There’s no shortage of reasons that you might want to consider using Shopify as a platform around which you can configure your online store. There are a load of user-friendly features that can almost make it easy for you to build an online business from the ground up.
In many ways, Shopify is the ultimate eCommerce platform. While every software has its benefits and drawbacks, with Shopify there’s almost no limit to how you can customize your store. It’s a great overall solution for online merchants who are looking to build an appealing store that integrates a lot of features.
While you can go your own way with your branding in the layout and design of your site, you’ll probably also be drawn to the fact that you can integrate tons of applications into your Shopify site that offer your visitors and customers additional functionality and engagement.
Shopify is also secure and offers some of the best uptime available to eCommerce entrepreneurs. As digital security becomes one of the main concerns – both for online buyers and sellers, you’ll appreciate the fact that Shopify has some of the best available security features available. Then there’s the fact that Shopify offers its users practically unlimited uptime, so that you don’t have to experience headaches and lost sales associated with downtime and customer complaints.
In short, Shopify offers a few solutions for online businesses with varying needs. The thing is, almost regardless of your marketing strategy, your business will face a lot of competition from other sellers online who are offering similar products and compete on similar or the same keywords to get in front of customers. In many cases, though your products might be different, your target markets might be the same.
How do you get in front of your customers before the competition gets in front of them first? How can you ensure that your page ranks sufficiently to be visible to those in the market that have an interest in, even a need for, your products or services?
You get in front of them with our Shopify SEO services. Here’s how.
Invest in Keyword Research and Develop A Strategy
One of the most significant ways to make changes to your website is by addressing the layout of your website, but that will take on many facets, so bear with us. We’ll start with the importance of keyword research and strategy.
In order to rank your website, there are a number of things that search engines must be able to identify as they crawl your site’s pages. It can be tough to find a place to start since all of the different factors affecting overall SEO are interrelated, but the way your site is laid out and the keywords it contains are a great place to start.
Let’s consider a keyword strategy, as a solid keyword strategy will affect both the way your site’s structure is addressed as well as nearly everything other aspect of your SEO endeavors. It all starts with taking a look at the greater market and conducting research into what keywords customers are searching for.
We’ll look for high volume keywords that search engines will be looking for when they crawl your website. In-depth keyword research entails understanding the relationship between customers’ reasons for searching for those keywords as well as what they expect to find.
Customers have a need for searching for keywords that drives that intent. While it’s impossible to read the customer’s minds, we can see what keywords are being searched for repeatedly as well as how competitors within your market are using those keywords to their advantage and ranking well for them.
If a competitor is successful at driving traffic to their website with a specific high volume keyword, then you can start to develop confidence that that website is offering some value to those who enter that word – that word might be a good word to target for your own use to try to grab some of that business – particularly if you offer similar or superior products.
Yet that is only one keyword, and keyword research will uncover a laundry list of words and terms that might be valuable to chase down. We’ll investigate their volume and relevance and come up with a list that will be effective for your business based on several indicators.
Once we’ve compiled a list of keywords for you to target in your efforts, we can get into your site structure, content production and garnering links to your website to gain authority for you.
Optimizing Your Site Structure
Optimizing your site structure is one of the primary ways that our Shopify SEO services can help you build more targeted traffic to your website, and some of that starts with the keyword research we hashed out above.
Before we get into the specifics of some of the many ways we can help to streamline and optimize your website, there’s some really good news in all this. Optimizing your Shopify stores for search engines won’t just help to generate more traffic to your site and help you boost conversions. It’s actually married to user experience. Know that as you develop an effective design that catches the attention of search engines, you will create a better user experience and interface as a by-product, so investing in SEO is a win-win for your business.
A large part of making your site structure more effective is tied to making it easier for search engines to crawl your website in a logical progression, which, as we stated, will also make your website easier for customers to navigate, another win-win scenario. The internal linking structure of your website must make sense, and not be overwhelmingly convoluted or circular.
Laying out your site structure in a basic fashion that only requires a few clicks to get to the page on which you want the ultimate conversion to occur is a pretty basic and effective design. It shouldn’t be counterintuitive or productive to find your products, services, sign-ups or anything else you want your customers to find. Think of it this way – if it’s hard for thinking customers to get there, it will probably be that much harder for an unthinking algorithm to do the same thing.
That’s a bit of a metaphor, but if it puts things in perspective, it’s worth it. There’s more to it than that, but that’s where our expert Shopify SEO services come into play. We handle the technical work so you don’t have to.
There’s so much more to optimizing your site structure than just the internal linking, though. Consider also the fact that our experts will take a look at your page titles, meta titles and meta descriptions, for example, to ensure that they are optimized as well.
Remember we stressed the importance of keyword research and strategy above? Here’s where it starts to come into the picture. What are your page titles, URLs, meta titles and meta descriptions made of? What are your category pages titles and descriptions composed of? All of the content, on and off your site that takes a written form, is composed of words.
So when we look at your site structure, we’re not just looking at the internal linking and hierarchy of the site. We’re looking at the keywords and phrases that appear in your meta titles and descriptions and on your category and product pages. This starts to enter the realm of content production as part of an SEO campaign, though we’re not entirely there yet.
Ultimately, we will address all of the titles and descriptions associated with your site to ensure that they are rich with keywords that will drive traffic to your site and ultimately to those pages. We don’t lose any opportunities to enrich your page titles and descriptions with keywords and phrases that customers are looking for to help generate traffic to your store. We also eliminate duplicate content in those titles and on those pages that can do more than confuse search engines and visitors to your site. It can even result in a penalty, but we’ll get to the dangers of duplicate content in a bit.
We Can Create A Responsive Design
As part of developing Shopify websites that are SEO friendly, our Shopify SEO experts can help your business develop a responsive design that will be adaptable to the small screen. This can and will have far-reaching benefits for both your SEO efforts and your customer friendliness.
If you need convincing on this front, know that M-commerce is rapidly growing and that every year, more and more online transactions take place on mobile devices. Shoppers are turning to their phones and tablets to research products, read reviews, communicate with other users and then ultimately make their purchase decisions. Over the course of 2020, mobile transactions are expected to surpass the halfway mark – that is, they are expected to account for over half of all online sales.
What does that mean? A website that doesn’t scale to the device to offer a flexible user experience will be left in the dust. If your desktop website is stellar, that’s grand. If it doesn’t fit the device, showing up as text-heavy, curtailed or disproportionate on a phone’s screen, that’s bad news.
We don’t feel the need to dive further into why this will adversely affect your conversion rate, but we will do you the service of elaborating on its impacts on SEO. Google has begun mobile-first indexing, which means that it will first evaluate a website on its mobile design and then on other factors. That means a responsive design is becoming more and more important to how your Shopify store will rank in search results. A user-friendly, engaging mobile site is just one more thing our Shopify SEO services can offer you.
Use Content Production to Your Advantage
Content production is more than just a component of your marketing efforts. Content can be used directly to optimize your website for search engines and it can even be used to generate backlinks to your website to gain your business referral traffic.
Content production is also, obviously, tied directly into the keyword strategy that we develop for your business. One of the aspects this takes on is on your product and category pages. We will conduct an analysis of these pages to investigate the content they contain, as this is one of the main areas in which businesses are guilty of offering duplicate content.
Category and product pages with duplicate content aren’t just boring to customers. Search engines will immediately recognize it as duplicate and defer to the original source as the authority, which will rob you of traffic. It can be tempting to take a manufacturer description but don’t fall prey to that trap.
As part of our Shopify SEO services, we will craft original, keyword-rich content for your category and product pages to drive customers looking for those keywords to those pages. Sounds effective, right? That’s because it is. You’re basically placing the solution right before the person with the problem.
We will also create content for your site’s blog to entice readers with valuable information on your company, on the solutions your products offer, and other engaging topics, and you guessed it, it will be original, keyword-rich, and highly targeted to your audience. But posting original and informative content on your website to engage readers and drive traffic isn’t our only strategy. We will create similar content and post it elsewhere on highly authoritative sites directing traffic back to your website indicating you as a reputable source. It’s genius (see: Genius eCommerce) and effective.
Of course, this is a highly simplified overview of the efforts we take as part of an SEO strategy to generate long term organic traffic to your site and craft the ideal user experience for your customers, but they all work together to achieve results. To learn more about our processes and see how we can impact your web design for the better, reach out to us at info@geniusecommerce.com or at 267-225-1946.
