Shopify is one of the favorite eCommerce platforms for online sellers to set up their businesses online. Shopify as a platform has grown tremendously over the past few years. But to rank, your website on the top of SERP, your Shopify SEO game needs to be strong.
Read on to know 5 secret techniques that will uplift your Shopify game to help your website rank better in SERPs.
In this article
What is Shopify SEO?
The Shopify SEO differs a bit from the usual website SEO. The main difference lies in the fact that in Shopify SEO you are not just optimizing the website content but also the products that are listed there. Optimizing product listings are different from website optimization. The easiest way to get organic traffic to your Shopify store is to optimize the content according to the query related to product listings.
Shopify platform provides a few SEO adjustments that help your page rank. But there is a lot more than learning just a few SEO adjustments in the Shopify platform. The most common Shopify features present in the platform are:
- Remove duplicate content from URL structured data by creating canonical tags
- Creating a blog with proper keyword research
- Auto generating of sitemap.xml and robots.txt
- Adding different structured data like “articles”, “product”, “breadcrumb list”, etc.
- Removing unnecessary Shopify apps
- Compressing image quality.
Now that we have learned the basics about what Shopify SEO is, let us see 5 proven techniques to improve your Shopify SEO.
5 Techniques to Improve Your Shopify SEO
1. Shopify Site Structure Optimization
One of the most important features for Google to rank your page is based on your page structure. A good page structure will help you navigate easily through the different sub-pages in a website. An ideal page structure should be in a pyramid model. The home page will be on top followed by categories, sub-categories, and then individual posts at the bottom. A simple Shopify site structure and easy navigation will keep users more on your page increasing the on-page duration time. Longer on-page duration time helps to improve your page rank better.
Your homepage is the most important page and the proper navigation through different sub-pages should be present on the homepage itself. Optimizing your Shopify homepage will lead the reader to reach other category pages.
An ideal Shopify website structure should be:
Home page>>Category page>>Products
The best practice of a website structure will allow customers to reach their desired product within 2-3 clicks. This will also allow crawlers to index your page faster. For indexing your page, the first thing you should do is to set up a Google Search Console (GSC) account.
How to Set up a Google Search Console account?
For setting up a GSC account the first thing is your GMAIL account. Follow these steps to set up your GSC account:
- Sign in to the Search Console account with your GMAIL account.
- Next, you have to put your website’s URL prefix or domain name to add the property.
- Lastly, you have to verify your website.
And your GSC account is set.
Apart from the Homepage optimization, another page that is important for Google to understand your credibility and authoritativeness is the Contact Us and About Us pages. Adding an element like a search box helps in eCommerce optimization which will ultimately help your site to rank higher.
2. Improve your User Experience
Improving your Shopify site user experience will also help in bringing more organic traffic. If users spend more time on your page, Google will understand the credibility of your website for certain products. The following ways will help you to increase your site’s user experience.
- Improving your site speed
After Google rolled out the Page Experience Update, the need for a good on-page experience has become crucial. Site speed is important to help keep your customers sticking to your site. The site speed is the time taken for all the elements to be shown on the site or the time taken to receive the first web server byte. Every page has elements like an HTTP code, CSS elements, images, videos, JavaScript files, etc. All of these add to the size of the page.
To improve your page speed, you can do the following:
- Remove unnecessary apps
- Use of smaller and optimized font and images
- Use of a mobile-friendly page
- Avoid using sliders.
- A Responsive Design
Using a responsive design is a great way of improving your Shopify site experience. Responsive design or RWD design is a modern approach to websites and pages to display automatically adapting to the screen type. An RWD design works through a technology called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
A responsive design will make your content look good on any device mobile, tablet, or desktop. A responsive design will help retain more users on your website which will eventually increase your site traffic.
3. Proper Keyword Research
Keywords are the foundation of a successful SEO campaign. But to rank your page, the first challenge is to find the right target keywords.
To find the best target keywords, you can use tools like Aherfs, Moz keyword research tool, Google keyword planner, or any other similar tools for getting the right keyword. An ideal keyword should be less KD (Keyword Difficulty) and have high volume and traffic potential. The higher the traffic potential is, the greater the chance for your keywords to rank.
Not just your blog content but infusing the right keywords to your homepage, collection pages, and product pages are also important for Google to better rank your page.
To do proper keyword research, you can do a competitor analysis by taking ideas from their meta descriptions and meta tags.
4. Product Page Optimization
Shopify is all about selling your products to the target audience. The easiest way to bring organic traffic to your eCommerce store is by letting them know about the product you are selling. After setting up an easily navigated website and good keyword research, you are now ready to optimize your Shopify product pages. Start optimizing from your Homepage and then move to the different product pages. Make a list of your top product pages that bring the best conversions and have high traffic.
The best practices for optimizing your product pages are:
- Optimize your Shopify product title tags for different categories. The title tags are the ones that appear when someone searches for your products.
- Optimizing product title and meta description. An ideal meta description should range between 155 to 160 characters and should contain the primary keyword.
- Optimize the image Alt texts.
- Add the correct headings and subheadings to your Shopify store pages.
5. Quality Backlinks
A quality backlink is the backbone of any eCommerce site. Backlinks from high-authority websites are like upvotes for Google to understand the credibility and authority of your Shopify store. With good backlinks directed to your site, you can also increase the ranking and DA (Domain Authority) of your Shopify website. Getting quality backlinks also results in a good influx of referral traffic from high authority external websites.
Some of the best ways to build backlinks for improvising your Shopify SEO are:
- Report broken links.
- Do guest blogging with high authority websites
- Getting a link from a manufacturer
- Get product reviews
- By creating more engaging and user-relevant content.
- Get backlinks from infographics, and many more.
Those are the top techniques that can give you the best result once implemented on your Shopify website. But there are other techniques too that will help you. Some of them are:
- Adding Shopify SEO apps (just like WordPress plugins!)
- Optimizing your Shopify blog post
- Enabling Shopify market for international selling.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Do Shopify websites have good SEO?
Yes, Shopify websites provide a good set of SEO tools providing all the basic features required to help your website rank in the SERPs. Shopify is considered the best SEO eCommerce platform.
What is Shopify’s SEO service?
Like a typical SEO service agency that helps to optimize your website in order to rank it well and bring more traffic to your site, Shopify SEO services help to increase business visibility by fine-tuning the Shopify SEO elements.
How much does Shopify SEO cost?
Since Shopify is an international eCommerce business platform, most sellers want to rank globally. The average range of Shopify SEO costs is from $1,000 to $10,000+ depending on the type of services provided.
Wrapping up
As Shopify continues to grow and evolve, the SEO elements to improve websites will also grow accordingly. More and more Shopify apps will come to help optimize your Shopify website and to help them rank better. Implementing the strategies we have mentioned will help you rank your page and bring more traffic. For knowing more about different SEO techniques and more about organic growth, you can reach out to LinkDoctor.
