By Heidi Jones
Shopify is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms leveraged by companies to scale their online business. But to enhance the visibility of your Shopify stores and draw customers, you need impeccable Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services.
Powerful SEO services will not just provide a seamless user experience but also make it easy for prospective buyers to discover your store online.
The below Shopify SEO guide will help you identify the best SEO practices fundamental for attaining and maintaining good search visibility for your eCommerce store.
1. Do the keyword research thoroughly.
Once you have decided on the products to be sold online, the first thing you need to do is prepare an extensive list of keywords for your Shopify store.
To do this, make a list of at least five key topics that your potential buyers care about and closely linked to your product. You can take inspiration from your buyer personas, social media hashtags related to your products, or analyze the competitor websites and their titles and meta descriptions.
After this, you can also check out some keyword research tools to refine and expand your keyword list.
2. Optimize the images of your Shopify store
This is one of the essential Shopify SEO tips that help to secure good rankings. Image optimization is crucial to enhance your presence on search engines like Google. These search engines use ALT tags as a shortcut to comprehend what the images on a website are all about.
So, make sure all the images on your Shopify website are reinforced with suitable ALT tags with appropriate keywords. Now, for instance, if a buyer is searching for images of a denim shirt, images from your website will have a good chance of appearing in front of the customers if the images are well optimized with a relevant description. But, at the same time, make sure not to stuff your description with too many keywords.
3. Create unique page titles and add suitable meta descriptions for product pages
Page titles and meta descriptions are incredibly vital for search engine rankings. The two should contain relevant keywords that describe the page content of your Shopify store.
The unique page metadata helps the search engines to understand what the specific page is all about. The better it understands, the higher it might be to place you in the search engine rankings.
So follow the best SEO practices while writing the page title and meta description. Also, make sure that the title is not more than 60 characters, and the description is limited to 160 characters.
4. Reduce the page load times
The on-page SEO score also depends on seamless user experience. But if your eCommerce store’s load speed is too slow, then it will hamper the user experience. So it is vital for optimizing the speed of your website.
Several factors may bring down the speed of your store. The most common reason includes heavy images or usage of apps that run hefty scripts on the frontend. You can use GTmetrix or Google PageSpeed Insights tools to analyze the landing pages’ speed and optimize them.
5. Frequently manage 404 errors.
Broken links are the biggest turn-off. If any page of your Shopify store is indexed and later changed to another URL or deleted, Google displays a “404 Page not found” error that immensely damages the SEO score. So, make sure to avoid any broken links.
To detect any broken links or similar discrepancies, you can use the Google Webmaster tool. It will help you quickly detect all the URLs with a 404 error listed.
6. Generate high-quality backlinks frequently.
Backlinks from high-quality sources improve the legitimacy of your website. It also has a direct positive impact on search engine rankings. However, you need to make efforts to secure backlinks from authoritative sources.
May it be deal sites, guest posting, or social bookmarking websites, there are plenty of ways to create backlinks. You must figure out the suitable channels and repeat the process regularly to ensure a good ranking.
You can also find out who is linking to your competitor’s homepages and reach out to them to feature your products.
7. Increase user-generated content on your Shopify store
The occurrence of good user-generated content on your website is a great way to symbolize user engagement. As an eCommerce store, if you don’t have user reviews and feedback on your website, you will lose the faith and credibility of your prospective buyers and the search engines.
Another great way to add user-generated content to your website is by collecting customer testimonials. When these testimonials appear on your website’s home page, they improve your business’s reliability score.
Wrapping Up
These simple Shopify SEO guidelines will help you understand the basics and get your SEO right. They will help you draw organic traffic from search engines and improve your business’s online presence and profitability.
