Shopify SEO can help to improve the rankings of your Shopify store leading to more clicks, traffic, and conversions.
Have you been looking forward to establishing the best Shopify online store that could outrank Amazon on rankings?
Well, your dream is valid. There are many ways you can go about that and achieve your objectives. Shopify SEO is all you need to practice.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Shopify entails all activities and practices that seek to improve a Shopify website ranking on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
Today, 500,000 online businesses in over 175 countries are using Shopify. Anyone can set up an ecommerce platform with Shopify.
As a Shopify shop owner, you need to practice the best Shopify SEO strategies to make your website visible to target customers.
As a beginner in Shopify SEO, it may be challenging to understand the various SEO concepts and apply them to your website. That is why I have created this ultimate Shopify SEO guide to make it hassle-free for you to rank your website and start acquiring tons of organic traffic for free.
What is Shopify SEO?
Shopify SEO is simply the process of making your online store rank at the top of search engines preferably at position one or position zero to acquire the maximum organic traffic, generate more orders, and raise your profits.
Shopify is an e-commerce platform that anyone can use to set up an online store and begin selling products and services online.
As an online entrepreneur, you can use the Shopify plugins to manage your e-catalog, set the best shopping cart, sell to target customers, and ship customer merchandise.
Every website targets to appear on the first page of most search engines so that customers and internet users get a chance to see them.
Shopify SEO involves a lot. Here is a breakdown of the process:
- First, you have to create a website with Shopify and ensure it is visible on search engines.
- Make it possible for search engines like Google and Bing to locate your site and index it appropriately on SERPs.
- Use the most searched keywords on your websites and optimize it so that it appears at the top or on the first page of most search engines.
- Attract visitors or organic traffic to your website. In this case, the visitors may translate to customers if you create a site with a higher customer conversion rate.
Google, like most search engines, will rank a website based on the content it has published. The website must be relevant, useful, and authoritative to the user.
That means your website should have content that provides exact or definite answers to the question the user is asking.
The website must be related to a keyword niche to appear amongst the top ten results on any search engine.
Terminologies Used In Shopify SEO
- Search Engine – This is a website or software that gives answers or results to search queries. Search engines have in-built algorithms that help them to sieve different websites and list only the most useful ones that answer the user queries.
- URL – Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is a web address link that directs a user to the exact website page.
- SERPs – Search Engine Results Page is what you see on your screen once you type a keyword on search engines. In most cases, you will see a website URL followed with some detailed description of the page. You can read the descriptions and find out if the website answers your question before you click on it.
- Sitemap – A sitemap is a detailed description of all the pages that you have published on your website. It is available for all search engines to read and rank your website so that users can easily trace it.
- Keyword – A keyword is a phrase or search query that you insert on a search engine. Also, it can mean the phrases or words that you use on the content published on your site.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR) – CTR is the number of people that have clicked on a website that appears on SERPs. It tells how many people visit a site and take some noticeable actions like reading content, filling a form, or filling a shopping cart.
The Basics Of Shopify SEO
Shopify SEO is an elaborate process that involves the following stages.
- Keyword research
- Link building
- Improving and optimizing website architecture
- Content marketing
- Improving user experience
1 – Keyword Research
A keyword is a phrase that you have published on your site, which makes it possible for users to locate your website on search engine results.
For example, if customers are looking to buy a product like flowers from your Shopify store then they use keywords like “buy flowers online”, “buy flowers for birthday”, “flowers for special occasions”, etc.
Keywords are either short-tail or long-tail. A long-tail keyword is more focused on s specific topic. It explains what the user needs more, making it easier for a search engine to give exact results for the search query.
Short tail keywords are useful when searching for a wider topic. For instance, in our case of “buy flowers online”, a short tail keyword can be “flowers” or “buy flowers”.
In most cases, people will use short tail or long-tail keywords based on the kind of information they are looking for on the internet.
You should optimize your Shopify website for both short-tail and long-tail keywords.
The choice of a search query depends on its intention for informational purposes or commercial purposes. Most short tail commercial keywords are very competitive. For instance, for the search query, ‘smartphones’, we get over 3.5 billion search results on Google. This shows the stiff competition that those intending to establish the best Shopify ecommerce platform may face.
Steps To Effective Keyword Research
Ideally, keyword research is the basis of Shopify SEO.
Therefore, if you are not going to get the concept right, then you should forget about ranking your site on the first page of a search engine.
To start the keyword research, you should follow the following steps.
Set A Keyword Sheet
First, you have to create a Google or Excel sheet. You will use the sheet to organize all the keywords. For instance, you can have a Google sheet with different columns. Have a column for products, the home page, and other collections of keywords.
Save the sheet on Google Drive so that you can access and retrieve it anytime when working on your site.
Identify The Best Keywords For Your Shopify Store
After setting a keyword research sheet, you can now focus on finding the most used keywords on search engines like Google. I will focus more on finding keywords for a collection page.
You can apply this specific approach to both the home page and product pages.
Use Google To Find Out The Most Searched Keywords
Google is one of the most used search engines in the world today. That is why I am going to use it to explain most of the points in this article.
Unlike other search engines, Goggle can help you with your keyword research. It provides a list of possible keywords at the bottom of a search page.
For instance, if you are dealing with animal feeds, you can enter a related search query on Google to find out what your customers may be looking for when they browse.
If you use a search query like ‘livestock feeds”, you are likely to get more generic keywords related to this search term.
Elaborate on the search query a bit to focus on a particular product category you are offering. Combine a generic keyword with a special keyword to increase the results your get on the search engine page. In our case, ‘livestock feeds ‘is our generic keyword.
We can include ‘cattle livestock feeds’ to increase the number of possible keywords we get.
Note that the word ‘cattle’ is our special keyword, and it should always come first to signal the search engine that we are mainly focusing on getting results related to the term.
Google will start giving you search results based on what people may be looking for as you continue adding more special keywords to your generic keyword.
In the above screenshot, Google suggests ten possible keywords that most people are searching for based on the generic keyword you have entered on the search engine.
Once you add the word ‘cattle’ on the generic keyword, the suggestion keywords change, as shown below.
If you are supplying cattle feeds to local farmers, you can now get over ten possible keywords to include in your collection pages. With such keywords, you can easily capture the attention of those searching for those keywords on Google.
Also, you can get more keyword suggestions at the bottom of the search results page and add to your list of keywords. The image below shows some keywords that Google suggests for the special keyword ‘cattle livestock feed.’
Use A Keyword Search Tool To Add More Keywords To Your Sheet
There are many keyword research tools like Soovle, Ubersuggest, Moz Keywordtool.io, Jaaxy, and Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, which you can use to increase your search keywords for Shopify SEO.
Most of these tools give more keyword suggestions when you subscribe to their paid packages.
I used the Keywordtool.io to search for more keywords for a special keyword’ cattle livestock feed”. The screenshot below shows the results I obtained from this tool.
As you can see on the screenshot above, the tool is giving six more keywords that you can include on your website. You can also get 2X more keywords once you subscribe to Keyword.io as specified on their page.
Keyword.io also gives you the chance to specify your keyword location or country.
For instance, in this case, the six keyword suggestions are based on the U.K. location. You are likely to get more keywords once you change the location or add more special keywords that relate to your products category.
Separate Primary And Secondary Keywords
The primary keyword is a short tail keyword, while a secondary keyword is a long-tail keyword. You can focus on separating and grouping those keywords into primary and secondary keywords once you come up with your long list of keywords. I would highly recommend you to read this extensive guide on keyword research because this will help you prepare your own keyword research sheet.
If you are selling livestock feeds, you probably have specialized in cow feeds, or cattle feeds. If you want to narrow down and pick the most appropriate keyword for your target customers, then consider a keyword that relates directly to your website.
Similarly, you can insert a new primary keyword ‘cattle livestock feed’ and see the suggestions Google provides.
This way, you can tell the most appropriate primary keyword that you can use on your content.
The Google sheet you created in the first step above includes the primary and secondary keywords that relate to the products you are offering. Google provides all secondary keywords related to a search query.
It bolds all secondary keywords and locates them at the end.
Use The Keywords
In this step of doing Shopify SEO, you now have the primary and secondary keywords ready for use. You can use some or all of the keywords in your Meta Descriptions, titles, and in the URL description. Do not use more than one keyword for each page. For example, if you are selling ‘Samsung smartphones’ then create a specific page for ‘Samsung smartphones’ and do not include ‘Nokia smartphones’ in it. Every page on your site should focus on one unique keyword.
Using the keyword in the URL makes it possible for the users to know whether your website has the content they are looking for, even without clicking on it. In most cases, you should only use the primary keyword in your URL.
For example, in our case, ‘we can include ‘cattle livestock feed’ as our primary keyword. Therefore, our final URL for a page will have the format below:
https://mystore.com/cattle-livestock-feed/
2- Link building For Shopify SEO
Frankly speaking, link building is never a walk in the park. However, if done the right way, it can help increase traffic to any website.
Link building is the entire process of earning or acquiring backlinks to your website.
As an off-page SEO strategy, link building helps you to position your website on the first page of every search engine so that target customers can quickly locate it.
Types Of Backlinks
Editorial backlinks: These are backlinks that you get free from other sites. For example, if you are dealing with livestock feeds, a website can publish content with the heading ‘How to Take Good Care of your Livestock’ and decide to include a link to your Shopify website.
In this case, the link is a free editorial backlink because you did not ask the website to publish it. They did it on free will because they believe your Shopify site has the best content.
Non-editorial backlinks: These are the type of backlinks that you acquire from your own efforts. You start by asking a website owner if you can guest post on their platform then create content with a backlink to your site.
Simply put. Editorial backlinks are free links that you didn’t pay for or ask websites to publish while outreach and non-editorial links are paid for backlinks.
Factors Affecting The Quality Of Backlinks
- Linking page authority: If the backlink is coming from a site that is highly ranked by search engines, then it is considered a high-quality backlink. Most people would pay to have a backlink from an authority site- this is against the guidelines of most search engines.
- The backlink relevance. A backlink from a website in your product category has more SEO weight compared to one from a different niche website.
- The original site’s content quality: A backlink has more SEO weight if it originates from a website with more quality content.
- The Domain Authority of the website: The backlink has a higher value and SEO weight if it comes from a website with great website domain authority.
- Type of anchor text: Vague anchor texts such as ‘click here’ or ‘read more’ have low SEO value compared to natural anchor texts that appear on the content.
- Domain age of the referring site: If the backlink is originating from a website with an old domain, then the SEO weight of the backlink is high, as opposed to a recently established site.
Steps To Effective Link Building
Step 1: What Type Of Backlinks Do You Need?
Without stating the type of backlinks you need, it may be difficult to succeed with a backlink strategy. Define the type of backlinks you want for your website and why you need them in the first place.
The primary objective of using backlinks is to drive traffic to your website and increase your customer base. Therefore, you should focus more on backlinks that redirect visitors to your sales page.
If you’ve set your mind on making your website rank at the top, you can focus on high-quality backlinks that target your website’s home page.
When your home pages earn more backlinks, it has a positive impact on your website domain authority.
Here is a breakdown of some types of backlinks you may opt for:
- Backlinks that increase your website visibility on search engines.
- Backlinks that increase the domain authority of your website.
- Backlinks that increase traffic to your website and improve your customer conversion rate.
- Backlinks that helps you to acquire customers from related sites.
Step 2: Set Your Goals Clearly
Every SEO strategy must have an objective or goal. A goal is what you want to achieve with the strategy you are employing.
With a definite goal and objective, you will always work towards improving your website and business by staying within your framework.
Here are some best practices to help you set the best goal for a link building campaign
- The goals you set for link building must relate to the objectives of your business. For instance, you can have a goal to set backlinks that will help you to grow the business in the next two years.
- To keep your progress and stay on the right track with link building, you must set quarterly goals that you want to meet. You can easily determine whether your business is progressing or not if you set a quarterly goal. This is because you will be able to account for all your actions.
- Set easy to achieve and measurable goals when coming up with a list of tasks that you intend to accomplish. Long term goals may be hard to accomplish because they take time and commitment, which is de-motivating.
Step 3: Set Link Targets
Coming up with a list of targets for your backlinks should not be that difficult as long as you understand your business niche.
Let’s say that you are dealing with fresh fruit supply for local customers. When coming up with link targets, you can now focus on answering questions such as:
- Which content may capture my customers’ attention?
- Who are the third-party bloggers and influencers I can partner with to publish my content? (See: The Complete Guide to Influencer Marketing).
Once you’ve specified the target audience, you should now come up with a long list of topics. In our example of fresh fruit business, you can have topics like:
- 10 benefits of eating fresh fruits
- Where should you buy your favorite fruits?
- 5 reasons why eating fruits help with weight loss
If you target creating backlinks with more SEO weight, you must ensure you come up with detailed topics that most websites have not published. You must ensure the content that you create stands out from the rest of the park.
After coming up with a detailed list of topics, the next question is to find out who is likely to publish your content online. The content ‘publishers’ in this case act as your backlink targets.
Reach out to famous bloggers and influencers to help you reach your target audience. (See: Influencer Marketing Guide).
If you get a blogger with an excellent reputation in your product niche and publish your content on their websites, you can be certain of increasing traffic to your site.
Also, use tools such as BuzzSumo and BuzzStream to find influencers that can share your content to target audience and increase traffic to your website.
Step 4: Build A Relationship With The Influencers
The only way to get influencers to promote your website is by establishing a more personal and long-term relationship with them. Focus more on making the influencer your products ambassador so they can market your site for many years to come.
Also, you should plan on getting some incentives to give the influencers and bloggers that publish your backlinks.
For instance, you can opt for affiliate marketing and provide commissions to every website that promotes your product if a customer from those sites ends up buying from your Shopify store.
Step 5: Custom Your Emails And Reach Out To Customers
In the modern world, businesses are looking forward to establishing the most loyal customers through customer-centered approaches.
One such approach is sending your customers personalized emails that reach out to them directly.
Ideally, personalized emails get more replies compared to generic outreach emails. Always personalize your emails by mentioning the customer’s name in the introductory part of the email.
Related: The Top Email Marketing Services
Here are some email marketing tips to help you improve your branding:
- Make the email subject line more compelling to the recipient. You can use something you feel is more general to the influencer you are contacting.
- Learn more about your influencers before you contact them. For example, if your influencer has a website, you can read their ‘About Us’ page and get some insights before sending them an email.
- Follow your influencer on social media platforms. This way, you can learn more about what they like or dislike. You can talk about something they posted on the emails you are sending them to capture their attention.
- Always send a follow-up email if you don’t get a reply from the influencer. If you get some negative feedback, you can review your email once more. It could be that you are not respectful or didn’t keep a professional tone when asking them to partner with you. The best practice is to find out why the email recipient is not replying before you follow them up.
3- Improve And Optimize Your Website Architecture
Having an optimized Shopify site is one sure way of ensuring search engines rank your websites at the top.
To enhance user experience and give your customers another reason to shop at your online store once more, you have to ensure you have the best website architecture.
Search engines like Google and Yahoo, use your site architecture rating for indexing. If your website is optimized, search engine robots can easily crawl it and ensure it is positioned where your target customers are.
For any Shopify website, you should have a flat architecture. This is because it reduces the number of mouse clicks the customers have to make before reaching the product to at least three.
You can also use the power of best SEO apps for Shopify that can help you optimize your technical SEO.
If the pages on your website are located far away from the home page, it may take the search engines a bit of time to index them.
Here are some tips that you should employ to make your website easy to navigate and crawl by search engines:
Increase Website Speed
Nothing pisses a customer off like a slow website. If your site takes more than ten seconds or longer to download, you are likely to witness higher bounce rates.
The point here is that you should ensure the site takes the shortest time to open so that the customers can easily locate the products you are offering on time. You reduce the customer conversion rate by at least 7% with a second delay in the opening of web pages.
You can practice the following to boost your website download speed:
- Remove all broken links and reduce the number of redirects on your website.
- Make the CSS and JS size file smaller.
- Choose a theme that is highly responsive and fast for your Shopify website.
- Reduce the size of the image that you upload on the site.
- Make the browser cache active.
- Sign up to Google Console and observe all the suggestions it gives.
Optimize Your Website For Search Engines
Your website should rank at the top of SERPs to increase conversion rate and the number of visitors that you get. To help your visitors locate your website, you must optimize it for search engines. The following are some tips that you can apply to make your site more visible to search engines.
- Use SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Agency Analytics for SEO
- Apply keyword research to get the most searched keywords for your website content.
- Use Alt tags for all images that you publish on your site.
- Observe character limit when optimizing your Meta Descriptions.
- Have a sitemap for your site and update it regularly.
- Ensure every page and product on your site has an optimized URL.
- Every page on your website should have a target keyword on the H1 tag.
- Monitor your website with Google Console and always implement all suggestions it gives you.
Enforce Structured Data Markup
Structured Data Markup is a code that tells Google crawler more about your site rating and product reviews even before navigating it. Search engines can understand more about the products you are selling and provide appropriate information to the users on the SERP. It readily avails information such as availability, price, and rating to the user.
Below is a screenshot showing how Structured Data Markup makes it easier for the user to know more about your site before they navigate it.
In the image above, Best Buy Mobile has a five-star rating for all individuals looking for places to buy smartphones in the U.S.
It is easy for customers to decide the best online store they would like to visit using the review information that Google provides for each website.
4- Content Marketing
Trust me. Running an online Shopify store is not going to be that easy. You have to be smart with the content you create and publish on your site if you intend to drive traffic and increase customer conversion rates.
Since most customers, at least 70%, would instead learn more about your online business in an article, you must ensure you come up with fresh, high quality, and customer-centered content.
Most customers reading your content are likely to jump from discovering your products into buying as long as the information you are providing is adequate and reliable.
Here are some tips for content marketing that you should always enforce if you intend o get your customers off the ‘awareness stage’ and turn them to potential buyers:
Share Your Content On Social Media Platforms
There are millions of potential customers spending their free time on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. You should focus on catching up with them by sharing your content on such platforms.
For instance, if you have products that require a lot of images for demonstration, you can post such images on Instagram. People will like and share the images making your brand more popular.
For short descriptions of your products, you can use Twitter. Create a hashtag for your products so that people can comment on your products. This way, you can drive more traffic to your website.
Also, use Facebook to share more about your products and services to those following your brand. Facebook has a live video feature (Facebook Live) that you can use to reach out to your customers and show them more about your products and services.
Get More Traffic Through PPC
Pay Per Click (PPC) is another useful way of increasing traffic to your website. PPC is a long-term content marketing tool that helps you test your site’s conversion rate.
You can use this strategy to find out if your website has all the features to increase user experiences, such as product descriptions, contact information, return policy, and shipping info.
Additionally, PPC can help you determine which content you create has the highest conversion rate. With the right information on the most useful content for your target customers, you can now do some keyword research and get the most relevant keywords to use in your content.
With the right keywords, you can create content that solves customers’ problems or helps you achieve your business goals – which in most cases, is to increase your website conversion rate and leads.
PPC has more strength compared to other forms of digital marketing. Let’s take the example of Google Ads. Once a user begins to search for products online, an Adword will appear at the top of their search engine.
The user is likely to click on the adverts and most probably visit the online store offering the products or services.
Unlike other forms of content marketing, PPC gets the customers at the right place and time, thereby increasing the conversion rate significantly.
Focus On Driving Sustained Traffic To Your Site
Another great way to drive more traffic to your site and make more sales is by becoming an expert in your field and commenting on social platforms. Here are some ways you can drive more sustained traffic to your website:
- Sign up for free on Quora.com and begin answering questions that relate to your product on this platform. The more questions you answer, the more backlinks you earn for your website.
- Comment more on videos and blog posts that relate to your website. This way, you get your brand and site on the customer limelight.
- Increase audience credibility by using podcasts. If you have valuable content that you feel like sharing, then you can reach out to related podcasts that look for interviews and share information with them.
Wrapping Up
The topic of Shopify SEO is a bit elaborate. You must master all the basic SEO concepts shared here if you want to succeed in your online business.
In this article, I have shared some simple tips on Shopify SEO that you should implement for your online store.
Here are some takeaways to recall:
- There are different types of backlinks, and you should always choose those that improve your site ranking on search engines.
- Create authoritative, reliable, and quality content to market your website to target customers.
- Optimizing your website architecture is key to improving its visibility and customer conversion rate.
- Before creating content for your website, you should do some keyword research to find out the most searched keywords for your product category.
- Partner with influencers and third party websites to market your products and help you build a brand online.
- You can share your brand on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram and drive more traffic to your site.
The Shopify SEO tips on this article can help you to improve your Shopify store ranking on most search engines. All you have to do is ensure you are consistent because most of these strategies will take time before you can realize the results.
