Shopify SEO: Changes You Can't Ignore With Nick's Tuesday Tea Break Talks

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Winning with Shopify podcast with me, your host, Nick Truman. It's a pleasure to have you tuning in and I'm delighted that you decided to join us today to talk about SEO. There is so much changing in SEO. I've been working in this industry for 19 years now.

How exciting. 2007 is when I started as a little whippersnapper 17 year old. You can work out how old I am now, October. Send me some presents.

Thank you very much. But anyway, we're going to talk about SEO and a little bit obviously about AI because that's been the big change in SEO is AI is taking up quite a lot of SEO space on Google. And also a lot of the SEO work we do now is also focused on GEO and getting traffic from AI. So there's not a massive strategy change, but there's a lot going on.

I'm going to unpack some of this stuff. I like numbered lists. There's four things we're going to unpack today. And before all of that, some of these things are done automatically by our partners, Yoast.

So check out Yoast. If you use our code WWS15, so winning with Shopify, that is confusing. It's WWS15. That gets you 15% off either the WordPress or Shopify apps to use Yoast.

Yoast does some of this stuff for you and you're going to need an app like that on Shopify and makes it easier on WordPress. You don't technically need it on WordPress, but it makes it so much easier and does a lot of stuff that save you a lot of time and money. But you will need an app on Shopify to do some of this stuff. So we highly recommend using our partners at Yoast and getting that lovely, fancy, chunky discount right there.

Number one, this isn't brand new, but something's changed. Number one is you need a file for SEO purposes, well, mainly AI purposes, but it falls under the SEO banner in terms of workload and the kind of thing it is. You need a thing called an llms.txt file.

I'll say that again, LLMS.txt file. The reason I'm bringing this up is these have existed for a while now, but the 17th of June, 2026, Google used a very technical word and said it is now fine. It's now fine to use this for AI optimization purposes.

How exciting. When Google says something fine in my experience of all the algorithm updates over 19 years when google says something's fine it means you should do this whenever they've said something's fine it's turned out when you do it you get more traffic rankings go up or in ai's case more visibility that's been one of the big changes you want visibility and then people come and search your brand later or they will click through from where people are starting to click through from the ai agents as well a year ago weren't really getting any traffic.

Now it's starting to register as small single digit percentages of total traffic. We're starting to get some traffic in. So you need this. If you need one of these, I should know this.

I'm going to Google it quickly because why not? It's one of the first things I try to work out in an interview is whether Yoast uses the LLMS. It does. Yes.

Click a button and it's done. Click a button and it's done. So go use Yoast and you'll get that feature in there. I've been using my laptop more and more for show notes recently rather than just having a chat.

So much technical stuff going on. But you need an LLMS. So four letters, LLMS.txt file.

And you need that run in and something like Yoast will get that set up for you. Number two, this replies to content. You need to be optimizing now for questions and keywords. Let me digest what each of those things are to make a bit more sense.

A keyword is the search term. That's what somebody looks for on Google when they want to buy that product. Let's pick something at random, my glasses. So I want to buy a new pair of glasses and I've already decided I want to buy them.

So I might do some research, but when I go to buy them, I'm going to go on YouTube and search. These are tortoise shell effect. I've got a stigmatism in one of my eyes. So I'm going to search for someone that does lenses like that.

Everybody does now, so don't worry about that too much. And I might even start looking, it's actually written, I've dropped them now, dropped my glasses, can make a dad joke, where have they gone, don't know. But on the side of my glasses as well, it got some of the things like these are Havana style it got some of the sizing of how long the arms are and stuff So I might look for a very very specific keyword to find my new glasses frame So that's a keyword. When I talk about questions, you don't go on, and I've written an example here.

You don't go on ChatGPT and tell it stuff. You don't go women's black t-shirt with short sleeves. You don't go and tell it that. You have a conversation with it.

That's how AI works. That's how people use it. So on AI, you would say, what are my options for a t-shirt that has XYZ, that is black, that has short sleeves, or what are the sleeve lengths of t-shirts that you're aware of? And it will come back and say, well, it's a very, very good question.

Having looked, lots of brands don't actually say how long the sleeves are. You're probably going to need to buy a slightly more premium model for an exact measurement because they will have that on a more premium, luxurious product, but they wouldn't on a cheaper product. But just looking at the images, here are some options. So the point being is you need to optimize for keywords, which is what we've traditionally always been doing in SEO.

But actually, one of the things that supports that that is now more important is we'd often have FAQs about that keyword to get the keyword mentioned a bit more and increase relevance to say, not only is this a relevant place to send people that want to buy tortoiseshell glasses, and here's a whole collection on Shopify of tortoiseshell glasses, we have some FAQs. What are these similar options to tortoiseshell? Does tortoiseshell last? Does it fade in the sun?

what are the sizing dimensions of these glasses and kind of filter by that we'd have these faqs when we're looking now at chat gpt and ai and this whole new world of geo generative um engine optimization which again is kind of seo but slightly different actually those faqs and those questions are becoming even more important and two ways you can deploy content to try and get more visibility visibility so you come up in chat gpt and start getting a bit traffic from that two ways you can do that one is is faqs and having really good and well structured questions they've got to be things people will ask i'll answer that point in a second once i said the second thing the second thing is doing blog posts or doing guides or doing some sort of how-to or even just little information blocks on collections of products or throughout the site that give one of those questions and give the answer if the question is quite a big one of like should I buy a standing desk a fixed desk for my home study that's quite it's quite a big article and there's a lot of considerations that someone might go and read so actually I would make that an article make that an information page in its own right but actually if it's just what's the maximum height of this desk I wouldn't write a blog post about that that's just an FAQ on that particular desk product page so there's a lot of work to do but LLMs which are the crawlers for AI hence that llms.

txt file you need um go and use Yoast they help fund the show and they are actually amazing I love the guys there um they come on the show quite regularly um but yeah on top of that when the llms come to crawl the page if there are actual questions with actual answers when someone asks the question to chat gbt it'll know the answer and it will reference you and say I got this information from Nick's awesome women's black t-shirt shop or whatever they're you know whatever the name of the shop is.

And so I think that's a really good way that you can integrate some of those questions to get more traffic from AI. And it's one of the things you need to change is we need to be targeting keywords now for what the items are and also questions as well. This one is not so new, but again, the way SEO is changing, the way Google presents websites and answers and information to the user and the way that AI is working, this one I'm going to go into probably the most detail on today and because I think it's the most important and it's the biggest miss and actually it's quite easy and it's just around building new pages on your Shopify store.

What kind of pages? Let's talk about those. So I've taken the example here of a health supplement. So we have clients that sell these and we've done a lot of projects around health supplements.

So first you need a page on what the health supplement is. If your whole business sells one supplement that can be your home page or it could be a page called the supplement. And there's a whole page of information about the supplement. You've got one page.

This is what it is. It is this. This is what's in it. This is what it does And that your what it is page Now what you need to think about are all the different verticals of that product And this applies to clothing it applies to footwear, it applies to cars, it applies to lights, homeware, kitchenware, it applies to anything.

There'll be different verticals as to what people are looking for to inquire about this product or service. So taking the health supplement, we got our page, what is it? the first set of pages we could make is say there were seven ingredients in this supplement have a bit on the what it is page that says these are seven ingredients with little buttons or links and where people can click through to a sub page the url is flat in shopify it would just say slash pages slash whatever you've called the page slash pages slash creatine for example as a as a supplement um ingredient and then but you want a page about creatine but you don't want to talk about creatine you want to talk about why it's in your supplement you want to keep that page focused back and linking back to going by the supplement it's got really really good uh creatine in it our creatine is different to everybody else's and here's why here's why it's more beneficial for you here's why you could feel some of the benefits you want a page on creatine and the other six or however many ingredients you've got off that you want a page for each and now you've got all this information all these information pages for google for google's ai for chat gbt and all the LLMs to go and crawl that initial page.

And there's all this supporting content around it as well. So then if somebody's looking for a creatine supplement or having a conversation with ChatGPT about supplements that include creatine, but don't dehydrate too much, and you can tell I take creatine, and also work really well with protein shakes, ChatGPT will look at that and go, well, this supplement's got this, this, this, this, and this. So you could take it as a supplement and have your protein shakes separate. And that would also give you all of these other things.

you're having a protein shake i assume you're working out and you're giving chat gbt that information by answering those questions for it and again you're the source of all of those answers that chat gbt has brought back another example on the health supplement is the benefits so some people i've put two examples here some people will look for a sleep supplements some people look for energy supplements so you see how you've got the keyword there and you've also got what is the best supplement and my fourth and final point after we've spoken about health supplements a bit longer we'll talk about how you can prove you're the best but if you start saying like you know this is the we believe we've got the best creatine on the market and here's why or the best supplement with all these things in and here's why with the those ingredient pages and then the benefits pages so like supplements to sleep better and supplements to what was the other one i put supplements to have more energy supplements to help you focus and so you can have sub pages so you have a benefits bit on that one main page about the supplement and then you have other again offshoot pages with more information about this but video content some ugc of the influencers that take it and you see how you're pulling together like a really really compelling case to the customer customer first which then google and chat gbt and others are looking at going okay there's actually social proof of this stuff this is amazing the other another angle you could go down to create more content more pages about this product is also the use cases so supplements for people who go to the gym supplements for people who work night shifts supplements for people that work over 12 hours shifts.

So it's the same as supplements for more focus, but they're specifically giving you the, this is what I'm doing. So it could be supplements for doctors and nurses or healthcare workers, supplements for long haul drivers. So there's a whole set of other pages you can make around this as well. So we've got the ingredients, we've got the benefits, we've got the use cases.

And finally, depending on product, you could also do a set of pages or even just one page about the results. What are the results of this product? People who wear this t-shirt find that they smell less it's more breathable the supplement they feel more focused they sleep better these trainers people's feet are you know excuse excuse for being so crude but like they sweat less right people's feet sweat less because they're breathable shoes or actually these shoes you don't need to wear socks with and also you you can chuck these shoes straight in the washing machine once a week you can literally wear them in the ocean or a river walk straight out they drain themselves they dry just as quick as your skin will like that's a really cool pair of trainers you're talking about the results here Trainers that dry quickly Supplements that help me feel better So this is the feel better supplement T that make T for people with eczema as a really really good example people that have very sensitive skin t for sensitive skin or t that prevent sensitive skin again conversation have a chat gpt and then the keyword something you Google on Google itself So there's some ideas of how you can build content around the product.

And that's not just the pages. If you've got multiple products that fit these things, make a collection. A little bit of information at the top, more information at the bottom, corresponding guide, and a list of here's our 20 products or 20 supplements that are really good for sleep. And these are the things that are in them as to why.

So a lot of work to do there, a little bit of change to your site. You can make it so much more user-friendly and answer those questions. Get a load more traffic coming in as well. fourth and final point i mentioned social proof earlier with some ugc that's user generated content if you're new to this world that's where an influencer does a video about you and then you feature that video my fourth point is actually about customer reviews it shocks me how many brands don't ask for a review or don't ask properly or don't ask hard enough i mentioned um a few weeks back about different growth strategies and one of them one at least one maybe two or three of my different areas where you need different strategies for different parts of the business.

One is you need a review strategy. You need a strategy of how you're going to get as many reviews as possible, set a target or set a benchmark. We need to double the amount of people that are leaving reviews after buying from us. And the second thing people absolutely miss on their website is featuring those reviews properly.

If you just have a thing saying five stars, that could be from one customer. It could be from 1 million customers. We don't know. We don't know at this stage so you need to feature some of the when you're featuring reviews you're paying all this money for a view platform you're putting all this energy in to get those reviews you want to make sure you feature them on the site it needs to say we've got five star or we've got 4.

6 star from 20 000 customers given that most people that land on your site probably have never heard of you like they've seen an advert they've seen a couple of your meta ads now they're on your site you need to show off you need to be like look we're just as good as we told you we were you could even feature those reviews in your advertising. Put them on your videos, put them on your social assets, put them in your Pmax assets, mention it in content on Google Shopping. If you've got product reviews, you can put them into Google Shopping, text adverts and Google Ads, make sure you've got your reviews in there and feature those reviews.

Reason being is when someone's talking to ChatGPT and says, I need the best waterproof backpack for hiking. When someone searches that, ChatGPT is going to go, well, these guys have the most reviews, right? And I know that because when I'm on their website it shows me how many that i don't even need to go to trust pilot or fifa whatever and or yopo and see how many reviews there are it's just there and i should probably shout out judge me as well the other one of the list who's been on the show um but the the the point being is it doesn't even need to go to that site it just goes we got this many reviews and they're 4.

8 stars and chat gpt goes well that's pretty good how many has everyone else got right well these guys win on reviews and chat gpt will actually say in the same with google's ai mode and also taking into account for SEO, it will go, this one's got the most reviews. People love this product. And they're on V3 now. I mentioned again a few weeks ago about a product optimization strategy.

So these guys are on V3 of their product. People love the V2 and V3's just dropped as well. And the reviews are looking even better. The waterproofness of this backpack is even better.

So again, think about how you're going to get these reviews, how you're going to showcase them, and how you're going to make sure you are the best. So when somebody asks ChatGPT, Google, or anywhere else for a recommendation of what product to buy, you are front and center number one. I hope it's been useful today. If you need any help with SEO, check out our agency, spec.

digital. We work at a whole range of brands and we've got a whole range of Shopify and Shopify Plus stores on there as well. And we're happy to have a conversation for free and see where it goes. But thank you for listening today.

I hope you've enjoyed it. Remember to download Yoast, WWS15, get 15% off when you use Yoast. Thanks for listening. I'm Nick.

You guys have been great. And we hope you can join us again on Friday. Thanks for tuning in. Thank you.