Search engine optimization (SEO) has come a long way since the days of keyword stuffing and clickbait copy.
To rank first in a Google search result, your store's content needs to match a potential visitor's intent. Optimizing your site for SEO can feel intimidating and tedious, but it’s all about understanding how search engines work and how searchers use them and implementing that insight into your page's copy, then methodically running through some completely accessible backend tinkering.
We've put together a step-by-step guide to optimizing with Shopify SEO Specialist —no SEO experience is required.
Why is SEO so Important?
1. The Majority Of Traffic Comes From Organic Search
If you don’t have an SEO strategy for your store, you might be missing out on traffic and revenue. Online stores can expect 35% of total traffic to come from search engine results pages and 33% of revenue from this organic traffic making it the marketing channel that can produce the highest traffic and revenue, according to IndeedSEO.
2. Paid Advertising Costs Are Increasing and SEO is “Free Traffic”
If you’re generating most of your sales through paid advertising channels like Facebook or Instagram, this can eat into your profit margins. Although generating organic traffic takes time, it should eventually become your best acquisition channel which makes its costs sustainable. Putting work in to increase organic traffic through SEO may cost you time and effort, but its compounding effect makes organic traffic the best value-for-money channel to produce customers. SEO should never be an afterthought even though the return is not immediate.
3. Ranking First in Search Engines Can Get You Up To 30% More Daily Traffic
There’s a joke in the SEO world that if you wanted to hide a dead body, you’d put it on page two. That’s because being in the first place gets the most clicks—disproportionately so compared to ranking in the 11th position.
Before you start: Essentials to improve your Shopify SEO
There are a few vital things you need to set up before jumping into improving your Shopify store’s SEO. These are:
Purchase a Custom Domain
Simply put, your store needs its domain to succeed in SEO. Custom domains create more trust with potential shoppers clicking through from search engines and they’re also more memorable. If you still have brandname.myshopify.com it’s time to upgrade to a custom domain like brandname.com. You can pick up a custom domain for anywhere between $10–$20 a year. If you need help, we have a resource on how to choose a domain name for your store.
Ensure You Have Google Analytics Installed On Your Site
Google Analytics is free to install on your website and lets you see how much traffic and what it does on your site. Learn how to set up Google Analytics on the Shopify SEO store.
Have a Mobile Ready Theme
Shopify offers a handful of free themes and they are built with Responsive Web in mind out of the box. If you’ve made any customizations to your theme or had one built, it’s best to test its mobile readiness with this Google tool even if there haven't been tweaks made.
Remove Password Protection
If you’re still getting your product pages created and sorted, you might want to wait to unlock your store to the public and search engines. But if your store is password protected, search engines won’t be able to see beyond your homepage and crawl or rank your pages on their search engine results page.
Be on a Paid Plan
While stores on free trials can be crawled and indexed, if you’re not on a paid plan you’re going to put all this work and not see the fruition of your efforts once your trial is over as waiting for a new store to rank will take longer than 14 days.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the under-the-hood type of SEO. Like the fresh engine oil that keeps a car running, it often can’t be seen but can dramatically improve the search performance of your website. Technical SEO ensures that your website is optimized for search engine crawlers, has good page speed, and is mobile device optimized. It also optimizes your site for humans by making sure its structure, navigation, and internal links allow easy browsing, and that meta tags are filled in so both search engines and humans know what the page is about.
If your website has discrepancies in these areas, it can stifle your rankings until errors are identified. By resolving these errors you’ll see the benefits:
1. Users engage more with the site because it’s faster and all important content and pages are easy to access
2. Increased crawling activity from crawl bots because the site is easier to crawl, which increases organic traffic over time
1. Create a logical internal linking strategy with your menus
2. Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console and fix site errors
3. Optimize your images to load quickly and be found by search engines
On-page SEO
On-page SEO is the primary method of directly telling readers and search engines what your page is about. Search engines look for certain on-page factors that can help them in ranking your page on search engine results pages (SERPs). On-page factors include keyword and topic relevance, meta information, the slug in the page URL, and your images, among other things. For more information on on-page factors, this Moz article is a great resource.
1. Keyword Research
A simpler way to think about keywords is as queries people use and type into search engines. Often, this replicates how we talk when asking questions—sometimes it is more of a “caveman speak” format, where you might type “buy new iPhone” versus “I want to buy the new iPhone.”
2. Match Search Intent and Create Pages Relevant to Your Keyword
No matter what type of search query your page is targeting, know that when it comes to choosing a keyword, Google and other search engines want to rank the pages that have the highest likelihood of concluding the searcher’s journey. In the specific case of Google, it wants no additional searches, and it doesn’t want the user to hit “Back” and click on another search result.
3. Content Optimization to Make Your Pages Visible
Content optimization helps your pages rank higher in search results for their target keyword. Examples include tweaking or optimizing a page’s content, meta description, and title tags. Content optimization becomes much easier when you have a clear keyword you’re trying to rank for.
Let’s dive into how we can do specific on-page content optimization.
1. Build Your Keyword Into Your Heading
With transactional pages, such as product pages, using your focus keyword in page titles can make sense if it’s an identifier, but usually, this is best reserved for collections pages. Ideally, your products are named something enticing. Let’s take The Lip Bar as an example. It has a collection with “concealer” as the target keyword, but its product pages within the collection are specific to which shade range the product is within and the product’s function (e.g., for the product 6:00 Ebony Caffeine Concealer, “6:00 Ebony” is the range, “Caffeine” is the function it serves (to help wake the skin), and “Concealer” is the wildly known name for this product, which can tie in some SEO benefits ranking for “caffeine concealer”).
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO can include reputation management like customer service and being present on social media, but essentially it boils down to building backlinks, which are links that point to your site. The more high-quality, relevant backlinks you have, the better your pages will rank. You know the importance of having high-ranking pages in search engines based on where clicks go from the earlier diagram above.
Active Link Building
Active link building is when you put together a plan and strategy for the pages you want to build links from—with an understanding of why you want to build them—and then execute that plan. Generally, active link building is time-intensive, as it’s a competitive strategy to get into. Journalists, influencers, and other writers get pitches all the time, so your pitch has to be compelling.
There are a couple of principles you can take forward when requesting anything from another site:
- But what’s in it for them upfront in your pitch? Yes, the nature of your request is to get something (a link), but what’s in it for them? Is what they’re linking to out of date or a page that no longer exists, or are they missing something vital in their list? Give them a reason to consider your request.
- Don’t request links from people who are your competitors. This may seem obvious, but a lot of link requests come from people who want coverage in the same product and topic area because there’s an existing resource. For example, if you’re selling athletic gym shorts and you find a buyer’s guide on what to look for when buying gym shorts and it’s by a brand that also sells shorts aimed at your niche, it’s better not to waste time reaching out to them.
1. Foundational Links
Foundational links are links from social media profiles, local business directories, and niche directories. If you haven’t signed up for social media accounts on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., then do so now. Also, it’s recommended you create a profile for Google My Business, whether or not you have a physical retail store, as this can improve your local SEO which can help you get local customers. The SEO benefits here are small but it’s easy to set these up and it increases the discoverability of your brand from different channels.
2. Pitch Gift Guides
Gift guides are a list of recommended products or gift ideas, typically centered around a holiday (like Christmas) or a person (like your dad). If you’ve ever Googled for gift ideas, you’ve likely come across several gift guides.
Getting your product in the right gift guides can increase sales and traffic to your website. However, inclusion in these guides does not happen randomly and requires some effort. In many cases, business owners lobby to get their products included. You’ll need to contact gift guide publishers and ask to have your product listed. There’s no guarantee, but if your product is the right fit, you could be included.
3. PR Campaigns
Traditionally, a press release campaign involves submitting a release to media to get featured in local, regional, national, or industry press. Press publications have a good chance of sending your website visitors, as well as giving you a high authority and trustworthy link to your website—all good things from an SEO point of view.
Instead of hiring a PR company, take a shot at getting your publicity. If you have a great story or an interesting product that people will want to write about, put it out there. Get in touch with bloggers and journalists who cover businesses like yours and tell them what you’re up to.
4. Skyscraper Technique
If your brand does content marketing or is considering it, the skyscraper technique could help you build links. It stems from internet marketer Brian Dean, who describes it as a method where you find link-worthy content by your competitors, make something even better, and then reach out to the right people to steal their links.
5. Guest Blog
If you’re writing on your blog to drive traffic, you know it takes time before you start to see results. Guest posting gives you a way to get in front of someone else’s audience while you’re growing your own. Not only does it drive traffic back to your website, but the links will help with search engine optimization.
Find and connect with other websites, publications, or industry bloggers who have the type of audience you want to reach. Offer to write a guest post that their audience will love. Make sure the topic you write about is also related to your business or it won’t drive any traffic.
6. Broken Link Building
Broken link building is where you find pages that link to sites that have a page removed, recreate content similar to that of the dead content, and then tell anyone linking to the removed resource to instead link to your content. This works because it’s bad for a website's SEO to be linking to pages that don’t exist.
7. Unlinked Mentions
Unlinked mentions are when your business is written about on another site without a link back to you. For instance, your business might be given as an example in an article that sells comfy loungewear apparel but doesn’t link to your homepage. With tools like Google Alerts or some SEO tools that have this feature, like ahrefs, you can get a notification to your inbox if your site is mentioned. Once you feel that getting a link from this site is worth reaching out to the writer or content manager, then go ahead and ask for a link to be credited to your mentioned business.
Build an SEO Plan to Scale Your Store’s Growth
When customers research products in your category, you want your store to be one of the top search results. But the only way for them to see your page in the results is to put time and effort into learning the rules that govern search engines and apply those rules to the structure and content of your site.
Working on SEO for your Shopify SEO Specialist can feel overwhelming in the beginning, but once you get the hang of it and iron out any issues, it can be as simple as tweaking pages to help them rank better and finding new keywords to create pages for. You’ll begin to see results slowly, but you will see movement increase over time, and SEO will be a great flywheel to bring in new customers for your business.
View Also: 7 Best Shopify SEO Strategies | Shopify SEO Guide | Rank High in 2024
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