What should the best Shopify SEO course cover?

[vitaliykolos]

I'm working on my Shopify SEO video course. And I've been wondering what are the biggest Shopify SEO struggles that people are having so that I can create course episodes about those things. What episodes should the best Shopify SEO course include for sure? 

[KieranR]

A good place to start for inspiration is the ContentKing Shopify SEO guide.

There's also the Unofficial Shopify Insiders fb group and podcast (search for SEO). 

There was a real nice podcast series on intro to SEO on Shopify that was bundled with an app JSON-LD for SEO although gated behind an app one off fee, not bad.

Plenty of online communities to find reoccuring pain points including this one.

But I'll list out a few areas from my own experience. 

• an overview of the platforms stock SEO quirks and common problem areas. Canonicals, effects of removimg pages, tag pages, dupe content, etc
• ways to control SEO meta desc & titles, liquid techniques and app comparison
• Linking directly to products skipping the collections dupe URLs. how to change and implications
• Redirects in shopify
• Adding custom content per page or collection beyond a textwall description field. 
• Schema, jsonld and metadata - how different themes and apps approach and some good ideas. including aroundup of review apps and aggregate schema. also faqschema.
• Limitations around inability to edit robots.txt, sitemaps, URL routing
• Advanced: how to deal with a lack of robust information architecture (no core concept of sub collections) and advanced ways around this like metafields and breadcrumb hacks
• advanced: work arounds for some limitations with cloudflare workers
• Advanced : how to setup a seo.hidden metafield for custom noindex on a per resource level
• Advanced: how to setup seo.canonical for custom canonical overrides on a per resource level
• Publishing content and an overview of some of the editor quirks 
• Internationisation, options available including seperate store instances on different cctlds, using subdomains and language /codes hreflang options. using the new country domain functionality vs other approaches
• The variant problem and how to make variants indexable without being duplicate content, for situations when there is long tail opportunity in the variants. Also the alternative approach of using individual PDPs for each. 
• Google Shopping organic listing's and an intro to shopping feeds and GMC, why the default app is crap

That's roughly the shape of what I'd love to see covered being platform specific to Shopify and then some. 

The real entry level stuff has been done to death imo, the above would actually have value. 

[Mete]

Great coverage from @KieranR!

I want to add one more thing. We have seen a lot of merchants are hiding/deleting their products when they become out of stock even if they will replenish them later. Because merchants don't want out of stock products to be seen in top of their collections. Then engines show them with status code 404 -> not found error. We created a Push Down & Hide app to prevent this type of issues.

1- We allow customers to push down their sold out products to the end of the collections so that crawlers can still access to them instead of getting a 404 response.

2- You can set a rule such as if product is not replenished after X days, hide it. So that we can hide it automatically if it's a product that customer won't replenish anymore.

3- As a better alternative to step 2, we will release a new feature which redirects this product page to a similar product page or collection page with status code 301.

[Propelguru]

SEO, referred to as Search engine optimization, is the key to the success of internet businesses with its digital capabilities and the benefits they receive. SEO can help many marketers improve the overall health and view of their sites and research.

The SEO Shopify course must include:

1. Learn the SEO basics for ranking websites, blogs or e-commerce sites
2. How to optimize your product for better search engine rankings
3. How to use the content
4. Set up local SEO and mobile websites
5. Define your audience, concepts, angles and patterns
6. How to measure SEO performance
7. Learn best practices from SEO
8. Learn how to search for content and optimize pages for content
9. Learn about connections and how to design the internal structure of connections
10. Learn how to make the most of your site's symbols and patterns
11. Promote your content through social media
12. How to become a good website for e-commerce research

[Entaice]

Honestly, would love to see someone focus on the expected business outcomes of SEO vs the technical implementation.  There's a ton out there about how to structure your pages and content...but very little on "what's a realistic amount of traffic i can expect in the next 6 months if I do X/Y/Z."  Nothing's more disheartening than trying to learn the ins and outs of SEO then having no increase in traffic.

[KieranR]

@Entaice if you are making a Shopify SEO course (like OP is asking about), then IMO covering Shopify-specific platform SEO-isms, makes way more sense to me.

Don't get me wrong there is huuge value in doing exactly what you are suggesting, although I feel that this is more suited to a much more in-depth SEO strategy or keyword research course.

I'm not sure what I'd call it, maybe "SEO benchmarking" or "SEO opportunity identification" or just "SEO strategy". Essentially all starting with keyword/topic research.

It can involve things like: 

• Get click potential based on niche, geo, competitors, keyword research, keyword volumes through various tools to see the total search volume potential
• Forecast realistic future target position per kwd based what content you *could* provide that you're not + what visibility you could improve
• Get click-through rate estimates and estimated monthly clicks (eg Ahrefs)
• Get the current onsite conversion rates. 
• Get the AOV, or value of a lead or LTV of a customer or some $ metric for what is an "aquisition"
• Back of envelope it, and multiply it all together.
  • IF we increased from pos x to pos y for this list of kw; based on:
    this kw vol data, and these CTR assumptions, in this geo, and this conversion rate assumption being roughly sustained
  • THEN this is the $dollar value potential
• Then you can start to quantify how much effort it will take to get there. How much content, how many links, what tech changes are needed/possible.
• Then scope that all out and work out how much time it *might take* and what mix of tactics/overall strategy you would take, and what deliverables look like.

Some of these the answers like "how long and how much will it cost?" just can't be answered quickly. They take time, experience, assumptions and both qualitative + quantitative information to start to evaluate, without even starting actual SEO work.

I've done things like this a number of times when working at agencies in the past, we would run through a quick version of a process like this to vet client organic search potential. Some businesses genuinely have very little SEO potential. Things like geos, competition levels, niche can affect this. Then more qualitative things like lack of content/dev resource, company politics can prevent SEO from actually working in practise.

So many factors involved in what you're suggesting. I agree it's important, but really not suited for a course on "How to do SEO on Shopify", much bigger picture stuff than that.

[pkacademy314]

WE offer a SEO Course