How To Add Meta Title To Blog Post Shopify

When it comes to SEO, your blog is one of the most powerful tools you have to drive traffic, increase your site's authority in your niche, and – most of all – share valuable information with your customers.

When run properly, a website's blog can be the main source of convert ready traffic.

On the Shopify platform, there are many considerations to address when it comes to properly setting up and utilizing your blog for growth. Let's break it down.

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To Blog or Not to Blog

A lot of merchants wonder whether it is worth their time to blog. The beautiful thing about blogging is that you don't have to be a stellar writer to have a great blog. A blog's popularity comes down to the quality and uniqueness of information that you're sharing. All you need to focus on for your blog is sharing your expertise.

Reasons Merchants Say They Don't Blog

"I'm not a good writer."

That may be true. But to be honest, your users don't expect impeccable prose and immaculate sentence structure – they want information. If the information is of high quality, they'll even overlook a misplaced comma or a dangling participle here and there. Assuming you can string together sentences in a coherent manner, you've got what it takes to write a blog. Additionally, writing is just one way to share information with people. There are videos, images, even transcription services that you can use to get your ideas down in text.

"I don't know what to write about."

This one always surprises me because anyone who starts a website or business does so for a reason. The same passion that compels you to have a store that sells vintage baseball caps is the same well of inspiration you draw from to produce blog content. What excites you? What upsets you? What unique piece of information can you share with the world? As long as you're not a piece or particle board, you have something to write about.

"I don't have time."

The problem with this excuse is it means the merchant doesn't understand the value that blogging can bring to a website and, thus, doesn't prioritize it. There are ways around this. Certainly you can hire a marketing agency to perform your blogging duties for you, like Studio. Or, as the business owner, you can set aside time to invest in your customer base. A good blog does a lot more than just drive traffic to your site.

Why You Should Be Blogging

If you're not blogging, there is a 99% chance that you're missing out on traffic, customers, and a chance to build some brand loyalty. Blogging is a great way to help grow your business. Here's how:

Ability to rank for more niche keywords – You can't realistically target all keywords and topics that you'd want to on a category page. If you did, you'd run the risk of over optimizing the page into relevancy oblivion. Blogging is the ideal platform to address those less searched but highly relevant keywords and queries that you otherwise wouldn't be able to rank for
Drive convert-ready traffic – while traffic to specific blog pages might be low, those who do visit your page are likely to be power users in your industry and more ready to convert. Let's say you sell IT hardware and there's a bug with one of your top brand's accessories. Writing a blog that covers the issue and tells customers how to overcome it is going to attract visitors who are likely to buy your kind of products.
Build brand equity – sharing expert and unique information about your product/niche/industry is one of the best ways to convert customers into brand ambassadors.
Send the right signals to Google – Google and other search engines are hungry for new, unique content and a regularly updated blog is one of the best tools to get the job done.

Convinced yet? Good. Let's talk about Shopify's blogging capabilities.

Shopify Blog Infrastructure

Shopify has a very simple, user-friendly blog interface. With it, you can:

Create and manage posts
Create blog categories where you can assign your posts
Add/edit content and media
Add tagging
Manage comments
Manage SEO fields for individual posts
Create blog categories
Set publish date/time

For additional features, you can check out Shopify's blog app plugins. For now, we'll just stick to basics.

Here's what Shopify's blogging infrastructure looks like:

Domain
- Blog Page
  - Blog Post 1
  - Blog Post 2
- Blog Page 2
  - Blog Post 1
  - Blog Post 2

For rock solid SEO, you need to make sure that you take extra care to utilize all SEO fields available to you at the Blog Page and Blog Post level, keeping your posts organized simply and logically.

SEO Fields & Setup for Blog Posts

When optimizing your blog posts for SEO, you want to make sure that properly fill out the following fields:

Post Title

This is exactly what it says it is: the title of your post. Once published, the title will display in the following areas:

How blog post is listed in your admin dashboard
The post title on Shopify Blog pages
The post title and H1 on the individual post page

Since Shopify gives you additional SEO fields, the post title is mostly user-facing. However, you still want to be relevant and concise with your titles and be sure to include relevant keywords.

Post content

This is where you're valuable information and content goes. Shopify gives you a WYSIWYG editor so you can create and edit content both visually and in HTML format.

Feature Image

The feature image is a mostly structural component. You'll see the featured image on your Shopify Blog pages as part of the post feed. They don't display on your individual post pages though, so you may want to add your featured image at the very top of your content section for continuity.

For purposes of consistency, make sure you're editing your images to be similar size and dimension. 16:9 is an ideal website dimension, but you may also want to do a 1:1 square image so it's easier to share on social platforms. For SEO, be sure to add in alt text to your featured image and any that embed in your content section.

Post Visibility

With this component, you can hide or display post and even set a specific publication date.

Assigned Author

This dropdown allows you to assign an author to the post if you have multiple users on the Shopify account.

Assigned Blog

This dropdown allows you to select which blog your post will show under. In some ways, this feature works the way post categories do on other blogging platforms. You can only select one blog to display you posts.

Tags

Here's where you can add organization to your posts. We cover tags extensively below.

Post Excerpt

The excerpt works much like the Featured Image in that it only displays in the blog feed on Shopify Blog pages. Be descriptive and fill it out to incentivize your users to click through.

Page Title (SEO Field)

This field is your Title Tag. Title Tags are used in various places on the web:

In search results
In browser tabs
As titles when posts are shared in social media

This is a big player in the SEO of you post so be sure to follow best practices in creating your title tags:

Shorter is better, but max of 70 characters
Front load with your main target keyword, and end with brand (ex: {KEYWORD/POST TITLE} – {BRAND NAME}

Meta Description (SEO field)

The meta description is the snippet of text that shows beneath your Title Tag in search results. Although Shopify says you can use up to 320 characters, Google tends to only display about 160 or so. Be sure to keep your descriptions short, sweet, and to the point.

URL & Handle (SEO Field)

This field allows you set the URL for your blog post. Again short, sweet, and relevant is ideal here.

SEO Fields & Setup for Blog Pages

You have far fewer options when it comes to the SEO fields for Shopify Blog pages.

Blog Page Title

This the name of your Blog Page. It displays in your Shopify admin as well as in the "Assigned Blog" dropdown on individual post pages.

Page Title (SEO Field)

This field is your Title Tag for your blog page. Works the exact same way as it is listed above.

Shorter is better, but max of 70 characters
Front load with your main target keyword, and end with brand (ex: {KEYWORD/POST TITLE} – {BRAND NAME}

Meta Description (SEO field)

URL & Handle (SEO Field)

This field allows you to set the URL for your Shopify Blog page. Again short, sweet, and relevant is ideal here.

Shopify Blog Taxonomies

One of the biggest shortcomings of Shopify's blog infrastructure is that it is fairly limited in taxonomy components that allow you to tag, categorize, and organize your posts.

Here's a breakdown of common blog taxonomy:

Tags – specific topics associated with an individual post, often used to help users find a topic of interest within a website search
Categories – a way to catalog broader topics on a blog and allow publishers to organize posts by category; additionally has SEO impact by including category name in category page URLs (ex: https://studio-test-x.myshopify.com/blogs/blog-category-2)
Archives – Catalog of post publication month and year

Other blogging platforms, like Blogger or WordPress, utilize tags and categories differently and provide users with archival taxonomies – Shopify does not. So when creating posts and looking at your content strategy as a whole overall, you need to make sure you take this into consideration.

Organizing Content by Shopify Blog

Because of how Shopify is set up, there is no taxonomy feature for categories. Instead, they have provided publishers a way to create separate "Blogs" and add individual posts to those blogs when you're publishing.

While the concept is a little misleading, the ability to create "Blogs" is essentially the same thing as creating categories to organize your posts.

Shopify will create a blog feed based on your blog category which will provide you, users, and search engines with an indexable URL.

For example, I have two Blogs on our test Shopify store: News and Blog Category 2. Both blogs can be visited at the relative URLs:

https://studio-test-x.myshopify.com/blogs/news
https://studio-test-x.myshopify.com/blogs/blog-category-2

At each URL, you will see a feed of all posts that I've associated with those Blogs. You can use Shopify's Blogs as a way to create categories and organize posts by topics on your site. While the functionality isn't necessarily intended to be used that way, it does solve the problem of not having a category feature at the individual post level.

Go to Online Store > Blog Posts > Manage Blogs

From there, you can create blog pages, delete blog pages, and add relevant SEO data for each.

Organizing Blogs by Shopify Tag

"Tags" are Shopify's catch-all taxonomy functionality. You can create as many tags as you want which is both a blessing and a curse. In the right hands, a highly organized tagging system will give you a lot of flexibility in how you display certain posts and where. In lesser hands, it can create a content nightmare.

What we see a lot with new website owners is they want to include everything as a tag thinking its going to help with traffic in some way. Adding everything but the kitchen sink as a tag is going to cause website bloat and will most likely look bad or spammy on your site.

Here's what it looks like on the post page when you overuse your tags:

Clearly, you've tried to include way too much information there.

When creating tags for Shopify, here's what we recommend:

Stick to 1 – 2 overarching tags that cover the general topic. Have these ready to be reused as needed. Something like "Company News" can be used for any post about company info. "Promos" can be used for product sales. You get the idea.
Make sure your tags are as few words as possible, 1 – 2 words if you can keep it that way. That prevents your tag URLs from being out of control.

For every tag you create, Shopify creates a feed page of all posts utilizing that tag. Here's an example:

https://studio-test-x.myshopify.com/blogs/blog-category-2/tagged/have

From there, you'd see all posts published on "Blog Category 2" that have been tagged with the tag "have." That's a unique URL for each tag on each blog.

If you recklessly overuse your tags, you can end up with a backlog of super low-quality blog feed pages, which Google and other search engines probably won't like. It could ultimately hurt your overall uniqueness and authority in your niche.

This means that you need to be extremely judicious about what information you include in your blog's tags. If you want to scale your blog and have a high quality publishing platform on your Shopify site, you need to be discerning about how many tags you add to each post and the syntax of those tags.

Organizing Blogs by Publication Date

As we mentioned above, Shopify does not have an archival taxonomy feature for it's blogs. If you want to utilize some sort of archival functionality, you'll need to do it using tags. Here's what we recommend:

Come up with a standard taxonomy to use for archival dating, something like "MONTH YYYY" (ex: January 2020). This can come in handy if you need to provide archival post catalogs at some point.

Down the road, you'll be able to reference a feed of posts published during a certain time frame by including the tag in the URL: https://studio-test-x.myshopify.com/blogs/blog-category-2/tagged/june-2020

Ultimately, categories, tags, and archival taxonomies have been boiled down to just "tags" on the Shopify platforms. Archives aren't available out of the box on the Shopify platform either (we go over how to add archives and categories below).

Additional Shopify Blog Functionality

If you want to extend your blog's core functionality and generate more traffic and ROI, here are a few ways to extend the functionality of your Shopify blog.

Adding Traditional Categories, Tags, Archives in the Sidebar

With a little bit of customization, you can get a fully functional sidebar with post categories, tags, and post archives.

Follow the guide at sumankc.com here.

Adding Content to Blog Category Pages

Shopify's blog pages don't give you fields to add H1s and body copy. We've created a way to utilize your page's title tag and meta description fields as your on page content.

Read our quick guide here.

Monetizing Blog Posts

Once you've got visitors on your blog, the next logical step is to convert them into buyers. Be sure to keep your products in focus with some Shopify's Buy Button feature.
Learn how to set it up here.

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