How often should SEO be updated?

A solo Shopify store owner was asking how often their SEO should be reviewed.

A lot will depend on how big SEO is in terms of your marketing. If it's your primary channel or one you're investing a lot of resources into growing, you'll want to review and update it more often than a store who just gets a trickle of SEO traffic.

A good process is to do a quarterly revision and fix-up. This means every three months you'll be going through your store to freshen up specific pieces and fixing problems you find.

Critical Errors

First of all, lets fix some of the critical errors that can be holding you back.

For this you'll want to use Google's Search Console. Not every error listed in there matters but there are some that are important.

Any Security Issues are absolutely your top priority. Enough so that if you ever get one, drop everything and fix it right away. They are fortunately rare and are usually from a hacker which is uncommon with Shopify stores.

Next are Manual Actions. These are where an issue was found in your store and Google's human reviewers flagged the problem. These sorts of things can tank your SEO or get you removed from the search results. The one I've seen was someone publishing fake reviews on their products and they got caught.

Potential issues

After those, you'll want to check how Search Console reports on different parts of your store.

Check the Indexing reports to make sure Google is finding your pages. Seeing a lot of Not Indexed potentially normal. Check there isn't a trend showing an increase of Not Indexed overall or an increase in Not Indexed for the same specific reason. Each reason will list which pages are impacted and give you details on them. Again, not all of these are cause for concern so understand which require action, and which can be ignored.

For example, if you just recently changed your theme, had a redesign, or migrated to Shopify then you'll see a lot of activity in here. Just make sure the numbers are slowly getting better over time.

Your Product Snippets, Merchant Listings, and Review Snippets should also have more URLs becoming Valid over time. Ideally you'd have as many valid ones as you have products. However, the more products you have, the higher chance that Google is showing a sample of URLs and not all of them. If you have multiple sets of data on a page, you may see more valid data. This can be misleading because they can count each set of data, inflating your valid results. If you don't have any URLs that are valid or they are all Invalid, you'll want to look into JSON-LD for SEO to get valid structured data added to your store.

Finding Improvements

Using Search Console you can find most of the errors and issues in your SEO. Other tools might find more but I've found most of them to flag 100s and 1,000s of problems that don't actually matter.

I won't name names here, but there are two very large and very well known SEO tools in particular that often flag issues that have zero impact on your SEO. Their job is to flag technical errors which you have no clue about so you trust that they are correct. In reality, these false flags create a fear based focus on SEO. I genuinely believe these, are only there to keep you on their tool as long as possible. Please, understand what they are flagging and why. Do some research to evaluate if they actually matter. If not, mark their false flags to ignore so that it doesn't keep bothering you to fix something that doesn't matter.

I don't want to get too deep into this because I could write an entire article on false flags. Please, understand what they are flagging and why. Do some research to evaluate if they actually matter. If not, mark their false flags to ignore so that it doesn't keep bothering you to fix something that doesn't matter. Just because they call it an error, doesn't mean Google or other search engines actually care about it. For example, there is no such thing as "text to HTML ratio". It's made up, a myth, and has NO impact on your SEO.

Once the issues are taken care of, it's best to work on revising and improving what you have.

Pick Five Pages to Improve

With a limited amount of time, you'll want to focus your improvements on your best pages. Fixing up a page that no one sees is a waste of time.

What I like to do is start with your top five pages by traffic popularity. Often this will be your homepage and four product or collection pages. You can also select a landing page or even a popular blog post to evaluate.

This time, you'll improve these five pages. The next time your run this process, you'll pick the next five pages to work on. Then the 3rd time pick the next five. Then the 4th time pick the next five. Finally the 5th time, you'll come back to the top five pages again.

This will make sure your top twenty pages are improved every year and gives new pages time to creep into the ranking. This also prevents over-optimizing a handful of pages.

What to improve on a page

You're going to do the following process for each page to figure out what to improve. Let me be clear, there are no shortcuts here. To properly evaluate your pages, you need to put in the time an effort to do it right.

First off, take the page and put it into Google's URL Inspector. Make sure it's indexed and there's no issues associated with it.

Next, lets get an idea about who visits this page. (Note: this won't work for your homepage so skip this step for that). Still in Search Console, go to Performance and add a Filter for this Page (use the URL). This will tell you have that page has performed over the past 3 months in the actual Google Search results.

On the Queries tab you can see what people are actually searching for. Skim the queries with the highest number of Clicks and Impressions (they can be different). Note down any queries that you think the page should perform better on and queries that sound like good ones for the page but you don't think you're using. (This is a quick form of keyword research, one without hours of number crunching)

The last step to collect data is to run the following search in Google Search. Replace example.com/URL with the actual full URL for the page you are researching:

site:example.com/URL

You should see only one result, the page you're working on. If you don't, make a note about an indexing problem for that page.

Check that:

1. The title doesn't end in an ellipsis ...
2. The description doesn't end in an ellipsis ...
3. If this is a product page, we should ideally see a Rich Result is showing things like the Price, Availability, and Reviews (if it has reviews)

If the title or description ends in and ellipsis, that means either the content you're providing doesn't fit or Google replaced them with an automatic version. If so note down you need to fix the SEO title or SEO description.

Improving the page

Now that you've collected some data, let's get to actually making these improvements.

1. If there are any issues in Google's URL Inspector, work on them. Use Google's docs and dig into what's wrong.
2. If the page didn't show up in the search results and it's more than a month or two old, check that the page is showing as Indexed in the URL Inspector. Often pages get hidden by a misconfigured robots.txt or by a meta tag blocking the page in Google.
3. If the title or description was cut off, go to your Shopify Admin for that page and scroll down. At the bottom will be the Search Engine Listing. You'll want to add the Page Title or Description or trim them to make your content fit.

After taking care of those issues, now you want to make a good page perform better. There are 100s of ways to do this but here are a few standout ways:

1. Add more content. This is the #1 problem with most Shopify stores when it comes to SEO. You need lots of unique, original content on every page. Add another 200 words of content minimum.
2. Add even more content. It's so important I'm listing it twice.
3. Check your headers are actual headers. The largest text on the page should be a <h1> header, usually the page title or product name. Subheaders should be <h2>,<h3>,<h4>,<h5>, or <h6> depending on your theme and ideally in order.
4. Check that the content is scannable. Break-up large clumps of text with new paragraphs, headings, quoted reviews, etc.
5. Check the page performance. This is a huge issue with a lot of potential causes and fixes so I can't describe it all here. One example of page performance is keeping your page size small. If you know how to check performance, do it now. If you don't, find the next thing.
6. For products: Make sure reviews are visually showing or there's the ability to collect reviews.
7. For any page: Pull-quote any media mentions or great reviews you have.
8. Weave in those search query terms you found in Search Console. Don't stuff them in unnaturally, but use them in places where is make sense.
9. Check pop-ups. Use a Private Window in your browser to visit the page and check that any pop-up, opt-ins, etc make sense. Check it on mobile and desktop. I've seen stores with five or more of these that fill the screen of a visitor, but the store owner never saw because they were always logged in. Also make sure they work, e.g. opt-ins get added to your newsletter, links go to the correct URLs, etc.
10. Ensure there is one clear primary call-to-action and at least one secondary. Avoid more than five calls-to-action on a page. These include the regulars like "Add to cart" and "opt-in" but also large navigational elements like a featured collection or related products.

Improve bit by bit

While this seems like a lot written out, once you get the hang of it, it's quick. Adding new content will be the most time consuming part.

You can also scale this up or down. Just can't quite get to five pages per quarter? Do two, it's better than none. Have a team? Do ten pages per quarter. Create an SEO maintenance plan that works for you.

The point is ongoing improvements are much easier to do bit by bit. You can still do big overhaul projects as needed.