Best Shopify themes for SEO – our hand-picked list

Using an SEO-friendly Shopify theme is a great way to launch your online store on the right foot. Well-optimized and organized pages will make visitors stay longer, improve search engine rankings, and potentially help boost conversions. However, choosing the right theme from thousands of options can be challenging.

That’s why, in this article, we reviewed, tested, and ranked the 10 best Shopify themes for SEO. We’ll cover their most useful features, theme styles, performance, and other details.

What to look for in the best Shopify theme for SEO?

To make sure you get sales on your Shopify store organically through Google, you need to ensure the theme has all the features to make the process easy. Here’s what you should look for in a SEO-friendly theme:

• Responsiveness. Make sure the theme of your choice can guarantee a mobile-friendly design to ensure better SERP rankings. If you’re looking for themes in the Shopify app store, you can check the demo versions on mobile devices as well.
• Clear navigation. A seamless user journey and clear navigation can ensure that search engines can understand your site structure better.
• Performance. While speed is an indirect ranking factor, it can influence bounce rates and thus affect your rankings. Make sure you check the theme example website performance on PageSpeed Insights or check for more information in the theme descriptions.
• Rich snippet support. An SEO-optimized theme should support rich snippets, which provide much more information about your page or products than regular search results.

Other features that are useful to take into account include social media sharing, translation support, and image size optimization options.

10 best Shopify themes for SEO for 2024 – our detailed list

We tested and reviewed dozens of Shopify themes to find out which ones are suitable for SEO and ensure great performance, useful features, and optimal value for your money. Here are all of our top 10 themes covered in detail:

1. Booster – best SEO Shopify theme for conversion-focused businesses

Booster is the best Shopify theme for SEO if you’re looking to rank high in search engine results. It focuses on seamless integration with Shopify’s native SEO functionality, website speed, and conversion improvement.

While the theme comes with a hefty price tag of $398, keep in mind that the amount of features you get with this option eliminates the need to buy many third-party apps.

Here are some of the main Booster’s features:

• Rich snippet support. The theme supports rich snippets, ensuring you can optimize how your page looks in search results.
• Lazyload. This feature is useful to improve load time by ensuring elements of a web page load only when the user needs them.
• Image optimizer. Booster helps you automatically optimize images for any screen, ensuring a mobile-friendly design and better loading times.
• Promotion timer. This feature uses urgency to encourage users to buy your product.
• Multiple swatches option. You can add swatch options, whether color, material, or anything else.
• GDPR cookie bar. With Booster, you don’t need to pay for an additional cookie consent banner app as it’s already included, helping you comply with privacy laws.

You can learn more in our Booster theme review.

2. Startup – Shopify SEO theme for small brands

Startup is a Shopify theme built for smaller stores looking to build their brand. From the SEO standpoint, Startup shines in trying to help you build brand trust. The theme offers flexible, customizable testimonial sections so that your product reviews can be displayed in fashion.

Let’s take a look at some of the theme’s main features:

• Editorial content. With this theme, you can include FAQ pages and run a blog, which is great not only for telling the audience about your brand but writing SEO-optimized content.
• Product reviews. You can showcase social proof to ensure potential customers gain trust in your brand.
• Store locator. If you have a physical store, a store locator is useful to create indexable pages for location that can improve your visibility in local search results.
• Promo banners. Promotional banners help you advertise sales and special discounts on your website.
• Breadcrumbs. It’s a feature that’s excellent for navigation, but it also helps search engines like Google understand the structure of your site better.

3. Woodstock – fast Shopify SEO theme

Woodstock is a Shopify theme suitable for building a fast and modern store that guarantees excellent user experience. It’s SEO-friendly, has all the main conversion-focused features a merchant may need, and offers a mobile-friendly design.

Here are some of Woodstock’s main features:

• Editorial content. With this theme, you can ensure your pages rank higher on search engines with keyword-optimized blog content or FAQ pages.
• Promo banners. You can use banners to promote any sales or offers that you’re currently running.
• Trust badges. These features help increase user trust in your product.
• Breadcrumbs. With breadcrumbs, you’re helping users navigate your website and search engines understand its structure more easily.
• Countdown timer. You can leverage urgency using a countdown timer to ensure more users purchase your products.

4. Mavon – great SEO theme for a positive user experience

Mavon is a multi-purpose theme suitable for SEO thanks to a mobile-optimized design, excellent flexibility, and exceptional load times. It’s one of the fastest themes we’ve tested – you can reach up to 97 out of 100 points in terms of PageSpeed Insights performance score.

Let’s take a look at some of the most useful features:

• Mobile-first approach. Mavon ensures that your customers can shop conveniently no matter what device they’re using.
• Multi-currency. If you’re an international seller, you’ll benefit from having multiple currency options.
• Countdown timer. Make use of the countdown timer and other conversion features like a stock counter to motivate more visitors to buy products.
• Size chart and swatch options. Ensure a frictionless shopping journey for your customers by including color or image swatch options and a size chart.
• Product reviews. Your customers can write genuine reviews straight on your website, helping ensure that your rich snippets are improved with high ratings.

5. Oars – trending design styles and clean back-end

Oars is a great SEO-friendly theme that offers great performance and a clean design. This theme has all important SEO microdata coded, it’s fully responsive with different screen resolutions, and the code is lightweight so it loads fast.

If you want to get creative, Oars allows for a lot of customization, so you can build a unique store perfect for your products. Here are some of the most useful features:

• Rich snippet support. The theme supports enhancing your website’s search engine results with additional information.
• Contact form with Google Maps. You can easily implement a contact form together with Google Maps showing your physical store location.
• Social sharing buttons. You can easily add social media buttons, such as Facebook or Pinterest, to make sharing your products or content easier.
• Swatch options. This feature lets you set up different variants for your products, ensuring a seamless shopping journey for your customers.
• Custom product tab. Oars lets you create in-depth and SEO-friendly product descriptions, and additional information like shipping, or anything else while keeping it organized.

6. Flex – highly customizable theme for Shopify SEO

Flex is a great theme because of how customizable it is, making it great for professionals looking to build SEO-friendly sites. This theme offers 10+ pre-designed demo stores, so getting started won’t be difficult at all.

Plus, SEO professionals will love the enhanced CSS editing and top-loading speeds. Let’s look at some of the main features:

• Promo popups. This feature lets you easily promote discounts, sales, your newsletter, or anything else using popups.
• Stock counter. You can add a stock counter feature to let others know how many items are left in your stock, which can even encourage more sales.
• Editorial content. With Flex, you can run a blog or add an FAQ page with SEO-optimized content to get higher positions in search engines.
• Cookie banner. Flex comes with a cookie banner, helping you be transparent with your customers and save money on a third-party app.
• Trust badges. By adding trust signals to your product pages, you can guarantee that your product is of high quality and remove any purchasing doubts for visitors.

7. Empire – marketplace-style Shopify theme for big SEO ambitions

The Empire theme boasts plenty of useful features for selling and ensuring a good user experience and SEO. With a clean design, your website will look great on both desktop and mobile devices.

Empire also gets frequent updates, so you’ll never fall behind when it comes to features. While not on the cheap side, this theme is definitely worth it in the long run. Here are some of the main features:

• Countdown timer. With this feature, you can encourage users to buy more using urgency with limited sales.
• Product reviews. Your customers will be able to add a review of your product, ensuring brand trust and potentially more customers.
• Blog. Empire lets you run a blog or include an FAQ page with SEO-friendly content to ensure your audience can reach you more easily.
• Breadcrumbs. You can use this feature to ensure easy navigation for your users as well as search engines.
• Swatch options. If you’re selling products of different colors, you can use swatch options on your product pages to ensure a frictionless shopping journey.

8. Star – modern in appearance and rich in features

The Star theme boasts a sleek and modern look but doesn’t overlook features – it’s great for those seeking to get ahead in the SEO game. Plus, it’s extremely easy to set up and navigate, offering a hassle-free experience even for the inexperienced.

Let’s take a look at the main features:

• Rich snippet support. This theme supports Google’s rich snippets, so you can make your search results stand out from competitors.
• Google Maps section. If you’re running a physical store as well, you can easily integrate a Google Maps section into your website to make it easier to find.
• Mobile-first design. Thanks to a mobile-optimized design, you won’t miss out on potential sales made by smartphone users.
• Product reviews. Your customers will be able to easily leave product reviews, which can then show up on rich snippets and encourage others to click on your site.
• Image optimization. The Star theme helps you optimize large images to ensure an SEO-friendly user experience.

9. Debutify – fast Shopify theme with 50+ powerful add-ons

Debutify is a powerful Shopify theme that focuses on boosting conversions with a variety of features like promo popups, trust badges, and more. Plus, it’s fully customizable and guarantees great performance, making it a great option for SEO.

Let’s take a look at the main features:

• Mobile-first design. The theme is responsive and guarantees a great user experience for customers on any device.
• Breadcrumbs. You can include breadcrumbs to make navigation simple and help Google understand your site structure more clearly.
• Size chart. If you’re selling clothing or anything of different sizes, Debutify lets you easily insert a size guide to ensure lower return rates.
• Cookie bar. You can enable a cookie consent banner to comply with privacy laws like GDPR.
• Promo popups. Whether you want to advertise your latest sale or encourage users to join your newsletter, you can do anything using a promo popup.

10. Yanka – powerful Shopify theme for a well-rounded online store

Yanka is a good theme for SEO because it has a lot of conversion-focused features, rich snippet support, and a PageSpeed performance score of 81%. It also offers plenty of customization options to make the user experience as smooth as possible.

Here are some of the most useful features:

• Rich snippet support. Yanka supports Google’s rich snippets, which offer a competitive advantage in search engines if you make use of it correctly.
• Mobile-optimized design. A user-friendly mobile design can ensure you rank higher in mobile search engine results.
• GDPR compliance. You can include a cookie banner for your users to provide transparency and be compliant with the law.
• Swatch options. Whatever your store is going to sell, you can add color, size, or material swatch options to your product pages.
• Promo popups. With this feature, you can promote limited offers or sales or even invite people to subscribe to your newsletter.

Why is an SEO-optimized Shopify theme important?

A high-quality Shopify theme that’s optimized for SEO can bring you a lot of benefits aside from naturally ranking better in search engines. Here are all the advantages of getting an SEO-friendly theme:

Better search engine ranking

An SEO-optimized theme will give you a competitive advantage over non-optimized ones, helping you rank higher in search engines. However, keep in mind that an SEO-friendly theme doesn’t automatically mean your pages will rank, so make sure you follow the best Shopify SEO practices.

Faster website speed

If your website is slow, you’re more likely to lose visitors. According to Think with Google statistics, the bounce rate can increase by 32% when the page load time goes from 1 to 3 seconds. A theme that’s optimized for SEO also ensures high performance and a great user experience.

Responsive design

According to the Google Ads Help Center, mobile-optimized websites are more likely to rank higher in search results. For this reason, SEO-friendly theme developers make sure the design is responsive on all types of devices.

Additionally, a website that looks good on mobile helps improve user experience, ensuring more traffic and higher conversion rates.

More traffic

The higher you rank on search engines, the more likely you’re going to get more traffic to your site, especially if your content appears as a feature snippet. According to a study by EngineScout, feature snippets get 35.1% of the total click share.

More sales

Since SEO-optimized sites are more likely to rank higher in search engine results, naturally, you can enhance your conversion rates.

Conclusion

An SEO-friendly Shopify theme is the first step to getting better search engine rankings, faster website performance, more traffic, and potentially, sales. The final decision depends on your business needs, but you should choose a mobile-optimized option with clear navigation options, great load times, and rich snippet support.

Our number one recommendation is the Booster theme. It’s a highly conversion-oriented theme that offers expanded rich snippet support and dozens of marketing features to help your store rank high.

While an SEO-optimized theme is a great first step, it doesn’t guarantee high rankings. That’s why you need to follow the best SEO practices or automate tasks with an app like TinyIMG. It helps you edit metadata in bulk, automatically optimize images, fix broken pages, hide specific pages from search engines, set up JSON-LD without coding, and much more.

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Frequently asked questions

What is the best Shopify theme for SEO?

Booster is the ultimate SEO-optimized theme for any store. It stands out with expanded rich snippet support and plenty of features to enhance conversions, such as a countdown timer, free shipping bar, dynamic checkout, and more. It’s perfect for online businesses that want to create a professional website without investing in many third-party apps.

Does Shopify theme affect SEO?

Yes, your Shopify theme may affect your website’s SEO. A slow theme that isn’t optimized for mobile can hinder your SEO efforts while a performance-oriented option with rich snippet support and a responsive design can only improve it.

What is the best SEO tool for Shopify?

TinyIMG is the best SEO tool for your store because it helps you conveniently edit metadata in bulk mode, optimize image alt texts, easily set up JSON-LD, fix broken links, or add noindex or nofollow meta tags in a click of a button. Plus, you can generate product descriptions and metadata using AI.

About the author

Nikoleta Kokleviciute

Nikoleta is a Marketing Manager at TinyIMG, an app for image and SEO optimization for Shopify merchants. Nikoleta loves diving deep into digital marketing, eCommerce, social media trends, and creating content that benefits its readers!