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Shopify is one of the best rated e-commerce platforms and a home to thousands of businesses of multiple sizes. With millions of stores worldwide and a huge growth rate, Shopify has proven to be a boon for such businesses. Some of the most notable companies, like Tesla and Pepsi, even rely on Shopify for a presence on the web.
But that's just the first step in setting up an online store. For a brand to make their business successful in such a competitive e-commerce space is a herculean task. Here, SEO becomes critical in determining the success of any business and implementing effective SEO strategies for your Shopify store becomes necessary.Â
Shopify supports building a new online store through the power of an e-commerce platform, but if the aim is organic traffic, then so is understanding and applying all sorts of SEO. Before you learn the methods of using SEO to gain traction to your website it is important for you to understand about SEO in detail and why it is important to integrate it with your online business.
Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, refers to optimization of the content and technical parameters of your website in order to enhance the ranking results in the search engine. A digital marketing strategy helps increase the chances of visibility on your website and brings more organic traffic.
Ranking at better positions for the keywords, which are relevant, allows you to capture potential customers who actively look for your products or services. You may gain a competitive advantage and get new customers.
SEO not only increases the visibility of your website but also empowers your company to be identified as an authoritative source in your niche. That will instill a sense of loyalty and trust in the minds of your target prospects.
SEO is really important for the success of an online business, but especially for businesses that belong to the ecommerce category. Optimizing your site in search engines increases your visibility, bringing more targeted visitors to your online store. Increased traffic provides you with a lot of opportunities to awaken potential customers and turn them into faithful buyers.
Shopify's best practices are considered when developing its platform: designed not only with the correct concerns of SEO but also regularly updated to keep up with the latest Google guidelines so businesses could more easily implement powerful SEO strategies and be better seen online.
SEO focuses on providing quality content on the website and technical optimization. Search engines give preference to those websites that give high quality information about a specific topic and are sound technically. Here we have discussed some of the best optimization strategies that will help your Shopify store rankings:
1. Keyword research and analysis
Keyword research is one of the fundamental aspects of an SEO of Shopify stores. One is looking for such keywords that your target audience would probably use while searching for products or services and then provides them to make website content rank high in search. Keyword research involves understanding how the search volume and difficulty vary with different keywords so you can determine the most effective keywords for your business.
For example, if we take the keyword ’Shopify’, getting it rank on Google will be like climbing Mount Everest especially for a newer website with a weak domain score as the keyword has an extremely hard difficulty level of 100. It’ll be very hard for a newer or weaker domain to rank on such a competitive keyword and will require lots of on-page SEO, high link building and content promotion efforts.
However, it doesn’t mean that one should give up, what you could instead do is use a long-tail keyword. Perform keyword research and target a long-tail keyword with decent search volume but lesser difficulty.Â
Long-tail keywords are different from single-word keywords since they have more than one word. When doing keyword research, make sure that the keywords you target are long-tail phrases, which have a reasonable search volume but a lower difficulty level. These are phrases that have more words than just single-word keywords.
Instead of going after a generic keyword like "Shopify app, " you could target a more specific long-tail keyword like "Shopify subscriptions app." This keyword has a difficulty level of 49%. While the page it is going to is competitive, considering that you have unique and well-structured content, you ought to be able to emerge victorious. In the meantime, it puts up a monthly search volume of 140. This means that people are actually looking for this keyword.
Keyword research is a necessity in an attempt to make any type of business SEO better. Regardless of the niche, keyword research is able to help companies make improvements to their SEO, thus ensuring their content will be easily seen.
2. Optimize relevant keywords
Keywords play an important role in getting your websites, pages and blogs ranked on Google, which is why it’s important to search for industry-related keywords. When you’ve narrowed down your keywords, add them to your titles, descriptions, content, and ALT text. You can also include them in your URLs. You can use multiple keyword research tools such as Ubersuggest or Semrush to find the keywords which have traffic on them and can bring in potential customers for your company.
3. Content is king
Quality content is the cornerstone of SEO for Shopify stores and, therefore, holds a great place. To optimize your website, which attracts more organic traffic, that's crucial, creating informative yet engaging content must be there at the top.
Ensure your blog posts are as well-written and of value to your target audience as any of your other site pages. Push content to be at the heart of your ecommerce content marketing strategy. But do keep in mind, when you speak of content, that term encompasses any piece of content that your audience consumes-from blog posts to webpage text, to infographics, videos, podcasts, newsletters, and social media posts.
Always publish meaningful, robust content that would directly answer the question for your target audience and satisfy their needs. This will help improve your search engine rankings and increase good trust and credibility among customers.
4. Backlinking
A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Buying backlinks, though common a few years ago, is now black hat SEO and can get you penalized by search engines.
For that reason, getting your backlinks from quality relevant sites and topics is the best way to utilize backlinks so your site appears to be an authority on the topic, improving your search rankings.
To acquire natural backlinks is to create quality, valuable content that people naturally want to link to. This takes time and effort but is worthwhile for a long term end: build strategic partnership and networking with other businesses in your industry-exchange links.
5. Maintain authority with Shopify reviews
Customer reviews are the pillars to building brand perception and thus, purchase decisions within an ecommerce realm. They not only offer insights about the experience a user had with your offering but also give prospective customers the strengths and weaknesses of a product or service.
Good reviews can really boost your brand reputation, as it creates trust and confidence among the target customers. They may exhibit the benefit of the product, customer service, and even strengthen the value proposition of the brand. A negative review can be terribly damaging to a brand's image if addressed poorly. They may worry about the quality of the product, customer service, or overall satisfaction.
Therefore, e-business companies must monitor and manage the reviews of the customers. As the company responds to negative and positive feedback, this shall encourage satisfaction of purchase among the customers. Consequently, this leads to greater customer service.
6. Optimize site structure
SEO optimization is really important if you want the best out of the prominent visibility of your website, attracting organic traffic, and that's where Shopify comes in offering numerous built-in features that will help you get there.
Proper website structure is one of the core SEO tactics. Shopify gives you a natural, structured hierarchy of categories to help you better organize the content on your website so that search engines can easily come to understand and index your pages. Also, Shopify generates URLs user-friendly with visible structures, consisting of standard characters that can give a leverage for your website to get good in its SEO.
Another point is that no iframes should be included. Iframes would make technological challenges for search engines, and this would bring lesser ranking for your site than what is possible. Using SEO best practices from Shopify helps you optimize your site structure for a better chance of ranking high on search engine rankings.
7. Refrain from using duplicate content
Duplicate content is actually a huge problem that could negatively affect your SEO on a Shopify store. Though the collections feature in Shopify is really useful for organizing products, it may accidentally create multiple URLs. Search engines get confused and index the wrong page.
Although Google will not penalise a website for innocent duplication, it does have the potential to cause problems. A lack of link equity also creates problems as search engines could end up confused about which one to prioritise. This will, of course, result in lower rankings on the search engine and fewer page views.
For duplicate content problems on your website, specialized tools like Semrush, Siteliner, and Screaming Frog will be of great help. They are able to show you both exact and near duplicates.
Once you've identified the duplicate content, you can then start to resolve the issue. This may mean using canonical tags to point to the preferred version of the page; you can use redirects to help the users and search engines know which URL is the correct one; or you can adjust your settings in the Google Search Console.
By fixing the duplicate content problems, you will be improving website SEO to enable search engines to crawl and index your content correctly and obtain highly ranked results when searching online for your e-commerce website.
8. Leverage metadata
Metadata is a very important element of SEO for Shopify stores. Optimizing metadata will make your website more visible and thus attract more organic traffic.
On the key points to consider while optimizing metadata:
By these guidelines, you should therefore manage to effectively optimize your metadata and advance your search engine rankings.
Emma Johnson is celebrated for her strategic brilliance and innovative flair. By seamlessly blending creativity with data-driven insights, she has propelled Loop’s brand to new heights, establishing it as a formidable force in the Shopify Subscriptions space.
