Overview
Whether you are launching or growing your online business, you need to consider critical strategies to help your customers find your store and buy your product. This article will cover Shopify SEO fundamentals that will enable to build your Shopify eCommerce store to attract and drive the qualified leads to your site, organically.
Statistics reveal that about 81 percent of shoppers conduct online research before making purchases, and over 30 percent clicks the top organic search results.
Choosing a platform that helps you reach more customers is also a key winning strategy. With a well-crafted SEO strategy, you can improve your store search engine ranking, get more traffic, and increase sales.
Shopify is one of the largest e-commerce platforms, with a 20 percent market share. It also provides all the tools you need to build your online store from the domain name to content management to SEO.
In this article, we will discuss the Shopify SEO practices and how you can use it to drive more traffic and sales.
Getting Started with Shopify SEO
Search Engine Optimization is about optimizing your websites to increase your search engine ranking on search engines and help users find your online content easily.
For an E-commerce website, SEO involves improving your site to ensure your product pages appear among the top organic search results. When you generate more traffic, you can convert the traffic to sales.
“Shopify has SEO friendly features. Shopify automatically generates canonical tags and adds it to your pages to ensure duplicate content does not appear in search results.”
Michael Jenkins
Furthermore, Shopify themes auto-generate title tags with your store name, robot.txt files, and sitemap.xml to help search engines index your site.
With the social media sharing tools and links, you can also market your products and e-commerce site on social media. Although these on-page SEO activities, there is so much you can do to boost your store. Let’s take a look at some of several strategies.
1. Research and Use Relevant Keywords
Keywords are high-value search terms that customers may be searching for when looking for a product related to your store. You can use keyword research tools like Google Trends, Google Keyword Planner, SEOBook Keyword Suggestion Tool to choose the right keyword.
You can go ahead to add these keywords to your page title, meta description, image alt tags, and product page content.
To add keywords to your online store.
Log into your Shopify admin account, click on Online Store and then click on Preferences. Enter a title and meta description containing relevant keywords for your store and tap Save
You can also edit your product page according to SEO best practices. Click on Products, Select a product, and Edit website SEO.
Search engines can read your image description, so it is best to edit your image alt tags to include target keywords.
2. Optimize Your Online Store or Website Structure
Website structure and content organization impact your search engine ranking and SEO success. Your site should be simple and easy to navigate.
Navigations should be descriptive and arranged in a manner that shows the relationship between menus and sub-menus.
Use appropriate filenames to describe your images. Rename your image files to include keywords before uploading them to your store.Â
Search engines find it difficult to read filenames with numbers, dates, or combinations of letters and numbers. Therefore, using suitable filenames will help search engines find your image.
Use relevant descriptive text to point to internal links. For example, “Get a 20 percent discount when you purchase a black shoe”.
Make your website URLs keyword-friendly instead of URLs with a combination of numbers and text.
You need to build or obtain quality external links (backlinks) from other websites directing back to your site.
Backlinks boost your website’s reputation and help search engines know your site can be trusted. To build reliable backlinks, you may need to
- Build relationships with influencers, popular blogs so that you can request a link back.
- Use social media to create traffic and visits to your site
- List your online store on other popular
- websites.
- Create and maintain quality content to attract site visits and link shares.
For example, if you are selling products made by a popular brand and you are a recognized supplier, you can contact the brand to link to your site.
3. Improve User Experience
Your e-commerce store must be user-friendly. Technical factors like website speed, design, and ease of use, mobile responsiveness are essential to increase search engine ranking.
“Using mobile responsive themes will make your website look excellent on a wide range of devices, including desktop, tablets, and smartphones. The Call to Action button must be clear.”
Michael Jenkins
Recent updates on algorithm use engagement metrics such as Dwell time to determine page rankings. Visitors are less likely to spend time on a slow site.
4. Shopify Apps and Plugins
You can utilize some Shopify plugins and tools to implement SEO and increase your e-commerce store rankings. SEO Image Optimizer checks your images every week and optimizes them.
The premium plan also offers full optimization. Yoast SEO, Plug-In SEO, and Smart SEO are great tools to help you automate your SEO. OptinMonster enables you to increase traffic to your e-commerce store. Visit the Shopify app store to access other great plugins and apps.
Put Your Shopify SEO to Work
Shopify has incredible built-in features to help you achieve your SEO objectives. Go ahead and implement the SEO strategies we have discussed to drive traffic to your Shopify store and increase sales. If you need help to setup your website on Shopify or migrate your website to Shopify then contact to our SEO agency in Sydney.Â
