Shopify gives you everything you need in order to build and launch a fully-functional online store, but the real challenge comes afterward. In order to attract customers to your website and turn a profit, it’s important to follow as many Shopify best practices for SEO as possible.
The good news is, you’re starting off on the right foot. Shopify is one of the leading eCommerce platforms for a reason. They have created an intuitive and feature-rich service that makes it easy for store owners to upload products, design their storefront, and manage all of the minutiae of running a business online.
What’s also true is that no plugin, app, or integration can replace manual SEO work. A high-quality well-coded Shopify theme, great branding, and easy-to-navigate site structure are the bare minimum when it comes to building a successful eCommerce website. User expectations are higher than ever, and Google has set the bar high as well. This means that in order to rank high in the SERPs (search engine results pages), you need a rock-solid SEO strategy in place that covers all the essentials, including keyword research, on-page technical enhancements, and high-quality backlinks, just to start.
Shopify provides store owners with incredible tools that they can use to launch their eCommerce businesses, but this is just the beginning. SEO best practices are necessary in order to compete for page one results.
Improving Your Organic Traffic With Shopify SEO
No matter how great your products are, your website isn’t going to rank well in Google unless you are following Shopify best practices and certain fundamental SEO strategies. Organic traffic is one of the most important elements of any successful online store, but it takes a great deal of work to get a steady stream of visitors to your website.
Important Shopify SEO Best Practices to Consider Implementing
- Focus on transactional search intent with the keywords you select. While you do want to provide plenty of valuable information on your blog, don’t make the mistake of targeting informational keyword on your products, or vice versa. Search intent is one of the most important ranking factors right now, as Google continues to optimize how users find products and services based on certain queries.
- Treat every one of your product pages as if it were a landing page. Don’t rely on throwaway images or one sentence product descriptions. This is one of the worst things you could do for your business, as it conveys a cheap and lazy attitude and doesn’t do anything for your brand. You should make sure each page features great product photography, informative descriptions, relevant supplemental information, and an attractive layout that uses proper headers and section breaks for improved readability.
- Pay attention to your page speed. No one likes a slow website, and this can influence the user experience substantially, even leading to increased bounce rates and abandoned carts. While it would seem that raw page speed is not a huge ranking factor in Google’s eyes, first contextual paint is being emphasized as one of the key ranking factors going into the new year. The first contextual paint is how fast from the time a user visits your site, to the point where they can interact with and understand the content being displayed. This is largely determined by factors such as how well your site is coded, how compressed your images are, and how weighed down by apps and fluff your site is. Shopify gives you a lot of control over the content of your website, which is one of the reasons why it is such a preferred platform for eCommerce stores.
- Work on your internal linking. This is another important area of eCommerce SEO that many store owners don’t focus on enough. Coupled with easy to read URLs and well-structured navigation, internal linking is essential for helping users find what they are looking for as best as possible. Internal links also provide necessary context for Google’s crawlers. Don’t leave any of your content on an “island,” and make sure to create content on your blog that supports your products so that you can easily link to it in your product descriptions. You can also link relevant blog articles to each other when appropriate.
- Create valuable content. As a store owner, you do want to focus on your products, but that doesn’t mean the rest of your website has to suffer. You should work to make sure that your Shopify website acts as a powerful tool for your brand, and creating long-form content that engages your audience is one way to do this. Google is constantly looking for the highest quality content possible to rank on the first page, and you’re not going to get there with thin blogs and weak product descriptions. Invest the appropriate amount of time and energy into the content on your website if you want to impress your customers and get results.
These Shopify best practices will help you build a strong foundation for your online store so that you can begin to see some growth in your impressions and traffic. While some of these tasks may seem involved, this is the level of quality you need to strive toward if you want that valuable organic traffic to start coming in.
The Next Step For Improving Your Shopify SEO
Improving your store’s position in the search results can be quite the task, especially if you don’t have an extensive background in SEO yourself. In order to get the kind of results you are looking for, you may want to consider professional Shopify services to help you make the right changes and craft the kind of content your audience will love.
It can be difficult to make inroads with SEO without the proper guidance. Here are a few additional guides and resources for applying search engine optimizations to your Shopify website:
Improving Your Shopify SEO in 5 Steps
The Secret to Optimizing Your SEO
The Importance of Meta Descriptions
Getting Your Shopify Store Ranking in the Search Engines
If you are still having trouble developing an SEO strategy or taking care of all of the different tasks that are required in order to get real organic traffic into your store, feel free to reach out to us here at Genius eCommerce®. We are experts when it comes to ranking Shopify websites and can work with you to build a powerful data-driven campaign. Give us a call at 888.982.8269.
