What do you think is preventing you from ranking your eCommerce website?
You’ll probably say time, too busy with paid media or too heavy a workload, but with a rock-solid plan, you can easily get organic visitors to your site. Ranking merely takes trial, error experimenting, and assessing feedback There’s no magic bullet but it is a straightforward process that anyone can follow.
Thankfully we’ve done all the hard work so that you don’t have to… if you’re keen to drive targeted traffic and customers to your site from search engines, this article is for you.
In this Shopify SEO article, you’ll find what is currently working for Shopify sites.
You can achieve the SEO results you are looking for and get the excellent rankings you want. It really is quite a simple process, here’s what to do.
Shopify Basics SEO Checklist
Home Page Optimization
You can use your Shopify subdomain (https://yourdomain.myshopify.com) when link building so you can pick up some of Shopify’s domain authority.
To optimize the homepage title and meta description-
Go into your admin dashboard >>Sales Channels>>Online Store>>Preferences. See the screenshot below.
For example, if you look at beardbrand.com’s homepage, it’s optimized for search rankings.
Product Page Optimization
Product page optimization is crucial because you are more likely to convert a visitor into a buyer on your here than on any other page so for this reason, the product page can be the most important page on your e-commerce site.
It’s important to have a high converting product page to maximize the chance that a visitor will make a purchase. Make sure you have the following:
- Enticing design,
- Professional product shots
- Well written unique descriptions
Remember to include some of your keywords in your description.
Optimize The Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
For on-page SEO, it’s important that you optimize your title tags and meta descriptions
The title tag is the highlighted line in the screenshot below in orange. A title tag is the HTML element used to specify the title of a webpage.
The meta description is highlighted in purple. A meta description is an HTML tag summarizing a web page’s content.
Your URLs also needed to be optimized for the keyword you would like to rank for.
On your page or product page scroll down to the “Edit Website SEO” to edit your title, meta, and URL descriptions, see below on the demo store:
The following are the pages you should optimize your title and meta tag descriptions for:
- Blog posts
- Collections
- Homepage
- All Pages
- Products
Collection Page Optimization for SEO
Recent data – culled by JumpFly and seoClarity from Google’s rankings in the U.S. found that the top 30 eCommerce stores for 25 billion keywords saw that collection and category pages are outperforming product pages by 19% in search engines. Source
That’s why you should optimize your collection pages.
What is a collection page?
“All Shopify stores have a page at the URL your-store.com/collections/all that lists all of the visible products in the store. This is the store’s catalog page.” Shopify
How do you go about doing that? Include content and text on your collection pages in order for them to serve as the Gateway for your store. Would you rather have one product ranking well on Google or have one collection with dozens of products ranking well on Google?
The more options you have the better chances of ranking for multi keywords.
After doing your keyword research and competitor keyword research analysis you can start determining how you can optimize these pages in order for not only your customers to find them but also Google to find them too.
If your Shopify theme doesn’t give the option to add text, use the Optizen App to add some SEO description to your collection page. You can modify your collection page code to add that option.
An example of an optimized collection’s page is biotrust.com/collections/collagen-protein.
Image Optimization
“Search engines can’t see what the image is about instead they use the ATL tag and filename, among other factors to determine what your image is about. “An alt tag, also known as “alt attribute” and “alt description,” is an HTML attribute applied to image tags to provide a text alternative for search engines.” BigCommerce
Before you upload an image to your store, use descriptive words including one of your keywords the would like to rank for.
For example:
Bad filename: img-ugsgjskub.png
Good filename: cozy soft pizza blanket.png
Use the Crush. pics app to compress your images.
Keyword Research That Helps You Get Found
Keywords are words people type into search engines such as Google and Bing to find something. Without keywords, the users who might be looking for what you sell, may not find you at all. The keywords you use in your website should mirror the keywords that your users are using to search with that’s why doing keyword research is important.
You have to get into your buyer’s mind and think about what keywords they might use to find what you’re selling. Then go to tools like Amazon Suggest, Google Ads Keywords Planner, Ahrefs, Semrush, etc.
There are lots of tools out there so many tools to help you find the most popular keywords used in Internet searches.
Here’s a video on eCommerce Keyword Research from Matthew Woodward.
Ecommerce SEO Friendly Site Architecture
Having an easy to navigate layout is important. Because it makes your online store more appealing and may increase the time your potential customers spend on your site. It also makes it easier for the search engine crawlers to crawl, scan, and index your website. With Shopify you can make use the following structures:
Homepage >> Collection Page >> Product Page
Homepage >> Collection Page >> Sub-Collection Page >> Product Page
Here’s an example of a user-friendly site structure:
Speed Up Your Website
Website speed is one of Google’s ranking factors also the faster your website loads the more user-friendly it is for your visitors. If possible make sure you get a theme that has related products built into it. The more apps you add the more they will adversely affect your speed.
You can check your website speed is here.
Setup Bing Webmasters & The Google Search Console
Before you start any SEO work, make sure that you verify your Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console accounts.
What is Bing Webmaster & Google Search Console?
These are search engine portals that have user dashboards showing you what search engines see in regard to your website. Verify your site using the steps in the screenshot below. After verifying your site you can monitor the progress of your SEO work. The bots will be able to crawl through your website, scan, and index relevant pages to be found in the search results.
The dashboards will also show what errors your website has.
Submit and set up your site to Bing Webmaster tools.
A sitemap is a file that contains all the URLs of your site and once you submit it to the search engines, they will be able to crawl and index your site. Shopify automatically creates and sets up your sitemap. You can find it here: www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.
Setup Google Analytics
Google Analytics, shows how your visitors find and use your site.
If you’re privacy-focused and don’t want to collect your visitors’ personal data, you can use Fathom Analytics.
Follow the steps here on how to set up Google Analytics:
Make sure to connect Google Analytics with the Google Search Console to get more SEO information.
Click this link to connect.
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1308621?hl=en
Find and Fix all your broken links
Broken links are caused when you rename, move, and forget to change your internal links. Why fix them? Because they cause a bad user experience and they devalue your SEO efforts.
Use Ahref’s Broken Link Checker to find them on your site.
Fix Duplicate Content Issues
How to fix default duplicate issues. There are two ways you can fix duplicate issues.
Either adding code to your theme’s liquid file or using the Sitemap and Noindex app.
This post shows one how to edit the Liquid file.
Internal Linking
Internal linking is simply linking one piece of content to another on your website including your menu and your anchor texts.
Related Posts at the bottom of a post will be considered as internal linking.
Other places that you can internally link from are the collection and product pages.
Conclusion
When you implement the changes suggested above. They do work.
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Or if you have a question about something you have read here, let us know by leaving a comment below.
