Shopify Product Tags: Do They Help Your SEO?
Many Shopify merchants believe their store’s success depends mainly on the quality of their products. And while great products are indeed crucial, there’s more to the story. Brands become well-known by offering products that customers adore, but how do they manage everything behind the scenes? The answer is Shopify product tags!
Product tags are essential tools for categorizing and managing your inventory efficiently. In this blog, we’ll guide you through the basics of product tags and show you how they can help streamline operations in your Shopify store.
What Are Shopify Tags?
Shopify tags are versatile tools used to organize different elements of your store, such as products, customer information, orders, transfers, returns, and blog posts. Although customers can’t view these tags, merchants use them to categorize products and improve search results, making it easier to manage their store efficiently.
What Makes Shopify Tags Important?
Product tags play a crucial role in any Shopify store. They not only help you organize and categorize products but also enable you to create special collections and filters. Additionally, tags contribute to SEO (search engine optimization), enhancing your store’s visibility.
As a Shopify merchant, using custom tags provides several key advantages:
Improve Search Accuracy
Shopify product tags enhance the accuracy of search results by helping customers find the most relevant products. With the ability to use up to 250 tags, you can categorize items based on themes rather than just specific product names. This approach not only improves the shopping experience but also boosts the likelihood of customers making a purchase by presenting them with products that match their interests.
Enhance Personalization
Personalization is a cornerstone of eCommerce success. Marketers often tailor their outreach efforts based on customers’ buying history, content preferences, and online behavior. By utilizing additional product tags, you can offer even more precise recommendations, guiding customers to items that truly capture their interest. This not only enriches their shopping experience but also encourages higher engagement and conversion rates.
Help Organize Products
Shopify product tags are essential for store owners who need to differentiate and organize a wide range of products. For online merchants dealing with various items and multiple product variations, keeping track of inventory can be challenging. Fortunately, product tags ensure that each item is stored correctly, eliminating the need for manual stock checks or searches for product locations. This streamlined organization helps maintain efficiency and accuracy in inventory management.
Optimize Your Product Catalog
Tagging automation minimizes human error and saves valuable time. AI-powered product tags can identify fast-selling items, current style trends, and products that may need to be discontinued. This information empowers you to make informed business decisions about which products to stock and which recommendations are most likely to resonate with your customers, ultimately leading to a more efficient and effective product catalog.
What Are the Different Types of Shopify Tags?
While we are focusing on creating product tags, it’s beneficial to understand the various custom tags you can create on Shopify to streamline your store operations and enhance customer experience. Here are the different types:
Product Tags
Product tags allow you to group items into categories or collections. You can tag products by features such as color, season, price range, or any other search terms your customers frequently use, making it easier for them to find what they need.
Draft Order / Orders Tags
These tags help you organize orders with similar expected delivery dates, fulfillment regions, or other criteria. This ensures that your fulfillment team can deliver goods efficiently and on time.
Customer Tags
Customer tags enable you to create marketing campaigns or personalized communications based on different customer segments. For example, you can label customers as “problematic” or “VIP” to tailor your interactions and marketing strategies.
Transfer Tags
These tags can be added to incoming inventory to highlight items that are urgent or recurring, helping you prioritize and manage your stock effectively.
Blog Post Tags
Blog post tags allow you to categorize your content according to themes or related products, making it easier for readers to find relevant articles and increasing engagement on your site.
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How Do Product Tags Function?
Product tags are easy to use and incredibly effective for organizing your store. Imagine you run a home decor shop and decide to use tags to categorize items by color, material, and type.
For instance, you might use tags like ceramic, porcelain, glass, mug, vase, and terracotta. Your online store can use these tags to filter products on its collection pages, allowing customers to easily view all items that match these tags.
Additionally, you can create an automatic collection that uses these tags as grouping conditions, streamlining product management and enhancing the shopping experience.
What Are the Guidelines for Creating Product Tags?
Creating effective product tags is essential for both store organization and customer experience. Here are some key guidelines to follow when creating product tags:
- Keep Tags Simple and Clear
Use ordinary letters, numbers, and hyphens, as special characters are often ignored. Simple and clear tags ensure that customers and your store’s search functionality can easily understand and use them. - Make Tags Customer-Friendly
Some store themes display tags in drop-down menu filters for customers, so it’s important that your tags are meaningful and intuitive. For instance, if you’re creating a tag for your 2024 summer clothing collection, Summer-Clothing-2024 is more user-friendly than mysummerclothes23. - Keep Tags Short
While Shopify allows up to 255 characters for product tags, it’s best to keep them as concise as possible for increased usability. Depending on your products, you might be able to use tags as short as 16 characters.
By following these guidelines, you can create product tags that are both effective and user-friendly, enhancing the overall functionality and customer experience of your Shopify store.
What’s the Process for Creating or Deleting Shopify Tags?
Creating or removing Shopify tags is a straightforward process. Follow these simple steps to manage your tags effectively:
Creating Custom Tags:
- Access Shopify Admin
Log in to your Shopify admin panel and select the Products tab. - Select the Product
Choose the specific product you want to add a tag to. - Enter the Tag
In the Tags section, enter the desired tag name. You can also select an existing tag from the “View all tags” list. Use a comma to separate multiple tags. If you’re creating a new tag, it will be automatically saved. - Save Changes
Click Save to apply the tags to your product.
Removing Product Tags:
- Access Shopify Admin
Navigate to the Shopify admin panel and go to the Products page. - Select the Product
Find and select the specific product from which you want to remove the tag. - Remove the Tag
Scroll down to the Organization section and click the x next to the tag you wish to remove. This action only removes the tag from the product detail page you opened, without affecting other products. - Save Changes
Once you’ve removed the tag, click Save to confirm the changes.
Following these steps will help you efficiently create and remove product tags, ensuring your Shopify store remains organized and easy to navigate.
Do Shopify Product Tags Help SEO?
Shopify product tags are primarily designed for organizing products within your online store and do not directly impact search engine rankings. Here’s how they relate to SEO and what you should consider:
Limited Direct SEO Impact
Product tags themselves are not indexed by search engines and do not appear in Google search results. Their main function is to help manage and categorize products within your Shopify store.
Indirect SEO Benefits
Although product tags don’t directly boost SEO, they can be utilized as keywords within your web page content, meta tags, and URLs. However, be cautious: if product tags are overused or make up a significant portion of your page content, Google might see this as keyword stuffing, which could negatively impact your rankings.
Duplicate Content Concerns
Each product tag in Shopify has its own URL, which can create duplicate content issues if not managed properly. For instance, if you use tags like categories or brands, which are also represented as separate pages on your site, it can lead to confusion for search engines. Google may struggle to determine the primary page to index, potentially harming your SEO performance.
To avoid these issues, it’s best to refrain from using categories or brands as product tags. Instead, focus on including essential keywords within product descriptions and meta tags where they naturally fit. Use product tags and URLs strategically and only when they are relevant and add value.
While Shopify product tags offer some organizational benefits, their direct impact on SEO is limited. To maximize SEO effectiveness, concentrate on optimizing product descriptions and meta tags, and use product tags judiciously to support your overall SEO strategy.
Boost Your Shopify SEO with Effective Product Tags
Using product tags effectively can boost your Shopify store’s sales. The primary goal of product tags is to improve the ease of navigation for customers and simplify inventory management. However, relying solely on product tags is not a substitute for a comprehensive SEO strategy.
Consider these tips for product tags only if they align with your store’s needs. Not every tag will offer SEO benefits, so apply your judgment to ensure they are used wisely.
Use rel=”canonical” to Manage Duplicate Content
Earlier, we discussed the risk of duplicate content due to each product tag having its own URL. To prevent these pages from being flagged as duplicates by Google, you can use the canonical tag (rel=”canonical”) to specify the original page. This approach ensures that Google bots only crawl the main page, while users can still explore other products through your tagged collections pages.
Create Collections to Enhance Your Store’s Appeal
Product collections are often more enticing than individual items because they offer customers a range of choices. This approach helps you upsell products and increase sales, and collections may also include special promotions like discounts or exclusive items.
With Shopify, you can set up automatic collections by defining up to 60 conditions to group products together. Properly managing these collections can improve your SEO by providing search engines with clear semantic information through your internal linking and folder organization. This enables Google and other search engines to better understand the relevance of your product pages and categories to various search queries.
This helps Google and other search engines grasp which types of queries your product pages and categories are most relevant for.
An Aside: Shopify Tags vs. Collection Pages
Collections are categories that group products together, while tags serve as internal organization tools, similar to a cross-reference system. Tags help you create automated collections, set up product filters, and even build email sequences based on customer purchases.
Use Keywords in Product Tags
Certain Shopify themes list product tags on product pages, and they become page content crawled by search engine spiders. So, if your tags are listed in the main product area, the content on the page can impact your SERP ranking.
Similarly, using a product tag as a keyword and page title can enhance SEO, so long as there’s no keyword stuffing. When it comes to Shopify tags, it’s advisable to tag products with keywords used by your target audience.
Conduct market research before creating custom tags. It’s crucial to add tags based on a product’s function and physical characteristics. For instance, use tags like “cream,” “white,” and “serving dish” to accurately describe the item.
Filter by Tag
To improve navigation on the Products, Transfers, Blog Posts, Orders, and Draft Orders pages, you can use tags to filter your lists. On the Inventory page, product tags help streamline the process by allowing you to filter variant lists, enhancing your workflow efficiency.
How to Optimize Product Tags for Meta Tags, URLs, and Web Content?
Web Page Content
Enhance your online business by incorporating optimized product tags into your page content and product descriptions. Ensure that the tags match customer queries and appear no more than 20 times to maintain effectiveness without keyword overuse.
Even with 20 relevant tags, they should only make up a small part of your web page content. Most of the content should come from engaging product descriptions, blog posts, and other marketing materials.
Shopify Tags in Meta Descriptions
Although meta descriptions aren’t part of the main page content, you can still optimize them with product tags. These brief descriptions appear below your website URL in SERPs and offer extra details about your product pages.
Ensure your meta tag titles are SEO-friendly. Each page on your Shopify site should have a unique title tag (distinct from Shopify tags) that accurately describes the page’s content.
For Example:
Title: Authentic Mid-Century Coffee Tables
Meta Description: Explore our unique collection of vintage mid-century coffee tables imported from Europe and North America.
In this example, “mid-century coffee tables” serves as both a keyword and product tag. Although Shopify allows for 70 characters in title tags, Google typically displays only the first 50-60 characters, so it’s wise to keep your tags within this limit.
Shopify Tags in URLs
As mentioned earlier, each Shopify product tag has its own URL, such as https://www.example.com/collections/[collection]/[tag].
To avoid issues with duplicate content, ensure that the keywords in these URLs are unique unless you use canonical tags. Google prefers “clean” SEO-friendly URLs.
For example, if you sell toy cars, use a URL like:
www.yourdomain.com/toy-car-ferrari
Instead of:
www.yourdomain.com/prdsf/ct/8e7e8ph=re454
Always create URLs that are clear and include focus keywords. If a product tag is used as a keyword, that’s an added benefit. This approach helps both search engines and users understand your content better.
Conclusion
Shopify product tags are invaluable for optimizing your eCommerce store’s organization and functionality. While they do not directly impact SEO rankings, they offer significant benefits that indirectly support your store’s visibility and user experience. By effectively using product tags, you can streamline your inventory management, enhance search accuracy, and provide a more personalized shopping experience for your customers.
Product tags help you categorize and organize your products, making it easier for customers to find what they are looking for. This improved navigation can lead to higher engagement and conversion rates. Additionally, using tags to create special collections and filters can make your store more appealing and easier to browse, which can indirectly support your SEO efforts by improving user experience.
To maximize the benefits of product tags, ensure they are used thoughtfully and strategically. Avoid keyword stuffing and duplicate content issues by focusing on relevant and user-friendly tags. Incorporate tags into your product descriptions, meta tags, and URLs in a way that enhances both functionality and SEO without overloading your content.
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