Shopify product tags allow eCommerce sellers like you to organize things, enhance user experience, and ultimately grow their stores. However, they can be a little bit confusing and complicated, especially if you’re a newbie. In this article, we’ll cover what Shopify tags are, how they work, and how you can use these tools to your advantage — keep reading to take your store to the next level.

What Are Shopify Tags and How Do They Work?

Shopify tags let you add labels to different items on your Shopify store, including products, orders, customer information, returns, blog posts, and more. Your customers can’t see these tags, but you and your customers can both use them to quickly search your products and enhance search results.

You can also use these tags to filter out information from the public eye; for example, if you want to take your summer collection out of rotation now that autumn is in full swing, you can easily hide anything with a “summer” tag from search results.

The 6 Types of Shopify Tags

There are multiple types of Shopify tags, allowing you to personalize and fine-tune your use of them. These six types are:

Transfer

Transfer tags can be added or removed from the details page of a specific transfer. This allows you to organize your inventory transfers from suppliers with tags “recurring,” “urgent,” and more.

Customers

You can add and remove customer tags on the customers’ details page. This allows you to categorize your customers using tag names, as “VIP,” “loyal,” and “problematic.” By doing this, you can also schedule SMS or emails to send to specific types of customers, personalizing your marketing efforts.

Blog Posts

With Shopify tags, you can categorize the blog posts on your website depending on their topics, themes, or advertised products. For instance, you could use the “winter” tag for posts about winter and the “skin care” tag for posts that plug your skin care products.

Orders

On the Orders page, you can add and remove tags for particular orders, such as “delivered,” “pending,” and “new order.” This also allows you to group orders with the same delivery dates, fulfillment regions, and more.

Draft Orders

From the details page, you can add tags to your draft orders as well. For example, many shop owners use this feature to track draft orders that are “paid,” “fraudulent,” and more.

Products

Quite possibly the most useful type of Shopify tags, product tags allow you to categorize your products. Like the other types, product tags can be added and removed from the product’s details page. By grouping your products, you can use the tags as filters or selection criteria when you create a menu or an automatic collection.

We recommend tagging products with words that you think customers will use to search for them. For example, you can tag boots, scarves, and coats with “winter” and clients will be shown all three types of products when they search “winter” in your shop. The customers won’t see the tags, so you can add as many relevant tags as you’d like to a product to make it easier to find.

While product tags are a simple concept, there’s quite a lot that many shop owners fail to understand when implementing them. Read on to learn about Shopify tags SEO and Shopify tags best practices for your products.

Shopify Product Tags: How and Why to Use Them?

Using Shopify product tags is quite simple. If you want to add tags, simply go to “Product” and “All products” and then select a product. In the “Tags” section, choose a tag from the existing selection or provide a new tag name. After clicking Save, you’re all set.

If you want to remove tags, just open the product’s details page. Then, in the “Tags” section, click the “X” on the specific tag you want to remove, and then click “Save.”

Why Use Shopify Product Tags

Using Shopify product tags allows you to improve customer experience in two major ways. First, they allow online visitors to easily and effectively search and filter your listings. Second, you can categorize your products according to certain similarities, allowing your customers to easily browse your selection of certain products. This keeps your product pages clean and organized and makes it easier for your visitors to find what they’re looking for, drastically increasing conversion rates.

Shopify product tags also make it easier to create an automatic collection. This ensures that customers won’t have to scroll through dozens of pages just to find a product, improving the ease of navigation and overall customer experience to drive more sales for your store.

We’ll get into how these work later on.

A Product Can Have Many Tags

Shopify allows you to add a maximum of 250 tags for each product. This might seem excessive, but trust that it comes in handy. You can use tags for a myriad of purposes, such as indicating whether listings are new, on sale, made of certain fabric, best for a certain season, and more.

However, don’t craft your tags carelessly; Shopify tags best practices exist for a reason, after all.

For functionality’s sake, keep the tags short and simple. Most shop owners recommend sticking to 16 characters at the most, though this depends on the type and number of products you’re selling.

You should also stick to ordinary letters, hyphens, and numbers and avoid special characters. Special characters are often ignored and may not work as you expect them to.

Finally, try to tag items with words that your customers are the most likely to put in your search bar, as this means your items will be easier to find.

Example: Shopify Product Tags for Shoes

Let’s look at an example so you can see Shopify tags best practices in action.

Imagine that you’re selling different types of shoes in your Shopify store. One detail that you can categorize them by is their materials, such as rubber, leather, suede, and canvas. You can also sort them based on color, season, and style.

Now, imagine that you’re adding a new pair of brown leather Chelsea boots with a one-inch heel to the store. You could include tags like “New”, “Chelsea”, “Chelsea boots”, “Leather”, “Winter”, “Fall”, “Spring”, “Tan”, “Brown”, and “Heel”. These tags will work well because they’re easily searchable, short, and devoid of special characters.

Automatic Product Collections

To create an automatic collection, you can simply go to “Products”, click on “Collections” and “Create collection” and then choose “Automated.” You will need to specify conditions that products must meet to be added to the collection; you can set up to 60 conditions. These conditions can be based on product title, weight, price, vendor, and more.

You can also control how products have to match the condition you set. This includes specifying whether the products have to satisfy all conditions or any condition to be included in your collection. You can have a total of 5,000 automatic product collections.

For a winter collection, for example, you could specify conditions like “Product tag is equal to Christmas”, “Product tag is equal to coat”, “Product tag is equal to boots”, and more. Once you set this to include all products that satisfy any of these conditions, this will automatically round up products with your specified tags in one large collection, making it easier for customers to browse for specific seasons and events.

Shopify Product Tags & SEO

If you’re unfamiliar, SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. This is the ongoing practice of optimizing your website and its content to rank well in search engines, with the ultimate goal of hitting the first page or even the #1 spot for your keywords.

Product tags are mainly used to organize your products; they’re also almost invisible to Google and customers. Thus, Shopify tags SEO is not very impactful unless you’re very strategic about it.

To get two birds with one stone, you can boost your ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs) by using your Shopify tags as keywords on your product pages or links to your tagged collections sites. This lets you add Shopify tags SEO to your list of things boosting your SERP rankings and bringing in more web traffic over time.

Shopify Product Tags as Keywords

Google reads words and tags that you add to your main product page as normal page content, so you will want to avoid providing too many tags and be careful using product tags as keywords. If you overdo it, Google will flag this as “keyword stuffing,” and your SERP ranking will plummet.

If the content on your product page is sparse, we recommend sticking to 20 or fewer product tags. However, if the content is robust, you can increase your tag count bit by bit. Ideally, 80 – 90% of the product page content should be product descriptions, blog post content, reviews, and other relevant details.

Shopify Product Tags as Keywords in URLs

Shopify generates URLs that can help your store with SEO. These URLs contain the collection and tag names, like https://www.sample.com/collections/[collection]/[tag]. If the collection name is great and the Shopify tag is keyword-rich, then the URL will be beneficial for SEO.

However, you also have to provide unique content for this to work. If the Shopify tags and collection pages have the same or seemingly matching content, then Google will likely not rank these pages well or simply ignore them due to the lack of distinct characteristics. Thus, keep the content of each collection page unique to avoid a “duplicate content penalty.”

You can also avoid this by creating comprehensive and catchy product descriptions and using a code snippet that sets certain pages to “no index” so that search engines won’t pick them up.

Final Takeaways: Using Shopify Product Tags Effectively

Shopify product tags help your customers search for their desired products quickly and conveniently. However, you can only improve user experience and grow your business with these product tags if you use them effectively.

To use this tool to the fullest, just remember these three Shopify tags best practices:

1) Use Shopify Product Tags in a Way That Helps Customers Find Products Easily

With straightforward, relevant, and easy-to-understand Shopify product tags, customers can find your products faster and easier. By improving user experience, you can improve your conversion rate, allowing your business to thrive.

2) Build Automatic Product Collections

By creating automatic product collections, you can make your website easier to browse, further improving the user experience. You can also use these to capitalize on market trends by advertising collections for holidays, like Halloween and Christmas, or even fashion trends, like Y2K or Dark Academia clothing.

3) Use Shopify Product Tags for SEO

If you want to utilize Shopify tags SEO for your store, you need to remember to use them as keywords and in links, maintain a good balance of keyword content to non-keyword content on product pages, set pages to “no index” when necessary, and provide unique, high-quality content on your pages.

Shopify Tags FAQ

What Are Tags for in Shopify?

Shopify tags are labels that you can use to organize your products, customers, and more to make your shop easier to browse for yourself and customers alike.

Product tags allow customers to search and filter products more effectively and make it easier for you to create automatic product collections, saving you a significant amount of time while still letting customers easily browse curated categories.

Overall, this allows you to make the customer experience smooth and hassle-free, increasing your sales and growing your store.

Should You Use Tags in Shopify?

Yes, you should use tags in Shopify. Tags help you properly organize your products, orders, and even customer data. By categorizing relevant information, you can increase your store’s efficiency, address inquiries more effectively, personalize your marketing efforts, and avoid delays or cancellations.

Moreover, the ease of navigation brought about by product tags will vastly improve customers’ experiences with your site. When they can find the products they’re interested in and even discover related items in the blink of an eye, they’re far more likely to make a purchase — and they’re also more likely to buy more than the one item they came to your store for.

How Do I Set up Tags in Shopify?

To set up tags in Spotify, open the details page of the product, order, blog post, or customer that you want to tag. In the Tags section, select the tag name you wish to add or type it in to create a new one, and then click “Save”.

To remove product tags, open the details page of the product, order, blog post, or customer that you want to edit. In the Tags section, locate the tag you want to remove and click the X next to it. This will only remove this tag from the specific product, order, blog post, customer, etc. that you have opened the details page of; it will not remove the tag from your store as a whole.

Once you get the hang of tagging, you will be able to manage your online store much more effectively.

How Do I Customize My Tags on Shopify?

To customize your tags on Shopify, open the details page of the transfer, product, order, draft order, blog post, or customer that you want to alter the tags of. From the Tags section, you can remove tags by clicking the X on them or add tags by selecting an existing one from the drop-down menu or typing in a new one.

If you would like to edit the tags of many things at once, go to your Shopify admin page, open the page of the things you would like to edit (for example, your blogs), check all of the things that you would like to amend, and click Add Tags or Remove Tags.

For example, let’s imagine that you’ve made a typo and have been tagging boots as “botts”. To fix this, you can open your Shopify admin page and go to Products. From here, check all of the products that are tagged “botts” and click Add Tags. Add the tag “boots” to all of the items, and then remove the tag “botts” from them. They will all now be tagged properly.