Shopify SEO

Online retail is an important part of many businesses’ operations. The world has changed a great deal and the convenience of internet shopping means many people do most of their shopping online today.

There are plenty of ways to take advantage of the modern consumer’s love of all things online, and Shopify is one of the most widely used options. Shopify offers the best of both worlds for online retailers. It’s easy to use (meaning you don’t have to have all-conquering IT skills to build your store), it converts well with customers and it can be SEO friendly. However, in order to achieve these aims, it’s got to be done properly.

Shopify gives you all the tools to keep your online store clean and easy to use for customers, something the bots love. But if you don’t take advantage of them, your store can easily get messy and complicated. When building your store, remember that just because it’s a store and not a blog, doesn’t mean SEO principles don’t apply.

Getting organic trafficOrganic search traffic (sometimes called natural or unpaid search) is the traffic that's driven to a website because of unpaid placement on a search engine results page. to your SEO store is just as important as it would be for a blog, so make sure you’re working on these four key points with your Shopify SEO.

Use Collections to Create an Intuitive Layout

SEO simply can’t be effective unless your website has a good user experience (UX). It’s all well and good trying to please the search engines’ algorithms, but if your users can’t navigate your site how they want to, they’re not going to spend much time on your site and they’re not going to buy.

Of course, your goal is to sell products, so it’s clear how a poor UX affects this, but it’s also going to have a negative effect on your SEO. The search engines have a pretty simple aim: they want to link people to content that’s going to engage them and help them achieve their aims. If your site offers a poor UX e.g. people can’t find what they’re looking for or it’s too slow with broken linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages., they won’t spend long on your page before they bounce to another website.

Google sees that people aren’t spending much time on your website and will conclude your site isn’t helping their users achieve their aims. If you have a poor user experience and you’re not useful to the search engines, why would they rank you?

Shopify offers lots of tools to organize your shop and makes it easy to navigate for your customers. Make the most of mobile optimized themes and organize your products using collections to help people find what they’re looking for.

Optimize Your Descriptions

SEO is always about a balance between pleasing your human audience and servicing the requirements of the search engine bots. While it’s the human audience that should come first (they’re the ones paying you), you can’t neglect the bots because they’re the ones bringing customers to your store.

Once you’ve got your collections set up, you have yet another opportunity to please both bots and humans by writing a variety of winning collection description. These shouldn’t just be a quick copy of a manufacturer’s blurb, use it as another opportunity to engage your customer.

You’ve worked hard to get your customer to this point, so use this opportunity to craft a message that’s going to get them to the next phase. Develop your keyword researchKeyword research helps websites unearth the best keywords to drive traffic and visibility. This research is supported by a number of powerful web-based tools, the best of which we’ve listed here. as part of your Shopify SEO strategy and focus in on the keywords that are going to get you organic traffic. If you need a little help in this area, an SEO agency can not only boost your traffic through Shopify SEO, but also increase your conversionA conversion is a desirable result on a website that leads to an action such as completing an order, filling out a form, or simply clicking on a link. rates.

Start a Blog

We’ve mentioned making the most of your opportunities a lot so far. The difficult thing when you have a Shopify shop can be your opportunities to go after keywords are limited, because there’s only so much you can do with your home page, about page, collections description, and product descriptions.

Never fear! Shopify allows you to run your own blog and greatly expand your opportunities to target keywords.

While your product descriptions need to be highly focussed on converting, your blog can talk about anything you like. It allows you to focus on different keywords in a longer form of content and expand your possibilities of ranking well in the search engines.

There are great content writing services out there which can help you create high-quality targeted content that’s going to help you bring in more customers. The stats say it’s a smart thing to do too! Websites with blogs get 55% more traffic and a massive 97% more links!

Build Links to Your Shopify Store

The fact that websites with blogs get 97% more links is highly significant because links are very important ranking factors.

Backlinks are one the main ways Google establishes whether your site is a trustworthy source. As you can imagine, the search engines don’t want to feature websites they can’t be sure are trustworthy sources, so your link profile is very important.

In order to give your store the best chance of ranking, you want to build links from other authoritative websites with a similar focus to yours. For example, if you sell sports products, your link building efforts are best focussed on sports-related websites. The more high-quality links you have from websites in your niche, the more authority you’re going to have in Google’s eyes. Therefore, the more likely you are to rank for your keywords.

The reason blogs can help get these links is because people are always looking for good content to include in their own blogs. If you write an amazing article on “The Most Important Things to Look for in Your Running Shoes,” and it has some mind-blowing info in there, then other people will want to point their readers to it.

Your Shopify SEO is going to be much improved if you can get the right backlink profile, and your blog is a great tool to help you achieve this.