Shopify SEO Guide: 11 Ways to Improve Rankings
The first thing every Shopify store owner wants is to rank better in search. This Shopify SEO Guide will show you 11 proven ways to improve rankings right from launch.
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Shopify SEO can be a bit of a mystery to business owners who are just starting.
It’s hard to know where to begin and what steps to take to improve your website’s ranking within search engines.
This blog post will serve as your Shopify SEO Guide to make sure your site ranks in search and generate more organic traffic for your online store!
What exactly is Shopify SEO?
Shopify SEO can be defined as the process of optimizing your eCommerce store for organic traffic from search engines. In other words, it’s all about improving your store’s ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).
And, since around 80% of shoppers now start their product search online, it’s clear that ranking highly in SERPs is essential for any business that wants to succeed in the e-commerce space.
Fortunately, there are a number of things you can do to improve your Shopify SEO. In this guide, we’ll walk you through 11 essential steps for optimizing your store for better SERP rankings. By the end, you’ll have a solid plan for improving your Shopify SEO and driving more organic traffic to your site. So, let’s get started!
How To Improve Shopify SEO Rankings?
Here are 11 ways you can improve your Shopify SEO rankings!
1. Improve the user-friendly experience
Improving your eCommerce store’s user-friendly experience is a great first step to take to start getting into SEO. It is great not only for your customers but for search engines too. let’s take a look at some ways you can achieve this.
Choose a simple theme
Customers should be able to find what they are looking for easily, without getting lost in a confusing layout. A simple theme will help with this by allowing customers to focus on your products and not get distracted by a complicated design.
Additionally, search engines will also be able to more easily crawl and index your site’s content when it is laid out simply.
Avoid using too many plugins
Installing too many plugins on your Shopify store can slow down your site’s loading speed, which will negatively impact your SEO. In addition, it can also make your site more difficult to navigate and use, which will turn customers away. So, be sure to only install the plugins that you really need and avoid using too many of them.
Adding a chatbot or chat widget to your website
With the recent surge in the popularity of chatbots, many businesses are wondering how they can incorporate this new technology into their SEO strategy.
Chatbots are computer programs that can mimic human conversation, and they are increasingly being used to provide customer service and support. By adding a chatbot or chat widget to your website, you can provide your visitors with instant answers to their questions, and you can also collect valuable data about their search queries.
In addition, chatbots can help to reduce your website’s bounce rate by keeping users engaged with your content. As a result, using a chatbot can be a great way to improve your website’s SEO.
Make sure your site is mobile-friendly
In today’s day and age, it is essential to have a mobile-friendly website. More and more people are using their phones and tablets to search the internet and do their shopping. In fact, it’s estimated that 70% of internet traffic comes from mobile devices.
If your site is not mobile-friendly, you will be missing out on a lot of potential customers and your SEO will suffer. Google has even came out and said that they use mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor in their search algorithm.
To make your website more mobile-friendly, follow these steps:
- Use a responsive theme
- Use an AMP plugin
- Take The google mobile friendly test
If you want to learn more about how to give your site a better design to convert more sales I recommend checking out our article on how to create a well designed website
2. Simplify navigation
Having a well-organized website is important for both search engine optimization (SEO) and providing a good user experience. A well-organized website is easy to navigate, and search engines can easily crawl and index the site.
This will help improve your SEO ranking by making it easier for people to find and navigate your site. Additionally, a well-organized website is more likely to keep people from clicking off, as they can easily find what they are looking for.
How to simplify your site’s navigation
You can achieve this by making fewer subcategories and having fewer clicks between a product and the home page. Something like shown in the chart below.
Just remember the fewer clicks between the home page and a product the better. This will keep a customer engaged and enjoy spending time on your website as they can find what they’re looking for quickly and easily
In addition, adding a search bar can be another great tool to make your customer’s experience better and as a result, the search engines will reward you for not just having a simple site to crawl but a site that people will spend time on.
Step 3. Optimize your site for speed
Search engine optimization is the practice of optimizing a website to rank higher in search engine results. One of the main goals of SEO is to improve site speed, as faster sites tend to rank higher than slower ones.
These things help:
- Optimize your images
- Make sure your code is optimized
- Try a speed optimization app
Optimizing images
Images are an essential part of any website, but they can also be a major contributor to slow loading speeds.
How do I optimize my images for speed?
- Compress your images
- Resize your images
- Use a content delivery network (CDN)
An image compression tool like Kraken.io can help you compress your images without losing quality. You can also resize your images using an image editor like Adobe Photoshop.
If you have a lot of images, you may want to consider using a CDN. A CDN is a network of servers that delivers content to users based on their location.
This can help improve loading times, as the content will be delivered from a server that is closer to the user. However, if you don’t have an excessive amount of images or content to load, the shopify included CDN should be fine.
Make sure your code is optimized
What are some ways I can optimize my code?
- Remove unnecessary characters
- Combine files
- Use a tool to compress the code of your website
Removing unnecessary characters, such as whitespace, comments, and newlines can help reduce the size of your code. You can also combine multiple files into one file to reduce the number of files that need to be loaded.
There are several tools available to compress the code of your website, a tool such as Minifier. This tool can help you minify your code with just a few clicks.
Use a speed optimization app
You can also use a speed optimization app to help speed up your website. Shopify has a number of apps that can help you speed up your site, including:
- Booster: Page Speed Optimizer
- SEO, Speed & Image Optimizer
- Swish: Page Speed Booster
- Page Speed Booster
While some of these apps are paid, they can be worth the investment as they can significantly improve your site’s speed and, as a result, your SEO ranking.
By taking these steps, you can ensure that your site loads quickly and efficiently for your customers. In today’s fast-paced world, optimizing your site for speed is essential for providing a good user experience and maintaining a high search engine ranking.
4. Set up a google search console account
Once your website is set up for the best possible user experience, it’s time to start telling search engines your site exists so they can start to index your e-commerce store.
A good place to start is to set up a Google search console account to rank on google as it has maintained a 92.47 percent market share as of June 2021.
Search engines use sitemaps to crawl and index your website, so it’s important to make sure that your sitemap is up-to-date and accurate. Creating a Search Console account is quick and easy, and it will give you valuable insights into how your website is performing on search engines.
Setting up a Google search console account
To get started, simply go to Google’s search console page and sign in with your Google account.
Then, enter your Website domain into google search console under “URL prefix” and grab your HTML tag. Then, go to Shopify > online store > edit code > theme.Liquid > under “<head>” click enter and paste the HTML tag you copied from earlier.
Find and upload a sitemap.XML
After that go back to google search console and click “verify”. Then, go back to Shopify and grab your site map. Last, go back to your google search console dashboard and upload the site map.
Within a few days, you should start seeing results in the form of improved search engine rankings.
5. Conduct keyword research
If you want your e-commerce store to be successful, keyword research is essential. By understanding how people search for products like yours, you can ensure that your store appears in their search engine results.
This, in turn, will help you to attract more visitors and boost your sales. The most important thing is to focus on target keywords that are relevant to your products.
How to Find Keywords
One way to find keywords that match your products is to go to Amazon and type in a keyword that relates to your product like “jewelry” into the search bar.
The suggestions that Amazon gives are a good indicator of what your ideal customer might be searching for related to your keyword.
Another way to do keyword research is by using Google’s Keyword Planner tool. This tool allows you to enter a keyword or phrase and see how often it is searched for on Google.
You can also use this tool to find keywords that are similar to your main keyword. This helps find related keywords that you may not have thought of.
The last way we will talk about doing keyword research is to get tools like semrush or ahrefs that allow you to do in-depth keyword research. These tools can help you to find more keywords, track your rankings, and analyze your competition.
While there are many different ways to do keyword research, these are some of the most effective methods. By taking the time to understand how people search for products like yours, you can ensure that your e-commerce store ranks highly in search engine results.
This, in turn, will help you to attract more visitors and boost your sales. So, don’t underestimate the importance of keyword research!
6. Put the keywords in your page content
Now that you have your keywords it’s time to add them to your website. There are four primary places you can put keywords to improve the SEO of your Shopify store:
- titles
- meta descriptions
- ALT tags
- a page’s body content
Page titles are one of the first things that a search engine looks at when determining the relevance of a website. Make sure to include your target keyword in the title of each page on your Shopify store.
The meta description is the summary that appears beneath a website’s URL in search results. This is another great place to incorporate keywords, as it gives potential customers an overview of what they can expect to find on your Shopify store.
When adding images to your Shopify store, be sure to include descriptive ALT tags with your keyword. These tags provide text descriptions of images and help search engines to understand the content of a page.
Finally, remember to use keywords throughout the body content; i.e. descriptions of your Shopify store. By following these simple tips, you can easily improve the SEO of your Shopify store and attract more visitors.
Here’s an article you can learn more about adding keywords for increased SEO
7. Start a blog
If you have a Shopify store, you may be wondering if starting a blog is right for you. There are many advantages to starting a blog for your Shopify site, including:
- more sales
- Improving your ranking in search engines
- building an audience
Benefits of Starting a Blog for Your Shopify Store
There are many benefits to starting a blog for your Shopify store. Perhaps the most significant benefit is increased SEO. When you blog, you have the opportunity to use keywords and other SEO practices to improve your ranking in search engines.
This can lead to more organic traffic and ultimately more sales. In addition, blogging can help build relationships with your customers and establish your brand as an authority in your industry.
If done correctly, a blog can be a powerful tool for driving traffic and increasing sales for your Shopify store.
How to Start a Blog for Your Shopify Store
Now that you know the benefits of starting a blog for your Shopify store, let’s talk about how to actually start one.
All Shopify stores already come with a blog page called “news”. However, you can change the name of this page at any point.
The steps to create your first blog post include:
- Log Into Shopify
- From the Shopify admin, go to Settings > Apps and sales channels.
- When you come to the Apps and sales channels page, select Online store.
- Select Open sales channel.
- Select Blog Posts.
- Select Create blog post.
- In the Title section, enter a title for your blog post.
- In the Content field, enter content for your blog post.
- In the Organization section, from the Blog drop-down menu, select Create a new blog.
- In the Blog title field, enter a title for the blog.
Check out this article if you want to learn more about how to set up a blog on Shopify.
As you can see, there are many benefits to starting a blog for your Shopify store. If you’re not already blogging, now is the time to start! Blogging can help improve your SEO, build relationships with customers, and increase sales. So what are you waiting for? Log into your Shopify account today and get started!
If you want to learn more about how to write your first blog post and much more look no further than my article about how to start a profitable blog.
8. Build backlinks
When you have an online store, it’s important to make sure that your site is ranking well in search engine results. One way to help improve your ranking is by building backlinks from other sites in your niche.
Backlinks are incoming links to a website. When a site links to another site, it’s seen as a vote of confidence. The more backlinks you have, the higher your site will rank in search engine results.
How to Get Backlinks for Your Shop
When a site links to yours, it’s telling search engines that your site is a credible source of information on the topic. In turn, this can help to improve your rankings and visibility in search results.
How can I build backlinks?
- guest posting
- Manufacturer links
- get product reviews
Guest posting
If you want to build backlinks to your Shopify website, there are a few strategies you can use. One is guest posting. This involves writing articles for another website’s blog within the same industry and including a link back to your site in the author bio.
This is why it’s crucial to have a blog on your e-commerce site as it can give you something to link back to. This can help to improve your search engine rankings, as well as increase traffic to your site and boost sales.
Manufacturer links
Another strategy is to get manufacturer links. If you sell products from a particular manufacturer, they may be willing to include a link to your site on their website.
Get product reviews
Finally, you can also try to get product reviews from other websites and influencers. These can provide valuable backlinks, as well as help boost your reputation and increase sales. By using these strategies, you can build powerful backlinks that will help improve your Shopify website’s Search Engine Optimization.
If you want to learn more about how to build backlinks to your site be sure to check out our article on link building for beginners
Step 9. Remove duplicate content
If you have a Shopify website, you may be wondering if duplicate content can hurt your SEO ranking.
The short answer is yes! This can happen when you have multiple web pages on your site with very similar or identical content which is called “internal duplicate content”. Or when the content on your web page looks similar to the content of another site which is called “external duplicate content”.
Duplicate content can hurt your SEO ranking because it confuses search engines and makes it difficult for them to determine which page is the most relevant result for a given query. As a result search engines will penalize you.
Luckily, there are tools that can help with this process like Duplicate Finder which is an app for Shopify that helps with removing duplicate content. And Grammarly for checking page content for plagiarism.
Where can duplicated content manifest?
- titles
- page content
- duplicate products
If you want to avoid duplicate content penalties, it’s important to make sure that all the content on your site is unique. You can do this by ensuring that all your product descriptions are different, as well as any blog posts or articles.
You should also avoid using the same keyword or phrase multiple times on a single page. If you’re not sure whether your content is unique, you can run it through a plagiarism checker like Grammarly. You can avoid duplicate content penalties and help improve your SEO ranking by taking these steps.
Step 10. Set up Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a powerful tool that can help you track the performance of your Shopify store and make improvements to your SEO strategy. Luckily, setting up Google Analytics for your Shopify store is a relatively simple process.
- Set up a google account for your business
- Follow the steps on google and create a universal google analytics account
- Copy your Universal Analytics property
- Go back to Shopify and navigate to Online store > preferences > Google Analytics
- Paste the code
- you can check everything is set up by going to Themes > Actions > Edit Code > in the Layout section, click {/} theme liquid. Within this page, you will need to look for tags that include: ga.js, gtag, js, or analytics.js.
Check out this article for more help setting up google analytics
Once you’ve completed these steps, all of your Shopify store’s data will be automatically fed into your Google Analytics account. You can then use this data to track your store’s traffic, conversion rate, average order value, and other important metrics. By taking advantage of Google Analytics, you can gain valuable insights that will help you improve your SEO and boost your bottom line.
Step 11. Try out Shopify SEO tools & apps
Yoast SEO is a powerful app that can help optimize your Shopify website. By providing detailed analyses of your site’s content, Yoast SEO can help you improve your rankings in search engines and attract more visitors. Yoast SEO is an essential tool for any website owner who wants to improve their site’s visibility and traffic.
Key Features:
- Get more organic traffic to your site
- Instantly improves technical SEO
- You can easily optimize the content on your site with just a few clicks.
2. Booster SEO & image optimizer
With Booster SEO & image optimizer, you can easily optimize your website’s images for better search engine visibility, resulting in more traffic and potential customers for your business.
Key Features:
- Easily compress and resize images with just a few clicks
- improve your website’s load time and speed
- Using booster SEO & image optimizer, you can easily improve your website’s traffic and performance with just a few clicks.
- Helps you optimize your website’s images for better search engine visibility
3 . Grammarly
Grammarly is a powerful tool that can help boost your SEO by improving the quality of your writing. By providing accurate and concise feedback, Grammarly can help you make sure that all your content is plagiarism and error-free. Which in turn will boost your SEO.
Key Features:
- Grammarly can help improve the quality of your writing
- Make sure that all your content is plagiarism and error-free
- Helps you communicate more effectively with your customers and audience
Conclusion
The goal of this blog post was to show people how they can improve the SEO rankings of their Shopify store. A few key points that were covered include: improving your user experience, simplifying your site navigation, optimizing your site for speed, conducting keyword research, and removing duplicate content. All of these factors can help you move up in the search engine rankings and get more traffic to your store. Additionally, there are a few Shopify SEO tools and apps that can help you further improve your ranking. What have been your most successful Shopify SEO tactics? Let us know in the comments below!
