Shopify is a large e-commerce platform that hosts more than 1 million stores. However, 95% of Shopify businesses fail. Why? There are many reasons including bad SEO, lack of marketing, bad design etc. It really takes your business day to build Shopify, but you have to work every day to get more organic traffic. This leads to sales. SEO plays a vital role in promoting your business. Hence, today we are going to talk about SEO tips for Shopify.
Is Shopify Good for SEO?
The short answer is yes. Shopify has several SEO options out there which you can read about in the official Shopify SEO guide. It’s also perfect for cell phones. Since 2018, Google has offered an approach to indexing mobile phones for the first time. So, once you have created your Shopify shop and have successfully set the initial SEO parameters, it will appear in Google search results. Then it’s up to you – the more SEO techniques you use, the higher your ranking.
How to get your Shopify site in the top position of Google search results?
As with any platform, you’ll need to put in a lot of work to get more traffic to your Shopify store. The better your website is when it comes to Google ranking, the higher your ranking will be. Here are a few SEO tips that can help you promote your Shopify store.
1: Optimize site structure
The way images, text, links and other content are placed on your website is important for search engine optimization. If users easily navigate your website and find what they need, they will likely keep coming back and spending a lot of time on your website. If a website looks complex or congested, users can simply close it down and start another store with the same product but with a clearer site structure.
What do we mean by structural optimization? Think about the categories and subcategories of your website. The simpler your site structure, the better it is for SEO.
In addition, you need to create About and Contacts pages to let users and search engines know that your store is credible.
2: Research and use relevant keywords
Keywords used to be and are the key to search engine optimization. For example, suppose your user searches for “Gucci dresses”. If you’re selling dresses from this brand, this is a great targeting keyword to use on related product or category pages. Remember, however, that in 2021 there will be no point in spamming unreadable keywords – all queries should be used naturally. There are 4 main places on Shopify where you can and should use targeted queries:
- Title
- Description
- Alt tag
- page text content
There are several strategies for using keywords. Some SEO experts recommend using only low frequency keywords, while others recommend paying attention to high frequency keywords first. Either way, you need to collect, classify, and use it wisely. Find and use related keywords in addition to your base query. Use a professional service like SE ranking, with which you can track your business position, find new relevant keywords, and segment them.
3: Create meta tags
You can use the free Shopify feature and add meta tags manually for each product and page. There is also a special Shopify app that automatically generates relevant meta tags, including title tags, meta descriptions, alternative text, and more. Meta tags are necessary so that Google’s crawlers can understand and judge the content of your page.
4: Create a sitemap
In fact, Shopify automatically generates a sitemap. It has links to all the content on your website (pages, products, images, etc.) and tells Google reviewers which URL to categorize. However, if you already like advanced search engine optimization, you can create sitemaps manually and, for example, exclude some pages.
Remember, sitemaps are only created for your store’s main domain when you use a Shopify master plan. If you’re on one of the advanced plans, you can use international domains and create region-specific domains. In this case, a sitemap will be generated for all of your domains.
5: Canon the url and find the robots.txt file
Shopify allows users to canonicalize URLs to let Google’s crawlers know what the basic versions of multiple identical pages are. So think about this step. Additionally, Shopify automatically blocks page content, which can affect the effectiveness of your SEO work. For example, a shopping cart page is always blocked. The robots.txt file contains a list of pages where you can allow or prevent search engine crawling. You can’t edit it, but you must know which pages are not indexed.
To ask Google to crawl your store’s content again, make changes to your sitemap and submit it to Google Search Console. If you want to add multiple pages to robots.txt for pages you don’t want indexed, here are step-by-step instructions. However, please note that you cannot exclude this page from the list. Just add them.
6: Link the product page from the main page
Your shop homepage is the hub of your entire website with the most link juice. There should be a link to the category and product page on the main page. Links to categories are not only on the menu but also on the main page. This may sound obvious, but it’s a common mistake made by inexperienced Shopify store owners. Some categories or subcategories may be buried so deep in the structure of your website that users can’t find them without a link.
Summary
Shopify’s SEO is similar to other platform SEO jobs, but there are a few differences. In general, Shopify has a few SEO setups in place so that people with no knowledge of internet marketing can gradually promote their online shop. However, to get impressive results, you need to understand the intricacies and move up to a higher level. Plus, you can use all the SEO apps Shopify has to offer itself. There are a wide variety of different services that partially automate SEO tasks.