Shopify SEO: A Step-by-Step Guide

Jeff Eisenberg said, “It’s much easier to double your business by doubling your conversion rate than by doubling your traffic.” This quote highlights the importance of the conversion rate. For any business, it is essential to have more effective traffic than mere website viewers who take no action. As a business owner on Shopify, you should direct your investments towards Shopify SEO to generate customers.

Although Shopify has extensive in-built SEO features, there’s more to it. With the help of an SEO Company in Mumbai, you will be able to grasp a hold of SEO to boost your business.

Before that, this step-by-step guide will help you understand the intricacies of SEO for Shopify.

What is Shopify SEO?

Now you might wonder, how eCommerce SEO differs from traditional SEO. Traditional SEO is focused on increasing visibility and enhancing your website ranking. Shopify is an eCommerce website which calls for the need to generate consumers. So SEO for Shopify is focused on the conversion of viewers to customers.

It is essential to increase visibility, rank higher, and build trust. While paid advertisements require the most investment, this is a cost-effective marketing option. SEO and PPC both can be used depending on the current state of your brand vision.

For now, let’s explore how to optimise SEO on Shopify.

How To Improve SEO On Shopify?

Keyword Research

For every eCommerce store, we want the category and product pages to rank on search engines. Keywords help with that. This is why keyword research is a crucial part of Shopify SEO. With keyword research, the first step is to identify the right keywords.

To find the right keywords, you have to step into your customer’s shoes. You need to focus on finding high-converting keywords. High-converting keywords are keywords that not only bring visitors to the website but also help convert them into customers or perform an action on your Shopify site. High-volume keywords can be competitive, which means you need to invest some time in finding low-competition but high-converting keywords. These are some of the best SEO tools for Keyword Research which you can use in order to conduct keyword research.

To find the right keywords you can follow the steps mentioned further. Suppose you have just opened an epoxy flooring business. You can start your research by simply entering epoxy in the keyword tool.

Here, for example, we have used
Semrush:

Let’s take a look at the metrics for the keyword epoxy:

• Intent Displays the purpose of the keyword like Transactional is denoted by the letter T, which means it’s used for conversion.

• Volume: The number of times the keyword epoxy has been searched for a month. In this case, it is 60.5k.

• KD%: Keyword difficulty percentage shows how hard it will be to rank in the Google top 10. Like here, it’s 61% so it’s quite difficult to rank.

• CPC: It is the cost per click of a keyword triggered in ads.

Since epoxy is a highly competitive keyword, you could try looking for other keyword ideas listed in the keyword research tool. However, the top 5 keyword ideas are highly competitive, making it harder to rank them.

To learn more about keywords and how they work, you can refer to Shopify’s Beginner’s Guide to Keyword Research for eCommerce.

On-Page SEO for Shopify

Your Shopify website is an online supermarket that needs to be just as organised. An unorganised Shopify store will instantly make the visitors leave. A high bounce rate can result in a poor SEO score, which means a lower ranking. On-page SEO helps with this.

The optimization of your website with URLs, interlinks, meta titles and descriptions, is called On-page SEO. It is an integral part of Shopify SEO as search engines check if the content on a page matches the search intent of a user.

For your Shopify business, it is necessary to optimise product pages. You can do that by writing SEO-friendly product descriptions. Avoid using the same type of descriptions for every product, make it unique. A keyword-rich title and catchy meta description are equally important. Strategically placing the target keyword is also essential. You can do so by adding them in the heading and sub-heading structure. You must also optimise with internal and external links and images and make the URLs look friendly. You can take the help of this SEO Checklist to learn more about what boxes you need to check for on-page SEO.

There are various SEO tools for Shopify like –

• Tiny IMG

Tiny IMG can be used to optimise the images on your website and also increase its speed.

• SEO Booster 

It is an all-in-one SEO tool. This tool will also generate a report about every issue on your website and instructions on how they can be fixed.

• AVADA SEO

If optimising your shop images, metadata, ALT tags, sitemaps, and JSON-LD are on your mind then you can use this tool as it works on it all.

• Crush.pics 

This is another tool for image optimisation.

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Technical SEO for Shopify

Technical SEO is all about making your Shopify store easy to access and navigate for both users and search engines. Being an eCommerce website, most of the users make use of mobile phones to access your website. Technical SEO will ensure your website is mobile-friendly and has the required loading speed over search engines.

Another thing under technical SEO is structured data in Schema Markup.

Schema is a language that represents the actual data called structured markup data. Structured data organizes the content on the webpage and makes the information easier for Google to crawl and understand. The user can use structured data on different web pages to let Google know about the user ratings and more elements. You can learn more about this with our schema markup guide.

To optimise the crawling and indexing of your Shopify store by search engines, XML sitemaps and robots.txt are essential tools. The bots keep crawling your website to scan and rank your pages. Sitemap and robots.txt help to communicate with them the website’s structure, content and preferences. This improves organic search performance.

Content Marketing for Shopify

Content is the face of everything online. You can utilise it to your best to generate valuable customers. According to the niche of your store, you can create blogs. Blogs are a great way to create ideal content and showcase your brand personality.

So, if you run a clothing store on Shopify, then you can create blogs relevant to clothing. Say, for example, 10 types of shirts to wear during summer. Make sure you create valuable, compelling content. You can add relevant products from your store and keywords for ranking in the blog, to drive traffic to your website.

Pay-per-click is another great way to do content marketing. There are various PPC advertisement platforms like Facebook ads, and Google ads which help you to reach ideal customers. This is by setting up targeted ad campaigns. You can write an ad copy which is compelling and work on optimising landing pages. It will help in maximising the conversion rate.

If you’re taking the help of social media in content marketing, UGC ads are a great option. User-generated ads are like the name. The customers who have bought your products before can review and discuss your product on social media. This can help to build trust and generate new buyers.

Building Backlinks for Your Shopify Store

If you’re thinking of taking the help of Link Building Services in Mumbai for your Shopify SEO strategy, then first you need to know its basics. We’ll explain backlinks first through an example instead of a definition.

Suppose a seller owns a Harry Potter merchandise store on Shopify. There is another person who is a Potterhead and a well-known blogger in the community. They purchased a Harry Potter figurine from the store and loved it so much that they wrote an ecstatic review about the store and the figure. They also provided a link to their Shopify store. The seller now has one more backlink which tells Google that he sells quality merchandise. Hence the store deserves to be ranked higher than stores with similar authority.

When other websites link your Shopify store on their website or blogs, you get backlinks. Approaches like white-hat link building are used to drive traffic to the website. White-hat uses SEO techniques such as interlinking other content on the web which is relevant. Unlike black hat which spams the users, white hat uses genuine links to boost ranking. You can also write guest posts for high-authority websites to generate backlinks and increase outreach.

Backlinks generated by spam sites, link mills, and links unrelated to your Shopify store are all part of bad links. You need to monitor and dismiss any such links that make your website look bad. SEO Audit services in Mumbai will help monitor and disavow any such bad links.

Measuring and Analysing Your SEO Efforts

*Image source: Semrush.com

The last but most important step for your Shopify SEO is measuring and analysing your SEO efforts. You should keep track of different SEO campaigns to make sure they are yielding the result you aimed for. Keep searching for areas where improvement can be made. To ensure effective performance tracking key SEO metrics is crucial. SEO KPIs can be used to measure the progress. Especially for the Shopify store you can use it for tracking conversions generated from organic traffic. Other things like keyword ranking, CTR, and engagement rate can be tracked with it.

Google Analytics used with Google Search Console is a great way to measure the progress of your Shopify store.

Google Search Console is something as an eCommerce business owner you should be aware of. It is best to be familiar with its features as it is a free service which shows Google search traffic data for your site.
Our Google Search Console Guide will answer all your questions about how it works in measuring performance.

You can study the bounce rates, average time a user spends on your site and pageviews with Google Analytics.

You can approach an eCommerce Development company to analyse and measure the SEO for Shopify. There’s more depth to optimising your Shopify website than just adding a few keywords and analysing their workings. Analysing is not just limited to the website but also the behaviour of users. Right from the website content to the SEO-friendliness of the content, everything needs to be analysed to yield the expected results. An SEO agency will create strategies to deal with all of it and adjust the existing Shopify SEO strategy based on the data to ensure your website gets organic reach.

Optimise Shopify Website Structure

When you visit a supermarket, it has directional signs that help you find products quickly without wasting time. Everything is well-organised, and there is no mix-up with one product being shelved into another. Supermarket workers ensure that everything is well within reach.

Your Shopify website is an online supermarket that needs to be just as organised. An unorganised Shopify store will instantly make the visitors leave. A high bounce rate can result in a poor SEO score, which means lower ranking.

Therefore, you should consider following the standard SEO-friendly online store structure.

Home page=> Categories=> Subcategories=>Products

Don’t forget to include the basic About us, Contact page, return and replacement policy page, and a search bar to find the necessary products by name.

Build a User-Friendly Shop

Optimising the Shopify website structure is a great start at improving the user experience. According to the latest web design statistics, around 90% of visitors won’t come back to a site because of a bad web design.

So, your Shopify web design has to be customer-centric. It has to be easy to use and appeal to your audience. One of the major turn-offs with websites is slow loading speed. Based on the statistics shared by WebsiteBuilderExpert, 1 in 4 visitors will leave the website if it takes longer than 4 seconds to load. Furthermore, a seconds delay adversely affects customer satisfaction by 16%.

To fix the slow speeds, start by optimising your website’s images. Also, consider removing unnecessary content and features weighing down your website’s loading speed. The majority of store visitors come from mobile devices, so it is essential to install a mobile responsive theme on your Shopify site. Responsive designs load faster and also make your Shopify site look great on any device.

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Optimise Shopify URL

The online stores for BBC Shop and Decatholon.com were created using Shopify. We’ll share URLs for collection and product as an example of optimised URL.

• Example 1: BBC Shop

URL for BBC’s collection, Books

BBC shop’s URL for the book, The Official Peaky Blinder Cookbook

• Example 2: Decathlon Store

URL for Decathlon’s collection, Cycling Shoes

Decathlon’s URL for the cycling shoes, Mountain Bike shoes XC 100

SEO strategies clearly state that you have to optimise website URLs so that they are easy to understand. Shopify, by default, allows you to build clean URLs for your products. However, naming your collection and products falls within your purview.

The URL structure follows a clear partner:

ShopifyStoreDomain.com => Collections => Collection Name
ShopifyStoreDomain.com => Collections => Collection Name => Products => Product Name

To ensure that you have clean URLs, provide a clear and intelligible collection and product names while creating your shop.

• Duplicate Links

Generally, in Shopify, when you associate a product page with a collection, it results in duplicate content as follows:

ShopifyStoreName.com/products/yellow-sling-bag
ShopifyStoreName.com/collections/womens-bags/products/yellow-sling-bag

Whenever you associate product pages with collections, Shopify automatically creates an extra URL. Now, you have two pages displaying the exact same product. It can be eliminated through canonical tags. Ideally, you should get an eCommerce Development company in Mumbai to fix the code to stop the automatic creation of duplicate pages.

Optimise Products Pages

When we searched for ray ban black round sunglasses, we came across these optimised pages from Ray-Ban:

As you can see, the URL for collections is well-optimised. However, the product URL seems quite complex. Regardless, the product page has been well-optimised with SEO-friendly meta description, meta title, and natural use of keywords that tell Google this page is a highly relevant answer to the query: ray ban black round sunglasses.

Ray Ban Collections URL

Ray Ban Product URL

You can optimise your Shopify product pages by incorporating Target Keywords in the meta description and meta title. But make sure the keywords fit naturally and don’t interrupt the flow of your content.

Enable Shopify Markets

Before the unveiling of Shopify Markets, Shopify store owners had to rely on other marketplaces and retailers to sell their services and products internationally.

Shopify Market is a cross-border management tool that helps Shopify store owners optimise their online store for international markets. These tools ensure a seamless shopping experience for the customers. With Shopify markets, store owners don’t have to worry about things such as language, currency conversion, and import taxes.

Learn how to enable multiple currencies with Shopify.

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Conclusion

The SEO for Shopify website is an intricate task as we saw in the guide. Many things need to be considered strategically to make the most out of it. With our SEO agency, a Shopify store can get steady clients that could turn into loyal returning customers.

Intergrowth also shared that around 86% choose to click on organic search results over paid ads. For this reason alone, you should follow all the steps to optimise your website for SEO. Our SEO Packages are detailed about the services we provide. You can take a look and connect your needs for us to bring your website to the top.

If great ROI is on your mind for Local SEO and you look forward to getting in touch with Local SEO Services then you can contact us. Our team of experienced professionals will leave no page unturned to help your local business website grow.