Improving SEO For Shopify Store
Whether you’re starting a new business, building a web presence for your store, or launching a new product, if you’re trying to sell online, you have an important problem to solve: how do you get your customers to find your store?
People who come across your online store on a search engine were probably looking for products like yours, so they are more likely to buy something. You can use search engine optimization (SEO) to improve the search engine ranking for your store and help customers find your products.
What is SEO?
Most of the people searching for something on the internet begin their search with a search engine like Google or Bing. These search engines are designed to use a variety of information from websites to create a ranked list of results for a particular query. These search engines determine which websites are most likely relevant to the search query, and then display the results in their order of relevance.
There are various factors that determine which online store appears higher in search results:
- The number of organic (not paid or social media) links to your online store from other websites
- How old your domain is
- The authority of the website on the basis of engagement and other factors
- The website structure and content that is optimized for search engines
During the initial few months of setting up your online store, it is difficult to do much about the first 3 factors. It takes time to build a reputation for your brand and get other sites to link to yours. These improvements need to be a part of your long term strategy.
For the short term, you need to focus on optimizing your content so that search engines recognize it as relevant to the queries that are related to your products. This increases your chances of appearing higher on the order and lead customers to your store.
Steps
To optimize your online store for search engines, you can carry out the following steps:
- Find keywords relevant to your products and your brand. What are the search terms that customers will use to find your store/products?
- Add these keywords to your content, in page titles, descriptions, and image alt text.
- Ensure that your URLs and filenames match the content.
- Add your sitemap.xml to Google Search Console, so that your online store website can be easily crawled and indexed.
- Create content that is relevant to your products and encourage other websites to link back to your online store.
Built-in SEO features in Shopify
Shopify online stores have inbuilt SEO features to help you optimize your content. Some of it is taken care of automatically, like your website’s sitemap.xml and robot.txt files are generated automatically, themes automatically generate title tags that include your store name. Also, themes are required to have social media linking and sharing options to make it easier for you to market your store.
You can also optimize your content using features built in to Shopify:
- You can edit the title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs for blog posts, webpages, products, and collections.
- You can edit the alt text for images.
