Practical SEO Analysis and Optimization for Shopify Stores: Tips for Maximizing Organic Search Traffic from Riku Yamada of JADE Inc.

Introduction

Our guest today is Riku Yamada of JADE Inc., an SEO specialist who has spent years working on large-scale site optimization with a strong focus on data-driven approaches. He joined the food discovery service "Retty" straight out of university, where he served as SEO lead during a period of rapid growth from 40 million to 50 million MAU (Monthly Active Users). After navigating the COVID-19 pandemic, he joined JADE Inc., where he now focuses primarily on consulting for sites that handle massive datasets — including e-commerce, real estate, and job listing platforms. Highly regarded for his advanced analytical skills using BigQuery and Search Console, he is widely recognized in the SEO space as an "analytics-focused consultant who lets the data do the talking."

In this interview, we focused on how to apply SEO data analysis in practice for e-commerce stores running on Shopify, and how to turn those insights into actionable improvements. From setting SEO KPIs and choosing the right tools, to query analysis and landing page optimization — we've packed in a wealth of practical know-how drawn from Yamada-san's extensive hands-on experience. For those of you running online stores, this interview is full of tips to help you steadily grow both organic search traffic and revenue, so please read it through to the end.

Setting and Understanding SEO KPIs for E-Commerce Sites

Kurose
When thinking about SEO for an e-commerce site, I find it difficult to know where to start with KPI setting. How do you approach this?

Yamada-san
At JADE, we advocate a framework called DCIR - QCLS (Introduction to the Search Interaction Model — The SEO Analysis Framework JADE Uses Every Day). This framework applies to any type of site, and I think it's highly valuable for running an e-commerce business as well. I'd like you to think in two phases: the first is "the phase before appearing in search results," and the second is "the phase after traffic arrives from search results." Using this as a base, you can design KPIs like the following.

Phase before appearing in search results

• Discover: URL discovery rate. How often Google discovers your URLs
• Crawl: Crawl rate. How often your URLs are being crawled
• Index: Index rate. How many of your URLs are actually indexed
• Rank: Rankings. Which position individual URLs rank at for which queries

Phase after traffic arrives from search results

• Query: What queries are generating impressions, and how many
• Click: Click-through rate. How many clicks each query is generating
• Land: Is the landing URL satisfying the user's search intent without them bouncing?
• Surf: Browse rate. Are users continuing their search journey and exploring the site?

Kurose
I see. When people think of SEO, they tend to fixate on rankings — but there are many other dimensions to consider, like indexation rates and user behavior.

Yamada-san
Exactly. Average position is actually not a particularly meaningful metric in itself. It's extremely rare for a single page to appear for only one query. It's simply the average ranking across all the various queries that caused the page to appear. Say you're ranking #1 for queries that lead to conversions, but #10 for queries that don't — the average comes out to position 5.5. But the reality is that you're performing well on the queries that matter most, which is perfectly fine.

If you chase that 5.5 average ranking thinking there's room to improve, you'd be spending effort on queries that don't convert — and that won't move the needle. Especially for e-commerce, as product attributes like color and size multiply, so do related keywords. I think you need to understand exactly which queries are generating how many impressions, at what CTR (click-through rate), and how many clicks.

※ The calculation of average position is also influenced by impression counts. For a deeper dive, please refer to this resource: (Avoiding Misjudgments with Google Search Console's Average Position — Beware of the "Average Trap")

Kurose
In e-commerce, depending on the product, items can go out of stock or get discontinued — so simply increasing traffic isn't always the goal. How should SEO be approached with those factors in mind?

Yamada-san
Out-of-stock and discontinued pages can indirectly affect search rankings. Post-visit user behavior is critically important, and pages for out-of-stock items are highly likely to result in search bounces — which is far from ideal user behavior. For example, imagine a product that consistently ranks #1 suddenly goes out of stock. If a TV feature or media buzz then drives a surge of search traffic to that page, you could see a massive spike in bounces, which in turn causes your ranking to drop. That kind of scenario is entirely plausible.

The importance of user behavior in SEO is not as widely understood as it should be, so I'd really encourage people to keep this in mind. When users make a purchase on an e-commerce site, they're entering sensitive personal information — their address, credit card details, and so on. From the user's perspective, they simply don't want to shop on a site that doesn't feel trustworthy.

Without that sense of credibility and safety, users won't feel motivated to browse around or make a purchase in the first place. Rather than chasing SEO tricks and tactics, making sure those fundamental elements are solid is, in my view, one of the most important factors for achieving real SEO results.

Specific Analysis Methods and Tool Usage

Kurose
For concrete analysis, is Google Search Console and GA4 the main toolkit?

Yamada-san
Yes, the top priority should always be leveraging your own first-party data. With Search Console, I recommend breaking down impressions, clicks, and CTR by directory or page type for analysis.

For example, think of it as getting a clear picture of each segment: "category/list pages," "product detail pages," "blog/content pages," and so on. Monitoring overall impressions, clicks, and ranking fluctuations without that breakdown gives you nothing actionable.

If nothing else changes but impressions for the T-shirt category specifically drop, you can start forming hypotheses: Is it a seasonal factor (an external cause), like cooler temperatures reducing demand? Or has the indexation rate deteriorated, causing the pages to drop out of search results altogether? Or has the number of queries a page appears for decreased (an internal cause)? Breaking things down by category rather than chasing overall numbers is a habit I want everyone to develop.

Kurose
What are the key analysis points with GA4?

Yamada-san
In GA4, I look at bounce rate, time on site, and CVR (conversion rate) by landing page. For e-commerce, filtering options tend to be numerous and the hierarchy can get deep, so the trick is to drill down progressively: top-level category → mid-level category → sub-category.

Compare user metrics across top-level categories, identify where they look poor, and then gradually increase the resolution of your analysis to find the root cause. You might discover, for example, that a specific category has a high bounce rate or low conversion rate because it simply doesn't have enough products.

Kurose
For intermediate-to-advanced users looking to go even deeper, what approaches would you recommend?

Yamada-san
Using the following two tools enables much deeper analysis.

• Inspection API (https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2022/01/url-inspection-api?hl=ja)
• Bulk Export Data (https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/02/bulk-data-export?hl=ja)

The first, the Inspection API, allows you to check whether a URL is indexed.
The biggest advantage of using the API is that you can investigate a large number of URLs all at once.
A key characteristic of e-commerce sites is that they tend to generate enormous numbers of URLs. Every product has its own URL, and once you factor in parameters for size, color, and other attributes, the volume of URLs generated becomes staggering. Given this nature of e-commerce sites, it's quite possible that many are unknowingly sitting on bottlenecks in the D-C-I phase of JADE's framework — the process up to indexation — with large amounts of unindexed content going unnoticed.
If your current indexation rate is 40%, bringing it up to 80% could potentially double your click count. If a URL isn't indexed, you can't improve its ranking at all — so the first step is to accurately understand your indexation status. And to do that properly, Search Console alone falls short, making the Inspection API essentially unavoidable.

The second, Bulk Export Data, is a feature that exports your Search Console data in full — without any omissions.
The data visible within the Search Console interface is actually only a subset of what's available. But with this export feature, you can get a complete picture: for every URL, which queries triggered it, how many impressions were generated, how many clicks occurred, and what the average position was.
Because e-commerce sites have so many URLs, the variety of queries tends to be extremely broad as well. It's quite common for sites to miss query clusters with significant traffic potential, or to overlook their own strengths.
On top of that, Search Console requires you to apply filters every time you want to view data, which makes analysis time-consuming. But if you build a dashboard environment on top of the exported data, you can dramatically cut down the time spent on analysis.

Personally, I've reached the point where doing SEO without these two tools feels impossible. For a newly launched blog, you might not need to go this far — but for an e-commerce site, these are features you absolutely want to use. If you're serious about growing organic search traffic, I strongly encourage you to explore these options.

The Role of the Analytics Tool "Amethyst"

Kurose
I heard that JADE Inc. offers an analytics tool called "Amethyst." Could you give us a brief overview?

Yamada-san
"Amethyst" is an SEO analytics tool provided by JADE. I consider the Inspection API, Bulk Export Data, and GA4 to be essential for serious SEO work. However, each of them comes with its own barriers to entry.

To use the Inspection API effectively, you need to retrieve data via the API, which requires development work. On top of that, the API has some quirks in its specifications, making it quite difficult to achieve stable, reliable data retrieval with a single implementation effort.

Bulk Export Data has the constraint of only being able to output data to Google Cloud's BigQuery. And to process that data once it's in BigQuery, you need to be able to write SQL, while also keeping in mind the storage and query costs involved.

GA4, as many have pointed out, feels more difficult to use than its predecessor UA (Universal Analytics), and I hear a lot of people say they haven't really gotten a handle on it or don't use it much.

Yet as I've described, not being able to use these tools effectively makes doing SEO impossible. That's exactly why "Amethyst" was built — to make all of these tools accessible to anyone. With Amethyst, you can use the Inspection API without any development work whatsoever, and measure indexation rates in a stable, consistent way. It even automatically visualizes the data it collects.

A common response when indexation rates are poor is to frantically add internal links in hopes of improving crawlability — but is that really an effective approach? With proper analysis, Amethyst makes it immediately clear whether the issue lies with crawling, or whether crawling is fine but the page quality is the problem.

Amethyst also lets you use Bulk Export Data without needing BigQuery, completely eliminating the cost concerns mentioned earlier — and with zero SQL knowledge required for data extraction. There's also a feature that lets you save extracted data directly as a dashboard, so instead of reapplying filters in Search Console every time, you can easily set up continuous tracking of the data you want to check daily.
Being able to wrap up a morning check of whether a campaign page is showing results — in just one minute — is a real time-saver.

GA4 data has also been made more intuitive to navigate, with key SEO metrics like browse rate and CVR available by default. Similarly easy to turn into dashboards, it means you can check numbers like session count, CVR, and browse rate for a specific set of category or list pages every morning in about a minute.

Kurose
E-commerce sites have rapidly changing inventory and product lineups, which means there are a lot of things you want to monitor on an ongoing basis. "Amethyst" can help streamline that process, it sounds like.

Yamada-san
Exactly. As I've been saying, e-commerce sites tend to generate a large number of URLs, which raises the SEO bar significantly.

• What is the indexation status of newly released URLs?
• Which queries are driving clicks, and how many?
• How are users who land on the site browsing around?

It's not that e-commerce requires some entirely different approach to SEO — but the sheer volume of URLs that need to be monitored, combined with the rapidly changing product lineup you mentioned, is what makes it more challenging. The key to success is being able to efficiently grasp the situation and quickly surface issues — and for that, I believe tools like the Inspection API are essential.

Companies with ample budget and development resources might be able to build these capabilities in-house, but for others, that's a pretty high hurdle. This data is extremely powerful, and the gap between sites that can leverage it and those that can't can easily become a competitive differentiator.

"Amethyst" was created specifically to give access to that data without requiring a large budget or heavy development investment. If you're serious about growing your organic search traffic, I hope you'll consider giving it a try.

Handling Competitor Analysis

Kurose
We often hear from e-commerce operators that "the competition is so strong it's overwhelming." How can competitor site analysis be put to good use?

Yamada-san
Personally, I think competitor analysis should come last. Even if you look at a competitor and see that their domain authority is strong, there's usually very little you can immediately act on. I find it more effective to start by digging into your own data, identifying the issues, and tackling them one by one.

Once you've addressed all the issues on your own site, then it might be worth looking at things like: where competitors are capturing queries that you're not, or analyzing competitor queries to expand your own query coverage.

Key Points to Master for Growing SEO on E-Commerce Sites

Kurose
Finally, if you were to summarize the key points for growing SEO on an e-commerce site, what would they be?

Yamada-san

1. Start with the proper use of your own site data
   Use Search Console and GA4 to progressively increase your analytical resolution — starting from broad categories down to finer segments — and identify where the bottlenecks are. User behavior is one of the most important indicators in SEO: if you're getting strong organic traffic but seeing poor browse rates or weak CVR, work through the causes systematically.
   
2. Intermediate-to-advanced users should leverage the Inspection API and Bulk Export Data
   If you're serious about growing organic search traffic, using these tools is non-negotiable. Use the Inspection API to get a granular, ongoing view of your indexation status. Use Bulk Export Data to get the full dataset from Search Console and uncover latent demand, strengths, and weaknesses. The ability to use these tools effectively — or not — could make a significant difference in outcomes.
   
3. Bring advanced analysis in-house with "Amethyst"
   I believe the Inspection API and Bulk Export Data are essential, but the development effort and costs involved can make it hard to commit to using them. That's why "Amethyst" was built — to make everything you need for SEO analysis accessible to anyone. It covers all your site's SEO analysis needs in one place, at minimal cost. It puts consultant-grade data in your hands, so it's also a great option for companies that don't have the budget to hire an external consultant.
   
4. Treat competitor analysis as secondary
   For e-commerce sites, there are so many internal improvements to work on — indexation rate optimization, page quality improvements — that you should focus on your own site first, without worrying about competitors. Use competitor analysis mainly to get a sense of overall trends or to discover new angles, and leave it at that.
   

Kurose
That's incredibly clear. Following these steps, I feel like meaningful improvement is very much within reach.

Summary

SEO isn't about improving search rankings for its own sake. The real goal is to drive traffic from search results and turn that into revenue. With that in mind, rather than chasing an abstract metric like average position, working through the analysis steps outlined above will bring you much closer to that goal.

Through this interview, we gained practical insights into how to use Search Console and GA4 for analysis, and which metrics to monitor and improve. In particular, the approach of tracking metrics across three stages — "before appearing in search results," "from search results to traffic," and "after traffic arrives on-site" — and translating them into actions that reflect e-commerce realities like product attributes and inventory, in order to maximize revenue from search, struck me as an especially effective and well-grounded strategy for online stores.

Contact Information

If you're interested in "Amethyst," the SEO analytics tool offered by JADE Inc., or in Yamada-san's SEO consulting services, please reach out via the link below. We're told that if you mention "I saw this article," Yamada-san will personally respond to your inquiry.

• Learn more about Amethyst