SEO is a crucial part of any online business. If you want to be successful in the long run, you must learn to use it effectively. When implemented correctly, you could outdo your competitors and get lots of traffic which will convert into sales.
We will share some useful Shopify SEO tips as shared by Bing Digital Shopify agency in London to boost the online visibility of ecommerce stores. These can help you improve your site rankings and drive more traffic to your website.
1- Make sure your technical SEO is on check
Before optimizing your content or creating new pages, make sure that all the technical aspects are working as they should. If something isn’t right, it can negatively impact your search engine ranking.
So, check on the following technical aspects of your Shopify store:
# Robots.txt file needs to be present and optimized. Ensure your site has a sitemap.xml file; otherwise, Google and other search engines won’t rank your products.
# Watch out for any crawling error on your Search Console page. Correct them immediately to avoid penalties.
Use H1, H2, H3, and so forth correctly. You can’t have a page without H1 or skip from H1 to H3.
Use canonical tags appropriately in your Shopify store.
# Ensure that your site loads fast. It’s one of the most important factors for user experience. Use tools such as Google Page Speed Insights and GTmetrix for this job.
# Check if there are broken links on your site. Broken links may lead to 404 errors and affect your site performance. So, fix them immediately.
# Make sure that your site is mobile-friendly. People these days prefer shopping from their smartphones to desktop computers. So, ensure that your site looks good on both devices.
2- Shopify product images should be optimized
Product images play an essential role in driving traffic to your website. They not only attract users but also influence conversion rates. But, you need to optimize your images before uploading them to your store. There are certain things that you must keep in mind while doing so.
# Keep your image sizes small: The recommended size for images on Shopify is 1200 pixels wide by 600 pixels tall. This small size ensures that your images load quickly and don’t cause any issues with your site speed. When uploading images, you should always crop them first. Cropping helps you remove unnecessary parts of the image and makes it look better.
# Add alt text to each image: Alt text tells search engines what the image is about and for which queries it should be ranked. For example, if you upload a dog picture, you can add “dog” as its alt text or your target keyword.
# Compress your images: Compressing your images reduces their size. Hence, they take less time to download and display on your visitors’ browsers.
# Use a CDN for your images: A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers located worldwide. Using a CDN allows you to serve your images faster because it caches the images and serves them from multiple locations.
3- Remove duplicate content in your store
For Shopify, duplicate content is another disaster that can harm our rankings. Duplicate content refers to identical or similar information published on different websites or the same website. It may happen due to some reasons like:
# You’re using the same description for two or more products.
# The exact keywords appear on multiple product pages.
# You have copy-pasted descriptions from another website.
Duplicating content will hurt your SEO efforts. To prevent this, you need to use unique descriptions, titles, keywords and metadata for every single product. Also, you need to make sure that you’ve used the best keywords for each product.
Use tools such as Copyscape and so forth to identify plagiarism in your pages. Also, use site audit tools such as SEMrush, Moz, Ahref, etc., to identify duplicate tags, content, and pages.
4. 4- Have a blog
Shopify has a built-in blog feature; hence you do not need other software to create one. Blogs help you engage with customers and increase sales.
A blog post should contain at least 500 words and include relevant keywords. If you want to rank higher on Google, you need to write informative and engaging posts. Also, blogs help you build backlinks to your site. Backlinks are essential for ranking high on Google.
5- Optimize your store’s URLs
URLs are critical when it comes to SEO. Your URL structure should be optimized for better results. Here are a few ways to improve your store’s URLs:
# Ensure that all your products have ‘/product/’ in their URL and your blog articles have “/blog/” in their URL.
# Name your category page appropriately. If you sell something like shoes, then name it “shoes”.
# Make sure that you’re using hyphens instead of spaces between words.
# Use keywords in your URLs.
# Do not use numbers or random codes on your URL; make sure they have the product name.
# If you move any product to a new URL, make sure you set up a 301 redirection.
Conclusion
SEO is a long process. But once you start implementing these five steps, you will see improvements within no time. We hope these Shopify SEO tips will help you out!
