The essence of Shopify SEO in 2017, 2018, and beyond

The past two weeks I’ve been working with a friend on a new product to help Shopify stores with SEO.

We’re covering an overview of about a dozen major SEO topics and distilling them down into useful advice.

I was thinking about that advice this morning and realized something.

Much of SEO these days boils down to a few key things:

• make it easy for customers and Google to find your store
• solve customer problems by being helpful
• do things to get attention from your customers

Or in other words: marketing.

SEO is a more technical type of marketing but at its root it’s still marketing.

That’s something to keep in mind when you hear about "new" SEO advice.

Ask yourself:

Does it sound like ethical marketing that you’d be proud of?

Or is it trying to trick and manipulate someone into helping you?

You can totally do the mom-test too, would you feel comfortable telling your mom what you’re planning to do?

Another thing creating this product has reinforced for me is how important it is to help Google understand your store.

It’s easy to mess that up, confuse Google, and hurt your SEO opportunities. One way to boost Google’s understanding is to setup and use structured data, like what JSON-LD for SEO does for you automatically.