Your store is running successfully and visitors are frequently coming on your site. The visitors definitely have interest in the products and services you are offering.
But this is not enough, something is still missing. When you check the dashboard of your store – you are not seeing any visits from search engines like Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing and all other.
Search traffic is really essential for any business, but you just don't know where and how to use search as a marketing tool. Before we proceed, I know all you have one question in your mind that why should you be paying attention to search traffic anyways?
In this blog, we will have a look at search engine optimization for your Shopify store, and some best practices you can start to see your business traffic and growth.
The Importance of Search Engine Optimization
On Wikipedia, the SEO is defined as "the process of affecting visibility of a web page or website in a search engine's unpaid results - often referred to as "organic," "earned" or "natural results."
A prospective customer searches a keyword or term related to your product or business, and as a business owner your objective is to appear in the top results of search engines.
There is a buzz of SEO being dead with the rise of email marketing, paid advertising and social media. The truth is, search is not going away any time soon – particularly with the continuous growth of in-app search, mobile search and more.
Above and beyond the fact that SEO is here to stay, it is also a cost-effective marketing play. While paid advertising can provide direct, nearly instant sales & traffic – it may cost you a lot. So SEO is the ticket when it comes to a minor investment that depends on your business & goals.
Search Engine Watch reported that a research study by Optify discovered that “websites ranked number one received an average click-through rate (CTR) of 36.4 percent" - that's huge potential for sales and traffic that depends on the targeted keywords!
Yes, it can take some time for you to really start seeing results with SEO if you're doing it all yourself, and it has the potential to get expensive if you're outsourcing the work – but it makes sure you are in the game for the long-run, and that you are generating high-quality content.
Let’s look into how your Shopify store is heightened for SEO, and some tips and tricks to make sure you are getting the full benefit of it.
Shopify & Search Engine Optimization
As an owner of the Shopify store, you are already up ahead of the game. No matter what plan you are on, Shopify consist of powerful SEO features like:
- editable meta descriptions, URLs and title tags for your pages
- editable ALT tags for customizable image file names and all images
- automatically generated robot.txt and sitemap.xml files
- automatically generated canonical URL tags to stop copied content
So, what does all that mean? Here are some standard definitions to get you started:
Title tags are often utilized on search engine results pages to display preview snippets for a given page, and are significant for both social sharing and SEO. The title element is meant to be a short and accurate description of the content of the entire web page.
Meta descriptions are HTML attributes that provide summarizing descriptions of the content of web pages. Meta descriptions are normally used on search engine result pages to display preview snippets for a given page.
The image's alt text and filename are utilized to define a picture's contents. Having descriptive alt text can assist your product images show up when visitors search for images. Also, alt text is a key accessibility feature: it defines your product images to people who have visual impairments.
Your sitemap.xml file comprises all your pages, products, collections, and blog posts.
The robots exclusion protocol (REP), or robots.txt is a text file webmasters create to teach search engine robots how to crawl and index pages on their website.
With those features and settings defined, let's next look into how they can be functional to your Shopify store.
Optimizing Your Shopify Store for Growth
While Shopify does cover all basics of SEO for you by default, you can take benefit of exclusive features to prolong the prospective of your store's organic search reach.
Here are a few of many different things you can tweak on your store:
Title tags
You can edit the title tag of your online store along with setting the title tag for each product, collection, or page in Shopify. Simply scroll down to the Search engines section on these pages in Shopify to make any necessary adjustments.
Meta descriptions
An additional great trick, is to customize the meta descriptions. Shopify will automatically pull text from your page, but you can modify the meta description yourself to fit your marketing objectives. You can set the descriptions for your homepage along with other landing pages, blog posts, and collections by making use of the Shopify admin.
Page headers (H1, H2 & So On)
It is imperative that you take in your main keywords in the names of your store's collections, products, blog posts, or other pages. Let’s take an example, if you are selling girls top with your store brand on it, you will wish to set the product's name to something like "Lilly's Girls Top". This will make your web page show up more likely when people search for words like "Lilly's" and "Girls top.
Content is king
If you will write more content in your collection text, blog post or product description, your web pages get better chance to be found on Google and other major search engines. Try to write a few paragraphs of text with some of your main keywords involved.
Try an app
There are a number of different apps accessible in the Shopify App Store that can truly make your life relaxed when it comes to all of the complexities of search engine optimization. Be sure to frolic with some of the apps to see which one goes exactly well with your business requirements.
I personally suggest you to use all these features by your own so that you get the better understanding of how search engine optimization works. There is no any harm in getting professional assistance. If you wish to hire any expert for SEO, make sure to have a look at our Shopify Marketing Experts.
Learn More
Really, we have only scratched the surface when it comes to SEO for Shopify store. There is a lot you can do to learn about how SEO can be extremely valuable for your business growth.
If you are interested in learning more about SEO, be sure to go through the Shopify forum where you can swap links, ask SEO questions and discuss other marketing topics.
