Yoast SEO for Shopify review

In recent years, Shopify has gone from strength to strength to become a leading shopping platform for online retailers and shoppers. A place where both small and large businesses can run their companies side by side and in harmony, requiring minimal effort (and having an anti-Amazon reputation) is perhaps why it has become so popular. 

However, this time last year, Yoast SEO made an app for Shopify with the intention of helping business owners to easily optimise their stores in order to increase rankings and generate more sales. 

Here’s an extensive review of Yoast SEO for Shopify so you can make an informed decision as to whether the app is right for you: 

What Does Yoast SEO For Shopify Do?

Before we get into it, it’s important for you, as a store owner, to know what the plugin actually does. In simple terms, it helps to incorporate all of the important search engine optimisation features needed to run a successful Shopify store easily. 

According to Yoast, it “makes sure your online store meets the highest technical SEO standards, without you having to do a thing.” What’s that saying again? Minimum effort, maximum satisfaction? But as well as essentially making your life that little bit easier, it also “guides you with making your product pages and blogs findable and easy-to-read.”

Some of the most helpful features it includes are:

• It helps you to create SEO-friendly blogs and product pages which will allow you to rank higher in search engines.
• It helps you to easily optimise your content for keyphrases which not only allows you to write naturally but also improves your content and makes it more accessible and visible for your audience and search engines.
• It’s available in 20 languages, including English, Dutch, German, French, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese, Polish, Arabic, Hebrew, Hungarian, Norwegian, Turkish, Czech, Japanese, Greek, Slovak and Indonesian. This can be incredibly helpful if you’re looking to write content that makes sense in more than one tongue.
• The plugin has a Google and social preview which helps you visualise what your products look like from a consumer’s perspective. 

Yoast SEO For Shopify Benefits

OK, so the features listed above are obviously some of the benefits of the plugin, but depending on where you’re at in your Shopify/business journey, the Yoast app may be more advantageous for some than others. Let’s begin…

It’s Good For New Stores

If your Shopify store or your small business is relatively new, for example, 6 months old or younger, purchasing the Yoast SEO plugin is probably a good and sensible idea. This is because Yoast is great for helping you with your copy, internal linking, focus keywords, meta descriptions, and how your site is structured – especially if you’re not fully equipped to build and ride the SEO wave on your own. 

Should you want it to, the plugin can override pre-existing metadata based on selected settings and guide you through replacing it with a more targeted approach to help you generate leads and sales. This can be especially helpful if the SEO work you’ve started doesn’t prove to be working as well as you’d like.

However, in all cases, the app makes sure to create backup files that allow merchants to restore their store to its original state before it was installed. So no need to worry if you actually decide you want something back to how it was prior to the Yoast SEO for Shopify changes.

Plus, it eases the pressure when thinking about technical SEO, as Yoast actually does it all for you. It automatically removes conflicting code in your theme files and then outputs its code cleanly. This improves site speed, therefore reducing the number of SEO problems. 

It Has the Same Interface as the WordPress Plugin

The Yoast SEO plugin has the same interface as the WordPress plugin, which is extremely handy if you already know how to navigate the site. This makes it quicker to begin optimising your website, as you don’t have to spend hours learning a new system.

If you have WordPress premium, you’ll also notice that the SEO analysis keyphrase synonyms are the same, too. For example, you’ll be able to discover your LSI or semantic keywords (search phrases related to your main targeted keyword) just like you would on WordPress. 

When carrying out this research, you’ll need to make sure you’re using synonym or semantic keywords, as it provides you with varied ways of saying your focused keyword. This gives web users more of a chance of coming across your site. Basically, you’re not just working to rank your focus keyword, you’re working to rank for all variations of it.

You Can Easily Optimise Important Features

The plugin allows you to easily optimise your titles, meta descriptions, and your schema markup. (Schema markup is otherwise known as structured data. It’s a coding language that helps search engines like Google to understand the content on your pages better in order to provide more informational results on the SERPs – Search Engine Results Pages – Google’s response to a consumer’s search query).  

And when navigating the plugin, you have easy access to be able to include products, search products, and decide how they’re going to be displayed on your Shopify store for the Google SERP. 

You can set templates for each content type, for example, blog posts, product pages and your homepage, plus save time optimising your metadata with the bulk editor. The tool also allows you to take charge of your SEO data on a page level.

Essentially, what the Shopify and Yoast collaboration does is allow you to optimise each and every one of your pages based on different variables and incorporate them into one app.

So, for companies who don’t have a team around them to customise code everything, the Yoast SEO plugin seems to be a great option to easily optimise your products, pages, blogs, collections, and even product tags.

*Sidenote: For the schema to work properly, you’ll have to give Yoast a helping hand. While a lot of structured data is incorporated automatically, you’ll need to add your store name, upload a logo and complete all of the social profiles. 

This brings us on to the next benefit…

The Plugin Has Schema Structured Data For Pages and Articles

Yoast SEO automatically adds the important structured data that helps search engines understand what your site is about, which in turn helps to get your website noticed on Google and improve your results on Google Shopping.

What this means is that the plugin will tell search engines about your business (name, logo, social handles, etc). The app is very flexible as it allows you to turn off and on individual structured data if you ever wanted to blend with another service. 

The plugin also comes with a further schema structured data choice, which lets you set it yourself for pages and posts. For example, with pages, the plugin will allow you to describe it in detail. You can let Google know via a selection in the app exactly what your contact page is, and Yoast SEO will add the said page data to your actual contact page. 

You can do this with articles, also. Yoast SEO for Shopify automatically adds structured data to every article, and you can choose between reports, news articles, scholarly reports and more. This defined data provides Google with more information on what they can find on your page which results in less guesswork for the search engines.

The app also allows you to add an OpenGraph image, title and description of your choice to a product when it’s shared to social media. The options are available for both Facebook and Twitter.

You can learn SEO with the Yoast Academy

If you’re not sure where to start when it comes to search engine optimisation, Yoast provides courses through its academy where it teaches you all of the basics. They have their own in-house SEO experts who are on hand to guide you step-by-step when improving your SEO skills.

From ecommerce SEO, keyword research and SEO content and copywriting courses, if you’re planning on using the Yoast SEO tool for Shopify, it can be especially handy to learn and understand SEO from the company itself. 

Yoast offers 365 days a year support for its customers

If you need help getting your Yoast SEO up and running or you simply have the odd question when it comes to your store, its support team are available literally all the time, all year round.

Whether you want to resolve a query via live chat or email, you’ll always be able to get a quick answer, plus who better to help you with the tool than the people who created it in the first place?

Final Thoughts

If search engine optimisation specifically for Shopify is what you’re interested in, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t give the Yoast SEO plugin a try. At first glance, it’s a useful tool and it does exactly what it does for WordPress, in that it provides you with focus keywords, readability analysis, and SEO analysis. 

And at $19 every 30 days as well as offering a 14-day free trial, if you want to boost your SEO with minimal effort, you may as well give it a go.

Minty Digital Team

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