Do you want your product titles to match your SEO titles in your Shopify store?

By Ilana Davis

Allie asked:

So, do you want your [product] title and SEO title to match? I thought that Google liked it if they did.

Like most SEO advice, it depends on your product and what you’re doing with the page.

If your product title and SEO title match, that’s a very strong signal to Google.

Google likes that because your title tag will match your header tag (a h1 usually) and many of the links to the product will use the same text. Those all count for votes saying that the product page is about .

But product names serve more purposes than just SEO.

They describe to customers what a product is.

They describe to your employees what a product is.

They appear in your site search.

They might be trademarked as a specific name.

etc, etc

What usually happens is that for SEO purposes you want to refine the product title, add a qualifier, or maybe even a subtitle.

That’s what the SEO title is used for.

(Sidebar on those three different ways to change the title.

Refining a title would be changing: "JSON-LD for SEO" to "Shopify Apps: JSON-LD for SEO"

A qualifier would be changing "JSON-LD for SEO" to "JSON-LD for SEO: an app to add structured data to Shopify stores"

Adding a subtitle would be like: "JSON-LD for SEO" to "JSON-LD for SEO: the safest way to get Rich Snippets to your Shopify store")

Since the SEO title field in Shopify only changes the HTML title tag, it only shows up in the browser tab for that page and in Google Search.

It’s a way to keep a normal looking product name everyone else in Shopify while still adding some additional context for SEO.

To answer Allie’s question:

If they match and your product title is the best title for SEO purposes, that’s great.

If they don’t match because you’ve created a better title for SEO purposes, also great.

This advice applies equally to blog posts, collection pages, and Shopify pages too. They all work the same.

What I personally do is to use the matching version at first. Then when a page becomes popular and attracts some SEO traffic, I’ll try to change the title to better target the traffic and keywords I’m wanting. That makes it easy to create a new page while also optimizing the winners.

One SEO feature that actually works is structured data.

Mostly because Google wants everyone to set it up so their jobs are easier.

You can either audit, code, and test your store’s structured data by hand or install JSON-LD for SEO and have all the structured data you need.

It’s already helping over two thousand Shopify stores with their structured data and it could help you too.

JSON-LD for SEO

Get more organic search traffic from Google without having to fight for better rankings by utilizing search enhancements called Rich Results.

Linking Llama

Link discontinued products to their best substitute. Keep discontinued products published on your website and continue to benefit from traffic to these pages.