What Is Shopify SEO & Why Is It Important?

Intro

Shopify grew in prominence over the years with a 23 percent market share in the United States. It ranks as one of the most powerful eCommerce websites across the globe. According to the 2022 stats, 2.14 billion individuals globally will purchase products and services online by 2024. So if you are planning to sell on Shopify, good news! It is and will continue to prove to be a lucrative eCommerce platform.

However, increased buyers and market demand result in an increased number of merchants too. So how do you plan to reach your target audience? The solution is utilizing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies to your benefit!

Read this blog to get a good understanding of Shopify SEO. We will discuss some valuable SEO strategies for a successful Shopify venture and help your customers find your online store with ease.

Learn more about how to sell on Shopify to get started with your new venture today!

What is SEO, and how does it impact your Shopify store?

To learn how Shopify SEO works, let us begin by understanding the basics.

Many individuals scour the web start with a search engine, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. These search engines leverage data from online platforms to provide a sorted list of results for a specific search query. Search engines assess which web pages are most relevant to the search query and then display the results in descending order of interest.

SEO is the process of obtaining organic traffic from search engine results without paid promotions. It seeks to boost your website's ranking on search engine results pages. Many variables can help your online business rank better in search results:

• The natural connections it has with other websites
• The website's authority on active engagement and other variables
• The duration of the existence of your domain name
• Search-engine-optimized content and structure

Initially, there is little you can do to control the first three elements. Building a reputation for your business and getting other sites to connect to yours takes time. You may, however, increase traffic to your online business by optimizing your content for the search engines to perceive it as relevant to product-related inquiries. Ranktracker designed a web-audit tool to help you examine your Shopify store's search engine optimization.

Here are a few tips to optimize Shopify SEO:

Enroll your Shopify store at Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools

All website owners, regardless of your platform, must register their domains with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. By registering your Shopify store, you are informing Google and Bing about your existence and ensuring that the website is indexed. You can access the Google and Bing guide to register your store.

Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools will notify you in case of technical difficulties keeping them from indexing your site effectively, preventing it from ranking as high.

You must then provide an XML sitemap to these services in order for them to properly and efficiently index your site. Shopify automates sitemap creation for you at: www.domainname.com/sitemap.xml.

Research your keywords

Keyword research is vital since it assists in discovering search terms that are highly valued and often used by potential consumers. Ecommerce keyword research differs from regular keyword research. Most websites are concerned with informative keywords. Commercial keywords that indicate purchasing intent are most important to eCommerce sites like yours. If you are interested in learning more about search intent in SEO, read our article Why Search Intent is the Most Important Element of On-Page SEO.

Use our incredible Keyword Finder to locate the ideal SEO keyword prospects in our up-to-date worldwide database. Simply input a word or phrase to view a list of comparable keywords with search volume and difficulty ratings.

If you want to learn more ways of researching apt keywords, read Printify’s blog about Shopify SEO. This page explores many other important aspects of SEO, including organization of store structure, removal of duplicate content, increasing website loading speed, etc.

Use latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords

LSI keywords are those that are closely connected to your primary keyword. You may locate these by performing a simple Amazon search or using our previously stated Keyword Finder. Search Amazon for your primary keyword and check for additional keywords that keep coming up. Assume you are attempting to advertise a kettle:

"Stainless steel." "1.5L" and "1500 Watt" "Kurrajong Steel Homes" appear several times, indicating that they are major selling points and presumably frequent search phrases.

Ranktracker's SERP analysis tool assists you in identifying your weak points in the competition. Ranktracker assists in dominating any search phrase by utilizing our 3+ trillion backlinks in a historical set of data together with precise keyword complexity.

Prioritize the titles and headings!

When determining how to categorize and display your content, search engines consider the titles of your page and product as critical bits of information. Your title appears as the most prominent element of results on the search page. Ensure two things while creating titles for your Shopify domain and blogs:

• Avoid vagueness
• Start with keywords

Therefore, if you are selling decorative mugs, it is better to start the name of the business with decorative mugs than anything else. For example, Decorative mugs by Mellisa is a better title than Melissa’s Pottery Wheel.

(Image source: stylefactoryproductions.com)

Shopify store vendors often ignore the importance of applying correct headings. They often mix up the hierarchy of the usage of Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, etc. This causes the following problems:

• Makes it harder for the visually impaired to read your articles
• Search engines struggle to correctly index your material
• Makes content look aesthetically unappealing

Therefore, pay more attention to headings when writing a blog article. Heading 1 (H1) should start with keywords as it is at the top of the headings hierarchy. The search engines use it along with titles to rank your page. Include H2s and H3s with LSI.

It is important to note that while indexing, search engine algorithms examine data from pictures too. They examine pictures alt text and file names.

Below the surface- Technical SEO

Technical SEO is a sort of search engine optimization that happens behind the scenes. It is not visible to customers, but it guarantees that your website is optimized for crawlers, has a fast site, and is mobile-friendly.

The following are some suggestions for improving your technical SEO for eCommerce:

• Internal linking
• Correcting duplicated content
• Optimizing website speed

Proper technical SEO ensures better engagement at your online shop and increased organic traffic due to the ease of indexing. If you wish to learn more about Technical SEO, read this blog about what is technical SEO.

Add rich snippets

A rich snippet is a kind of structured data that assists search engines in comprehending the content of the website. Rich snippets act as extra data to better classify and index information. They include visual cues regarding the product, page, or post, such as star ratings, author, and pricing. It appears under the page's title and before the meta description.

(Image source: stylefactoryproductions.com)

You can generate a rich snippet by adding data markup code in the templates of your store or using a rich snippet app.

Link building

Google algorithm thinks that the best information might be obtained if websites were granted credibility by citations from other websites. However, citations here are backlinks. Google evaluates a site's standard and relevance based on the number of such links and the quality of websites that link it. New websites have less authority in the eyes of search engines for the same reason.

Creating partnerships is one of the greatest methods to approach backlink development. Guest articles, for example, can be a terrific approach to creating backlinks if the material is relevant and provides actual value to your audience and your partners' audiences.

Backlink checker can evaluate competitor backlinks and help you discover backlinks used by competing businesses. It is an easy approach to identifying related sites in your field. Additionally, use Ranktracker’s Backlink Monitor to check who’s linking or unlinking your store to their website. It will help analyze the performance of your content strategy.

Utilize Yoast SEO for Shopify

Yoast just made its well-known Yoast SEO plugin accessible to Shopify users. Yoast SEO is a program that helps you make changes to your content that will improve its performance in search results. Yoast scans your content and generates a set of practical ideas to optimize it. It considers various aspects, including the length of the meta description, the density of keywords, and the readability of the page. Yoast for Shopify costs $19 per month to use. It is, nevertheless, a useful tool for driving traffic to your Shopify shop via writing and digital marketing. Yoast can help you ease the SEO process for your online business.

Make your customers spend more time on your site

The length of time a user spends on a website before returning to search results determines the performance of your website in the search result. If your Shopify website retains attention for a longer time, it is likely to show up on the top when potential customers search for products you are selling. Let us look at ways for you to keep viewers on your page longer:

• Create intriguing content by writing in-depth blog entries or showing stunning photographs of your product.
• Ask questions and use phrases that get the reader thinking and continue reading.
• Use a simplistic navigation layout allowing visitors to easily go from one section of your store to another, encouraging them to stay longer.
• Add internal links for visitors to browse other products in your domain.
• Add how-to-use videos or videos that keep them engaged on a single page for longer.
• Ask them to rate you and leave comments.
• Make sure your content adds real value to the viewer.

Conclusion

SEO is a complex subject with constantly upgrading tricks and tips to crack through the search engine algorithms in an organic way. Nonetheless, optimizing Shopify SEO is crucial to boosting traffic and increasing the profitability of your eCommerce business. Keep track of your SEO performance and your search rank using the Rank Tracker tool.

It tracks your domain's position up and down the results pages when potential customers make a search. It provides you with useful notifications and visual synopses.

(Image source: Ranktracker)

The ideas provided above should assist you in improving the performance of your Shopify shop in search results; however, there is much more you can do to improve your site's search ranks. Keep up-to-date with the blog section to keep learning more about SEO for the success of your Shopify store.