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A Comprehensive Guide on Shopify SEO
Nowadays, online trade is especially in-demand. A worldwide pandemic forced people to do shopping online. That's why lots of merchants moved their business into online platforms. However, there is a problem - nobody visits online shops and buys anything. If you are the one who is experiencing this scenario right now, you need to find a way to improve online shopping. Perhaps you've heard that there is a great way to attract customers with the help of SEO. But the question is how to do this correctly and get the results you deserve? In this guide, you will get familiar with eight actionable SEO tips that will help you optimize your Shopify online store. Let’s start!
Before you start working on creating the structure of your online shop, you must decide what platform to choose - Shopify or Wix. Each of these platforms has its benefits. However, the practice shows that Shopify is best for building out more robust online stores. While Wix is suitable for creating visually appealing websites.
Having a good site structure for your online store gives you a few advantages. First of all, it helps the visitors of the site to navigate it easily. Secondly, it helps search engines understand your website better and rank it higher.
A good site structure means building a certain hierarchy. In other words, your main categories of the product must be at the top. Then these categories must be split into subcategories, followed by products.
For instance, you have created your Shopify store that sells music equipment. Let it be bass-guitars. The main category "bass-guitars" can be followed by the categories "electric" and "acoustic" basses. These two categories include different subcategories. "Electric" one has subcategories like "Warwick", "Spector", etc. "Acoustic" category includes subcategories - "Dean" and "Ibanez" as for example.
These subcategories will list the products to buy.
How to organize them properly?
By exploring Shopify, you will find out that category pages are known as "collections" and product pages as "products" there.
If you want to create a collection page, you should go to "Products" - "Collections", and click "Create collection": To create a product page you should click "Products" - "All Products", and click "Add product": Afterwards, go to "Online store" - "Navigation" and add these collections to the main menu.
Once the structure of the site is completed, you should take care of exploring keywords to your product and category pages. To put it simply, you must run keyword research.
Keyword research is an integral part of the SEO process. By knowing what your potential customers search on Google, you will have more chances to attract them to your online store. The more people you attract organically, the more sales you will drive eventually.
You can run keyword research manually by searching words or phrases that would describe your page on Google. Pay attention to top-pages. If you see that these pages are similar to your ones, you can review their title tags and guess the keywords they are targeting. This method is quite time-consuming and you will never know if these keywords are popular among your target audience.
Therefore, you need to use a more trust-worthy way of exploring keywords. In this very case, you can delegate this task to some SEO tool, like Keywords Explorer from Ahrefs. A query "ibanez gsr200 bass" gets 100 searches per month in the US. However, if you draw your attention to "Parent topic" report, you will see that "ibanez gsr200" gets around 3.4K searches monthly.
As you already guessed, it would make more sense to target a keyword suggested by "Parent topic" report.
Explore keyword opportunities and optimize your online store accordingly. It will help you drive sales from Google organically.
You already sifted the keywords for your future SEO steps. It is time to work on the optimization of titles, meta descriptions, and URLs for the product pages.
The process of editing is pretty simple with Shopify. Go to one of your product pages and scroll down to "Search engine listing preview" and edit the metadata by clicking "Edit website SEO": It is strictly important to write a compelling description. It helps search engines understand the information on the page. Consequently, it will make it easier to help search engines rank these product pages on Google.
What's more important, the description of the product has a direct impact on your customers. If it meets customers' needs, they are more likely to buy from you.
It is a well-known fact that site speed is one of the ranking factors since 2010. As a result, you must optimize your website on this term.
To check your online store's speed you can use PageSpeed Insights or GTMetrix. But when it comes to site speed based on Shopify's servers, you will have less options for improving the speed.
Nevertheless, here are a couple of pieces of advice that might help you:
Do you know that you can get traffic to your online store with images?
Yes, you can do this by adding alt text to images. Simply said, each image across product pages must have a description. This description tells Google what your image is about.
It is quite simple to add alt text in Shopify. You just need to upload your image and click on it after. You will see the options of adding and saving alt text.
It goes without saying that you have seen results on Google with schema markup. Schema markup attracts clicks like a charm. And with Shopify, you can get it added automatically. Just fill in the form with the information required.
Backlinks are another ranking factor that Google takes into account. Hence, the more backlinks a page has, the more traffic it will get.
So, how to acquire backlinks?
Start with exploring the pages that are linking back to your competitors. Your purpose is to make these pages link back to your own pages as well.
In order to find these pages, you need to grab a few competitors' URLs and paste them into Link Intersect tool from Ahrefs. Don't forget to choose "URL" mode and leave the bottom field empty. Afterwards, review the results the tool provides you with. Explore the opportunities and ask to add your product to their pieces of content as well.
Being a music fan or professional musician you might know an online shop Music Store. It is a well-known online store that offers different music equipment. As you can see, this online store gets a massive amount of traffic. What's more important, a solid chunk of traffic comes from content hosted on the blog. It leads to a conclusion that by running a blog your store can attract potential customers. Other than that, there are more reasons why you should create a blog. Let's review them:
Shopify allows you to create blog posts in a few clicks. Keep in mind, blogging is a time-consuming process. Especially, at the very beginning stage. Content can't attract dozens of people from Google if you don't put much effort into it. Therefore, you should create a team of writers who would take care of your blog, while you're doing other marketing tasks for the business. The best way to find content creators is to hire freelancers who would do this job for you.
Conclusion Shopify SEO is something necessary for your online store business. It helps you get more traffic and sell more products.
These eight tips are not all SEO pieces of advice you can implement. There are more of them, of course. Likely, if you have just thought about Shopify SEO, the tips you found in the guide will help you a lot.
Use them in your practice and make more people happy with selling your goods. Author’s bio: Sergey Aliokhin is a Community Outreach Manager at Visme. When not at work, he likes to spend his time with family, read books on science-fiction, practice playing the bass, and visit the gym.
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