Hi there,
To get your website on top of Google, you'd need SEO - to have good SEO, follow these steps
Step 01: Setting up Google Search Console and Submit Your Sitemap
What's the difference between Shopify SEO, and let's say, regular SEO?
Not much, both follow the same principles and set of basic rules. Shopify SEO tactics can also be categorized in the same three buckets:
- On-page SEO: On-page SEO covers all approaches you use to help search engines better understand and rank your content - which includes making content friendly and useful to your target audience; then optimizing your headings, tags, links so it can also be friendly to search engines.
- Off-page SEO: Off-page SEO covers all activities carried out on another site or platforms, including, but not limited to Link Building, Social Media, Local citation, landing reviews.
- Technical SEO: Technical SEO covers all activities that play a deciding role in whether your Shopify store gets indexed by search engines, including: site speed optimization, structured data, canonicalization, hreflang, and more all classes as technical SEO.
However, when it comes to Shopify SEO, there are several differences, both good and bad:
Is Shopify Good For SEO? | Is Shopify Bad For SEO? |
Speed: Shopify's CDN allows your online store to load quickly around the globe | Low capacity for content customization: Your options for customizing your blog pages, or regular pages are limited, which can be a hinder to your content marketing approach |
SEO built-in features: Shopify has all the basic built-in SEO options that most stores need: Automatic sitemap, 301 redirects, URLs personalization, etc. | Strings in URL: Shopify add some defaults fixed string to URL, etc. For example, a product page will have a mandatory ‘/products/’ in their URL. |
Apps: A wide variety of apps supporting you in improving your SEO performance |
With a quick analysis, the Goods outweighed the bad.
If you’re an SEO expert, you might need to rethink. But as an online store owner, Shopify makes it simple and efficient enough to navigate around lots of SEO's mind-boggling terminologies, and quickly pick up the basics to improve SEO.
Step 02: Setting up Google Search Console and Submit Your Sitemap
Let’s take a look at this detailed tutorial to learn how you can set up your Google Search Console, understand Shopify sitemap and how to submit one so that your customers can locate your treasure in the forest of Google search results.
Step 03: Setting up Google Analytics For Shopify Store
Check out how to connect eCommerce data from Shopify to Google Analytics to better measure your sales performance and your online store performance.
For more in-depth analysis and tutorials, check out our guide: Shopify Google Analytics Convesion Tracking For Beginners.
Step 04: Define Your Store Structure
With Shopify SEO, we'd recommend you use a Hierarchical model, that should look like this:
In Shopify, you'll generally use the following page types:
- Homepage
- Collection Pages
- Product Pages
- Informational Pages (contact us, about)
- Blog
The Homepage should be on top of the hierarchy, followed by the main categories (level 1), sub-categories (level 2) and finally the product pages (level 3).
This structure helps you to achieve the 1st golden rule in the site structure: No more than 03 clicks - simply put, potential buyers should be able to find what they're looking for in three clicks or less. Besides a better navigation experience for users, this 3-click rule allows your Homepage to distribute its authority to all of your major categories and product pages, thus, providing them a better chance to rank highly.
Step 05: Perform Keyword research your Shopify SEO
Keyword research is the very foundation of your SEO success - the reason is simple: we Googled in keywords. Thousands of search queries are typed into search engines every second - our job is to find out which one converts!
It sounds simple, but not so in reality.
Let's say you're selling Dog Chew Toys - which will be the keywords you're going to target?
- How to keep my dog happy?
- Dog toys near me
- Buy dog chew toys online
Now you want to target the last one right, but should you?
Hold off your horse - Before jumping right into it, let take a step back - these three options are three types of keyword:
- Informational keyword - this type of keyword matches the first stage of the online buyer journey - Awareness. Buyers use informational keywords to help them learn more about a topic, problem, product.
- Navigational keyword - this type of keyword matches the second stage of the online buyer journey - Consideration. Buyers use Navigation keywords to learn about a specific offering (dog toys) - these keywords often include brand-specific terms and navigational phrases like Near me, Features of, Reviews, Prices.
- Transactional keyword - this type of keyword matches the 3rd stage of the online buyer journey - Conversion. Buyers are ready to buy, and they are using transactional keyword (or product-focused keywords) to take action. Hence, these keywords often include phrases like: Discount, Buy, For Sale, Where to buy, etc.
“What am I going to do with this information?” - asked you?
Simply put, you use Informational keywords and Navigational keywords for creating content (blog posts, video, tutorials) to lead potential buyers to your store, and get them to be familiar with your brand.
At the same time, You use Transactional keywords for your Product Pages, to tailor the product pages and match it with the conversion step of the buyer's purchase process.
Now, let’s go over the keyword research process
Step 5.1: Keyword research tools 1. Aliexpress
Head-to-head with Amazon, Aliexpress is one of the biggest eCommerce sites, and also a goldmine of keywords. To tap into its potential, first head over to Aliexpress, enter a keyword that describes your products and check the suggestions.
The suggested keywords are often long-tail keywords, which tends to have a clearer buying intent, convert better and have lower competition.
This tactic can be easily replicated on Amazon as well!
2. Answerthepublic
Answer the public is a great tool to explore long-tail keyword ideas. Head over to Answerthepublic.com, enter your broad keyword (dog toys).
Wait for a for minutes, and get access to a bountiful of long-tailed keywords that can be used for your blog pages, or for your product pages.
3. Keywordtool.io
Similar to Answerthepublic, Keywordtool.io helps you explore long-tail keyword ideas. Free plan is available, but you'd need to upgrade to see more details, like search volume and keyword difficulty.
Step 5.2: Keyword selection tools
The above approaches should help you get plenty of keyword ideas for your Shopify store - the next question is What keyword should you select?
To decide it, use these 02 main criteria: Search Volume and Keyword Difficulty.
- Search volume tells you how many people have used a specific search query.
- Keyword difficulty tells you how competitive that keyword is.
So the ideal approach is that we'd want to target keywords having medium to large search volume, and medium to low competition. We'll introduce how you can get access to these data
1. Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is a built-in tool in Google Ads, you’d need to create a Google Ads account to get access to it - which should take you just a few minutes, plus, it's a free tool - so why not?
After logging in, you have two options: You can explore more keyword ideas (whose functions are similar to those of Keywordtool.io) or to get search volume data of your selected keyword.
Since we’re talking about how to select a keyword, head to option 2:
You can either enter your keywords, or put all of your keywords in a CSV file and upload it onto the search box.
After that, select Historical Metrics tab, you'll see Search volume and Competition information. Top of the page bid indicates how much money you'll need to spend to get Ads about Dog Toys to the top of the page. A high CPC indicates buyer intent - however, “high” is relative, for some niches, $3.73 is a bargain, but with Dog Toys, $3.73 is considerable.
As you can see, dog toys has an attractive Avg. Monthly searches, but high competition. So you might want to try out other long-tail keywords.
2. Ahrefs Keyword Explorer
Ahrefs is an SEO software suite that provides tools for keyword research, link building, rank tracking and many more. The pricing can be a bit too high for new Shopify store owners, but I can tell it's worth every cent!
Let see how we can use Ahrefs Keyword Explorer to determine which keywords can help you grow sales?
First, head over to Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, enter your keywords or upload a CSV file containing all keywords.
You'll get a detailed report including Keyword difficulty, Search volume, and a list of your direct competitors who are also ranking for that keyword.
Scroll down to see whom you're competing with - this helps you estimate how much efforts, SEO-wise, you need to make to get to Top 10 of search results. For example, the #1 result (Chewy.com) has strong Domain Rating (the strength) of a domain, over 1000 backlinks - can you compete with that? If you're a new Shopify merchant building your store, taking a long-tail keyword route might be a better idea.
Or if you're on budget, you can use Ahrefs's free tools like Keyword Difficulty checker to check more details about the competitiveness of a keyword, or Keyword generator to get more keyword ideas. We'll come back to Ahrefs' free tool later in Step 5 and 6.
If you want to get really technical about keyword research, check out this tutorial from Ahrefs themselves: Keyword Research guide for beginner.
Step 6: On-page SEO for Your Shopify Pages
Before we dive in, check out this sweet summary of a perfectly optimized ecommerce product page:
(Source: SEMrush.com)
Related article: How To Make Your Product Pages SEO-Friendly [Tutorials]
Step 6.1. URL
A simple rule to follow:
The URLs of your Product pages should be short, easy to scan and contain your focus keyword.
You might have seen an URL for a product page like this: storename.com/collections/collection-name/products/products-name and there are discussions about why long URLs like that are not preferred by search engines.
While it is true that Google, or any other search engines, prefers short URLs, Shopify’s built-in SEO capacity also helps you canonicalize your product pages - to put it simply, it tells Google which version of your product page is the primary version.
Step 6.2. Title
Naturally, you want to include your focus keyword in the Title tag, whether it's a product page or a blog page.
But that's also what everyone is doing. To take it to the next level, you'd need to:
- Add emotion-triggering, click-magnet words: Buyers are human too 🙂 they are influenced by powerful words like X% off, Free Shipping, Guarantee.
These click-magnet words help you increase your CTR, a higher CTR = more clicks = more sales. Quick math!
- Be mindful of the length of characters: The Title tag should be less than 70 characters, while your meta description should be less than 320 characters.
Step 6.3. Meta description
Similar to the Title tag, Meta description should have less than 320 characters (as indicated in Shopify SEO section), including focus keyword, related keywords and product features.
Now this is where most SEO beginners got it wrong - by cramming keywords into the meta description - in fact, it won't help at your SEO at all. Your meta description should be:
- Contain power keyword: Try now, Get it now, Buy now, Sales off
- Be descriptive - tell audience what to expect
Why? A persuasive copy helps your page get more clicks, and a higher CTR tells Search Engines about the attractiveness of your page - playing effects in climbing to a higher ranking.
PRO TIP 1: Now, Shopify SEO built-in tool shown above, without a doubt, is pretty handy to most SEO beginners. Unfortunately, the configuration was a bit outdated - Google no longer counts Title tag and meta description in the number of characters, it uses pixels instead. So how do you get the perfect SEO title and meta tag for your Product Pages?
Use this tool as an additional resource when crafting your Shopify SEO copies
Simply enter your Title, Meta and URL, and get an accurate SERP simulator to see if your Title or Meta are chopped off where it matters! As you can see, the Title should be under 560 pixels, URL should contain less than 560 pixels and META tag should be 990 pixels.
Step 6.4. Body content
Most category pages or product pages get straight to the products with no introduction — which isn’t good for User experience, and for Search Engines.
You should aim for at least a 300-word intro with your keyword included at least 2-3 times. (But don’t stuff it in there — make it flow and look natural.)
After that, you can use User-generated content, especially Product Reviews to rank for more keywords and increase conversion rate probabilities. Check out this example for Solo Stove where they masterfully combine Long-form content, Video content, Product Reviews and Excellent product usability wrapped up in a nice design.
Learn more about how to design a rocking product page with PageFly's Ultimate Guide to eCommerce Product Page Design.
PRO TIP 1: Avoid using jargon, overcomplicated words. Use words and phrases that your customer uses.
Use Hemingway app to check if your content can be easily scanned and has good readability.
PRO TIP 2: Use LSI (Latent Indexing Intent).
LSI keywords are essentially keywords that are semantically related to your main keyword, used in a search query. These LSI keywords supplement the main keywords and act as helpers to give stronger contextual information to the search engines and users.
Simply enter your focus keyword in LSIgraph.com
Let LSI database do the heavy work, and get a list of LSI keywords that you can use for your Product Page content
Step 6.5. Image ALT
Google can’t read images, they rely on alt text to know what it’s about which provides you another opportunity to include your keyword on the page, but only if it's relevant.
Keyword cramming is never good, whether in Page content, or in Image ALT. Write ALT text like you're describing the images to a visually-impaired person.
To optimize your Image ALT, check out this Shopify SEO app:
Avada SEO Image Optimizer helps you quickly optimize your Alt tag, among other great options like Meta tags optimization, SEO checklist or auto-complete Google Structured Data.
You can easily implement rich snippets for your Shopify store, using this SEO app:
Step 6.6: Page Experience & Page Speed
Google explicitly tells us that Page Speed and Page Experience are one of the ranking factors.
A good page speed alone would not do for your ranking, it must be supplemented with other page experience factors including Design, Interactivity, Safe-browsing, Mobile-friendliness.
It's also stated that while Page Experience is important, helpful information must go hand-in-hand.
Improving Page Experience can start with:
- Make mobile and desktop navigation effortless
- Decrease landing page load time.
- Improve your page speed
- Customize your landing page
You can achieve all of these approaches with PageFly's recommended customization capacity.
now that's the basics when it comes to SEO, for more details check out this GUIDE.
Let me know if my answer is helpful or not with a thumb up or like, cheers 😄
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