Shopify SEO - The Basics for your online store

As most store owners will know, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can bring your online store user traffic from search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Being ranked higher requires your content to be optimized via keywords that users would use to find what they are looking for. In addition to your content, there is your site's user experience (desktop and mobile), site errors, and your ability to get backlinks. When these factors are in a strong position to your competition on the core keywords, you will see your "authority" rank higher. The higher "authority", the better the position you will rank when searched, in the hopes to be in the top 10 for your core keywords. When search results appear, the ten organic results are among paid ads and Google Shopping ads as well. Let's cover the basics of getting this laid out.

Creating a Shopify SEO digital marketing strategy

1. Keyword search: Identifying the high-value search terms that your audience would be using. Not all keywords have the same "intent" - informational keywords vs. transactional intent keywords make all the difference. The goal is to have the right pool of transactional keywords for your core keywords on your online store.
2. Site architecture for eCommerce: Shopify already provides a good site structure to organize your content and your SEO with its CMS (Content Management System). However, for your content marketing, there will also be landing pages, and blog posts and you might run an SEO Audit (part of the SEO tools) to ensure your site structure is in good shape. In addition to verifying the user experience, Google Search Console will also scan your site, and report any user experience errors. Structured data content helps the search engines to organize your data and information such that it can then respond to the audience's search requests accordingly.
3. Ease of Navigation: It isn't enough to have a mega-menu, it is all about product hierarchy and how you put together your collections as well as international sites. It is important to ensure that the user can find your information easily, without using the back button all the time.
4. Technical SEO: This is more of an under-the-hood activity that focuses on the speed of the site, create logical links to the menu, image size optimization, and sitemap submission to the Google search console. It also covers Meta descriptions being keyword optimized and differentiated and HrefLang properly configured between different International sites.
5. On-page SEO for eCommerce: Canonical tags are part of the Product Page, Sitemap.txt and Robots.txt are automatically generated, and Themes generate title tags that include your online store name with social media sharing options. You can edit Page Title Tags, Meta tags, and Meta descriptions to add your keywords. Alt-text can be added to your images to include your keywords. Chose your URLs to contain your keywords in Pages, Blog posts, and Collections.
6. Writing a Blog post: To add search engine visibility, powering a long-form content strategy in using your keyword search, technical SEO, and on-page SEO to add diversity of use in keywords as well as highlighting your product or service in a different light - product introduction, product reviews, long-term reviews, servicing of products, and other topics that can cover your product, brand, and social media. Every blog increases your overall site content in keywords, the concentration of your core keywords with cross-links to other articles, products, and collections. This is one of the key content marketing strategies being considered vs. advertising.
7. Content writing: Focus on what problem your audience is trying to solve, and the keywords associated with it. Have your keywords that focus on the product that solves this issue and make your content easy to read. Do not keyword stuff the blog with repetitive words or phrases, the grammar must be good and you must be legible for humans to read.
8. Link Building: Quality backlinks from reputable and of good authority sites are what improve your authority and the ability to draw in your audience. These digital marketing channels are seen by Google as of good authority and raise your profile. The difficulty here is getting the link of your site onto these pages, where at times if your article is of high interest, these websites add your product on their pages to help their community.
9. Best SEO tools to consider: When it comes to SEO there are literally hundreds of tools out there, for onsite SEO, Content writing, and Site Audits. Here are some worth mentioning:

• SEO Image optimizer page speed: This is a Shopify App by Avada is a great plugin to help you outrank competitors. Image compression, site speed optimization, Schema mark-up with 24/7 customer support.
• SEOant SEO Image Optimizer: Free all-in-one SEO tool, that gives your SEO check-up reports, monitors SEO health, fixes broken links and re-directs, and boosts traffic from Google.
• Google Analytics: This is a basic tool that covers website traffic and where it originates, and gives you insights into your audience. Connected to your Shopify store, it can combine the analytics with Shopify Analytics and can then give you specific eCommerce data to track.
• AHref: Used to check keyword-based search, track, rank, and overall SEO performance. SEO Audits, competitive research, PPC features, and top content analysis.
• SEMRush: A more advanced tool in some ways over AHref which covers the same level of features, but has components in content writing (which can be applied to Email marketing, social media marketing, or traditional marketing) - this is a paid tool.

Conclusion

When thinking of your marketing campaigns, you can use the above as your checklist of what you should be looking out for. The field of SEO can be pretty vast in both technical as well as strategic. Sure, you can do your best in getting your site content in good shape, verifying can be a free exercise with some free SEO tools, it is the creative side that will most likely come at a cost. Selling products can be a tough job to source at the right cost, check for quality, store and then have the logistics to ship to the end user - getting the end user to purchase can be even tougher since you have to seek them out, establish trust, and get them to transact. With a solid keyword approach, and at times some of these can be checked with Google Trends, you can see how your competition is doing, and learn from their keywords on how you can bring the traffic they have your way. If you have any questions on your SEO, feel free to enquire at wish@thegenielab.com