Do I need to complete all 9 steps for Shopify SEO to work?

Yes. Skipping steps or doing them out of order reduces your results significantly. All nine steps are built on each other.

Should I optimize product pages or collection pages first?

Product pages first, because they are closest to a purchase. Collection pages will typically drive more organic revenue long-term.

How many products does a collection page need before it is worth creating?

At least two to three products. If you only have one product that fits a keyword, do not build the collection page.

Can I use AI to write blog content for topical authority?

You can use AI to draft briefs and first drafts, but you must humanize the content before publishing. AI-only content will not rank reliably.

What makes a backlink worth building?

The linking page should already publish content relevant to your niche and receive traffic from your target country.

The 9-Step Shopify SEO Playbook That Generates Organic Revenue

Name: The 9-Step Shopify SEO Playbook That Generates Organic Revenue
Channel: Kai Cromwell
Description: Kai Cromwell, founder of New Seas, walks through a complete 9-step Shopify SEO playbook used across 7-to-9-figure brands. The video covers everything from fixing technical issues to building topical authority and backlinks — and explains why all nine steps must be done together.

Kai Cromwell is the founder of New Seas, a Shopify SEO agency that works exclusively with 7-to-9-figure brands. In 2025, the agency generated $132,000 in additional organic revenue for a compression sock brand, $242,000 for an appliance brand, and $815,000 for a women's activewear company — 105% growth over the prior year. The playbook below is what they run on every client.

The critical qualifier: all nine steps must be done, in order. Doing steps one through five and jumping to backlinks will not produce the same result. Each step creates the conditions the next one depends on.

Step 1: Fix Technical SEO Issues

Run a site crawl using Ahrefs, Semrush, or Screaming Frog. Fix every issue flagged as critical; skip warnings for now. The issues that apply to nearly every Shopify store are broken links, 404 pages, broken backlinks worth reclaiming, 301 redirect chains, and missing or duplicate H1s. Thin content may also qualify depending on the page.

Shopify has a handful of platform-specific technical problems that need separate attention. Duplicate product URLs are the most common. You also need a plan for tag-generated pages, pagination URLs, and other extraneous URLs — handle them with your robots.txt file or no-index tags. Cromwell recommends the Logix Shopify technical SEO guide, linked from the video description, as the most thorough resource available on this topic.

Steps 2 and 3: Optimize Product Pages, Then Collection Pages

Start with product pages because they're closest to a purchase. If you have a few hundred products or fewer, optimize all of them. If you have thousands of SKUs, prioritize the top 10–20% first — ranked by current traffic, ticket price, and profitability — and build a plan for the rest.

How to optimize both page types

The formula is identical for products and collections. Your target keyword needs to appear in:

The URL
The H1 — the product title or collection name
The meta title, frontloaded (the keyword starts the title)
The meta description, also frontloaded
The first sentence of the page copy, also frontloaded
A few more times naturally throughout the page

Collection pages need one additional layer of structure. Above the product grid: a short description under 50 words. Below the grid: 300–350 words of content built around an H2 (an inverse or variation of your target keyword), three H3s covering your top selling points for that collection, roughly 100 words under each H3, and internal links to related collections.

Collection pages will usually drive more organic revenue than product pages. Most transactional search results return category pages at the top — the collection page is the entry point, and the product page is where the transaction happens.

Step 4: Build New Collections for Every Buyer Persona

You need a page for every way a customer might search for your products. For a hot tub brand, that means collections for two-person, three-person, and four-person tubs; indoor and outdoor; luxury and affordable; in-ground and above-ground. For a compression sock brand: collections by gender, activity (running, walking, flying), symptom (swollen ankles, varicose veins, tendinitis), and color. The same product can exist in multiple collections — that is not duplicate content, because each collection page has unique copy optimized for that specific use case.

Before creating any of these pages, validate the keyword in Ahrefs or Semrush. AI tools can help generate collection ideas, but they cannot provide accurate search volume. If you build pages for terms nobody searches, you've created dead weight on your site.

Step 5: Build Internal Links Between Collections

Pages without internal links are invisible to Google and to users. The absence of a link is a signal — if the page were important, you'd link to it. Build most of your internal links toward your highest-value collection pages, since those have the most revenue potential and the most competitive keywords to win. Every subcollection should link back to the parent collection. Use exact or near-match anchor text, and cap outgoing internal links at three to five per collection page to avoid diluting the value you're passing around.

Step 6: Write Competitor Comparison Content

Versus and alternative articles capture branded search traffic from larger competitors and directly influence how Google surfaces your brand in AI overviews. Compare yourself only to brands that are equal to or larger than you — writing a comparison against a weaker competitor pulls you down a peg. To stay on the right side of legal risk: avoid inflammatory language, write in an unbiased tone, use real reviews from both brands, and fact-check every claim before publishing. Two sets of human eyes on the fact-checking is the standard Cromwell's team uses.

Steps 7 and 8: Build Topical Authority, Then Connect It

Blog content does not directly generate revenue. Its job is to make your product and collection pages rank higher by establishing your site as an authority on the topics surrounding what you sell. Start writing at the bottom of the funnel — the questions people ask immediately before buying. For hot tubs, that's: how much does a hot tub cost to maintain, how to install one, what to look for when buying, what size is right for my family. For supplements, it's: is this safe, how fast does it work, can I take it with other medications. After covering that ground, work backward toward earlier stages of the buying journey.

Once the content exists, internal linking closes the loop. The first link in every blog post should point to a relevant collection or product page, within the first 100–200 words. After that, link to three to five related blog posts. Never link from a collection or product page back to a blog post — don't pull a buyer back up the funnel.

Step 9: Build Backlinks from Niche-Relevant Sites

Most of what people think matters about backlinks — domain authority, follow vs. no-follow, guest posts vs. link insertions — matters less than one thing: the linking page publishes content about your niche and gets traffic from your target country. A link from a page with no traffic, or traffic from the wrong country, delivers little value. The safest long-term approach is to build links to your homepage using branded anchors, then let your internal link structure distribute that value to deeper pages. If your internal linking from steps five and eight is solid, the math works.

It's (nearly) impossible NOT to make money in 2026 with Shopify SEO if you do THIS