Step 16: Set SEO Title & Meta Description
To setup the SEO title and meta description for your homepage (which is the most important page to set):
Go to your Shopify admin > Online Store > Preferences.
At the top of the page, you'll see options for "Homepage title" and "Homepage meta description."
- For the homepage title, you'll want to keep this short-and-sweet. Usually, this is just your store's name, unless your store's name doesn't accurately reflect what your business is (ie. "Ted's Shoes" pretty much says it all, but "Stephen's World" doesn't actually tell people that I'm a web designer).
- For the homepage meta description, you'll want to put in 2-3 sentences, describing your site, what you sell, and/or why customers should purchase from you.
See my settings below - from Stephen's World - as an example:
You will also want to set the title and meta description for all of your products, collections, blog posts, and content pages. This can be done by going into the settings for any of the above, one at a time, and then scrolling to the very bottom of the page.
From here, you will see a "Search engine listing preview" section, with a blue link for "Edit website SEO". Click this link, and the section will cascade to show some settings to edit. Here's an example product's SEO settings from my site.
By default, it will use the product/collection/blog/page's full name as the SEO title, and then the first sentence or two of the content for the meta description. This can often end up looking a bit tacky, if the product name is really long, or the description is heavily formatted (which can leave the meta description to be a bit of a jumbled-up run-on mess).
It will also let you edit the 'handle' which is what shows up at the very end of the URL. This is a good place to use some of your keywords that you weren't able to organically fit into the title and meta description. Be sure to separate each word in the handle, using dashes. You either want to keep the handle as short as possible (which looks more professional for your customers), or else load up the handle with a bunch of keywords (which doesn't look as nice, but should help your SEO rankings on Google).
Need more help with this step? Check out Shopify's help docs for SEO settings by clicking here.