The aim of content marketing is to get your posts seen by millions of people who would benefit from the information. Shopify SEO is an important element to get results with organic search. It is common knowledge that organic search is the most effective method of marketing and guarantees long term results. In addition, it is also an effective means of building thought leadership.
Optimizing your store for search engines is important to help potential customers discover your site. The major principles of search engine optimization involve creating valuable content for your customers and making it easy for them to find you.
In this article, we address some of the fundamentals of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as it concerns stores built with Shopify.
Shopify SEO Features
Shopify Page Editor:
Shopify has a page editor that helps users to build landing pages and product pages. With this editor, it is easy to do basic formatting such as headings, options, tables, and so on.
The preview section automatically generates a meta-description and page title. You can edit this and fix the bells and whistles to fit your site and get higher click-through rates.
Page title:
This is a way to give search engine crawlers an idea of what your website is about. The Meta description should summarize the page contents. You also have the opportunity to optimize the meta-description. Craft it beautifully to describe what the page is about.
Analytics:
It is important to have a means of measurement to track the effects of changes that are made on the website. Shopify integrates with two major tools that help with Analytics.: Google Search Console (GSC) and Google Analytics.
Google Search Console is useful to measure the impact of changes made to the website with respect to traffic and visitors. In addition, it helps to monitor changes in the search engine results. Furthermore, it gives an insight into what queries land customers on your website.
Google Analytics shows how many people visited your website, what they did on your website, and where they navigated to. To get all this useful information, you need to set the code and configure them properly. Also, you need to alter the settings often to suit changing needs or requirements of measurement.
Site speed:
Site speed is an important ranking factor. The present algorithm of Google delivers websites that are user-friendly. If your website takes long to load the common thing is that visitors will abandon that site and go on to the next results. This is not good for the search engine results page. Bounce rates will be high and when this happens Google will finalize your website. is that simple.
It is important to use a light theme to build your Shopify store. As a rule of thumb, websites should load in less than two seconds.
Shopify implements a content delivery network that helps to improve page load times. With this technology, no matter where your visitors are in the world, content delivery is optimized. It is also useful to implement lazy loading and optimize your images so that your website loads
With lazy loading when visitors land on your website instead of the images to attempt to load all at once, the browser loads images as your users interact with your website. This decreases the time it takes to load upfront initially.
Image Optimization:
Typically, e-commerce stores have images to illustrate their products. Image optimization is crucial for your store performance.
Although Shopify has a Content Delivery Network (CDN) which helps to enhance fetching of data to display for optimal loading speed, however, this doesn’t preclude the need to optimize your images. Poorly optimized image is responsible for distorted pages and increased page load times.
Keep the image size uniform across your website. Also, the file format to use is key. It is better to use jpg or jpeg rather than PNG. PNG is more preferable if you need a transparent background.
Sitemaps:
Sitemaps contain information about our pages. It helps these search engines crawler to understand what our site is all about. When a search engine crawls your website easily, it helps your ranking on search results.
Shopify automatically generates a sitemap.xml file, although you can still go ahead and manually generate your sitemap. Having done this, submit it to google so that it can index your pages.
Technical SEO for Shopify:
Shopify makes it easier for store owners to start selling and not have to deal with too many technical worries. However, with respect to technical SEO, some things still need to be optimized. These things majorly concern URL structure, and the technologies such as JavaScript. Be sure to clean up any duplicate pages and look for alternate URLs.
Boosting Shopify site traffic takes time; however, these tips would come in handy.
If you need help with your Shopify store, you can get help from Shopify experts like Open Think Group. You will discover that there are opportunities to get exposure for your business by using SEO strategies. You can increase your success rate by working with seasoned Shopify experts.