Practical, Handy, and Comprehensive Shopify SEO Guide
Shopify is a practical and handy e-commerce platform letting a retailer set up a highly functional and well-designed, robust online store to sell their products. Shopify POS is an important service that helps merchants sell their products in person. Shopify began more than a decade ago when the founder Tobi tried to sell snowboards with his company, Snowdevil. He found it highly challenging to sell snowboards online. There wasn’t any easy and convenient-to-use e-commerce platform whereby he decided to create the platform due to which Shopify was born.
Shopify is a leading commerce platform created for businesses of different sizes. Shopify is a ubiquitous platform that allows you to carry out sales anywhere-right from the car’s trunk, in-store, or on social media. Shopify had its store before it got started to be used by others. Shopify’s mission was to make e-commerce better for everyone from that time.
Ecommerce search engine optimization (SEO) lets you generate more organic or non-paid or free traffic from Google, Bing, and Yahoo to your online store. You will navigate to the search engine results page (SERP) as you search for something on Google.
You will find the first ten organic results on the first page in addition to the paid ads, which are highlighted in orange or purple results of Google Shopping ads.
This Ecommerce Guide helps you take care of E-commerce SEO related to the product pages that will be the top 10 organic search results on the first page.
Also, as you rank on page one, you will generate more traffic, which gets lesser and lesser on the subsequent pages. A study in 2013 found that just 4.8% of searchers reach the second page of search results. Only 1.1% of the number will shrink with time to lower the click-through rate from search results to your website, which will again be much lower.
Backlinko found that just 0.78% of searchers like to click on any link present on the second page of the search results. Again, it will be a matter of concern that your link ranks on the second page. Here’s a quick look at the click-through rates for the top 10 positions. (As per Backlinko)
In 2022, you cannot find search results where the first ten positions have been clearly laid out. The search results format is completely changed. The search results page on Google will show you:
Among different other things.
The rich snippets will also affect your website’s click-through rate. Therefore, it is also related to ranking on the first page of engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo, which allows you to use search terms that potential customers can use. You need to take several steps after learning about e-commerce SEO for beginners.
Shopify SEO is connected to the SEO adjustments that are unique to the Shopify platform, and they are accompanied by certain useful things for SEO, such as a blog and its ability to redirect. However, such issues may also lead to SEO issues such as duplicate content.
Duplicate content has the highest priority issue that has been created in Shopify. Duplicate content gets created when similar content is present on two distinct URLs. It leads to issues in search engines where they cannot get two pages needed to be a canonical version. Moreover, we also require link signals which will be split among the pages. We can find duplicate content in Shopify in different ways:
Shopify can again have this issue on its product pages. Shopify stores let the /products/ pages render for two different URL paths, including:
Shopify accounts ensures that all /collections/.*/products/ pages have a canonical tag for the associated /products/ page. Find out how the URL in the address is distinct from the “canonical” field.
Technically, product variant pages are Shopify’s extension for duplicate content. This section may not just be an SEO issue. Due to slight changes, Shopify stores might not have multiple product URLs created for the appropriate product. It may lead to duplicate content issues, such as the product descriptions may be the same for different products.
It can often be connected to an attribute (such as color) change. It means that you have multiple pages that may be present as duplicate or similar product descriptions and images. Several duplicate page examples will be created using a variant.
You need to go for the right kind of duplicate content. But, variant URLs must not become an SEO issue. Several sites may benefit from such URLs as they let you find indexable pages that you can optimize for a few terms. The product variant pages are highly beneficial, and they do not differ for every site. You must answer a few key questions that you can ask yourself.
You need to get a more in-depth guide with this article to determine the true course of action for different product variations. When the Shopify store has product variants, it will be worthwhile to find out early whether these pages should exist or not at a separate URL. You need to create unique content to optimize each variant’s target keywords.
It is necessary to create valuable, informative, and engaging content that will help in increasing the organic visibility of the store. Content gives the search engines more information about your site to prospective customers. Therefore, customers get more ways to discover your business. More visibility would mean higher traffic and more sales.
You need to create an “About us” and “Contact” page. Such pages help potential customers to become familiar with your business. It allows them to get in touch with things that may be of concern to them before and after buying the product.
Additionally, you also need a page dedicated to information on our shipping information, return policy, privacy policy, terms, and conditions. Adding a frequently asked question section can also help you communicate important details and lower the time you will spend answering redundant customer questions. Also, consider adding a mission statement or an “Our Story” page that helps you to distinguish your brand from others. You can also set up a blog on your Shopify store to create content that differentiates your brand and supplements your transactional pages to help you earn backlinks.
On-page SEO is related to optimizing the store’s internal pages to improve the search engine rankings. It has various factors, such as the quality of your code, text, and visual content. The HTML tags you will use need to be user-friendly on a site and do a lot. Such factors will be in your control for the maximum number of times. You can start optimizing the store’s rankings when you fix your on-page SEO through Shopify.
It is vital to conduct keyword research for Shopify stores that are highly similar to the study you want to perform for other e-commerce stores.
Here are some general ways to generate keywords:
Export the keyword data from Google AdWords. You must track and optimize the keywords which generate significant revenue for every site. Research AdWords keywords have high conversion rates. You achieve a high conversion rate for low-volume keywords, which shows that you will get highly transactional keywords. Review the keywords which will get the site’s clicks or impressions in Google Search Console. Find out the high-priority keywords which give you top-class ideas through Moz’s Keyword Explorer.
The “Content Gap” report on Ahrefs is useful for finding keyword opportunities where the competitor sites will rank; however, your site may not be ranking.
When you have keywords with similar modifiers, make sure that you use MergeWords to generate huge keyword variations automatically.
Shopify allows you to optimize the correct elements such as title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs. Always use the target keywords in such elements.
To understand these elements, you only need to navigate to a particular page you want to adjust for scrolling down to your “Search Engine Listing Preview.”
Make sure that you write compelling page titles which people want to click. In the search crawler, you must include keywords in the titles. Ensure that page titles are not stuffed with keywords and draw the human readers’ interest.
Google displays the initial 50–60 characters of most page titles which means that you keep your page titles less than 60 characters to avoid them getting truncated in the search results. Also, make sure that you include the primary keywords near the beginning of your page title lest the title ensures that it shows in search results.
You must have just one H1 tag on each page. Shopify SEO titles will have an H1 tag for pages created with Shopify. You can manually avoid adding an H1 tag anywhere on the page.
The meta description is also related to the text, seen below the title, especially on the search results page. When it comes to the title tag, the right keywords in the meta description help the Google bots choose the right keywords. However, you also need a text needs which entices and convinces the real people that visit your site.
As you write meta descriptions for product pages, ensure that you can find the right value propositions. Find out if you’re offering free shipping or if you can get a discount?
For example, use a description that informs all the users about purchases that are more than $25 to get free delivery as they encourage the website’s click-through.
Again, it’s important to have short meta descriptions of less than 155 characters. Otherwise, the descriptions may be truncated in the SERPs. Include unique selling propositions (USP) in your description.
Include the right keywords on your pages’ URLs, as you keep your URLs short and sweet and avoid filler words (like “the” and “for”).
Your page’s title, meta description, and URL will navigate to a page that you must adjust. Go down to the “Search Engine Listing Preview.”
On-page optimization is highly focused on optimizing all the textual content for the keywords. Well, this is again true for visual content.
Ensure that all your product images have a descriptive file name (and not something like 298343798. jpg). Write descriptive alt tags that show what each image is about. This is not only helpful for search engine crawlers who cannot “see” the images. They are highly suitable for visually-challenged people who rely on screen readers.
In addition to the titles, meta descriptions, URLs, and image alt tags, it is important to optimize all the website content, including:
And so on
You need to carry it out for primary and secondary (and “semantic” or related) keywords.
If you want to consistently create keyword-optimized long-form content like the article, how-to guides, and listicles, it goes a long way to help you attain these top rankings on Google.
It is necessary to publish such helpful content. It helps you to target different keywords having a separate user intent. This means that some of your pages, like the blog posts, will be targeting searches to get information (e.g., “what is romper”). On the other hand, other pages, such as the product pages, require targeting lower search volume keywords showing their intent to buy (for example, “buy women’s rompers”).
There are so many basic on-page optimization factors that need our attention every time we publish a new blog post or form another product page. However, all advanced on-page SEO improvements are present in the present subsections, including the things one must do. This works for some time till nothing else changes all such types of settings.
SEO is the best way to organize your website. A well-structured site helps both the search engines and the shoppers to navigate your store in the right way.
The shoppers find it easy and intuitive to hang around the store to browse the products. It helps boost the purchase, while a solid site structure translates to giving a top-class user experience. Similarly, the search engine crawlers will find it easier to:
And rank your various pages in the right way to get relevant search queries. Now, find out how well you have optimized the Shopify store’s structure? It’s straightforward, and it also helps to keep things simple. You do not require to have a lot of subcollections (that will be product categories known as “Collections” in Shopify. Elaborate on your website’s hierarchies.
Include the global search box at the top of every site’s webpage. This doesn’t directly help the search crawlers. Instead, it is also helpful for the human visitors with a particular purchase intent to find things they are looking for. It means you get a better user experience that leads to the best outcomes and higher rankings on Google.
Page speed is a metric that is crucial for user experience, and it is also the right official Google ranking factor for desktop and mobile searches. You don’t need a slow-loading store. It won’t just frustrate the visitors and enhance the bounce rate but also lower your Google rankings.
There are several tools to help in page speed optimization. What you need is to check the SEO connection tool consistently. You can do many things to optimize the Shopify store’s load speed. Just look at each of them in detail.
Finding that the comments and whitespace in the CSS files take up a lot of space and slow down the site, you need to work to minify or compress the code as you remove the extra characters such as spaces and comments and combine the common styles.
It minifies the files to a smaller size. As the files get lighter for a faster transfer, it helps to load your store faster.
Shopify provides the ability to auto-minify the CSS as it renders it in an ‘scss’ suffix. You need to include the same in your site using the suffix .scss.css
Apart from optimizing your images using a proper file name and an alt text, you also need to ensure that the image’s file size is small. Using bulky product images harms the page load speed. It also affects the search rankings.
With Plugin Speed Optimizer, you can go for automatic image compression to reduce the sizes of all images while retaining high product quality, such as for products present in product collection and blog.
Lazy loading is a great means to delay the object construction. This includes things such as images that may be needed. All the images on your pages will be loaded in their full size, despite the user being only present at the top of the website.
You do not need all the images to load as the user may not see them if they never scroll down. You get a low-quality image that acts as a placeholder using lazy load. When the user doesn’t scroll down a page, your image seems to be in the viewport. Otherwise, it gets replaced using a top-quality version of the picture.
Pick the right theme not just to ensure that you get appealing store aesthetics and an enjoyable user experience. But, you also need to consider your store’s loading speed.
Whether you update Shopify’s theme with new features or create a modern look, you need to review the theme for how much the user yearns for it. If the new theme exerts a lot of demand on your users’ internet connections due to a bloated code or features you don’t need; you can skip it.
To test a theme’s resource demands before switching themes, run a performance tool like GTMetrix on the themes under consideration. Of course, your own resources are going to exchange the right numbers. But, testing the theme gives you an idea of how the theme will load when it is put on your site.
50% of your store visitors and 50% of your conversions come from mobile devices. This proportion is increasing day by day. Therefore, it is indispensable to lower your store’s page load times on mobile devices. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an open-source framework made by Google’s collaboration with Twitter which renders you better and faster experiences on mobile devices.
This framework lets you build top-class and easy experiences for mobile devices through the straightforward implementation of HTML taking care of the series of CSS rules. Google shows AMP content in special slots, which are much better than the organic results in specific slots. Therefore, as you enable the AMP, it starts creating a great difference that helps to give you top rankings in the mobile search results. It is important to use an efficient app like AMP by Shop Sheriff. This app quickly and easily amplifies mobile speed. It gives youtube the right boost to go for the right search result in your mobile listing.
Also, it is important to run the PageSpeed Insights to achieve Google’s recommendations for an improved store speed.
The Shopify theme you choose plays an essential role in determining your store’s load speed directly and the store’s success indirectly. A large part of the site’s visitors come from mobile devices like smartphones or tablets. Your store must appear and function flawlessly on mobile devices.
A responsive design automatically helps to adjust to loading as per the required screen size. However, every theme on Shopify’s theme store is highly mobile-friendly and responsive. However, small errors can occur on the mobile, making a massive difference to the user experience and rankings. Therefore, it is necessary to review various pages to ensure that they are readable and appealing on mobile and the desktop.
Off-page SEO is connected to various activities you can perform external to your website to improve its SERPs rankings. Such activities give higher credibility to your site, as per Google.
Here are the Two Most Important Ways to Take Care of the Off-page SEO for your Shopify Store.
Backlinks are present externally on other websites which point to your store. Google also uses the correct number, quality, and relevant backlinks, essential ranking factors. Having the right number and quality of backlinks is an important and direct deciding factor in how your store ranks on Google.
Simply put, Google considers links pointing out to trust and authority. Without having the right link-building strategy, your store won’t be able to reach the SERPs’ first page.
You need to do some things consistently while making them a part of your marketing strategy for building high-quality links to your online store.
Guest posting is a traditional and correct way to build quality backlinks involving improving your brand’s online awareness.
You need to create and contribute high-quality content like blog posts on authority websites and publications. It will improve Google’s rankings, but guest posting also helps bring in new audiences, gain the audience’s trust, and use thought leadership for your brand.
Blogs in niches like fashion and fitness have a massive following. The bloggers’ content is trusted by a large community of people who think alike. Blogger outreach is a crucial technique whereby you work with bloggers to create authentic content which promotes your brand and products. In this way, you can build a stronger influence which gives your store a higher exposure.
Blogger outreach is related to finding the top authority bloggers in an industry. You can also pitch bloggers personalized to tell them what is present for them (this may include giving free access to your products alongside charging a sponsored fee). There may be certain things they want to do for your brand. When the content gets published, you and your blogger must promote the same on respective channels giving you results that bring in a high level of exposure to new audiences for your blog and your brand.
You need to create content for your brand, which can range from anything right from a product review to a giveaway contest. Partnering with your blogger can help you make the right content that offers value to your audience and, in this way, bring great results to you and your audience.
When you produce precious content, it attracts spontaneous links. It means that you must publish highly shareable content. Such kind of content includes:
Additionally, you must also enhance your outreach. It’s most important to pitch your content to niche’s high authority blogs or media publications. Reputed and authority blogs will publish your content on their web property only if it really offers value. Having high-quality content means that you will surely find some websites that would be happy to publish the content on their blog.
The importance of giving your audience pertinent content that helps them find more excellent value for your products or services also provides you with easily crawlable content by the search engines. An Ecommerce SEO Agency will usually use these types of content ideas to start with.
As per many articles, you will also find that many unlinked brand mentions on Google’s highly reputed sites can give you great value and may also increase your authority on the search engine. However, working for link reclamation or asking for links on unlinked mentions can give you a higher value.
Link building involves a plethora of methods and techniques. This may not always be related to new content creation. You may also encounter situations whereby many other pages, businesses, or niches have already mentioned you in several places without linking to you. Make sure that you use such tools to find such unlinked mentions. Reach out to the right publishers requesting them to link to your site on its mention.
Another way to build links involves finding broken links to websites in your niche. You can reach the site owner exhibiting the broken link as you find broken links for your content or products similar to what you offer. Offering a valid link on your webpage in place of the broken link gives more traffic and value to your site.
In SEO, broken link building proves to be a mutually beneficial activity for you and the site that links to you. Broken link building helps you repair broken links and gives you a free backlink.
The greater the number of backlinks you can get, the happier you will be. However, remember, there are two things you need to consider:
The second point means that link quality is also paramount. So, having two natural backlinks from high authority websites will be much better than getting twenty links from low authority websites, while it will be a discredit to get links from spammy websites.
Backlinks directly add to your site’s SEO juice store. Social media mentions from reputable brands also offer your brand a high authority over competitors. Social media shares of your posts, webpages, or mention of your business show that you are a trustworthy business.
So, tools such as Ahrefs help you find mentions for forming your content strategy as per mentions of your brand in the media or press.
CDN stands for Content Delivery Network will deliver content from the website to users quickly and efficiently depending on location. A CDN comprises a network of servers, also known as (“points of presence,” or POPs) present in worldwide locations. The CDN server nearest to a user is the “edge server.” It comes to play as people submit a request from a website to get content served from the CDN. This content delivery network is connected to the most proximal edge server, ensuring the best possible online experience.
Therefore, just like your images, your content gets cached on a CDN. So, this content gets delivered from your edge server to the end-users in the fastest way in place of being delivered right from the origin and across.
You do not need to worry about anything as Shopify offers the merchants Fastly, a world-class CDN. Making the right changes to the images, Shopify will mention and inform your CDN that your images have been changed due to the “asset_url” filter. It automatically takes care of the version numbers of all the URLs it generates.
However, if you use CSS to refer to your image directly, your URL needs to stay static, which will not be the right asset version that Shopify automatically updates. This means that you must ensure that your images get automatically updated.
This is all that you need to do.
When you need your store to stand out in the SERPs, it means that you begin to add to your website’s structured data markup. As you offer Google some data in a particular structured format, it gives you the name “structured data” which will show up as per the product pages.
Product schema is a top priority for e-commerce websites as it helps bring the most interested buyers from the search results as they can see important information such as reviews and prices.
Product Schema. Search engines require a schema to generate rich snippets that make the best-selling products highly visible in the search results. The schema, connected with the structured data, helps the search engines find out more about your site’s content.
Google uses product schema in its image search results to show the product’s price, star ratings, and availability.
A Shopify store must also use schema to determine which products are in stock. Google’s Popular Products section also provides a new search feature that utilizes schema giving your customers top-quality product information. This may only become available for fashion apparel objects. Schema and Google Merchant Center always give you better organic visibility.
Use apps such as Feed for Google Shopping or ShoppingFeeder to sync the complete product inventory with your Merchant Center. Merchant Center also allows you to appear in your ‘Local Surfaces Across Google’ Programs. It means that your products will be present in Google Maps results. People can find you as they search for you using the right product keywords when it’s a Google-hosted storefront that you want to see. Surfaces Across Google helps you take care of the lowered number of visitors present in Shopify analytics. With customers requiring the use of the right products on Google, it enables you to track the visitors in the Merchant Center.
Product schema is built utilizing the essential Shopify themes. Having a default theme such as “Dawn,” again supports various schema types, including:
Moreover, you may get access to add structured data types, such as a recipe or FAQ schema. You can add higher information, but your theme won’t support the same. During such a situation, you can also understand the structured data code present in your theme, which considers the structured data through JavaScript. This helps install a dedicated schema app, which ensures the safety of the pages regardless of your choice. Your pages need to get marked up correctly using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.
Breadcrumbs are essential for every e-commerce store, as they require easy-to-use internal links that show the right places where they are present. Breadcrumbs are used in a site’s hierarchy. Moreover, you also have breadcrumbs which are highly helpful to give Google a complete understanding of the internal linking structure of a website.
How do you come to understand issues in breadcrumb?
Webmasters get notifications in Google Search Console about issues in the breadcrumb schema. When the site’s breadcrumb schema report exhibits the errors, it helps you determine if there has been an issue that the support team can help resolve. Determine the product on the site showing the output of the breadcrumb markup.
As such, Yoast SEO does not give the right breadcrumb schema output. Make sure that you have enabled Yoast SEO breadcrumbs.
While you are not using Yoast SEO breadcrumbs, you can find other issues on your site (such as your theme). It will be added to the breadcrumb markup. Ensure that you reach out to the right team for the product that requires the addition of breadcrumbs to help you in issue resolution. If you do not understand the products properly, adding breadcrumbs to your site will be hard. A conflict check can help in this case.
There is a lot of chance that things get added to the breadcrumb markup. Suppose you do not understand the best way to set up things correctly. There’s a great chance that the other things get added to the breadcrumb markup. Therefore, you require understanding if a breadcrumb error is present in Yoast SEO breadcrumb markup.
When this happens, you need to do a small test. Going for this in a step-by-step manner will prove easy. Before you start, you need to consider at least another URL that gets listed in the Google Search Console. It leads to a breadcrumb schema report error.
In the last step, you need to fix the errors you have found.
Google’s Structured Data Testing tool helps confirm that the breadcrumb code is validated with the least amount of errors occurring. Fixing the breadcrumb output means establishing the breadcrumb code that validates the fixed errors as you use the ‘Validate Fix’ button in the Google Search Console.
Having an active online store blog with posts that will get published consistently, you need to understand the structured data you must use from within the “Article”. Schema requires Google to understand a blog’s editorial content.
The broken links (which use the “404 not found” error) on your store aren’t good enough to give you a top-class SEO, and user experience as a site’s webpage site becomes inactive, for example, as you get a product that needs to be used for the sale. During such situations, you need to redirect the page to a relevant or an existing page present on your site to give your visitors and crawlers an appropriate destination in place of incurring an error.
When it comes to broken links, duplicate content is connected with the use of other priority issues related to e-commerce websites we can find in general. Duplicate content is related to getting similar content on two separate URLs of a website. It produces issues where search crawlers cannot find the two pages they consider canonical or as their “non-preferred” versions.
People who did not access the canonical URL as a page’s URL must be highly representative and connected to the series of duplicate pages that your site may possess.
Putting up the things straightforwardly, Google would understand all about the primary version of your site. You may also use rel=” canonical” tags that point in the right direction when it comes to search bots. You must understand the same while getting the correct link within your site, allowing you to link to the canonical URL. You must consistently link to the canonical URL and let Google find what you prefer. You must also employ the right tool to take care of page speed Optimization. The persistent Connection tool is a great tool used in SEO.
The technical SEO audit and working on the issues which show up are beneficial for improving your organic traffic. But, there are also other aspects of Shopify SEO that you can work on to increase your website’s organic traffic. They include:
Shopify Apps. An essential advantage of the Shopify platform is that the app ecosystem helps you add a higher number of tools and features to your site without any coding. Certain apps also allow you to:
Shopify has loads of SEO apps, such as Yoast SEO, offering you the correct functionality for its famous and widely used WordPress counterpart. Yoast SEO helps to take care of your titles and descriptions appearing on social media or Google Search. Moreover, the app gives you great feedback on readability. Additionally, it also helps you to implement structured data that can prove handy because structured data uses the power of product information in its image search results. This can directly guide the searchers present in Google’s image results to the product pages.
In 2021, Google and Bing are now launching Shopify integrations. Such integrations are usually apps (such as Google Channel and Microsoft Channel apps). Both apps let the merchants go for products present in Google’s and Bing’s free product listings. It also offers a top-class addition for the various Shopify retailers as these integrations help searchers get higher search visibility without requiring help from the experts. Both apps may also be used for launching shopping campaigns, especially as you move forward to advertise your offerings.
There are also so many other apps that allow you to add product reviews to give more information to customers about things you’re selling. Search engines generally use star ratings to enhance their website’s clickthrough rates.
Remember, any apps you load will add an extra code to your site. Moreover, apps that load up on the user’s end, like those helping you create your own store’s design, may slow down the site.
Sitemaps. Sitemaps have a lot of information connected to your files and pages. They get used by search engines for indexing and crawling your site. This helps to let your pages appear in search results. Moreover, Shopify will, by default, generate the sitemap.xml file, giving the appropriate links to your pages alongside the use of the right products, images, collections, and other blog posts for various sites. Submit the sitemap to Google to verify your Google Search Console account so that it can easily index your pages.
Crawl Optimization. Merchants need to control the pages that get crawled. Site owners can edit their robots.txt files with Shopify. It means that you can prevent specific URLs from getting crawled. It also includes the addition of different sitemap block URLs, crawlers, and other things.
International Domains. Also, Shopify launched several global domains in 2021, which allowed merchants to sell more in one country through a single account. Merchants may also now configure subdomains alongside language folders for targeting international users. Shopify will add hreflang tags to your store by itself, which helps save your time.
From the onset of the COVID pandemic, many local merchants started using Shopify. Businesses serving a locale require ensuring that you get an online presence where customers can look for companies such as yours on platforms like Google, Bing, Facebook, and other platforms.
Your Shopify website will take care of your local efforts, and you get a range of options for local search optimization, which lets you get numerous standalone articles. If you fear jumping-off points, check out our how-to guide for optimizing your Google local knowledge panel.
Visuals play a significant role in the food niche. You cannot tell visitors that the low-cal snacks are also highly delicious. It gives them reasons to do things rightly. Few e-commerce businesses may also do a top-class job.
This Shopify store balances your color palette using a seamless scrolling system that takes care of the brand’s elegance.
Here are a few key features you need to note:
This entices your visitors to become a part of the Ratio Coffee community. The store also has playful and fun articles on its website to drive highly qualified traffic to its store.
Ratio Coffee’s website gives you a better shopping experience than others. Also, it helps you to stay connected to the brand identity.
Gallery Drinkware refers to a great art project which utilizes eye-catching design and glassware craft. The website content is only present as art pieces. And the products also enhance reusability, and you do not have to dump plastic into the ocean.
The website is assembled in an orderly fashion. It draws visitors’ attention to products. It gives a seamless checkout process making payment an easy and tension-free experience for the customers.
The website is well-presented for things where you can get lost. This provides you with a great example of how you can make your homepage minimalistic and focused on a point.
Rhone is a website made by professionals passionate about athletics to promote quality sportswear in the market. They wanted to take care of the issues by themselves.
The selection of Rhone’s products gives you a highly pleasant experience due to the engaging layout and top-quality images.
The light-colored background donning bold font attracts customers’ attention to the products. You also get a list of publications in some of the best magazines featuring Rhone’s products. It has a simple and appealing style, especially for fitness niche sportspersons.
Rhone also serves as a great example of having a great layout.
This simple approach has made a significant impact.
This brand involves young creatives who have gathered to create the odeon eyewear, a unique brand. They make products from acetate and polycarbonate materials employing bamboo, walnut, and cherry.
Every product is well-presented using high-quality images. This helps the customers to find themselves to be touching a product. Easy page navigation and clear product descriptions coax shoppers to stay a little longer on their website.
Take A Shot understands how it can take photos to represent its style. This gives you an inspiring example of great photography used in e-commerce.
Silk Laundry is the collection of classic silk pieces for omen who are trendsetters and not trend followers. Their products are handmade with the operation being so small, allowing them to devote an adequate time to give you a perfect piece in the end.
It is undoubtedly a pleasant experience to browse Silk Laundry’s collection of products. It features high-quality images to help customers check how the product feels. It also shows you listings with footage of the product smoothly.
It has informative product descriptions having sleek and elegant typography. The site also has transparent “Shipping and Returns” and “Reviews” pages to build trust with the customer. The overall structure is simple to navigate and doesn’t require clicking a lot.
Silk Laundry tells you all about leveraging the video to make each product stand out. This provides you with a great user experience that appeals to the shoppers.
Shopify surely stands out as an e-commerce platform. But, it’s far from perfect concerning SEO. There are various issues that you must address through SEO.
Shopify has a few SEO limitations which you cannot fix. For example, y̶o̶u̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶’̶t̶ ̶c̶u̶s̶t̶o̶m̶i̶s̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶r̶o̶b̶o̶t̶s̶.̶t̶x̶t̶ ̶f̶i̶l̶e̶ (Update 23 June 2021: Shopify also announced recently that users could start editing robots.txt file) ). Also, you just have a few customization options for URLs. This helps you write the image alt-text for every image (though you may use the same image in the entire website).
Shopify may involve several SEO issues which you can fix. They include:
Twitter-Like Character Counts for Titles
Shopify has a character counter similar to Twitter for the number of characters one can use in the title tags. Most of the time, 70 characters’ limit can be misleading. Google has a certain title width in SERPs as it measures its pixels, whereby it can go up to 600-pixels, which translates to about 60 characters.
A quick fix to determine if your title tag is too long (in terms of pixels) is reaching out to Google to perform a site: command (e.g., site:mystore.com), and if you want to find out about a specific URL that appears in Google, go for the exact URL named after the site: operator.
Shopify gives you a peculiar URL structure that is long and not SEO-friendly.
Ideally, URLs should look short and simple, and the product should be as close to the root domain as possible, for example,
>mystore.com/boots
Shopify’s forced URL structure gives you the same domain that looks somewhat like this:
A) mystore.com/products/boots
And, as you go for collections, it will be even worse:
B) mystore.com /collections/collection-title/products/boots
In this case, you will find that the URL gets longer and longer. This may impact SEO a little, but this is what you can’t change, and it’s not going to be a big deal.
Though you may experience a lack of control over the URL structure and products to take multiple URL forms, also, Shopify canonicalizes a product back to the “root.” Therefore, in the above example, B is canonical to A, while A is self-referencing. You do not require duplicate content issues that will be a big nuisance for e-commerce websites.
Update 01 July 2021: Removed the block with several instructions for a workaround to edit the robots.txt because this is a native feature on Shopify.
Use the Liquid to add or remove directives from the robots.txt.liquid template. This method takes care of Shopify’s ability to keep the file automatically updated in the coming time. It is a highly recommended app. To access the for editing the file, go to Shopify’s Developer page to Customize robots.txt.liquid.
Make the requisite changes to the default template. Shopify’s Developer page provides more information on liquid variables and common use cases. Now, customize robots.txt.liquid.
Save changes in the robots.txt.liquid file in a particular published theme.
Here’s a quick look at a few actionable tips allowing you to improve how friendly the search engine is toward the different pages of your store:
Your homepage is the storefront of your online store and not only for your internet visitors and the search engine crawlers. Optimize your homepage to welcome the bots because it is essential to make things easy for the customers. This is how you can do it.
You need just one H1 tag optimized for the most important keywords related to your business.
Use the paragraph underneath the title alongside the meta description, which describes a business that has created a keyword-rich copy. Also, use the broad and related keywords in the homepage content.
Collections are helpful to suggest they add similar products into their buckets or groups. It can be beneficial for SEO, allowing you to target various types of keywords present on such pages than what is possible for a few product pages.
Click “Products” and “Collections,” then “Create Collection.” You need to select the criteria for your page, followed by clicking “Save Collection.”
In addition to optimizing the titles and meta descriptions. So, there are a few things you can do to get optimal rankings for your collection pages:
Customize each page to give it a unique touch to sort the duplicate content issue. Always have long-tail keyword phrases for every product present on your collection page.
Write a detailed description to boost that uniqueness score for each page. Avoid creating a boring text slab, using bullets and essential keywords in bold.
Make sure to work to rank your product pages on the first SERPs to skyrocket the sales. As you follow guidelines, create search-friendly product pages:
Use the proper structure and hierarchy in headings, subheadings, and bullets, making it easier for visitors to scan through. Do not make a low-quality copy that you want to incorporate into your brand’s tone. Keep things crisp.
Emphasize your brand’s value proposition –including its features. Describe the advantages of using products from your brand that customers can’t find anywhere.
Always write easy-to-read content using crisp sentences and paragraphs. Use the head and long-tail keywords but ensure that you do not remove them; otherwise, it may affect your ranking. Now, check the readability. Answer the potential questions or doubts that may arise.
Use Product and FAQ Structured data.
Carry out SEO for optimizing the Shopify product tags.
SEO Tips for Shopify Blog
When your products rank on the first page of SERPs, it will skyrocket your sales. Follow the guidelines to create the right search-friendly product pages:
Create a high-quality article in place of coming up with a large number of meaningless posts which no one would like to read or share.
Ensure that you consistently post per your schedule and go for a few comprehensive long-form posts per month.
What kind of content do you need?
The content you create should
all the content you create should resonate with your brand. Moreover, all your content must be original or unique, well-researched, and have accurate grammar.
Target the informational keywords for building internal links to your products with your collection of the pages.
Ensure that you have the right call-to-action (CTA) in each post to guide the visitors for the desired action, for example, to check the product catalog or subscribe to your email marketing newsletter.
You can do a lot to improve your site’s visibility on the search engine. Sort out the various SEO tasks which you must carry out. Use a handy checklist to check your progress:
Conclusion
There are so many online platforms that are highly useful for different e-Commerce businesses. Shopify provides several indispensable functionalities which are essential for a new store. It allows business owners to develop profitable online businesses that can also help you!
Shopify is not only a great platform but also a user-friendly platform. It helps you to scale both large and small online shops. It has many functional free and paid in-store apps, including social media & email marketing integrations. You can access a community of developers and experts to help you.
