How Do I Do SEO in Shopify?

When growing your business’s e-commerce presence, as with any business, physical or digital; the most important commodity is your ability to reach new customers. For your Shopify, this means utilising SEO to it’s fullest capabilities, generating new customers and allowing your Shopify to cement your place in the e-commerce market.

In this article, we will go through some tips and ideas on how best to improve your Shopify SEO to give your e-commerce presence the best opportunity to shine.

Why is SEO important for my Shopify?

Your Shopify is the easiest way for you to generate revenue, so why not generate this revenue for free? It’s obviously not as cut and dry as this, but good SEO practices provide a free way to promote your Shopify by adhering to what Google’s algorithm views as accurate and relevant to the customers search. This should be the crux of your SEO Shopify strategy, to help Google to accurately represent and identify the products on your Shopify so that the most relevant and interested customers will arrive on your Shopify organically. A crucial way of achieving this is via keywords.

What Keywords should I use for my Shopify Website?

Keywords are the terms and phrases searched by a customer that, if used on your page accurately and with relevance, will drive prospective customers to your Shopify organically. There are three important characteristics of a keyword or keyword phrase:

• Search Volume
• Intent 
• Competition

These three things will determine the volume of users who are searching, the value of their digital footfall, and how difficult it will be to be presented top or first page on Google for their search. For this reason it is important to build your keyword set to relevant and honest to your products and brand to ensure the correct customers can find your store, and therefore build sales.

Where should I use Keywords on my Shopify?

Once you have your keywords, these must implemented throughout your content, including page titles, meta titles, product descriptions, and even alt image texts. After you completely embedded your keyword strategy throughout your Shopify, and ensured all URLs and filenames match the content, it is time to submit your full sitemap.xml to Google Search Console. This sitemap will mean that Google will be able to easily crawl and index your Shopify.

Once this has been submitted, it will take Google around 48 to 72 to crawl your website, and then you will start to build an organic search presence based off of your keyword strategy. 

In the meantime, a great way to further build your Shopify’s organic search presence is through link building and SEO focused content.

How do Link building and SEO content help my Shopify?

Link building is a great way to improve your Shopify SEO presence, because by having inbound links on other websites you are saying to Google that you are a reputable, trustworthy site; this helps to build your domain authority, which is another key part of building your Shopify’s SEO visibility. 

Internal links also offer another avenue to sign post to Google that, by having a website or e-commerce platform comprised of interconnecting articles and pages, you are a knowledgeable voice in the market. This can be best achieved by writing keyword driven blog articles that aim to answer important questions a customer may have. 

For example, If I were running a secondhand vintage clothing shop through Shopify; a good keyword driven piece of content may be centered around the question “Why should I buy vintage clothes instead of new?”. This works for a couple of reasons, it has a good chance to appear via Google’s SERP function, itself a great way of appearing 1st page without overtaking more organically established sites; and it helps to place a prospective customer at the top of your sales funnel with the aim of convincing them of your position as a reputable Shopify, and then linking through to your Shopify pages via a Call to action. 

How do I measure the success of my Shopify SEO?

The best tools to measure the success of your Shopify SEO strategy are Google Analytics, and Google Search Console. These tools will give you accurate data on the volume of customers, keyword rankings, and conversion rates across your website; allowing you to further refine your approach to your online presence.

What else can I do to build my Shopify SEO?

The beauty of SEO is that there is always work to be done, from the more topline keyword and content based strategies we have covered, through to the more intricate aspects of technical SEO. As a Google and Shopify Partner, at Our Digital Team we specialise in providing digital marketing services to a full range of businesses across the UK via a non-traditional agency approach.