Traditionally, buying and selling activities involved a brick-and-mortar set-up. As time played its trick, the introduction of the popular e-commerce store, Amazon, changed the face of buying-and-selling. Today, these activities are carried out by simply gliding through our phone screen and taking SEO measures to ensure a flow of traffic.
Multiple inflection points in the graph of virtual buying-and-selling suggest that consumer idiosyncrasies have swayed the curve in favor of e-commerce activities. And in such a situation, if you do not have an online store, you must act now!
Building your ecommerce website can seem intimidating because of the processes that seem to follow, and the response it may receive. Also, the process can be difficult to understand and follow; and given the state of the economy, it may be challenging to invest in outsourcing your development and marketing needs.
In such a case, Shopify has got your back! The prominent e-commerce platform allows you to create your e-store, hassle-free. Irrespective of the size of your business or the industry, it provides you the gratification of having a website and reaching a larger group of people.
So whether you are a budding artist, an established firm, or somewhere in the middle, and are looking to expand your business via e-commerce, then Shopify is your one-stop guide.
How Can SEO Help In Expediting The Reach Of Your E-Store?
In an ideal world, you'd create your Shopify E-store and wait for your niche to find you, but in the real world, you have SEO to do that for you.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of increasing the quantity, and the quality of your website traffic, organically. It does so by increasing your visibility on the SERPs by following these three processes;
- Crawling your webpages,
- Indexing your webpages, and
- Ranking your webpages on the SERPs.
While creating a Shopify e-store, you must understand that you may not be the only one selling a category of products via e-commerce. Given that the world follows a monopolistic competition of trading, we may have multiple sellers of the same product; and for this reason, we must make use of efficient tools to promote ourselves.
So once you begin optimizing your web pages according to the SEO guidelines, you'll essentially want to get rid of all the duplicate content, you will want to have a structured data to make it easy for the search engines to crawl your webpages, and you'll also want to have a definitive site-map to improve the crawl budget.
7 Shopify Seo Tips to Rank Your E-Store Rank Faster
The following are a few tips and tricks that you might want to apply to accelerate your e-store ranking and visibility -
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Make The Search Engine(s) Notice Your Shopify E-Store.
Our world functions on the emotion of belongingness. Since the time we begin our school, we're associated with a certain institution all through our lives.
Similarly, after your Shopify e-store is ready to greet the world, you must register it with Google Search Console and other tools where you want it to reflect. The idea behind it is simple - if you register with such tools, then you have a higher chance of being noticed and ranked in their SERPs.
Once you register yourself with these tools, the next step is to provide them with an XML sitemap that will expedite the process of indexing your webpages accurately. Shopify allows you to generate a sitemap for your e-store automatically, and you can find it in the file named <sitemap.xml>. Once you find the XML file of your sitemap, you can enter the link in tools like Google Console and Bing Webmaster.
This is the first thing you want to do after the verification of your website to enable the search engines to crawl and index your e-store.
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Get That 'https://' before your Shopify E-Store Domain-Name.
The websites with 'https://' are considered as more secure than the websites that use 'http://'. So, search engines prefer the former over the latter due to its security. Also, a lot of internet browsers have the same preference when it comes to loading a website.
As a new Shopify e-store, you want your website to be secure to build your customers' trust since you'll also need a payment gateway. You must obtain an SSL (secure socket layer) certification to ensure that your Shopify site is completely safe.
You can activate this by following this path;
Shopify Dashboard --> Sales Channels --> Online Stores --> Domains.
It is customary to ensure that you've followed all the steps to secure your website, primarily because of its e-commerce status but generally because of its search engine visibility.
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Optimize Speed And Content.
In a world where the majority of the things are available at your fingertips, nobody wants to stare at a loading screen to get through to your e-store. The search engine crawlers crawl, index, and rank your web pages when they find it worthy of your target market, and they may not crawl the web page if they find it too slow.
Here are a few tips-and-tricks that you can apply to make sure that your website is fast:-
- Use compression tools to reduce the size of the images used in your Shopify e-store.
- Use AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) for your Shopify web pages; this will load your web pages quickly on mobile devices, which will increase the dwell time on your products and services. Google prioritizes AMP pages over the other, which can increase your ranking.
- Do not use too many web-fonts for your web-pages.
These were a few tricks that will help your pages load quicker, but you still have other concerns on your hands. You want your data to be in a Structured format since it enables search engine crawlers to index your pages easily and rank them better.
Shopify automatically follows a few steps that may help you in structuring your data;
- The URLs use standard characters and are constituted in a simple structure.
- iframes are not used in web pages since they aren't SEO-friendly.
- The categories follow a hierarchy.
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Essentials For Your Shopify Store; Keywords, Titles, and Meta Description.
Keywords, Titles, and Meta Descriptions are the essence of your SEO. The search engine crawlers love everything in there; let's break down each component to understand how it can affect the ranking of Shopify e-store.
Keywords: Keywords are phrases that people use to find a product or services that are similar to yours. For this reason, you must conduct thorough keyword research before you begin formulating content for your webpages. To choose a specific keyword, you must focus on the search volume for each of them and then decide your targeted keyword(s).
Tools like SemRush help you with finding keywords and also give you information about their search volume.
Titles: While performing the optimization chores, search engine crawlers will look for your webpage titles as a guide to help them categorize it and later, rank it. So, come to think of it, your title in itself is a keyword that accounts for a huge factor when it comes to getting your website ranked on the SERPs. To have the crawlers rank your page, and focus on a word that you want to promote, you must make sure that you include it in more of your Shopify web pages. Also, you must make sure that you use your heading wisely. There must be a structure for H1, H2, and H3; since it makes indexing easier for the crawlers. H1 is something that could fall after your page title, followed by H2 and H3; so if the crawlers want more information about your webpage. In addition to your page-title, your H1 could help them make the decision.
Meta Description: A meta description is a concise summary of your blog that tells the reader if it is worth clicking on your webpage's link. It could be within a 50-160 character limit since Google shortens it to 160 characters anyway. It must contain the keyword that you want to target and it must be crisp.
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Must-Have SEO Checks.
The process of optimization is pretty simple to understand and implement on your website. It begins with letting the crawlers know about your page. Since we live in a monopolistic economy, there may be several other e-stores selling the same products and services, like yours. In such a case, the crawler is bound to get confused between you and the others. To avoid such confusion and have the crawler index your page, you must follow these checks religiously;
No Duplication Of Content: Content is the king when it comes to your Shopify e-store. You want to make sure that all the content on your website is original and not copied from elsewhere. When you use content from a different source, the crawler gets confused between which one to index for a particular search result; this could prove negatively for your webpages.
So you must avoid duplication of content and aim at originality.
Images and ALt Texts: Sometimes, it may so happen that the images on your website may not load completely, and in such cases, if the crawler doesn't find a description of that image, you could lose on the ranking because chances are, your page won't get indexed.
To avoid such a situation, you must provide an alt text with your image to help the crawler understand its content and categorize it. Also, an alt text helps the screen readers(specifically for visually impaired users) to describe your image.
It is also beneficial if you name all the images in your web pages rather than keeping them under their original name since it allows the crawlers to read it easily.
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Use Canonical Tags
There are a few variations of the URL of your website. For us, it may seem like a trivial matter, but when it comes to search engine crawlers, it becomes a duplication issue that could affect the ranking of your website.
For example;
http://www.domain.com
https://www.domain.com
https://domain.com
http://www.domain.com/index.php
These are just a few examples where the crawler might get confused and write off the content as duplicate.
To avoid such a situation, developers use Canonical Tag to tell the crawler that a certain URL is a copy of the original URL; this prevents duplication of content, and the ranking doesn't get affected.
From an SEO perspective, the canonical tag is very important because of the following reasons;
- The crawlers have a lot of pages to crawl, and if they come across duplicate content on multiple pages, they may not index your webpage, and your ranking may be lost.
- If you already have a rank on the SERPs, it will dilute due to the duplication error. The Canonical tag can help you in solving the duplication error.
- Canonical Tags help the crawlers to pick the original URL in a pool of multiple URLs with duplicate content.
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Product Schema
We understand that the business arena is very competitive, and there are new firms breathing life each day. Amidst such quick turn-around, we must remain one step ahead of our competition. Product schema is one way to ensure a traffic upsurge on your webpages. It contains information about a product such as product price, reviews, ratings, or other important information on the SERPs that may result in better traffic on your pages.
From an SEO perspective, crawlers love product schema because of its structured outlook towards product data. It is easy for them to index you into categories which will increase your ranking on the SERPs.
Conclusion
Building a Shopify store could be a great investment for your business because of the rich features that it provides. Given the condition of the world economy, it is safe to believe that the digital platform is going to be the next big thing in the realm of buying-and-selling. But you must remember that developing a website is just the beginning, to have people visit your website and buy your product, you have to have a rank on the SERPs, which is the job for SEO.
An e-commerce store generally requires a technical and meticulous SEO work on their website. If you are looking for such services, check out GoodFirms researched and compiled a list of SEO companies, that create the best strategies to implement aggressive on-page & off-page techniques to help clients accelerate quality organic traffic.
