Modify or remove the meta title and description in the Shopify theme code

Rankings are one of the top things thought about when it comes to SEO, but they are only one part of the story.

Ranking #1 but with crappy text in the search results will lead to a lot of impressions and zero clicks. What you really care about are clicks as those are potential customers coming to your store.

Did you know that you have some control when it comes to search results? You can't control everything, but by supplying the content and data to Google, you can influence what search engines show.

There are five major components to the search results:

1. Site Name
2. Breadcrumbs
3. Title
4. Description
5. Rich Results and search enhancements

You have some control over the Site Name and breadcrumbs with some help from the structured data.

As for Rich Results, you can qualify for them and other search enhancements with a mix of structured data and data coming from Merchant Center. However, Google's algorithm decides when and which types of enhancements they award to you.

The two areas you have the most influence over are the title and description. That makes makes them prime candidates for customization.

Let's take a look at how to customize the title and description.

Title

The title in the search results comes from the URL's <title> and often referred to as the meta title. Give a URL a different title and eventually that new title will show up in the search results.

Since every page has a single <title> tag and Shopify uses templates, it can be easy to customize. We'll use Dawn's example but each theme can potentially have different code.

In Dawn, open the file layout/theme.liquid and look for the title tag. You'll notice there are four lines of code inside there

{{ 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 -%}

Line 1: page title

The first line page_title will use the specific title for the page. On product pages that'll be the product name (or the customized SEO title). On collection page's it'll use the collection name and so on.

This code is an easy way to dynamically change the title depending on the page. This page_title can also be changed in the Search Engine Listings for every page.

e.g. Women's Shoes

Line 2: tags

The second line with current_tags will add on the list of tags if the page has been tagged. For example, when filtering collections by tags like tagged red, shoe, womens.

e.g. Women's Shoes - Boots

Line 3: page number

The third line will include the page number when you're paging through a list. Think "Page 2", "Page 3" of your collections.

e.g. Women's Shoes - Page 3

Line 4: shop name

The fourth line is a bit tricky. The code is adding your shop name at the end of the title but only if the page_title doesn't contain it already. That means for example when your homepage has your shop name listed, it won't be shown twice.

e.g. Women's Shoes - Ilana's Shoe Store

If you don't want your shop name to show in search results, the easiest solution is to remove that last line. So the end result would look like this:

{{ page_title }}
{%- if current_tags %} – tagged "{{ current_tags | join: ', ' }}"{% endif -%}
{%- if current_page != 1 %} – Page {{ current_page }}{% endif -%}

Customize the title tag

Or if wanted to add something to your <title> tag, like say you had some tagline or catchphrase you want to include, you can just add to the end or wherever you'd like.

{{ page_title }} - Catchphrase!

Search Result page descriptions

The text that shows up in the search results are both easier and more difficult to change.

There's another tag called the meta description tag that provides the content for search engines to use (in code it's <meta name="description" ...). Luckily Shopify has made it easy to get content into this tag using their Search Engine Listings settings.

Every product, collection, page, blog post, and your homepage can all have different content put in here from the Shopify admin. No code required.

Aim for one or two sentences of about 30-40 words. Google doesn't have a hard and fast rule for how long the meta description should be so that's why I recommend a sentence or two. If you want a harder guideline, target less than 160 characters.

The difficult part of the description, is that every page should have one. This can get out of hand quickly if you have to update thousands of pages.

Prioritize your most popular pages and products and slowly work through them as you can.

Search result title and descriptions are hints

Now for the bad news.

Whatever you put into the title and description aren't guaranteed to be used. They are merely hints to search engines.

We often see search engines will ignore your content and show something else in the search results. That's what I mean by saying you have control over them but not complete control.

On the plus side, search engines will usually alter them to better fit the searcher's query.

If someone searched for something you didn't have in the meta description, but the search engine can find something relevant on the page, they'll use the page content. Believe it or not, the revised content is more likely to convert than the more generic text you entered.

With that said, don't break the bank trying to update your meta title and description. Work through them over time. Be open to changing your content as you learn more about the keyword (short or long-tail) searches for your products.

Think of the search result title and description as extra content for your page. Content that is likely to be seen by larger numbers of people (searchers) than your regular page content.