I’m here to tell you why Shopify is one of the best e-commerce platforms out there! Just look at these facts – there’s no denying it. Over two million Shopify stores across the world, with a whopping 201.53% growth from recent years. Impressive, right? Not to mention well-known brands like Tesla and Pepsi trusting Shopify with their businesses.
However, if you decide to launch your store with an e-commerce platform, it’s not as simple as setting up and hitting the ‘publish’ button. It’s equally important to understand how to optimize your Shopify website for SEO in order to succeed. That’s why we created this guide – to help you gain more insight on the features of Shopify, explore helpful tools so you can get more out of your store, and understand how SEO works on the platform. With this guide, you can take full advantage of all that Shopify has to offer, even if you’re making the switch from Magento to Shopify. Learn more about Magento to Shopify migration with our expert guide – https://mtnhaus.co/magento-to-shopify-migration/.
Why Should You Invest In SEO For Shopify?
As an e-commerce business, SEO is becoming an absolute must for us. We must make a real effort to invest in SEO techniques and strategies if we are to drive traffic to our website and give visitors more opportunities to potentially become loyal customers. I know it is a lot of hard work and can take months to show results, but the benefits are truly worth it if you can persevere and stay dedicated.
Not to mention, there are several advantages to SEO optimization for Shopify. For example, it can improve your rankings in search engines, improve website speed, and of course, drive more traffic. Ultimately, mastering SEO is vital and has the potential to give your business a real edge over the competition.
SEO
- can assist you with positioning higher in list items, and that implies more individuals see your items
- draws in designated rush hour gridlock, meaning guests are bound to purchase from your site
- assists you construct trust and validity with likely clients by empowering them to effectively track down your site
- permits you to target catchphrases to get you before your optimal crowd
If you are looking for a platform to drive traffic to your website, then Shopify has a great deal to offer. With Shopify, you have the ability to customize your content and structure based on the keywords and phrases that you choose to include. On the other hand, there are some drawbacks to the platform: the design and coding features are limited and the platform does not provide you with the same level of control as with other options. However, Shopify does have a distinct advantage when it comes to its SEO best practices, which are constantly updated in accordance with Google’s recommendations. Taking all these points into consideration, Shopify would make an excellent choice for getting your website the most visibility and generating more leads.
What Features Does Shopify Have To Support SEO?
Shopify offers a variety of built-in SEO features in addition to being search engine friendly, such as:
- XML sitemaps and automatic sitemaps
- ability to modify the URL structure of your store
- URL optimization
- meta tags support
- Canonical tags
- SSL certification
- structured data
- mobile friendly
- auto-produced robot txt record (a text document that assists with training web insects)
- 301 redirects
With the help of Shopify’s great range of features, you can drastically improve visibility, delight prospective leads and ultimately, draw in customers. Even more, in the Shopify App Store, you’ll find various helpful applications that are perfect for website optimization – such as keyword analysis, constructing links and tracking important analytics. Need more? Then check out the Shopify blog, which offers a whole host of informative and instructional articles regarding increasing search engine rankings, among other topics.
How To Improve SEO For Your Shopify Pages
If you run a store, you probably constantly look for ways to increase traffic and improve your rankings. The following are some Shopify SEO optimization tips to get prospects to visit your website:
- As you build your Shopify store, there are a few key steps to keep in mind for optimal Search Engine Optimization (SEO). To begin, selection of the right keywords can have a positive impact on your visibility and ranking potential within search results. Therefore, the relevance of these keywords should be carefully considered and featured throughout your e-commerce content.
- In addition to carefully curated keywords, the quality of content is essential and should be a priority for any Shopify store. Every page should be filled with well-written and informative texts, visuals, and videos to ensure that consumers are educated and engaged. This approach should also be taken when developing your content marketing strategy.
- Once your Shopify store is designed, leveraging review apps such as Shopify Reviews and Yotpo can help to add authority to your store. Therefore, it is important to ensure that you choose the best Shopify theme for SEO that has all the key features such as compatibility, speed, mobile-friendliness, clear navigation, and the ability to customize.
- Moreover, after you are ready to launch your store, registering your website with the Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools is oftentimes necessary in order to get your website indexed and visible in search results.
Next, Shopify has these SEO tips:
- Change your robots.txt.liquid file. You can use the Shopify template to enable or disable crawling of pages, block specific crawlers, add additional site crawlers, and add crawl delay rules for specific crawlers.
- Add your search terms: Ubersuggest is a free keyword tool with a long list of features, but you can use any number of them. Add the keywords you’ve chosen to your titles, descriptions, content, and ALT text after you’ve narrowed them down. Additionally, you can include them in your URLs.
- Streamline your site structure for the web search tools. Shopify has a logical hierarchy of content category categories built in as part of its SEO best practices. URLs have standard characters and a structure that is simple to understand; pages do not have iframes.
- Send your sitemap in: A sitemap.xml file is automatically generated by Shopify and is located in the root directory of your Shopify domain store.
- Make your website easier to find and provide Google with more context for your images by giving them descriptive file names.
- Place internal links to relevant pages strategically.
- Check the site menu for clarity, use the search function, label categories and menus, and make important links stand out to make your store’s navigation easier. All of this makes sure that visitors can easily find what they want.
There are additional ways to improve your Shopify store’s SEO, but these are harder to break down. Continue reading to learn more about optimizing your Shopify SEO.
Beware of duplicate content and pages
The duplicate page issue is commonplace on e-commerce sites, and something that should be addressed. Shopify’s ‘collections’ feature provides great organization by creating separate pages for products, but you must take care with extra URLs and potential duplication issues from other areas of your website. For this, solutions like canonical tags and redirects are available, but most importantly, you need to watch out for the possibility of Google penalties; though their stance is that this won’t happen in most circumstances.
To find duplicate content, use one of the following tools, you can use:
- Semrush
- Siteliner
- Screaming Frog
If you decide to take advantage of the SEO Spider feature that is featured on the Screaming Frog website, you will be able to identify precise duplicates along with those that are similar. To make sure that content is not repeated, you can utilize canonical tags, create redirects and adjust parameters on the Google search console.
Choose Keywords That Make Sense For Your Audience
When trying to determine the most effective keywords for your Shopify store, it’s important to put yourself in the shoes of your target customers and consider what terms they would typically use when searching for your products. Brainstorm some potential keywords and phrases that could be relevant for your store, and make a list of these. Research what other businesses in your product niche use for key terms, as this may also help you determine the most helpful words for your store. Once you have a solid list of potential keywords, you can start evaluating which ones will be the most impactful for your business. You also need to consider:
- each keyword’s level of competition.
- how relevant it is to your products and the people you want to sell to.
- keywords with the highest likelihood of conversion.
There are several tools you can use for your keyword research, including:
- Ubersuggest
- Ahrefs
- Google Search Console
You can then integrate keywords throughout your site.
Optimize Your Metadata
When it comes to SEO, Shopify owners and marketers will agree that metadata is one of the most significant elements to consider. Effectively optimizing the metadata of your store will not only result in increased visibility and higher search engine rankings, but it will also help to direct more organic traffic to your website. Here are a few tips to keep in mind when optimizing your metadata to increase your SEO performance:
- Choose your keywords wisely. Refrain from simply stuffing as many words as possible into your titles and descriptions. Instead, carefully pick and include relevant keywords that customers are likely to use when searching for something related to your store and place your most important keywords first.
- Keep your titles and descriptions brief and concise. Long, confusing sentences won’t do you any favors and likely won’t help boost your search engine rankings. Make sure you’re clear and to the point – that’s usually the most effective way to communicate to potential customers.
- Keep your titles and descriptions within the 50-160 character limit.
- Provide actionable meta descriptions. If you want the visitor to take a specific action, tell them in the description. Don’t leave them guessing!
- To make the changes, access the ‘Products and online stores’ menu on Shopify admin, go to ‘all products’, select the item you want to optimize, and fill out the description.
Ensure that your pages load rapidly
Nowadays, in our hyper-paced environment, people expect to acquire what they need instantly. So, it’s important for your website to load quickly and operate with proficiency in order to placate these users.
Research from Portent has demonstrated that site speed is escalating in some respect. Remarkably, 86 percent of pages investigated by Portent loaded in five or fewer seconds, compared to 81 percent in 2019.
Additionally, there is a commotion between exceedingly prompt loading times and moderately quick sites when it comes to ecommerce conversions. Astonishingly, sites that take only one second to load are enjoying 2.5 times higher conversion rates than those taking five seconds.
Fortunately, there are a few methods that can be given a go to ensure that your pages swiftly load – regardless of the connection speed. These include:
- Enhancing your pictures. A website’s loading times are slowed by these, which are frequently its largest files.
- Ensuring that the code on your website is organized and clean. Streamlining your code can make a big difference, as messy code can slow down loading times.
- Minimize the site’s HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code. In order to make the files smaller and simpler, this entails removing any unnecessary code and characters.
- Utilize a solid web with high velocities.
- Deactivate applications and theme options that could slow down your website.
Don’t Neglect User Experience
If you manage an online store, you can’t overlook the importance of your customers’ experience (UX). A deficient user experience can cause shoppers to take their business elsewhere and damage your business.
Much of a fulfilling user experience involves seamless navigation. Not only can straightforward navigation enhance the UX, but it can also assist with SEO for Shopify sites and guarantee visitors on all devices can view your pages expediently.
In addition to the limited selection of products and simple selection, you can:
- ensure that your menus are easy to read and understand.
- use drop-down menus to assist clients with reducing their choices.
- use breadcrumbs (to display the user’s journey from the home page to the product page on the website).
- include a search bar to make it easy for customers to find what they want.
Exploit the Shopify Blog Capability
If you own a Shopify store, it’s important to take advantage of its blog feature to draw more traffic and optimize SERP rankings. To get the most out of your Shopify blog, here are some helpful tips you can use:
- Use keyword-rich titles, descriptions, and URLs.
Working with your blog post titles, descriptions and URLs should be packed with keywords that relate to the topic of your post and will also be interesting to potential readers.
- Incorporate visuals.
You should also consider adding images and videos to your blog post. This helps make the content more attention-grabbing, while also improving your SEO as these can appear in image and video search results.
- Spread the word.
Boost the reach of your blog posts by sharing them across your social media networks. This includes Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and any other platforms you have.
- Incorporate interesting contents.
You can create content that is informative, like news about products or services. You can also get inspired by sites, such as beardbrand.com, that offer style tips and beard care guides.
Consider SEO Tools For Shopify
When it comes to driving more customers to your Shopify store, it’s no secret that SEO can be a significant factor in reaching your objectives. With so many options on offer, how do you know which ones will be the most beneficial for your business?
It’s critical to ask yourself some questions prior to making your choice. Firstly, what are the goals you want to reach? You must firstly set out the outcomes you want to achieve, like increasing traffic from more specific areas or boosting your rankings according to certain key phrases. Once you are aware of your targets, you can better narrow down the proper tools to fit these requirements.
Also, it’s important to consider your budget as some SEO tools are completely free while others may cost more. Some well-known tools to think over may include Tiny IMG SEO Image Optimizer, SEO HTML Sitemap, or SEO JSON‑LD Boost by Verge. Before making your decision, make certain to look at their features plus the compatibility with your web page and its current capabilities so you can find the proper solution for you.