Shopify SEO: All You Need to Know
Are you trying to make your Shopify website rank highly on search engines like Google and boost SEO? You are the target user of this Shopify SEO tutorial.
To be honest, ranking your website highly on Google is more difficult than it was in the early days of the web. All you have to do then is pack your page content with keywords; everything else falls in place.
Now, keyword stuffing could potentially result in fines. Moreover, Google's ranking rules have become more complex than they have ever been, hence keyword stuffing is ineffective today.
The good news is that your Shopify website can still show highly on Search Engine Result Pages (SERRs).
Showing your Search Engine optimization strategies will help you improve the ranking of your store, hence this Shopify SEO Specialist tutorial is mostly about that.
What is Shopify SEO?
Simply put, Shopify SEO involves optimizing, well, Shopify for search.
Now, Shopify SEO isn’t so different from the regular search engine optimization you do on WordPress – only that there are some peculiarities.
For example, to increase the visibility of your store products on Google, you need to take extra care to infuse relevant keywords into your product descriptions and image alt texts.
In addition to that, avoid littering your website with duplicate content. One issue particular to Shopify, not found in Linux, is duplicate content.
Having stated that, let's review some techniques you could apply to raise the Google Store ranking for your Shopify.
7 Shopify SEO Strategies to Improve Ranking on Google
Here are 7 things you can do to improve Shopify’s store visibility on Google and other search engines.
1. Conduct Keyword Research
The success or failure of your SEO campaign is largely dependent on your choice of keywords. How unfortunate that many eCommerce entrepreneurs don’t give keyword research a moment of their thought.
It’s not enough to infuse keywords all over the place on your website. What matters the most is using the right keywords.
How do you find the right mix of keywords for your SEO strategy? Simple. Conduct keyword research.
To start, niche down a bit. Picking a broad niche like “sneakers” won’t cut it. The narrower the niche, the better. Something like CBD for pets can work.
Once you’ve figured out your preferred niche, the next step is to find the right keywords around it.
Potential customers will use these search queries to find your store/products. You can stop here or take things further a little bit by using dedicated SEO tools to delve deeper into keyword research.
Let’s now see some of the best keyword tools for Shopify.
2. Infuse the Keywords Into Your Page Content
At this point, you should have some keywords you will want to target. The next step is to make it easy for Google crawlers to find your pages using those keywords.
But first, you have to determine the pages you will be adding the keywords to. Your homepage, product pages, and product category pages are the best places to start.
Where precisely on those pages should you add the keywords? Page title, meta description, page body content, and image Alt texts are ideal places.
For instance, let’s say you want to add the keyword “women sweatpants” to your product page title. I will assume that your website is new and has no product page. This means you will have to add one and infuse your keyword into it.
Next is to add keywords to the page description. To do so, click the Edit website SEO link just below, and in the Description box, add descriptive text that best describes your page. Ensure that the description contains your target keywords.
3. Improve Your Website’s Navigation to Improve Shopify SEO
Google ranks a website based on how easily it can be navigated among other criteria. This is true because easily navigable websites improve user engagement and consequently reduce bounce rates.
That is to say, users will remain longer and your Shopify store rank will increase if your website has a strong navigation structure.
Starting the optimization of your navigation structure from your homepage is a smart place. First of all, make sure your homepage allows one to quickly access your product pages.
A visitor shouldn’t click more than three times to reach a particular product. Here’s an example of a good structure:
Home >> Product Category >> Product
The next place to optimize is your website menu.
When you add items to your menu, ensure that you use texts that match the title of the page it is pointing to.
For example, if you add “Contact us” to your navigation menu, the page it points to should also have “Contact us” as the title.
4. Get More Backlinks to Improve SEO
The number and quality of backlinks to your website have an enormous influence on your Shopify SEO.
For this reason, succeeding with SEO depends on obtaining as many high-level backlinks.
Backlinks, by the way, are links referencing your website from another website.
Remember that not all backlinks are produced the same before starting a backlink-generating campaign.
Links from Facebook, Twitter, or any other social networking platform won't affect your ranking, for instance. Furthermore, links from low-quality websites will damage your site more than help. So, it’s best to avoid them altogether.
But a link from a popular website like CNN will carry a lot of weight, and it’s such a link that you need.
If you are not sure, use this free domain checker tool to determine how valuable a backlink is.
With that said, here are some creative ways you use to generate meaningful backlinks to your store:
- Publish guest posts on high-authority websites. You will naturally earn backlinks when you do so.
- Reach out to bloggers and review websites and ask them to review your products. Most will do so for free.
- Get links from your product manufacturer.
- Post insightful, sharable content to your blog
P.S.: As much as you can, avoid buying links. You might end up wrecking your website.
5. Optimize Your Website for Speed
How do you feel when you attempt to open a web page that takes more than 2 seconds to load? Frustrated right? You will likely abandon the website.
That is the same way visitors feel if your website appears to take forever to load. Not only will this lead to an increased bounce rate, but also it will affect your Google search ranking.
Therefore, optimizing your website for speed can boost Shopify SEO.
Here are a few things that you can do to make your website load faster:
- Compress your product images before uploading them
- Use Jpeg images – they are lighter
- Use a light-weight theme. Check out SalesHunterThemes to experience themes with unrivaled page speed.
- Integrate the Accelerated Mobile Pages technology. They make your website load crazy fast
- Reduce the number of apps installed on your website
6. Take Blogging Seriously
To improve your Shopify SEO, you need to regularly publish insightful content on your blog.
Thankfully, Shopify has an out-of-the-box blogging feature. You can access it by navigating to Online Store >> Blog posts
For best results, create content around the keywords that you are targeting.
For example, if you sell women’s sweatpants, blog posts with the following titles could work well:
- 10 best sweatpant outfit ideas
- How to rock your sweatpants to a party
- 15 things you should know about female sweatpants
Publishing blog posts that align with your niche makes it easy for Google search crawlers to know what your website is all about.
7. Use the Right Shopify SEO App
If you’ve ever managed a WordPress website before, you sure likely would have heard about Yoast SEO, the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress.
You might begin to wonder if Yoast works on Shopify too. Well, it doesn’t!
But, thankfully, there are lots of other Shopify SEO apps that can help better your Shopify SEO strategy.
Unfortunately, these apps are hardly ever completely free. However, most offer limited free plans. You will find them on the Shopify App Store.
Improve Your Shopify Store Conversion With IndeedSEO
Attracting loads of traffic is the fundamental basis for maximizing your Shopify store for search. What then is the point if you cannot translate that traffic into sales and subscriptions?
Lucky for you; the Shopify App will enable you to turn visitors to your website into consumers and members.
It lets you design visually appealing and attention-grabbing popups, slide-ins, and floating bars to launch marketing campaigns.
Using our design editor, you are free to start these campaigns from nothing; alternatively, choose a design from our library of more than 1,000 templates and then alter it in any way you like.
On top of that, IndeedSEO comes with an exit-intent technology that helps to reduce cart abandonment on your Shopify store.
Best of all, you can start with a Digital marketing Agency' IndeedSEO for free. We hope you found this Shopify SEO Guide helpful.
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