklist covers the technical, on-page, and content steps for improving search rankings, whether a site is brand new or well established.

SEO basics checklist

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 affecting their site’s search rankings.

Head to the welcome page to create your Google Search Console account. Verify your domain to confirm you own the website. First though, make sure to verify your Shopify domain to use Google services.

2. Set up Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing is Google’s closest competitor, with Bing holding a 4.5% share of the search engine market compared to Google’s 91.3% share. Make sure you’re optimizing to rank in both of these top search engines.

Bing Webmaster Tools is a free Microsoft service that lets you add your store to the Bing crawler. Open a free Bing Webmaster Tools 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, including details like when each page was last updated. A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which pages or sections of a site to skip, and includes the sitemap’s URL so crawlers locate it directly.

Many ecommerce platforms and content management systems (CMS) automatically generate a sitemap that lists your website’s pages, including all Shopify stores. Access your Shopify store sitemap 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’ve created.

4. Set up Google Analytics

Google Analytics shares data about how visitors interact with your website. Once installed, segment store visitors to monitor how they engage with your website after arriving through a search engine. Use these segments to deliver targeted marketing campaigns based on visitors’ site habits.

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. Check whether your site is indexed through a site search (searching “site:yourdomain.com”).

If nothing shows up, your site isn’t indexed yet. Indexing takes a week or more after a sitemap submission.

Google can’t crawl or index password-protected pages. New Shopify stores are password-protected by default, so search engines index only the password page until a paid plan is selected and the password is removed.

6. Consider SEO tools

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.

For added SEO functionality, apps in the Shopify App Store, such as SEO Meta Manager, help manage meta tags, fix broken links, and make bulk edits to on-page SEO details from the Shopify admin.

You’re already one step ahead by setting up Google Search Console and Analytics. Third-party tools outside the Shopify App Store can add further SEO functionality.

These are some popular paid SEO tools:

• Moz has a full SEO marketing suite, including keyword research tools.
• Ahrefs is a suite for SEO audits, research, and tracking.
• Semrush is a tool for tracking keywords and exploring competitor sites.
• KeySearch.co is a tool for keyword research.

Here are some free SEO tools for beginners:

• 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.

For those new to SEO, free tools work well as a starting point, with paid tools as an option once you have more experience.

Keyword research checklist

Keyword research uncovers the words and phrases your target audience is searching for. Here’s how to find them and 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. Keyword research tools show the average number of monthly searches for a keyword. Weigh search volume alongside keyword difficulty when deciding which terms to target.
• Keyword difficulty. 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. A keyword should match what you’re selling. For example, targeting “candle holders” doesn’t fit a store that sells only candle-making kits.

8. Analyze competitors’ keyword rankings

Competitor keyword rankings show which search terms competitors in the same market already rank for.

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.

When reviewing competitor rankings, look at:

• Keyword gaps. Keywords a competitor ranks for that don’t appear on your own keyword list.
• Ranking pages. The specific page or post that ranks for each keyword.
• Content format. Whether the ranking result is a blog post, product page, or comparison guide. This shows the content format Google returns for that keyword.
• Search intent. Whether the keyword reflects someone researching, comparing, or ready to buy. This affects which type of page best matches the 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, look at the SERP to see which pages are ranking for the keyword. Or 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, or resources. Use this to map keywords to content types. Each page on your site—product pages, categories, blog posts, homepage—ranks for different long-tail keywords.

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

• 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

Make a collection page for citrus essential oils (lemon, lime, grapefruit) and another for essential oil bottles (glass, roller, spray). Also write articles that target long-tail keywords related to questions regarding essential oils. For instance, you could write a listicle 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.

Follow this on-page SEO checklist to optimize each page on your site.

10. Optimize heading tags

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

Include just one H1 per page. For example, the H1 for the product detail page (PDP) of a product named Lemon Drop Bliss, a lemon essential oil, 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, page titles are the default H1 tag for pages created in Shopify. Verifying prevents duplicate or missing tags.

Write headings that are descriptive and serve as anchors for users scanning a page to find the part that answers their question or matches their search intent. Each heading serves as a signpost that helps users find what they’re looking for quickly.

Keyword cannibalization happens when multiple pages on a site target the same keyword in their H1 tags, splitting ranking signals between the competing pages. Assign each page a distinct primary keyword to avoid this.

11. Write compelling title tags

Appearing in search results is only part of the job. Title tags, the blue clickable links that appear in the SERP, encourage users to click through to your page instead of a competitor’s search result.

Here are some tips for optimizing title tags:

• Write page titles for humans first. Describe the page content clearly and include the primary keyword. Vary repeated keywords with natural synonyms to avoid keyword stuffing.
• Keep your title tag between 40 and 60 characters. Backlinko’s analysis of 4 million Google search results found that title tags in this range get a 33.3% higher click-through rate than titles outside it.
• Include the primary keyword near the beginning of the title tag. Frontloading the main keyword signals relevance to both search engines and searchers scanning results.

To edit a title tag in the Shopify admin, go to Products, Collections, or Pages, select the item, scroll to the Search engine listing section, and click Edit website SEO to update the Page title field. For the homepage, go to Online Store > Preferences and edit the Homepage title field.

12. Optimize your meta description

A meta description is the small snippet of text that appears below your title tag in the SERP. Write copy that clearly describes the page content and encourages clicks.

Include your target keywords near the beginning of your meta description. Keep it under 160 characters. Moz’s meta description guide recommends this length to avoid truncation in the SERP.

To edit a meta description in the Shopify admin, go to Products, Collections, or Pages, select the item, scroll to the Search engine listing section, and click Edit website SEO to update the Description field. For the homepage, go to Online Store > Preferences and edit the Meta description field.

13. Include a keyword in your page URL

A URL tells search engines about the content on your page. Include your target keyword and keep URLs short by avoiding filler words.

To serve search engines and human visitors reading your URL, follow these examples:

Make readable URLs

Do: https://yourdomain.com/pink-socks

Don’t: https://yourdomain.com/index.php?24551=p44=?

Use hyphens not underscores

Do: https://yourdomain.com/pink-socks

Don’t: https://yourdomain.com/pink_socks

Include target keywords

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

Don’t: https://yourdomain.com/polkadotsocks-yellow-white-for-men

Keep your URL structures simple and easy to understand

If you’re already generating SEO traffic at your current URL structure, changing it without reason isn’t worth the risk. Search engines treat a new URL as a new page, so changing an established URL means it has to be recrawled and reindexed, temporarily affecting search traffic.

If you must change a URL, set up a redirect from the old URL to the new one. In the Shopify admin, changing a URL handle through Edit website SEO includes the option to create that redirect.

14. Write descriptive alt text for images

Name each image file something descriptive to help it appear in image results. For example, don’t name an image "83798.jpg."

Write descriptive alt text explaining the picture, too. Alt text helps search engines understand image content and makes the image 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 page information, such as star ratings or reviews, is eligible to appear directly in the SERP as a rich result.

In the example below, Couplet Coffee uses schema to display its five-star rating and customer reviews:

Shopify automatically generates product schema for merchants. Apps like Judge.me collect customer reviews and display an aggregate rating, as shown in the Couplet Coffee example above.

For more advanced schema types, see the Advanced schema section further in this checklist (#46).

Check out this schema guide or talk to a website developer for more guidance.

Content checklist

Use this SEO content checklist to optimize your website content.

16. Create a content marketing strategy

Developing and executing a content marketing strategy takes time. Product and collection pages are a good starting point.

Here’s how to kick off your content marketing strategy:

• Consider where your audience is. Some of your target market searches on Google. Others show up on platforms such as TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, or YouTube. Use audience research tools like SparkToro to discover where your audience is, then create content to meet them there.
• 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. Consider what types of educational or inspirational content will help your customers use your products. For grocers, recipes are one example. For florists, it’s tips for prolonging floral freshness.

17. Format content for readability

Keep your copy clear, concise, and organized so readers can find what they need. The average Google first-page result contains 1,447 words, according to Backlinko’s analysis of Google ranking factors, though Backlinko found no correlation between word count and ranking position.

These structural tactics help organize longer content so it doesn’t read as a wall of text:

• Add a table of contents and an FAQ. Include jump links to help readers navigate directly to different sections of your page.
• 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.
• Vary sentence and paragraph length. Use Hemingway to check your copy for readability.
• Focus on quality over 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. Write original product descriptions instead.

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 collection page is a single URL that groups related products around a shared topic. Collection pages help you categorize products and make it easier for readers to find what they want on your site. Optimizing collection pages for relevant keywords helps them rank for those terms.

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,” says Ilia Mundut, founder of Heftyberry. “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, and create blog posts that internally link to them to establish topical authority. Then you have a money machine.”

20. Optimize for video and visual search

Google’s visual search tool, Lens, processes nearly 20 billion visual searches per month. According to Google, 20% of those searches are shopping-related.

Here’s how to optimize your product photos and videos for search:

• Take pictures from multiple angles. Include close-ups of texture, labels, and scale.
• Follow Google’s SEO image guidance. Use HTML image elements, supported formats, fast-loading assets, and descriptive 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.

AI SEO checklist

About 50% of consumers already use AI-powered search, projected to influence up to $750 billion in US consumer spending by 2028, according to McKinsey.

This checklist covers generative engine optimization (GEO), the practice of optimizing content for AI-powered search tools.

21. 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 relevant supporting pages so related context is easy to discover and attribute.

Shopify’s guidance on optimizing your store for AI recommends adding detailed product specifications, comparison information, and structured data for AI systems to crawl, alongside clear, concise content for human shoppers.

The free Shopify Knowledge Base app lets merchants view and customize the FAQs that AI shopping agents use to answer questions about a store.

Agentic storefronts let customers discover and purchase products directly within AI channels such as ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, and Meta. Agentic storefronts is active by default for eligible Shopify stores.

22. Monitor AI Overview impact on your traffic

Google now provides new insights in Search Console for its generative AI Search features. According to Google, these insights include impressions and information about which pages appear in AI responses and in which countries. Clicks from AI features like AI Overviews and AI Mode are still included in overall search traffic totals.

Use other tools, such as Semrush and Ahrefs, to track visibility and correlate it with GSC traffic data. Use GSC as a proxy detector by looking for queries and pages where impressions are stable but click-through rate (CTR) drops. Pay particular attention to informational queries, which trigger AI Overviews more often than transactional searches.

Technical SEO checklist

Follow this technical SEO checklist for a functional user experience for your readers and accessibility for search engine crawlers. Run through it periodically as a technical audit to catch crawl and indexing issues before they affect traffic.

23. Create an internal link strategy

Internal linking 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.

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.

Ensure every page on your site is accessible from your homepage or within a few clicks. If not, it’s orphaned, meaning it isn’t accessible to users or search crawlers.

24. 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, revise it to be clearer or more specific.

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

• Exact match: 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”

25. Build a global navigation menu

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

Common types of navigation links include:

• Single-bar navigation. All links live in one bar.
• 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.

Link to your main collection pages (and, if one or two products are particularly popular, to their product pages).

Stanley, for example, uses a broad “Shop” dropdown, while placing its bestselling Quenchers on a separate tab.

26. 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. This practice, often called mobile SEO, matters because mobile devices account for more than half of all organic search engine visits in the US, according to Merkle data reported by Statista. All pages need to be readable on mobile and desktop.

Every theme on the Shopify Theme Store is mobile friendly, but it’s important to test your chosen website theme across multiple devices and browsers. A responsive website doesn’t mean all content automatically displays correctly, so go through your website to confirm 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 screenshot or summarize their experiences testing and navigating your site on their smartphones.

27. Ensure your store is fast

Search engines aim to provide searchers with relevant results for their queries, so site speed is a ranking factor for both desktop and mobile searches. Run your site through PageSpeed Insights to get Google’s recommended performance-enhancing tweaks.

Other factors that slow your site down are large image files, 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.

28. 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. Address any error alerts you receive.

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, redirect that page to another page on your site. This keeps visitors from encountering dead links.

29. Improve your Core Web Vitals

Google Core Web Vitals (CWV) measure the real-world user experience (UX) of your website. Google’s ranking systems consider Core Web Vitals as part of page experience.

Your Core Web Vitals include three main components:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). Measures loading performance. LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page starts loading.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP). Measures responsiveness. 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.

An ecommerce platform’s content delivery affects Core Web Vitals.

30. Secure your site with HTTPS

HTTPS encrypts the connection between your website and its visitors. Google confirmed HTTPS as a ranking signal in 2014 and continues to recommend it as part of a secure site, according to Google Search Central.

Shopify provides free TLS/SSL certificates automatically for every store domain, according to the Shopify Help Center. Activate it in the Shopify admin under Online Store > Domains by selecting "Activate SSL certificates." Once active, HTTP traffic redirects automatically to HTTPS.

Check for mixed content, i.e., images, scripts, or other assets still loading over HTTP on an HTTPS page, since these trigger browser security warnings.

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 metric that describes 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 depends on the niche or industry your website operates in. Watching your competitors to see what’s working in your industry helps, along with the following ideas.

31. Analyze a competitor’s backlink profile

Tools like Moz’s Link Explorer and Ahrefs Site Explorer let you explore your competitors’ off-page links. Determine why these sites chose to link to your competitors and what about their pages earned those links.

Look for trends to apply to your site. If competitors are getting many journalistic mentions, look at what kinds of content earns them backlinks from well-known outlets. Understanding what potential backlink partners look for helps you create content that appeals to them and earns high-quality backlinks.

Check your own site’s inbound links for spammy or low-quality sources, too. Google’s systems identify and discount most untrustworthy links automatically, so most sites don’t need to take action, according to Google Search Console Help.

If you have a considerable number of spammy or artificial links pointing to your site and believe they’re affecting your rankings, use the Disavow Links tool in Google Search Console to ask Google to ignore them.

32. Write guest posts

Building backlinks through partnerships means identifying potential partners and determining how to provide value to them.

If you know a beauty blogger who regularly reviews the type of skin care products you sell, a simple introduction is a starting point for a partnership.

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"

33. Secure press mentions

Journalists look for news to cover. Building relationships with them helps secure press coverage on high-authority sites, which in turn builds backlinks to your website.

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.’"

34. Reclaim brand mentions

Use a brand monitoring tool to find "unlinked" mentions of your store or products. Then, ask the writer or publication to turn the brand mention into a link.

Ahrefs has 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

This local SEO checklist covers how brick-and-mortar businesses help local customers discover their retail locations.

35. Set up a Google Business profile

Google Business Profile is a 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 add a new one by heading to the sign-up page, where you’ll enter basic information such as your business name, category, location, and contact details.

Next, verify your business details. Google determines the verification method: a live recording, phone call, or postal mail.

Google ranks local results based on three main factors: relevance, distance, and popularity.

Optimize your profile with these factors in mind to help customers find and connect with you.

Setting up your Google Business Profile involves:

• Representing your business consistently. For example, using the same business name and description online and in real life.
• Updating your business 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, choose one to three categories that directly describe your business.
• Maintaining one profile. You only need one profile per business. Duplicate profiles violate Google’s guidelines.
• Treating reviews as an ongoing part of profile management. Replying to reviews shows customers their feedback is valued. Responding to positive reviews shows engagement, and responding to negative ones demonstrates accountability.

36. List your store on major directories and platforms

Listing your store on web directories improves your searchability. Choose directories relevant to your business and industry.

Common directories and platforms to list your store on include:

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

37. Fill out your Contact Us page thoroughly

For brick-and-mortar businesses, a Contact Us page helps local customers find and reach your store.

A Contact Us page provides shoppers with your name, address, and phone number. This matters for local SEO because Google values consistent, accurate information for searchers. Update the page whenever your hours, address, or contact details change.

38. 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. This takes time and resources, especially with several locations, but templated pages with only the city name changed risk falling under Google’s doorway-page spam policy, which discourages pages built at scale with little unique value.

Ecommerce SEO checklist

If you want to start an online store, SEO drives potential customers to your website. Here’s the checklist to follow when optimizing an ecommerce store.

39. Optimize product pages for search

A search engine’s goal is to direct users to relevant, helpful, and reliable information.

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. Support search performance and quickly help shoppers find what they need by using bullet points, highlighted text, and heading tags to structure your product pages.

Here are 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 descriptive meta description. Summarize the page and include target keywords.
• Use structured product data. Including this machine-readable code on your product pages helps Google better understand your products and become eligible for rich 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 discovers and surfaces 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 keyword 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.

Tip: Answer engine optimization is another way to drive traffic to your ecommerce website.

40. Structure collection pages strategically

Use collection pages to target broad product categories like "women’s jeans." Create a simple click path from your main menu to categories and subcategories, then to individual products. Make sure each category page links to its product pages so Google’s crawlers reach your full 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 subcategories and best sellers.

Keep filters crawlable for search engines. Use canonical tags, noindex tags, or robots.txt rules to 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.

41. Handle out-of-stock and seasonal products

Out-of-stock or seasonal products 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, or on backorder. 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 product alternative.

42. Collect customer reviews

Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines cite trustworthiness, experience, expertise, and authoritativeness (E-E-A-T) as central to how raters judge content quality.

To support the trustworthiness of your site, collect customer reviews and display them on relevant product pages. If you’ve added schema markup, review ratings become eligible to appear in the SERP.

Shopify apps like Yotpo and Judge.me automate this process. They also trigger automated emails that ask customers to review products after their orders arrive.

43. 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.

Product images are the first thing most shoppers look at on a product page: 56% of shoppers’ first action is to view the images before reading titles or descriptions, according to Baymard Institute’s UX research.

Follow image optimization practices for all media: compress image files, name files appropriately, and use a content delivery network (CDN) for fast load times.

Advanced SEO checklist

Use this advanced SEO checklist to build on the fundamentals covered in the SEO basics checklist above.

44. Optimize for zero-click searches

Google is no longer only a directory that connects users to websites that address their queries. In the first four months of 2026, about 68% of US Google searches ended without a click to any website, up from roughly 60% in 2024, according to SparkToro.

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

• Featured snippets
• AI Overviews
• "People Also Ask" sections

AI Overviews reduce clicks specifically: Google users who saw an AI Overview clicked a traditional search result in just 8% of visits, compared with 15% when no AI Overview appeared, according to Pew Research Center.

AI Overviews cite source content with links to the originating pages, as shown in this example for the query "what is dropshipping":

Optimizing for zero-click placements uses the same practices as general SEO. Share helpful content, improve formatting, and use schema markup to help your pages surface as direct answers.

45. Configure SEO reporting dashboards

Monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) to check whether your SEO strategy is working, such as:

• Organic traffic
• Search visibility
• Keyword rankings

Organic traffic is the most-cited metric for measuring SEO performance, cited by about 75% of SEO professionals in a global survey, ahead of qualified leads and conversions at 60%, according to Search Engine Journal’s State of SEO 2026 report.

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

46. 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 Gallery and implement them only when they match what users see on your page.

Shopify automatically generates Product schema for merchants. Review snippet, BreadcrumbList, and Local business schema typically require manual setup or an app.

Some schema options for commerce businesses are:

• Product: Makes your product pages eligible for rich results with price, availability, and ratings.
• Review snippet: Makes star ratings and review snippets eligible to appear in search, when used according to Google’s review guidelines.
• BreadcrumbList: Helps Google understand your hierarchy and makes breadcrumb paths (a navigational tool) eligible to appear in results.
• Local business: Describes your store’s name, location, and contact details to help Google represent your business in local search and knowledge panel results.

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

47. Implement international SEO correctly

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

For example, a store could host /en-us and /en-gb versions, or it could host an English and German version. Hreflang clarifies that pages sharing the same language but differing by region (e.g., US and UK), or covering the same content in different languages (e.g., English and German), are localized variants of each other.

Shopify automatically generates hreflang tags based on a store’s market and language configuration. If a theme or app already adds hreflang tags, turn off the automatic tags in Online Store > Preferences to avoid duplicates.

48. 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 pressure to produce content, some website owners are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as Shopify Sidekick, Jasper, and ChatGPT to keep up.

Generative AI can be useful for researching topics and structuring original content, but using it to generate many pages without adding value for users violates Google’s spam policy on scaled content abuse. Focus on accuracy, quality, and relevance when using AI-assisted content, according to Google.

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.

"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,” says Noah Kain, owner of Noah Kain Consulting. "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."

49. Refresh and relaunch declining content

Identify pages with declining organic traffic or rankings using Google Search Console or Analytics.

Compare year-over-year performance to spot pages that have dropped.

For each declining page:

• Update statistics, examples, and outdated information.
• Add sections that address gaps in search intent.
• Fix or replace broken internal and external links.
• Improve formatting, headings, and readability.
• Refresh schema, images, and internal links.

Google’s ranking systems include freshness systems, which show newer content for queries where recency matters, such as current events. For evergreen topics, the quality of an update matters more than the update itself.

Update the page’s last-modified or published date only when the content has meaningfully changed. Resubmit the URL in Google Search Console to request recrawling, then re-promote the refreshed content through your usual channels.

Bonus SEO tips

Here are three additional SEO tips:

50. Invite influential creators to produce content

E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. E-E-A-T itself isn’t a specific ranking factor, but Google’s ranking systems use a mix of signals to identify content that demonstrates strong E-E-A-T.

Make your content more credible by inviting third-party experts to contribute, such as people with:

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

51. Diversify content formats

Search engines surface information in different formats, and that doesn’t always mean text. Google pulls different content formats into its main search results page, including pictures from Google Images and videos from YouTube.

52. Improve the user experience

As you build your site, consider the connection between user experience and search optimization. Google’s ranking systems favor pages that serve people well, so a strong user experience supports search performance.

Use this SEO checklist to optimize your website

Work through the sections above in order: basics, technical, content, off-page, local, ecommerce, and advanced. Revisit the checklist periodically as Google updates its guidelines and your store grows.

Choosing between an SEO app, a Shopify Partner, or handling SEO in-house depends on a few factors:

• Time. Apps automate specific tasks, such as schema markup or meta tag edits, directly in the Shopify admin. A Shopify Partner handles broader strategy, audits, and technical fixes.
• Pricing model. Apps use a subscription pricing model. Partners price by project or retainer.
• Complexity. Multi-location stores, international stores, and site migrations need more technical SEO work, which Shopify Partners handle.

Install an SEO app from the Shopify App Store for specific tasks. Hire a Shopify Partner for broader strategy and technical work.