Shopify SEO is something you should ponder if you earnestly want to improve your ranking on Google search results, drive traffic to your store and make sales.
With Shopify SEO, you create attention-grabbing and appealing marketing campaigns in the form of slide-ins, content, floating bars and popups using different metrics and tools to convert traffic to sales.
With the increasing number of entrepreneurs in the Shopify space, competition becomes higher and tougher, leaving you at the mercy of “the survival of the fittest.”
But that shouldn’t scare you. Do you know why?
This article teaches you all the best approaches you’d need to successfully optimize your Shopify store and rank in no time.
To do Shopify SEO like a pro:
- Improve Your Store With Backlinks
- Optimize Your Site Navigation
- Speed Up User Experience
- Use the Right Target Keywords in Your Content
- Enhance Your Products Pages
- Use the Right Shopify SEO Apps
- Be Creative in Your Content Marketing
Ready? Let’s begin.
1. Improve Your Store With Backlinks
To do Shopify SEO like a pro, improve your store with backlinks—that is, links directing visitors to your website from another website.
Note that not all backlinks have the same impact on your ranking. Particularly, links from social media platforms have a low impact on our ranking.
Don’t buy links—this is a death trap. It has the potential to wreck your store.
Use free domain checker tools like Moz to ascertain the impact of a backlink before using it on your store.
Reach out to influential bloggers and ask them to review your products. Of course, this comes with a fee—unless you both have an existing cordial relationship.
Publish guest posts on reputable websites. If possible, try posting on a mega-site like CNN, as such posts tend to have great impact. That way, you automatically get backlinks from them.
Try getting backlinks also through your product manufacturer. For the most part, those established brands already have a good number of followers.
That’s what you can bet on.
2. Optimize Your Site Navigation
To do Shopify SEO like a maven, optimize your site navigation to increase your website’s user engagement and get a lower bounce rate.
Google checks your website’s navigation to see how easy it is—among other metrics. As you can imagine, an easily navigable website enhances its overall user-friendliness and the average duration a visitor stays on your website.
Pay attention to your site’s home page. Make sure visitors don’t have to click more than three times to access a product. For instance, Home>> Product Category>>Product. Anything beyond this is a mess.
Add links to internal pages in your store and use a descriptive anchor text—that is the link’s title that fits the page they are aiming at.
Include the “About” and “Contact” pages on your site. This shows how reliable your store is to shoppers and search engines.
Add the “Search” box on your store’s page to help shoppers easily find what they are looking for. Though this may not impact your SEO directly, it impacts your site’s overall performance.
3. Speed Up User Experience
To do Shopify SEO like a pundit and rank higher in search results, speed up your site and improve user experience.
Use responsive themes to make your store relevant on any device—phones, tablets, laptops and desktops—especially on phones, since that’s where most shoppers buy products from these days. Use tools like Browsershots to see how your store looks on different devices.
A responsive theme also influences how long a visitor stays in your store. Remember, Google considers the time-on-page as an indicator of your site’s value.
Use easy-to-read font style, size and color to improve visitors’ usability. This in turn improves your ranking and conversions.
Speed up your site. A lagging website increases your chances of losing first-time visitors to your store. Use smaller optimized images and fast themes, avoid using sliders, and uninstall any app you are not using on your store.
Pay attention to your hosting service—it plays a major role in your store’s speed. Don’t use shared servers for hosting; they have many other websites sharing from the same server.
Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix to test your website speed.
4. Use the Right Target Keywords in Your Content
To do Shopify SEO like a pro, use the right target keywords in your content to help shoppers find your store on search engines.
Use tools like Google Keyword Planner to help you zero in on the right keyword to use. Also, Google Trends is a powerful tool that helps you gather information on what’s trending within your niche.
Use specific tools like Monster Insights to display the top 50 Google search terms. Optimize your store with the top five terms that rank high on your search results. Whatever you do, pay attention to search terms.
Write down target keywords from your research—you’d use them later while writing your content.
Include your target keywords in your content marketing. Tailor your writing (along with those keywords) to how your product can solve your customers’ needs.
Remember, your brand exists to solve needs. Make it count. Write your content around the problem your brand exists to solve.
5. Enhance Your Products Pages
To do Shopify SEO like an ecommerce doyen, enhance your product pages using target keywords.
Pay attention to product pages that generate massive leads, and product pages that have similar keywords from your earlier keyword search. These metrics play significant roles in enhancing your product pages, which in turn boost your ranking on search engines.
Optimize your title by including target keywords in your products and categories. Avoid vague and non-catchy titles. Craft exclusive titles for each page of your store with not more than 55 fonts.
Write a compelling meta description that summarizes your page’s content. When writing, make it appealing and compelling with fewer than 150 characters. Make sure you include your target keywords.
6. Use the Right Shopify SEO Apps
To do Shopify SEO like a master, use the right Shopify SEO apps to boost your ranking. SEO apps regularly check your page titles, meta descriptions, speed, content, article structure, etc. for any issue that requires attention.
Pay attention to these three tools:
- Smart SEO: With Smart SEO, you generate appropriate meta tags for products and article pages in your Shopify store, relieving the stress of manually doing edits. The tool also sends your store’s information to search engines using JSON-LD data.
- SEMRush: Helps you gather competitors’ top keywords, where they rank at, and their pages with the most active search traffic. This is key to having a competitive advantage over similar players in the field.
- SEO Image Optimizer: Helps boost your store’s traffic from Google image search without necessarily having coding knowledge. This is crucial since product images are what customers see before making purchases. Make them count.
7. Be Creative in Your Content Marketing
To do Shopify SEO like an expert, use creative content marketing techniques to outwit the competition. With content marketing, you create and publish content online for a specific audience in order to rank high on Google search results, drive traffic, generate leads and increase brand awareness and sales.
Again, infuse your target keywords when creating your content (articles, videos, webinars, newsletters, podcasts, etc.) to boost your ranking.
Write content around the problem your product exists to solve. That way, you have relevant data on your target audience’s thoughts and needs. Ensure to include customer reviews and testimonials to boost credibility.
Don’t write about what your Shopify store exists to offer, but what the product offers. Tailor your writing to how your product can solve your customers’ needs.
Make simple and short sentences with familiar words—to increase engagement. Use the right punctuations and grammatical construction. Also, proofread your content for errors.
With these in place, your Shopify store has greater chances on top of Google’s search results.
Recap
To do Shopify SEO like a pundit, improve your store with backlinks to direct visitors to your website and optimize your site’s navigation, and speed up user experience.
Use the right target keywords in your content and enhance your product pages. This also boosts your Google ranking.
Finally, use the right Shopify SEO apps to relieve you of some unnecessary hassles and use creative content marketing techniques to increase user engagement in your store.
