In today's digital age, it's more important than ever to have a strong online presence; this is especially true for small businesses.
Shopify is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms out there, and for good reason. It's easy to use and offers tons of features to help your business grow.
But even if you're using Shopify, you still need to do some SEO work to ensure your site reaches its full potential. While Shopify has automated SEO solutions, a business still needs to put in the effort to optimise the site so that there is a higher chance customers will find them in the SERPs.
Is Shopify good for SEO?
Popping up on the top SERP page isn’t just a game of luck. Several factors will influence how Google or Bing choose to display your Shopify store. These factors include:
- The store’s online age
- The number of links pointing to the site
- Your store's authority
- How optimised the structure of your website and content are
While Shopify can’t help the first three ranking factors (this will happen over time), the platform offers excellent tools to increase your ranking with search engines. It also includes built-in functionality that optimises SEO.
As well as the Shopify tools on offer, the platform offers many popular apps that are designed to increase your online presence with Google and Bing.
How to improve SEO Shopify
When someone is searching for a product you’re selling, and they land on your page, they are most likely to make a purchase given that you’re providing what they are searching for. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the most important reason we need to look for ways to improve our organic search.
Add keywords to your Shopify store
If you’re wondering ‘how do I rank higher in SEO Shopify?’, all you need to do is turn to keywords.
No Shopify store, or any online site, would be successful without the proper use of keywords. Keywords are the search queries that users input into a search engine to find what they’re looking for. Chances are, you probably typed in keywords like ‘SEO for Shopify’ or ‘increase traffic to Shopify website’ and happened to land on this page.
Where to add keywords:
- Titles and headings: Use descriptive keywords that let Google and users know what you are selling or providing.
- Meta descriptions: Enter a meta description of around 150 characters and be sure to include the main keyword and some enticing keywords that can market your product.
- Alt-text: Alt-text is an important tool for someone with visual impairments. When you’re adding alt-text, use short keywords to describe the image in the text.
- Landing pages: Use unique phrases as well as keywords to create headings to describe what you are marketing.
- Website content: Ensure that there is no less than 500 words per blog and informational post, with adequate use of keywords.
To find the correct keywords, you’ll need to use online tools. Then, make sure that the keywords are relevant to your site and strengthen your marketing efforts. And a little SEO secret? You’re not just using keywords to win Google over; keep your keywords flowing naturally throughout your site so that readers don’t just feel like they’re being marketed to.
Optimise your store navigation
Optimising your site structure is an essential part of helping Google crawl and understand your Shopify store. But guess what? You don’t need to worry about your site structure too much because Shopify has you covered with their built-in SEO features that help Google crawl your site.
They take care of the content structure, ensuring URLs are well-structured and don’t use iframes. Your job is to take care of store navigation.
When optimising your store navigation, ensure that your menu title describes its content. Anchor text that links to menus should also be descriptive, and every page should have a link.
Other tips for improving your site’s navigation include:
- Adding descriptive words for file names
- Using descriptive text for internal links
- Using a link building strategy to build more links to your site
Top tip: Where possible, pages should be no more than three clicks away from the homepage.
Submit a sitemap to Google
Verify your site with Google Search Console so that Google knows that you are the rightful owner of your Shopify store. Verification will help build trust and authority - a useful tactic for increasing your rankings.
You can then submit your sitemap to Google, which will allow Google Bots to find and index your pages effectively.
Top tip: You can find your sitemap on your Shopify store’s domain by adding the extension ‘sitemap.xml.’ If your site is called tester-shopify, you can add the extension to the URL, tester-shopify.com/sitemap.xml, and boom, you’ll be presented with your sitemap.
What is the best SEO app for Shopify?
The best SEO app for Shopify is a difficult question to answer. There are a variety of factors that you should consider before choosing the right one for your business. However, you’ll find 11 of the best SEO tools for Shopify, some of which are free, but all are highly recommended!
- AVADA SEO Suite
- SEO Manager
- Plugin SEO Optimizer
- SEO HTML Sitemap
- SPO (SEO Product Optimizer)
- Ultra SEO
- Site Booster
- Schema App Total Schema Markup
- Rich Snippets for SEO
- Handle SEO
- AVADA SEO Image Optimizer FREE
