Getting on board for your online store is not that easy in today’s competitive market therefor building a web presence for your retail location, launching a new product, selling your product, and services online, the most important issue is how to find a relevant customer for your store?
There are people who do a search online for their buy something or looking for a product like yours, here SEO (search engine optimization) will help you to improve your search engine ranking for your store so that customers can find your products easily, let’s discuss how?
- Pick the Perfect Keywords So Google Can Find You
Keywords are one of the most important factors of SEO because it tells Google who you are? & what you do? We can say that keywords are the heart of search engine optimization.
For searching the relevant keywords you have to think as per your relevant customer’s search requirement such as what they would search for find your product? Maybe its ‘Sweat t-shirts’ or ‘wedding dresses’ or ‘adventure cameras’.
While choosing a keyword always try to find out your sweet spot because it’s not that easy to rank your keywords on top like ‘watch’ because the biggest retailers dominate. On the other hand, a niche key phrase like ‘Black leather watch’ won’t pick up enough searches. Try something in the middle, like ‘leather watch’.
- Optimize Your Shopify Site Structure
The way you represent your content in an organized way on your page will result in a successful SEO.
When buyers can easily find their required things, they tend to spend more time on your website & view more pages that will help you rank higher on search engines.
Now you might be thinking how can you make your site easier to navigate?
Simplify. Don’t go overboard with categories and subcategories. An easy website structure makes it simple for search engines to crawl your sites & rank your products. Make your site SEO-friendly with a simple site structure and organize your content easily with Shopify SEO Expert by using the given below structures. Always Remember, your site should be built for customers first.
Homepage > Category Pages > Product Pages
Homepage > Category Pages > Sub-Category Pages > Product Pages
Also you have to include About Page & Contact Page on your site because these pages build your credibility and trust towards customers as well as search engines both.
Don’t forget to include a search box on your page. It will help visitors to find what they are looking for, and it is an important part of e-commerce optimization so that you can make more money from the traffic you already have.
- Improve the User Experience
Great user experience will help you to increase your rank higher in search results. With the following points, you can provide the best user experience possible.
Boost Your Site Speed
When your site is easy to navigate & everything can be accessed quickly, visitors will like to spend more time on your site, after all, site speed is all about accessibility.
To make your Shopify store faster, you can:
- Use optimized images.
- Use a fast and mobile-friendly theme.
- Remove unwanted applications.
- Use fewer sliders.
- Use a Responsive Design
Your Shopify store Setup expert should look great on all the devices such as tablets, desktop, smartphones. Always make sure that your store works on mobile devices because shoppers tend to buy smartphones more.
A responsive theme improves user experience and keeps your visitors engaging on-site for a longer time. Having a site that can easily navigate and read will improve your site ranking because Google at a time on page ass a marker of site value. A better usability site with improve ranking results in increased conversions and visitors like to visit again.
- Choose a Keyword or Phrase That Actually Sells
Now here there is a difference between normal SEO & Shopify SEO:
You want searchers that will actually buy something such as relevant searchers as per your product.
Suppose you are selling handmade designer bags on Shopify and people searching for ‘handmade bags’ might be looking for information on making a bag but people are not your relevant customers because you want relevant customers that actually buy your products.
You want a customer who wants to buy handmade bags so try to change your keywords or phrases to include active words such as ‘buy’, ‘best’ ‘cheap’.
- Place Those Keywords in All the Right Places
Always place your keywords on where Google will find them easily. Here, Shopify has five crucial places to put your keywords:
You’re Page Title
A title is an initial phrase that will appear on Google’s results page so try to keep it eye-catching and relevant as per your target audiences.
Meta Description
A meta description is the short piece of words that shows up after the title of your page. You can place your targeted keywords here but try to make it intriguing & descriptive so that you can easily convince your customers to click. Make sure every page of your site has a different Meta description.
Image Description & Alt Tags
Google is smarter but not enough to understand a picture of like a blue shirt. Here you have to tell Google it is a Blue shirt and for this, you have to change the name of the image to ‘blue shirt>shop name’ before uploading.
For an image, you can add ‘alt-text’ that shows if a browser cannot load the image. That’s how you can easily make it descriptive including your targeted keywords so that Google can find it, read it, & rank it in the search result.
Headers and Titles (H1-H6 tags)
Headers are the first place Google looks to see what your site content is all about? So make sure all product pages have descriptive headers with your targeted keywords.
Product Descriptions and Copy
It’s important to include your targeted keywords in the product description so that Google can easily find your page. Always try to keep your product description unique & exciting.
Don’t just copy the manufacturer description because there are already many similar copies present on the internet and Google doesn’t not like a duplicate copy. With your own tone of voice and descriptive details, you can convince customers to make a purchase.
- Crawling and indexing
Crawling & indexing is one of the important components of e-commerce SEO and here we will discuss a few that apply to Shopify.
Robots.txt file
You should be aware that in a Shopify store, you cannot adjust the robots.txt file and this is stated in their official help documentation. Here you can add the ‘noindex’ to pages through the theme. liquid, but it is not helpful if you want to prevent Google from crawling your content altogether.
There are few sections of the site such as Checkout, Shopping Cart, Admin area, internal search, orders, Policies page that Shopify will disallow for crawling.
Shopify provides you some default disallow commands for your site is good but robots.txt is probably the simple way to control Google’s crawl of your site It Is very easy to update & allow for a lot of flexibility. You might need to try another method of adjusting Google’s crawl through canonical tags or nofollow.
Adding the “noindex” tag
As we have learned above that instead of robots.txt, Shopify does allow you to add the ‘noindex’ tag. Here you can exclude a specific page from the index by adding the bellow given code to your theme.liquid file
{% if the template contains ‘search’ %}
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>
{% endif %}
In case, you want to exclude an entire template then use the below code:
{% if handle contains ‘page-handle-you-want-to-exclude’ %}
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>
{% endif %}
Redirects
It is great that Shopify allows you to implement redirects out of the box. You can use redirects for consolidating the old or expired pages, all you have to do is go to Online Store > Navigation > URL Redirects.
Log files
Shopify does not provide you the log file information the same as robots.txt and this has been confirmed by Shopify support.
- Optimize Your Shopify Products Pages
For a great Shopify product page, you should have a list of keywords & a logical site structure for optimizing your store page.
Initiate with your top pages that are the most profitable & have the best conversions such as your homepage, top-selling product pages, main product collections, and so on. In case you are opening a brand new store, you should still optimize your homepage.
There are few other easy ways to choose which other pages to optimize:
- Those product pages that generate the most buzz while building up to the launch of your store.
- The most searched related product page keywords on your site.
- How to Optimize Title Tags for Categories
You should optimize your title tags effectively on your pages and use your keywords in a consistent way as given below:
Keyword 1 – Shop for Keyword 2 – Store Name
Blue Jacket – Shop for Blue Jacket Online – The Store
- How to Optimize Title and Meta Description for Products
You need to write some titles and descriptions for your products and categories. Here you should not do the keyword stuffing instead try to fit the keyword naturally.
The alt text for the image can also be optimized for SEO but this also needs to fit naturally so that it will be easy and fast for shoppers to find what they’re looking for and easy for search engines to crawl the site.
- Rank Higher With Content Marketing
As we all know that content is the king and reason that people come to your site. Good original content adds more value to your overall user experience.
Always provide the real answers instead of only providing product information by making a list of all queries your customers ask for and anything you think your customers may want an answer to.
Through content, your customers get to know about your brand in a way that doesn’t involve selling. Content is the easiest way to rank for more keywords and generate more backlinks.
- Create Backlinks To Your Shopify Store
For ranking your store on top, Google looks at which other websites are linking to you. Here you require to generate quality backlinks because Google uses an algorithm based on the number of links & the authority of the site linking to you for determining your rating.
The following are the few tips for getting links to your store:
Broken Links
Through broken links, you can find out for broken links of products & services similar to those you offer. When you find out the broken link then reach out to the owner of the site displaying the broken link and to have them a link to your site instead.
Generally, broken links can hurt your SEO strategies so it is a mutually beneficial solution for both the parties from which you got a backlink and they get to repair a broken link as well.
Industry/Influencer Voices
It is better to work to reach out to the great industry leaders & influencers for interviews to generate both backlinks & content of your site.
Supplier/Manufacturer Links
While selling the products made & supplied by established organizations, they might have a policy that authorized retailers will get a link to email them & ask if they will link to your store.
Mentions
There are possibilities that you are mention in many places without being linked so simply find these mentions and send an email asking all of them to link your site with the mention.
- Use The Blog Feature!
Same as content, blogging is also very useful for SEO. Through blogging, you can use more keywords and generate lots of backlinks & traffic to your Shopify store.
A good blog will keep your user engagement on your site for a long time duration & will point customers to your products. Shopify has a built-in blog features but that is highly underused.
Summing Up
Today Shopify usage continues to grow, it is important to understand the SEO terms that come with the platform. Above we have provided you detailed information with additional knowledge that will help you to make your Shopify store rank higher in the search engines. If you have any doubts or looking for Shopify expert services, feel free to visit Cartcoders the Shopify Service provider that will boost your online presence through Shopify SEO to a high level.
