When you’re looking to set up your online store, Shopify is a great choice.
But, just because you have a shop set up and ready to go doesn’t mean people are going to flock to it.
Shopify is an amazing platform for eCommerce, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to work to rank it to get people to shop there. Much like with a shopify site that produces content, eCommerce sites have to be search engine optimized to pop up in the search results over their competitors.
The good news is, it comes with some Search Engine Optimization features (Shopify SEO), which will help you get started, but you’ll have to put in some work to get your shop up there in the rankings.
Is Your Site Built to be SEO Friendly?
When we talk about the way your site is built, we’re talking about how easy it is to use. Can users find what they’re looking for easily? This is where organization and simplicity help you to achieve your goals.
Organization starts with making sure the items on your shopping site are easy to find, if a user clicks on shoes, it shouldn’t be showing them tennis racks, right? When a user is able to easily find what they are looking for, they are more likely to explore other things, this not only equates to more potential sales but longer stay time on your site. Longer stay time equals higher ranking with Google.
Organization doesn’t mean cramming your shop full of categories and drop-down menus and separate pages. That’s where simplicity comes in. Make it organized, but don’t go all-in on subdividing your content. For instance, if you sell shoes, it’s a good idea to separate sneakers and dress shoes. However, separating your dress shoes into five other categories will just get confusing and hard to navigate, especially depending on how you index it.
The idea is to make it easy enough so that users can organically find what they are looking for and maybe stay a while in the process.
Improve the Interface
This next tip ties into the first, but focuses more on the actual function of your site rather than the layout.
The big key here is to make sure your site is optimized for mobile users. Google has moved to “mobile first” indexing, meaning desktop is considered as ancillary for crawling and ranking purposes.
There are tools within Google that will allow you to track your mobile device friendliness. Believe it or not, a lot of your shoppers will be browsing on their mobile phones and there is an entire process of optimizing for mobile.
Other tips include having multiple payment options, using small images to improve performance and load times, turning off any background shopify SEO apps you’re not using, and avoiding the use of sliders.
Much of what you’re doing is improving the loading times of your pages and minimizing the hassle of actively browsing your site. This will make users want to stay and shop. If it takes too long to load, or users are bombarded by large obnoxious product images, they will likely be turned off and go shop elsewhere.
Keywords Matter Too
Just like with content creation, you want to use the relevant keywords or target keywords related to the products you sell in meta descriptions with high search volume. That means looking for what your potential customers would look for on the search engines and tailoring your site to those keywords meta description.
It isn’t that complicated in terms of sales keywords. Simply think to yourself, “If I wanted to buy what I sell, how would I search for it in Google?” (keyword research).
If you’re not sure, you can find inspiration from social media, as well as forums, and even competitors’ sites. Once you have a good idea of how customers are searching, you can select the keywords that are most relevant and will have the most impact on search engine results (keyword research tool).
Build Out Your Site to be More Than Just a Store
Yes, we know, you’re trying to sell products, that doesn’t mean you can just stick some pictures and prices up and start selling. Having a web presence means just that, having a presence.
Having a threadbare eCommerce side with just some product pages on it isn’t going to rank highly at all.
The first thing to do when building out your site is to optimize product pages or category page. Using the right titles, tags, and headers will help your product pages and blog posts rank when people search for “where to buy” whatever it is you’re selling. Put some thought and effort in as well. If you sell t-shirts don’t just label your tags with the word “t-shirt” see what other categories you fit in and create the appropriate tags.
It’s important to clearly identify your space and then try your best to fit into it. You can add blogs and other content to your site related to your field to help it rank higher. You can also use link building to help drive traffic and increase ranking. Just make sure that you link with reputable sites that have a good reputation or your ranking won’t do anything but slide.
Use All the Tools & Services at Your Disposal
Some tools and plugins have been developed for Shopify that help you with optimizing your site for SEO. There are tools to help you consistently update your site to stay ranking and relevant as well as SEO tools that alert you to problems with the site and other features that you can add to help you with keyword saturation and other issues.
You should also make use of all the data that Google analytics gives you about your site to track organic traffic and how well your site is performing. This will let you determine how you’re doing, whether you need to advertise more, add new products or change your messaging to target other users and demographics. Data is a major key to success.
Data means more than just reading and interpreting. It means taking action in the form of engaging an agency with the appropriate SEO service for relevant audits, link building services and online content production. Relevancy often means giving the search engines more content to crawl. For a Shopify website or store, that could mean more blog posts, videos or even more product SKUs.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully, the tips we have provided in this guide will help you take your site from just a simple eCommerce site to a top-ranking sales behemoth with just a few simple tweaks. Shopify is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms out there, but if you don’t put in the work to optimize it, you’ll just be another store in the vast online marketplace.
Need help with optimizing your Shopify store? Engage our SEO services and SEO strategy today for SEO success!
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