25 Jan
This is Shopify SEO Guide to bring more traffic and sales to your site.
Your store leaks sales if it does not appear at the top of Google when someone searches your products, the brand names you sell, or problems that your products solve. Google in a retail study found 75% of people turn to search engines to learn about products. Search engines are used more in online purchases than any other source.
Examine your Shopify’s SEO by following the guide, when you notice a drop in organic visitors, or when you are unsure of what to do next to get more buyers from search at no cost.
Additionally, SEO requires no technical knowledge it just takes some time, commitment, and consistent action or a sufficient budget to hire some expert.
Does Shopify Have Good SEO?
Shopify have strong SEO functionality. It comes with many SEO friendly features you need for an ecommerce to rank on top. Moreover, SEO relies on keywords. And is easy to use.
In this Shopify SEO guide, we’re going to walk you through 8 key steps to master SEO for your Shopify store and rank on top.
- Optimize Your Shopify Site Structure
- Improve the User Experience
- Research the Right Target Keywords
- Optimize Your Shopify Products Pages
- Build Links to Your Store
- Rank Higher With Content Marketing
- Use the Best Shopify SEO Apps and Tools
Step 1: Optimize Your Shopify Site Structure
The most important thing to SEO is the way your content is organized on the page. Plus, optimize your site structure to make it easier for search engines to find all of your content.
Simple and easy to use structure helps customers to find the product with no trouble. Therefore this tends the customer to spend more time and go through more pages on your website. This helps your search engine rankings.
How can you make your site easier to navigate?
Simplify your website. Don’t create many categories and subcategories. Keep its structure easy to navigate.
Organizing your content is easy with Shopify, using one of these structures:
- Homepage » Category Pages » Product Pages
- Homepage » Category Pages » Sub-Category Page » Product Pages
In addition to product and category pages you will need to include an About page and Contact page on your site. These pages let you build trust with customers and search engines so don’t skip these pages.
Also, include a Search box in your page too. This will not help in SEO directly but will help customers to find what they are looking for. Yet, this is an important part of ecommerce optimization so you can make more money from the traffic.
Step 2: Improve the User Experience
Here are few ways you can improve the user experience on your site, which will also help you to rank higher in search results.
Increase your site speed
When your website is easy to navigate, visitors spend more time on it .To make your Shopify store faster, you can:
- use a fast, mobile-friendly theme
- use smaller, optimized images
- remove any apps you’re not using
- avoid using sliders
Use a Responsive Design
Responsive design means, the website respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation.
Responsive themes can keep visitors on your website for long time. When the site is easy to navigate and read this improves your ranking. This results in repeat visitor and increase conversions.
It’s also important to make sure your store works on mobile, since shoppers are buying using their smartphones.
Step 3: Research the right targeted keywords
Using fancy tools is not the only thing. Make a list of main topics that you think your customers care about or is related to your product.
Even if you’re just looking at keyword data, there are dozens of keyword research tools available like SEMrush, AHrefs and many more.
You can also find inspiration for these topics from places like:
- your own buyer personas
- searching forums and subreddits related to your products
- social media hashtags related to your products
- looking at the titles, meta descriptions, and image alt-text used on competitors’ sites
Step 4. Optimize Your Shopify Products Pages
By this time you will be having a list of keywords and logical site structure. Now the next step is to optimize your store page using the keywords.
Start with top pages like homepage, main product collection and top selling products basically the pages that are the most profitable and have the best conversions.
Even you’re opening a brand new store, you should still optimize your homepage. There are some ways to choose which other pages to optimize:
- Pages for the products that generated the most buzz building up to the launch of your store
- Pages for the products related to the most searched keywords you found (> 10K searches/month)
How to Optimize Title Tags for Categories
Now decide how you want to name the pages across the entire site. You should use your keywords in a consistent way, like in this example formula:
Keyword 1 – Shop for Keyword 2 – Store Name
Unicorn T-shirts – Shop for Unicorn T-shirts Online – The Store
How to Optimize Title and Meta Description for Products
Afterward, you have to write titles and descriptions for products and categories. You can use the marketing copy of the supplier website but it would be great for SEO if you write original content.
The alt text for images can also be optimized for SEO, but even this needs to fit naturally.
You have to reevaluate the words that doesn’t fit into your copy naturally.
Step 5. Build Links to Your Store
It’s an off-page optimization strategy that relies on establishing your credibility and trustworthiness. Besides this backlinks are used by search engines to determine how extensive community values your site.
Here are few tips for: How can you get links to your store?
Supplier/Manufacturer Links
If you are selling a products made or supplied by established company, they may have a policy that authorized retailers can get a link.
Email them to ask if they will link to your store.
Industry/Influencer Voices
Reach out to industry leaders and influencers for interviews to generate both links and content.
Mentions
You may already be mentioned in several places without being linked. You can use mention.com to find these mentions. Then, send an email asking them to link to your site with the mention.
Broken Links
This requires a little bit of detective work to search out for broken links for products and services similar to those you offer. Once you find one, reach out to the owner of the site displaying the broken link to have them link to your site instead. Since broken links can hurt SEO this is a mutually beneficial solution for both parties; they get to repair a broken link and you get a backlink.
Step 6. Rank Higher With Content Marketing
An ecommerce website owner may not like to spend much time on content writing and the product description.
Deciding what to write about can be daunting, but it doesn’t need to be. Make a list of all the things your customers ask you or anything you think customers may want answers to.
Whereas, your content is a chance to let customer get to know your brand in way. It’s also one of the easiest ways to rank for more keywords and get more backlink.
Step 7. Use the Best Shopify SEO Apps and Tools
In this section, we’re going to cover 5 tools and Shopify apps that you can use to boost your site’s rankings.
- Multilingual
- Constantly updated as search engines change
- Automatically checks your shop and alerts you of problems via email
This Shopify app helps to target the SEO issue and it saves your time and money. It provides automatic, regular checking of page titles and headings, Meta descriptions, speed, content, article structure, and more, all to make sure that your site is as optimized as it can be.
- Cut down on time spent optimizing your site
- Eliminates the need to manually enter meta tags or alt tags
- Provides structured data to Google and other search engines to enhance search results
This apps get your store information to search engine JSON-LD. Smart SEO lets you generate relevant meta tags for product, collection, blog, and article pages in your Shopify store. As well as alt tags for product images, without having to make each edit manually.
- Increase traffic from Google image search
- Quickly and easily optimize images
- No coding knowledge necessary
Images are generally what sell your products, hence it’s important to have plenty of them on your site. Of course, quality images can also be resource hogs, so you’ll definitely want to use an image optimizer like this one to keep your site speed up.
- Check all pages and posts for SEO strength and get recommendations for improvement
- Edit multiple pages with a single click
- Always updated for Google’s algorithm
This apps makes it really easy to optimize your site using the keywords that you choose.
- See competitors’ top keywords
- Find out which keywords your competitors rank for
- See which pages on competitors’ sites are getting the most organic search traffic
This can help you find overlooked and underused keywords that you can use to increase traffic and conversions.
OptinMonster helps you to optimize your Shopify store to make more money from the traffic you already have, without harming your SEO.
- Salt Strong increased conversions 185% while increasing SEO traffic
- Skates.co.uk added £2000 a day with OptinMonster campaigns
- White River increased sales 35% since installing OptinMonster
OptinMonster also integrates with every major email marketing service.
Conclusion:
A little upfront effort will ensure that your target audience finds your store first. Therefore, the higher you rank in search engine results, the more traffic your E-Commerce store is going to have. This naturally leads to increased sales.
Shopify has all the core features you need for ecommerce SEO, and they’re easy to use. Anything Shopify doesn’t provide themselves can be found in the app store.
Hopefully this Shopify SEO Guide will help you for your Shopify Store.