Ready to enhance your eCommerce site and dramatically boost your Google rankings, increase store traffic, and ultimately revenue?
There’s no better way to start than with Shopify SEO.
In this guide, you’ll discover five ways you can greatly enhance your SEO strategy.
With Shopify surpassing more than one million merchants on the platform in October 2019, it has never been more important to enhance and improve your Shopify SEO strategy.
Whether you’re launching your first online store or are a well-established business looking to increase market presence, these tips are an easy way to strengthen your SEO and boost your Shopify website traffic.
How can you improve your Shopify SEO?
SEO is focused on optimizing a website so that it’s:
- Easy for the search engine to crawl through and understand
- Relevant for the customer with content that speaks to the audience
- Trusted by other websites across your chosen industry
By building on these three key areas, you’ll quickly see your Shopify store grow. So, what are you waiting for? Let’s get started!
The Essential Technical SEO Checklist
Having strong technical SEO on your Shopify website will help serve as a powerful foundation for your store, ensuring that it can be easily understood by search engines such as Google.
Here are a number of technical SEO components that you need to review.
1. Optimize Meta Information
For Shopify SEO, meta information generally refers to the page title or meta description of your page. Both play a major factor in SEO ranking, but for two different reasons.
Title Tags
The title tag is one of the most important pieces of SEO on any web page, as this will be what people will see when on a search engines page. As the first piece of information any customer has of your website, it’s important that title tags are optimized to grab the most visitors.
Meta Descriptions
The meta description is the little snippet of text which sits below the title tag. While it’s not explicitly a ranking factor, it can have a major impact in terms of click-through-rate as customers use the information to decide whether the website is worth visiting.
Optimizing your Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Here’s how to optimize your title tags and meta descriptions for SEO:
- Use a focus keyword (and keep it at the front)
- Mention the year or month
- Keep title tags to 50 – 60 characters and meta descriptions between 150 – 160 characters in length
- Include the brand/store name at the end of the title tag
- Use an active and engaging tone
Optimizing Product and Collection Descriptions
Now it’s time to move onto the description of your Shopify products or collections. While simply using the copy provided by your suppliers can work, original and unique copy is always far more effective.
While writing up this copy, it’s important to be mindful of how you incorporate keywords. Adding in keywords with reckless abandon can easily be spotted by search engines, causing your copy to be needlessly devalued. As such, try to add keywords in a way which naturally flows with the content.
For more help, here’s a perfect guide on how to create epic product descriptions.
Decrease Load Times
Nothing is worse than clicking on a website than waiting forever for the page to load, oftentimes, we’ll simply move on to the next website instead. Shopify pages on average take around 4.5 – 5 seconds to fully load, while this is a good speed, the bounce rate between load times of 4 and 5 seconds increases dramatically from 24% to 38%.
Here are two simple ways to optimize your website that can drastically increase your Shopify website speed and decrease your bounce rate.
a. Compress Images
From product thumbnails, lifestyle photos, to user generated content, your Shopify store will have plenty of images that help a customer understand and purchase your product. Nevertheless, if left unchecked, images could become a major issue tanking your loading speeds. This is where image compression comes in.
By taking your images, compressing them down to a much smaller size, you should see your Shopify site quickly rise in speed. Websites like Tinypng are free and amazing services which let you save plenty of file size without reducing the quality of your images.
b. Reduce Number of Apps Installed
As you add one app after another on Shopify, your page speed will inevitably increase. That’s because each app will add more Javascript or CSS code to your website to ensure it can be used at all times, making your store slower.
Look through every app on your Shopify store and uninstall any that are not being currently used. Also, be extra considerate when choosing future apps, as these could negatively impact your speed long-term.
Clean up any Duplicate Content
While you won’t be explicitly penalized for duplicate content, this can still at times negatively impact your search rankings. If the same content appears in more than one location, search engines need to decide for themselves which is more relevant and will display that page instead. This could lead to a coin toss that doesn’t land in your favor.
But why leave it to chance?
Here are two ways to reduce duplicate content.
a. Use 301 redirects
An easy way to reduce duplicate pages is to introduce a 301 redirect to the original page. Not only will this tell Google which is the correct page, it will help customers visit the pages you want them to see.
b. Add Canonicalization URLs
Canonical links tell search engines that the chosen page is a copy of a specified URL and that any “ranking power” applied to this page should instead go to the specified URL instead. In use, canonical tags are placed in the <head> section of your desired web pages code like this:
<link rel=“canonical” href=“https://example.com/page/” />
To break this down:
- Rel=”canonical” signifies that the link provided is the main version of this page.
- Href=”https://example.com/page/” defines the link which should be considered the canonical (main) version.
Build Internal and External Links to Your Store
Obtaining external links going back to your Shopify website – otherwise known as backlinks – is a powerful way to increase the value of your store. Think of backlinks like word of mouth, the more websites link to you, the more Google thinks your website is important.
Not sure how to grab backlinks? Here are some ideas:
- Obtain links from your manufacturers and suppliers
- Outreach to influencers to create content linking to your store
- Create meaningful content that is shared by other websites
- Make your product pages embeddable on other websites or shareable on social media
Can you be successful on Shopify?
Definitely! Shopify is specially built as an eCommerce platform that is perfect for businesses of any size and make. With $319 billion of global economic activity on businesses on Shopify being recorded on the platform overall from 2016 to 2019, it’s clear Shopify has been successful in elevating stores and increasing conversions. Plus, with the eCommerce platform holding a strong 20% market share, and only increasing, it’s time to make the change to Shopify today.
Start improving your Shopify store today
Search engine optimization can and will deliver huge eCommerce growth, new sales opportunities, and tangible revenue impact when you’ve created a strong framework. Maximize your traffic and skyrocket your small business to success. Discover new opportunities and outshine your competitors, claim your free Digital Audit and Strategy Session (worth 2K) from Online Marketing Gurus, Payability’s partner in evidence-based digital marketing.
