If you have poorly optimised Shopify title tags and meta descriptions, you may see an increase of thirty percent in organic search visitors by following this tutorial. I’ve seen it before for Shopify clients. That may mean a thirty percent increase in sales from basic on-page SEO. When combined with the ultimate Shopify SEO guide to tick-off on-page and off-page SEO factors, organic search growth can double or triple in 6 months.
A title tag is the blue text you see in Google while a meta description is the black text that describes the page:
You can influence what gets displayed in search results with HTML code on the website that looks like:
<title>Your title is here</title>
<meta name="description" content="Your description is here" />
Get these right on the important pages of your Shopify store and you will profit. I make no mention of meta keywords because it has no positive affect on SEO. If you use a plugin like SEO Meta Manager, do not enter meta keywords as it could hurt your rankings. Plugins like these that allow you to edit meta information in Shopify are pointless if you follow this guide, unless you have a large number of SKUs that you will not write.
What if you fail to write great titles and descriptions or even ignore this guide?
Google is likely to pick the text to display which often sucks compared to what you could write. This is not to say if you write great titles and descriptions that Google will not sometimes change them—what I’m saying is if you fail to, Google is more likely than not to create its own titles and meta descriptions for you.
Depending on your niche and organic presence, anywhere from 10-90% of your visitors first encounter your store in search. An altered search results display means you do not control your marketing message. Even worse, the store under-performs in SEO and your listing gets a low click-through rate.
Good title tags and meta descriptions are core to better rankings and increased clicks from search results. This guide teaches you how to setup, write, and optimise title tags and meta descriptions for your Shopify store.
It All Begins with Search Query Analysis
You start with a search query analysis because it determines what search queries you want to rank for. It determines what you write, who are your competitors, and the SEO of everything else you do. It’s vital to do well.
I say “do well”, not “get right” because there are many ways to write a perfect title or meta description for the page—provided you meet the criteria revealed in this guide.
The best place to begin search query analysis or what you might think of as “keyword research”, is not a keyword tool. Look at the page you are optimising then ask yourself:
If someone was to discover only this page on the Internet then walk away happy, what would they look for?
Write down all your answers. You should have multiple answers for one page. It is easy to discover in ecommerce.
- An online store called “Jill’s Fashion Store” answers the searches “jills fashion store”, “online fashion store”, or possibly “women’s fashion store”.
- A collection page of leather jackets could answer the searches “leather jackets”, “motorcycle leather jackets”, or “leather jackets for men”. For “motorcycle leather jackets” to apply, every product in the collection should be motorcycle-focused otherwise the shoppers may leave frustrated.
- A product page selling the Vintage Digital Gold Databank watch made by Casio could answer, “vintage digital gold databank”, “gold casio watch”, or “vintage digital watch”. The “casio watch” search is not answered by the product page because the page is too specific. Someone searching “casio watch” is unsure of what they want and should receive a page from another website with a list of casio watches and information about the brand.
You want to solve a searcher’s problem better than other websites. Fail to do this and SEO becomes more challenging as Google’s algorithms can (or will) detect that your competitor who better answers the search query should out-rank you. You may be able to boost SEO by improving the page to better serve visitors.
Once you have a list of keywords to optimise the page for, type them in the Google Keyword Planner tool to check if people use these search terms:
There are thousands of searches around “gold Casio watches”. That’s a lot. I recommend you narrow to lessen competition by seeing other keyword suggestions. If I click-through the ad group ideas, I came across one that perfectly answers the product page:
The “Low”, “Medium”, and “High” under competition is just for Google Ads. You don’t need to pay much attention to it, but high competition means advertisers are spending money (a good hint they are making money on the searches) while low competition means less advertisers competing for user attention and more distribution of clicks to organic search results.
Search your potential term in Google. Look at the organic results, not the ad results. The top three organic results for this example are:
Do you see “casio”, “watch”, “gold”, or “mens” in the titles and descriptions of these pages? Hardly. That’s one indication of low competition.
A more advanced strategy to evaluate competition is to do backlink analysis using Ahrefs.com. A high number of backlinks to the page or homepage of these top ranking websites means higher competition. An even more advanced keyword method to discover what you should optimise for is to use Google Ads because the platform lets you near-instantly see what search terms in organic search will bring you clicks and sales.
One simple judgement of competition is to look at websites ranking high. Asos is an online store, but they are huge. Casio.co.uk is a little worrying because they are an official brand. Competition is likely to exist.
You want to balance search volume and competition. In a perfect world you optimize for high search volume (1000+ searches) and low competition, but there too many sites in today’s ecommerce for that to be true. Just go for keywords with some search volume and moderate to low competition.
Now you know what to go after, let’s optimize your store.
How to Edit Your Shopify Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
First you need to check if your theme is compatible with the built-in SEO features of Shopify on the homepage, collection pages, product pages, and general pages. You want all these pages to be SEO-optimised to maximise search visibility. Each presents a chance to capture organic traffic.
For the homepage, go to:
- Online Store > Preferences
- Enter a homepage title and meta description
- View the source code of the page to see if each updated exactly how you want. If it didn’t, you need to edit the template
For general pages, go to:
- Online Store > Pages
- Select a page
- Enter a page title and meta description
- View the source code of the page to see if each updated exactly how you want. If it didn’t, you need to edit the template
For all products, go to
- Products
- Select a product
- Click on “Edit website SEO” seen at the bottom of the below screenshot:
- Enter a page title and meta description
- View the source code of the product page to see if each updated exactly how you want. If it didn’t, you need to edit the template
For collections, go to:
- Products > Collections
- Select a collection
- Click on “Edit website SEO”
- Enter a page title and meta description
- View the source code of the collections page to see if each updated exactly how you want. If it didn’t, you need to edit the template
If your updates appear on the homepage, pages, collections, and products you’re fortunate to have a Shopify theme built with the option to customise these SEO factors. Jump to the next section on how to write a SEO-friendly title.
How to Edit the Title Tags in your Shopify Template
If the SEO text is not displaying how you want as per the previous section, you need to edit the template. Warning: do not edit your store’s template unless you know HTML and can easily undo your changes. Otherwise spend a few dollars on hiring a freelancer from UpWork and spend your time doing other valuable tasks. To make the edit:
- In the admin section, go to Online Store > Themes
- Click “Actions” on your live them then select “Edit Code”:
- Click on the “theme.liquid” file on the left side. This is where you can edit the Shopify theme’s title tags and meta descriptions.
- Find the text between <title> and </title> then replace it with:
<title>{{ page_title }}{% if current_tags %} – tagged "{{ current_tags | join: ', ' }}"{% endif %}{% if current_page != 1 %} – Page {{ current_page }}{% endif %}{% unless page_title contains shop.name %} – {{ shop.name }}{% endunless %}</title>
I recommend all Shopify designers use this in their templates because it allows you to control exactly how the title tags display on all pages in the store and provides fall back. When no title tag is entered:
- The homepage uses the store’s name
- A general page uses the name of the page then dash and store name
- A product page uses the name of the product then dash and store name
- A collections page uses the name of the collection then dash and store name
The configuration also:
- Supports naming best practices for pagination
- Works with tags if your template uses filters
- Does not add a dash and store name at the end of the homepage title tag if the store name is included somewhere
The store name is good to have for ecommerce in all pages when you have a strong brand presence. If you are a small store and do not have many people search your brand, begin with excluding the store name from your title tag—the store name takes up character space to dilute keyword value. Use this instead:
<title>{{ page_title }}{% if current_tags %} – tagged "{{ current_tags | join: ', ' }}"{% endif %}{% if current_page != 1 %} – Page {{ current_page }}{% endif %}</title>
Google may auto-insert the website’s name into the title. Test it for you store. It is one strategic reason to have a short name unlike “Independent Living Centres”.
How to Edit the Meta Description Tag in Your Shopify Theme
This is a lot easier to get right in your template and is often already setup.
- Go to your theme.liquid template
- Find the line that begins with
<meta name="description"then replace it with the following. This customizes the meta description so that paginated collections vary in description with the page number:
{% if page_description %}
<meta name="description" content="{{ page_description | escape }} {% if template contains 'collection' %}{% if current_page > 1 %}Page no. {{ current_page }}{% endif %}{% endif %}" />
{% endif %}
- In the unlikely case your theme doesn’t have a meta description, copy-and-paste the code after the closing title tag (
</title>)
Congratulations. Your Shopify store’s title tags and meta descriptions are now ready to be optimised. Let’s continue to do your on-page SEO right to boost visitors and sales.
How to Write an SEO-friendly Title
Title tags are the second most important on-page factor to help SEO. The most important is great value delivered in content, images, user-experience—stuff that makes your store fantastic.
If you ignore this process, Google picks what it thinks is best:
This page had no meta description and a poorly written title tag of:
<title>SurfStitch - Clothing | Footwear | Surf | Street - Shop Online!</title>
Here’s the seven-step process for a perfect title. It should:
- Contain your keywords from the search query analysis and keyword research you did earlier
- Be between 50-55 characters (sometimes you can get away with 35-60 characters). Too few and you miss opportunities. Too many and the title gets cut
- Be understandable
- Present the answer to the person’s search query
- Match the content on the page. This should happen when the title contains your keywords
- Be unique to other pages on your site
- Be attractive or interesting in some way to make people want to click. Interesting is often ticked off when other steps are done
Some perfect examples:
- Yo-Yos – Duncan & Yomega | Toys”R”Us
- Best Chef Knives – Six Recommendations | KitchenKnifeGuru
- The Tissue Box Cover Store, Over 50 styles!
Go ahead and write a few title tags for your pages. Start with your keywords. Run through the other six steps once you have a title written down. It’s better to edit than to have nothing.
Shopify provide a nice preview of your meta description and title tag when editing a product or collection. You can also use Portent’s SERP preview tool to test the display of your SEO work.
How to Write a SEO-friendly Meta Description
Google in 2009 said the meta description tag is not used in their ranking. What it does affect is user attention and click-through rate, which influences rankings.
A description is easier to write than a title. The process is the same but with more character space. Aim for 145-160 characters.
Shopify makes counting character length simple by telling you the number characters in the title and description:
You include your keywords in the meta description so the text is bold in search results and stands out. Structure the description around your keywords. Put them down first then write around it by thinking of the intent behind the search query.
To fix a brain freeze, search your targeted keywords in Google to see what other sites do. Write something different. Amateur SEOers tell you to copy the top ranking website, but this is ineffective because me-too is poor marketing and most stores do not follow the seven-step writing process to produce the perfect title and meta description.
Advanced On-page Optimisation Strategies
If you stop your on-page SEO with a one-off setup of title tags and meta descriptions, you miss making a few simple changes that can boost rankings and CTR. Google may be displaying different text to what you wrote. Let’s check:
- Allow two weeks for Google to re-crawl your site. This is enough time for Google to pick up the changes for most stores.
- Discover what information Google changes in their search results. Use RankTank’s meta and rich snippet testing tool. Enter your website address in the spreadsheet. The tool will compare what you have in the HTML code of all pages against the snippet for each page when displayed in search results.
- Rewrite titles and meta descriptions for pages that get changed in ways you’re unhappy with. Work your way through the spreadsheet.
My second favorite SEO strategy for meta optimisation is to use Google Search Console to spot easy wins in SEO. You want to identify pages that have a high ranking and low CTR, or have high impressions and low ranking.
- Allow two weeks for Google to re-crawl your site if you’ve made recent changes to the titles or meta description.
- Log into Google Webmaster Tools then go to the “Search Analytics” section.
- Click the “Clicks”, “Impressions”, “CTR”, and “Position” check boxes.
- Select the “Pages” radio icon because what you are about to do needs to be evaluated on a page-by-page basis:
- Sort the pages with the most impressions at the top by clicking the “Impressions” column. For pages with high impressions (relative to your other pages), an average position above 20, and a low CTR (<5%), see if the meta description misses any of the seven steps. Consider a rewrite of the meta description to improve the CTR. Phrase Research is a tool where you can upload your Google Search Console search analytics data to quickly identify your best CTR opportunities. The tool looks at the average clicks for other search queries in the search position analysed.
- Bonus tip: drill down to a specific page then click the “Queries” radio box to view queries for that page. Check if those keywords are included in your SEO on that page.
- Second bonus tip: further optimise pages that have low rankings and high impressions. How could you make the page more completely answer the search queries it ranks for?
- Super advanced bonus tip: split-test SERP results using SERP Turkey and Amazon Mechanical Turk.
What To Do Next?
Continue to improve your Shopify store’s SEO by following the ultimate guide to Shopify SEO with 101+ tips.
57 Comments. Leave new
Hey Josua,
Do you know how to add metakeywords in products page?
I see I can put product tags but it isn’t what I’m looking for.
Hope you can help me.
Thanks in advance
@davidnathr
Re-read the guide David. Meta keywords are a waste of time and may even hurt your SEO.
Didn’t change anything…help?
My meta description on search results of my website didn’t change at all…
Google Bot needs to crawl the page first then index what is updated. Search results can only update this way.
Hi Joshua,
Can you help how can i submit the trending search pages of my website to google?
For example.
https://www.variation.in/search?q=designer+sarees
Don’t. Google have said they do not want to crawl pages with substantially duplicate content like internal search results. Most stores’ search results are essentially doorway pages.
{{ page_title }}{% if current_tags %} – tagged “{{ current_tags | join: ‘, ‘ }}”{% endif %}{% if current_page != 1 %} – Page {{ current_page }}{% endif %}{% unless page_title contains shop.name %} – {{ shop.name }}{% endunless %}
I like this code above, and I like how the shop name title is on the end of the page titles, but for the home page on google the {shop name} : {home page title} comes up in this sequence, and wanted to know how to just have the {home page title } appear without the shop name in front, I dont mind it being tagged after the home page, but I dont want it before the home page title.
Please help! thanks!
Hey Joshua, thanks for the article. I’m currently creating collections to match categories that existed on my old site. However, we also have filters in place on shopify. Any ideas on how to sync collection and filter URLs and meta tags?
Sorry, missed your comments Benjamin. Did you get this solved? If not, provide some example URLs and what you mean by “sync”.
No mention of h1 tags… not much seo juice in this article!
Because the guide has nothing to do h1 tags, which is covered in the expert guide to Shopify SEO: https://www.digitaldarts.com.au/the-expert-guide-to-shopify-seo
Hi Joshua,
I know I’m late to comment on this, but do you have any advice or guides for doing custom H1’s for each page? My current theme sets the H1 as the page title by default, which makes for a very awkward looking H1. I looked at your Expert Guide to Shopify SEO, but didn’t see anything related to this. I have been trying to figure this out for weeks now. Thanks in advance.
Just hire someone. It’s a simple web design fix that If you find that challenging, you shouldn’t be doing it.
You should only have one H1 tag per page anyway, so… you should probably make your title whatever you want your H1 tag to be, ie. what the page is about (duh). Not sure why you would be doing “custom H1 tags” on any page.
I didn’t say anything about doing more than one H1 per page. Right now Shopify just uses the title of the page (for instance, the name of the category, so on an ecomm site about hardware, it just says “Electrical”, and nothing else. That isn’t ideal, especially for SEO. To change this, you would need… a custom H1 tag.
Do people that make snarky comments like (duh) when someone is trying to learn really deserve to comment here? I feel sorry for your wife and children FRED, What a dk.
Hi Josh nice article but how do you address a situation like this.. Shoe store with a structure that divides collections using gender, style, brand and this is done via tags. So for example you have a shoe with a tag with Womens, Birkenstock, Sandals.
Now we’re working with the powertools filter menu as we have hundreds of products so a typical URL would be = shopname/collections/mens/birkenstock/sandals. Now my challenge is the page name and description for this URL by default in shopify is from ‘mens’. This gives no reference to what the content / page is actually really displaying which are Mens Birkenstock Sandal products.
Is there a way you can create like dynamic page names in shopify so I’m not stuck with the title of the leading collection?
Hopefully that makes sense?
Hi Leigh, Brad from Power Tools here. We have a helper here that dynamically generates a block of text that you can use in your titles and headers. This may require professional installation, depending on how comfortable you are editing your theme.
https://www.shopifypowertools.com/asset_installers/_natural_language_collection_titles?path=filter_menu
Note that not all themes need this and it is not always worth replacing default text provided by your theme, so I don’t recommend it as a ‘one size fits all’ type of solution, but it does sound like an appropriate solution in your case. If you need further help, please contact our support.
Hi Josua;
How can I declare my website as a spanish website instead of an english website?
I´m looking at the Woorank diagnostics webpage, and my website appears as an English declared website, but it is detected in spanish. I´m afraid this will affect my searches as google will not show my website to spanish users. How can I fix this on a Shopify webpage? I have translated it, but I think it has to be done in the Meta Tags and URL.
See the section on my expert SEO guide that covers international targeting and the hreflang tag: https://www.digitaldarts.com.au/the-expert-guide-to-shopify-seo
Hi Joshua,
How can you help me to add products to my site. What do you think about my theme?
Thanks
Okito
Thanks Josh I am following your directions:)
Hi Joshua,
Could you please help me with updating meta title tags on tagged pages?
Currently, meta title tag is displaying like – “Order Online from Kids’ Pyjamas & Sleepwear Summer Collection – Tagged “Girls-Pyjamas-Summer-2017″ – My little Shop”
Please tell me a way how can I customize title tags of these tagged pages?
Waiting for your reply on this!
Thanks
I am guessing there is not a plugin for all this for those of us whos degree didnt come from MIT. All I want at the moment is for the picture I choose to come up in facebook when I or someone else shares 1 picture Spent the last 2 hours trying to get it to happen
No way is there a plugin or application that gets close to doing all this.
Hi Josh,
I am trying to figure out the opposite of this article – how to hide certain pages (like a Thank you page after someone leaves a review) from showing up on Google search. I use Shopify. I’ve read in some places to edit the metadata, but I am just seeing that option for specific pages. Do you have any experience with this?
I think this is the most excellent Shopify SEO guide available online. I pasted some of the code into my store to control how this appears in Google. Thank you for your help!
Hi Joshua,
What is the difference between below,
1. Product name
2. Product Description
3. Meta title tag
4. Meta Description
are the meta info derived from basic product name and product description or they are the totally different entity. please advise.
Hi Aditi,
In Shopify, if you don’t have a title tag entered, Shopify will use the product name in that field. Same thing goes for the product description and meta description. The title and meta description fields give you more control over the snippet shown in search results.
Hi Joshua,
I got report from WMT, it said my shopify web got meta description duplicate.
These two links are duplicate.
sunwear.vn/collections/mat-kinh-rayban/products/rb3025-181
sunwear.vn/products/rb3025-181
link rel=”canonical” was already put in, how WMT still catch the duplicate?
Thanks for your help.
Hi Kinh,
It’s possible Google hasn’t crawled the latest versions of both pages. Even so, I would ignore the warning.
Can you tell me how can I add meta tags to my all collections page?
/collections/all
This is really very helpful information.
Thank you
https://www.omnichannelcommerce.biz/
Useful. Not only for Shopify. I recommend that to my boss maybe he teaches me on SEO products.
Hi Joshua,
thanks for the article.
thanks joshua for sharing this detailed mail on meta title. it was easy to understand and can be implemented well.
Hello Joshua, I updated my websites Meta Title & Meta Description under “Preferences”. I Also verify my website with Google Search Console. I already set up my google analytics. For some reason, when I try to search my website on google search: it does not show the meta description that I have customized. Instead it shows this, “CloutIndustry
https://cloutindustry.com/
CloutIndustry. Coming Soon. Be the first to know when we launch. Promotions, new products and sales. Directly to your inbox. Email. Subscribe. Spread the …
I customize my meta title and description promptly and it still does not show correctly on google search. This is how I want it to look like this when I search my website on google —>
CloutIndustry | High Fashion Streetwear Clothes & Accessories (Meta Title)
CloutIndustry offers a wide selection of premium high fashion streetwear clothes & accessories for every occasion. Visit our online store today. (Meta Description)
Can you please tell me why its not showing on google search the correct way?
Thanks.
Hi Erik,
When searching your page in Google, click on the little green arrow next to the URL then on “Cached”. This will access the cache Google has of the page. In your case, the homepage was last crawled by Google on 14 Mar 2019 10:30:34 GMT. So Google has not yet crawled your updated title and meta description. The best way to get good crawling going is gather quality inbound links. As a short-term fix, you can also submit the URL for crawling in Google Search Console.
Sidenote: you’ll be interested to know when clicking on your domain from gmail, I receive a warning message from Google that your domain is suspicious: This link leads to an untrusted site. Are you sure you want to proceed to cloutindustry.com?
Thanks pal, it worked for my store.
Hi Joshua!
Thank you so much for all your information and answering questions! For a complete newbie, this article has been the most helpful I’ve come across and I actually was able to learn and accomplish a new task. With that, I’ve noticed that my title tag has changed on search engines like yahoo, duck duck go, and bing, but it won’t change in Google. Google has crawled my sight in the last month, but it only lists our store name. The title tag has been changed for 4 months now. Any insights? Thank you again!
Good to hear Erika. Check the last time the page was crawled by looking at the page’s data in Google Search Console. It’s not enough to know the website was crawled as not all pages may be. Secondly, as mentioned, Google will change the title to what it sees fit in SERP and it’s continuing to do so. Review what it’s changing it to and see you can deduce any lessons from it.
Thank you so much for the reply! I’ll definitely be trying what you’ve recommended!!
Great tips for sure, I am having trouble with a duplicate meta issue. Do you know how I can change the meta description and title of this page: http://saltyscales.com/collections/all
Yes, you can edit the meta description and title of the all collections page. You first need to take control of the collection by creating it manually. You then edit the title and meta description for the collection like any other. Shopify have directions to do so.
Okay, but how to create OG Tags so that when I paste my link into facebook, it shows the metadata(tites, tags, etc..) and a nice preview picture?
Here you go Michael: https://shopify.github.io/liquid-code-examples/example/open-graph-tags
thank you for your article. Can we hire you for our website?
You can learn more about SEO service here then reach out to start a conversation.
This is a great article. I am using the minimal theme on shopify and cannot find where the title tag is held, it isn’t in the theme.scss.liquid
Please could you point me in the right direction so that I can add this code in the right place.
{{ page_title }}{% if current_tags %} – tagged “{{ current_tags | join: ‘, ‘ }}”{% endif %}{% if current_page != 1 %} – Page {{ current_page }}{% endif %}
Many thanks,
Jenny
hi when writing a meta description for my products on bulk editor, am i able to copy and paste it into all other variants? (their all different styles of the same product)
On many sites I read about how to write seo-title correctly, but in many respects the situation remained not very clear to me. After reading your article, I received all the answers to the questions that interested me. Thank you, now I can use this information for my site.
Thank you very much, the shopify tags were missing in theme liquid and now I could add it because of your article. Appreciate!
Thank you very much, the shopify tags were missing in theme and now its working!
After we take the time to write baller optimized short SEO descriptions (bottom of the product page/search engine-meta description), how can we reuse our fantastic text? For instance, using it automatically as a metafield or display as a paragraph in our product descriptions? I can’t find any liquid variable that pulls or references that particular page data field
If you’re manually writing the meta description, and you want to use it in the product description, I would want to manually edit the product description with it. The liquid field is
page_description.Hi Joshua, thanks for a really great article and assistance on Shopify. Appreciate how you respond and reply diligently to people’s issues and remarks. Inspiring bro!
Hi Joshua ,
Which is best shopify app for Title tags , Description , meta title , meta descriptions (meta tags) customization? Is FavSEO a better app