8 Steps How To Improve Ecommerce SEO For Beginners
Looking to rank your Shopify store high on Google to increase your organic revenue?
Well, you’ve come to the right place. Here’s some tips to get your started for 2023!
Learning these SEO strategies will ensure that the products and services are easily accessible to customers whenever they search for them. To increase sales on the store website, the following strategies will help.
1. Optimising The Free Google Tools For Your Shopify SEO Strategy🚀
First, ensure that both Google Analytics and Google Search Console are present and that the website/store is registered beforehand. This process allows the Shopify store/webpage to be visible and helps the store rank higher in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
Google Search Console (GSC)
Google Search Console is an essential tool for SEO because it gives information on your store or site’s visibility in Google Search Results. Further, it provides information about the questions that appear on your site and how high or low traffic your site is getting from google searches.
With this information, you can identify the keywords working well on the webpage. It also helps detect any issues within the site that may hinder visibility in Google Search Results.
Google Analytics (GA)
GA is necessary because it gives you information about your store’s traffic sources, time on store/page, bounce rates, and the pages most visited by your user. You can also custom-set the GA to monitor ‘add-to-cart purchases for your website for better visibility.
2. Optimising Site Structure and User Experience
This step is essential for SEO because for customers to buy products and services from you, you need to have met their needs on your store/site so that they can be captivated and thus purchase from your store.
Therefore, your store structure needs to be optimised by creating a simple and user-friendly navigation system. This is because a better user experience helps customers have a smooth sail on your Shopify Store, thus resulting in high traffic, which translates to more purchases on your site.
Shopify Navigation
Ensure your Shopify store is easy to navigate to enhance your customer experience. This is done by having a straightforward menu that shows the users where they are on your site and where they are headed.
Related: Add navigation to your theme
Optimise site-speed
This is an essential aspect of SEO because users will most likely stay in your store and make purchases if your store is fast.
One way to optimise your store speed is by using a cache plugin. This enhances your site with the help of saved pages and file copies for quicker access. The second option can be compressing a file to 100KB or less.
Moreover, one can also optimise the speed by leveraging the browser cache. Contents such as images and JavaScript are stored locally within the users’ browsers for faster access from one visit to another rather than having new downloads each time, thus saving on bandwidth.
3. Optimising Keywords/topics
Topics are your gold mine!
You need to be targeting topical coverage with your Shopify store
Keywords do tell you a lot about the targeted market and where it is headed at all times. By paying close attention to the targeted keywords, you must ensure that your site’s titles and descriptions use the words identified. Using the words in your content can also improve your ranking in SERPs.
4. Optimising Product Description
For product descriptions to be heightened, it is essential to use the keywords that potential customers search for on Google. This will help your goods and services and the total store rank higher on the SERPs. When describing your product in the store, try using lists and ensure that your descriptions do not exceed 200 words.
Importance of Product Description
- It increases your sales by making your products visible to the right consumers.
- It increases your search rankings.
- It improves the entire shopping experience.
5. Optimising Slug
What comes after the domain name in an URL is known as a slug. It is vital to enhance the slug for SEO because Google uses it to determine its relevance to a particular keyword.
To heighten the slug, include your targeted keyword as close to the beginning as possible on the title page.URL slugs that are easy to read help search engines and visitors comprehend what is on a page easily.
Related: How Can I Change The URL Of A Product Page?
6. Optimising Product Page and Title
Product pages and titles are some of the most crucial parts of any eCommerce site. They are the face value when they click on a product listing from the Google search results page.
A great way to optimise them is to use header tags correctly and write meta descriptions with a summary of what a user will find with a click on your product.
Using Header Tags Correctly
The title of your product is an essential parameter as this is the first thing that will attract the customer’s attention when they click on the search result. This product title can be optimised by following the following practices:
- It should contain relevant keywords to your website.
- Use numerical instead of spelt out numbers.
- Use uppercase when writing the title.
- Make the title short yet captivating and has all the details. It should be between 75-100 characters.
- You can use symbols to make it easy to read and remember.
- You can add your brand name to the title too.
Utilising Your ShopifyMeta Description
Your meta description is a brief description that tells us about the page’s contents. It usually appears below the URL and the page title on SERP. This is typically a chance to let potential customers know that the product being sold entails other things than its name.
For you to optimise your meta description, you should:
- Make use of action-focused language.
- Include relevant and specific keywords.
- Make it between 120-160 characters because mobile devices can only accommodate 120 characters, whereas desktops can do up to 158.
- Only include what your users will find to have their trust.
Don’ts While Writing Meta Descriptions
- Avoid keyword repetition. Only use a keyword once to avoid penalties.
- Do not use a meta description for two or more pages, as this will water down your intentions and cause confusion to search engine bots.
- Do not copy-paste web content to act as a meta description for it to be unique and catchy.
7. Optimising Schema-Markup 🔧
You’d be surprised how many brands ignore this!
Schema markup or structured raw facts that have no meaning is a code that can be added to a website’s HTML to help the search engine understand the contents on your pages.
This code allows you to include extra vital information about your product, such as star ratings, prices, and availability. This can motivate users to click on your site from Google, thus improving your ranking in SERPs.
8. Optimising Link Building
Link building is where you use links from other websites to bring them on board to your website/store. Links determine the ranking of each page. Thus, the more high-ranking links you have created on your website, the higher your website will be positioned in SERPs.
Ways to Acquire the Links
– Guest posting
This process entails writing a blog post for a different website and including a link back on your website. This will help you acquire high-quality links and increase traffic and your brand’s exposure on the search engine.
– Directory submission
By submitting your website to online directories, you make your business visible and allow it to be accessible to anyone using Google in a directory of similar websites. Online directories include:
- Google My Business
- Bing Places for Business
- Yelp
– Social media outreach
By coming together with other online businesses on social media and working together on content projects. Through this, good professional relationships can be cultivated with other business owners, thus acquiring high-quality links for your website.
9. Optimising Internal Linking
This is where money is made!
Internal linking can be described as any linking found within your website that helps link your page to another internal page. These links are essential as they allow the user and the search engine to understand your content and its value.
Contextual links are links added to the content, and they direct your customers to be related and engaging content.
To maximise the internal linking, you should:
- Use keywords related to the page you are linking to.
- Not link pages that are not related in any way to your page topic.
- Only link the first keyword if it appears many times on the page.
With all the comprehensive details provided above for your Shopify SEO, you now have the necessary knowledge to work on your website efficiently and effortlessly to acquire the most incredible results.
While working on your website, ensure that all the aspects of your Shopify SEO optimisation list are in sync and work pleasantly to increase your website’s Google search engine ranking. This will make you more visible to potential buyers; thus, they can find you swiftly.
