Once you’re done setting up your eCommerce Shopify website, the next thing you should try and implement is a strategic SEO plan that will help facilitate the expected growth of your brand. Building a loyal customer base through organic search is the holy grail of any Shopify eCommerce business owner.
If you want to achieve the goals of your business cost-effectively and efficiently, it’s a must for you to follow some shopify SEO tips. The best part about SEO is that its results are sustainable. Once you start getting organic traffic, it will stay for a long period of time.
Compared to paid advertising, search engine optimization, or SEO, provides an array of advantages to eCommerce store owners. In comparison with other strategies for increasing revenue, SEO is not only more cost-effective but also more stable. Unlike pop-up ads, SEO guarantees that you will attract high-quality customers who are more likely to patronize your business.
At the same time, Shopify and similar e-commerce platforms lay the groundwork for the success of your SEO strategies. Shopify features more built-in SEO tools than other e-commerce platforms, but to get the most out of your investments, you should still incorporate a well-planned SEO strategy.
In this article, we will talk about how you can do strategic SEO for your Shopify eCommerce website.
Measures to Take for Strategic SEO for Your eCommerce Site
Your business will enjoy way too many benefits from working with an SEO company. But it can be quite difficult to use SEO effectively and to your best advantage, especially if you don’t have prior knowledge of it. So, here we have compiled a list of 8 best practices that will help you conduct strategic SEO for your eCommerce site-
Conduct Thorough Keyword Research
People use keywords in search engines to find your products and services. After finding those keywords, you can strategically incorporate them into your site, which will help you increase your SERP ranking. SEO relies heavily on keywords, as they inform the search engines regarding the relevance of your content to user searches.
If you want to know which keywords will work best for your brand, you can use keyword research tools. Semrush, Moz Keyword Explorer, Ahrefs, etc., are some of the popular tools for keyword research. There are many other free and paid keyword research tools as well.
After you’re done choosing a tool, it’s time for you to begin your keyword research. The research process is quite simple and has three steps-
- Compile an extensive list comprising relevant keywords for your business
- Create “keyword clusters” or groups of keywords in categories
- Link the Keywords to the relevant pages on your site
After you finish doing these, you will be ready to start optimizing your pages. The next task will be to put the keywords on your site’s pages. Here are a few examples of where your keywords will be most effective-
- URL
- Meta Title
- Meta Description
- Heading 1
- Description Box of Product Page
- Body Content of the Blog Posts (in places where it is more logical)
- Texts that Appear at the Top of the Category Pages
You should remember to not cram your text with keywords. They must flow rather naturally through the content. Search engines are becoming clever enough to rank your sites for certain keywords, so it’s best to use synonyms and concepts that are semantically similar instead.
Sort Collection Pages Based on Priority
Increasing the visibility of collection pages rather than product pages is a great Shopify SEO tactic. In contrast to product pages, which showcase a single item, collection pages display all of your categorized products in one convenient location. Although they accomplish the same goal, Google has an easier time ranking collection pages than product pages.
So, if you want quick and easy results, focus on developing links to your collection pages. Moreover, potential customers will get to see your whole inventory on the collection pages rather than just one product, which is a huge plus for your brand.
Create Internal Links and Backlinks for Your Site
To increase the number of inbound links to your website, you should target various online media and businesses to link their original content to your page. Link-building is one of the ways Google determines your credibility, so it is quite important.
Search engines like Google put more stock in the trust other websites put in you, which is indicated by them linking to your site. Accordingly, Google gives you greater credibility the more links you generate. Your search engine rankings will improve in direct proportion to Google’s perception of your credibility.
Creating content that is both relevant and of high quality is the first step in acquiring backlinks. As other brands will find your content valuable, pitching to them becomes easier. In most cases, Google gives greater weight to backlinks than internal links since Google views them as coming from more credible sources outside of your site.
However, SEO-wise, internal links are still crucial as they-
- Sustain the user’s engagement
- Assist users in navigating your website more effectively (user experience)
- Assist Google in finding your sites more effectively
- Shift link equity away from more prominent pages and onto less prominent ones
- Increase the number of conversions
Build Your Authoritative Blog
Building an authoritative blog is an investment that will always pay off down the road. A high search engine ranking is still within reach with the help of an authoritative blog because of the topical relevance it provides. In addition to improving your search engine results, having an authoritative blog will help you attract high-quality visitors, raise your brand’s profile, and establish yourself as an authority in your field.
Short articles stuffed with informative keywords are a great way to establish your blog as an authority in your field. The next step is to make your post more relevant by connecting it to relevant collection pages. This also improves the rankings of your collection pages.
A word of advice, small, specific content paragraphs usually score better than big, extensive ones, so try to avoid those.
Incorporate Keywords into Meta Titles
It might take six months to a year before you see any real improvement in your SEO efforts. However, many Shopify eCommerce store owners have seen massive results after strategically adding keywords to their meta titles. If you want to rank higher in search results quickly, one strategy is to include keywords in each meta title.
Apply the strategy we discussed before to each meta title and include relevant, well-researched keywords. Your sales team will be grateful for it.
Take Out Duplicate Content
If you have duplicate content, search engines will index the incorrect pages, which will hurt your SEO efforts. Eliminating duplicate content and producing original, high-quality content should be part of your sensible Shopify SEO strategy.
To find out if there is duplicate content, you can check the URLs you have. One possible sign of duplicate pages is if your URLs begin with consecutive numbers such as 2, 3, 4, etc. Fortunately, Shopify makes it easy to eliminate duplicate content by using 301 redirects or canonical tags. By default, Shopify shop themes include canonical URLs, which prevent search engines from indexing duplicate content and provide a means to reroute traffic from a duplicate page to the original.
If you want to avoid having your link equity split out among different versions of a page, change all of your internal links to direct just toward your original pages, not the duplicates.
Enhance User Experience
The goal of Google’s highly-ranked pages is to provide users with relevant content and an enjoyable experience. Search engines place a higher value on sites that provide a positive user experience. Google employs different metrics, including safe browsing, HTTPS, mobile friendliness, and the absence of intrusive interstitials, to measure user experience.
According to Google’s Core Web Vital metrics, you can enhance your user experience by reducing the size of your image files and making your pages load faster. Make sure that your Shopify store is properly optimized to make it more mobile-friendly by using Google’s mobile testing tool, which checks the mobile-friendliness of websites.
The full Core Web Vitals reports are available in Google Search Console in three different categories: poor, good, and “URLs need improvement.”
Enhance the Structure of Your Shopify Store
The structure of your Shopify site is the way you arrange the content on your site. It boils down to the organization, linking, and presentation of your content to the end user. The structure of your store can have a significant impact on both the user experience and your SEO rankings.
If you want to make your store as efficient as possible, one of the first things you should do is look at the hierarchy. Be careful to organize your URLs into distinct categories and subcategories and to place related pages in the same places.
Link pages within the same category or subcategory, as well as between subcategories and their parent category, and vice versa. Doing so will keep the link juice flowing around your site’s pages, which will improve Google’s ability to find and rank your most important content.
Final Words
If you want to get your desired results from Shopify SEO, you need a solid strategy. The fundamentals, homepage collections, technical SEO, and products are all crucial parts of search engine optimization, and a good strategy will contain a plan to maximize all of these elements. The strategy will also contain plans for optimizing site speed and enhancing blog posts and backlinks.
Although Shopify is a top eCommerce site when it comes to search engine optimization, it does have its own set of problems. That’s why you will require the services of a Shopify SEO specialist to help you create the optimal SEO strategy so that you can make the most of your SEO benefits while avoiding the drawbacks. SEO experts come with extensive SEO knowledge and problem-solving skills, which make them essential for businesses, as they can help you grow traffic for your eCommerce Shopify site and increase revenue through tailored SEO techniques.