Using Rankira

Publishing to Shopify

How articles reach your blog — timing, drafts, authors, images, and links.

Once a keyword’s day arrives, Rankira writes the article and sends it to your Shopify blog. You control the timing, whether it goes live or waits for you, and which blog and author it appears under.

What actually gets published

A finished article isn’t just body text. Rankira fills in everything a blog post needs to rank:

Title and body
A full-length, structured article with headings, written in your chosen tone around the keyword.
Featured image
Generated in the image style you picked, and copied into your Shopify files so it loads from your own store.
Meta description
The grey summary line under your link in Google results. Saved to Shopify’s Excerpt field.
URL handle
A clean, readable web address based on the article title.
Tags
Topic tags, so related posts group together on your blog.
Internal links
Links to your products, collections, and pages, chosen from the pool you set in Link Management.
Author
The author name you chose in Settings › Website & Blog.

When articles go out

In Settings › Publishing you pick one publishing window from four. Rankira writes the article near the start of that window and publishes it within the same window — one article per active day, never a burst of five at once.

The four windows are fixed six-hour slots on a global clock (UTC), and the dropdown shows each one already converted to your store’s time zone. So you read the times as your customers experience them — but unless your store sits on UTC, they won’t land on tidy boundaries. A store in New York sees options like 8:00 PM - 2:00 AM; one in Berlin sees 2:00 AM - 8:00 AM. Both are the same underlying slot.

Which window to pick

Ignore the fact that the numbers look odd and just read them: pick the option whose times fall just before your customers are usually online, so fresh posts are waiting when they arrive. If you review drafts yourself, choose the one that finishes before you start your day.

Daylight saving shifts the labels

The windows are anchored to UTC, so when your region moves its clocks the displayed times shift by an hour. Nothing about your schedule changes — only how it reads. The settings screen always shows your store’s time zone and current local time next to the dropdown so you can sanity-check it.

Live immediately, or draft first

The publishing strategy setting decides what happens when an article is finished:

Publish directly
The article goes live on your blog as soon as it’s written. Fully hands-off — best once you trust the output.
Save as draft
The article is saved to your Shopify blog but hidden from customers. Nothing appears publicly until you publish it yourself.

Start with Save as draft. Read the first week’s articles, adjust your settings where something reads wrong, and switch to direct publishing when a few in a row need no changes.

Publishing a draft yourself

  1. Open Content History

    Drafts show the Saved status. Tick the checkbox to select several at once if you’re catching up.

  2. Read it

    Click the title to open the editor. Fix anything that needs fixing — or use the AI Rewriter on a single section. See Articles & editor.

  3. Publish

    Choose Publish. It goes live straight away, with its images, links, and meta description intact.

Blog and author

Set both in Settings › Website & Blog:

Main blog
Which Shopify blog receives articles. Most stores have one called “News”. You can create a new blog from this screen if you’d rather keep SEO content separate.
Primary author
The name readers see as the byline. Use a real person’s name if you have one — it reads more trustworthy than a brand name.

Changing your blog later

Switching the main blog only affects articles published from that point on. Anything already live stays where it is, at the URL it already has.

Leave published URLs alone

Once an article is live, treat its web address as permanent. This is the single easiest way to undo your own SEO work.

Every link pointing at an article — a backlink you earned through the exchange, a mention someone posted, a customer’s bookmark — points at the exact URL that existed when the link was made. Change the URL and those links land on a page that’s no longer there. The ranking strength they were passing to you goes with them, and rebuilding it takes months.

The URL comes from the article’s handle, which you can edit in the Rankira editor or in Shopify. Rankira doesn’t create redirects when it changes, so:

  • Fix the handle before you publish, not after. While an article is still a draft, rename it freely.
  • A typo in a live URL is usually not worth fixing. Readers don’t notice; search engines don’t care. Losing your inbound links costs more than the typo does.
  • If you genuinely must change it — the article is about something else now, say — set up a redirect from the old address to the new one so existing links keep working. In your Shopify admin: Content › Menus, then View URL redirects → Create URL redirect. Put the old path in Redirect from and the new one in Redirect to. Redirects take effect immediately.

Can't find URL redirects?

It’s tucked behind Content › Menus rather than sitting in the Content menu directly — look for the View URL redirects button once you’re on the Menus page. If Shopify has moved it since, type “URL redirects” into the search bar at the top of your admin.

Editing the title, body, images, or meta description is completely safe and doesn’t touch the URL. It’s only the handle that matters here.

Internal links are links from an article to your own products, collections, and pages. They turn readers into shoppers and help search engines understand how your store is organised.

Go to Link Management › Internal Links to build the pool Rankira picks from:

  1. Add your linkable pages

    The left panel lists your pages, products, collections, and existing articles. Move the ones you want linkable across — Add all is a fine starting point.

  2. Mark your priorities

    Flag your best sellers and most profitable collections as priority. Rankira reaches for these first when a link fits naturally.

  3. Set how many links per article

    In Settings › Article Customization, choose between none and five links per article. Two or three reads naturally; five in a short article starts to feel like a sales page.

The pool keeps itself current

Automatic Internal Links Selection (Settings › Publishing, on by default) adds newly created store content to the pool once a day, so products and collections you launch after setup become linkable on their own. You pick which types are included. With it switched off, add them yourself — otherwise your newest articles keep pointing at last season’s catalogue.

After an article is live

  • It appears on your Shopify blog immediately and can be shared like any other post.
  • Google usually takes a few days to a few weeks to index it. There is no way to hurry this.
  • Once it starts collecting impressions, it shows up in the Home dashboard, provided Google Search Console is connected.
  • You can keep editing it — in Rankira or in Shopify — and the two stay in step.