Shopify SEO: Guide to More Traffic and Sales

Organic traffic is essential for an e-commerce site with Shopify. While not free, it is not paid. In extenso, you don't have to directly pay a third party for traffic coming to the site (e.g., Google Adwords), but it's not free because it requires work (content creation) and is also the result of past marketing, communication, and advertising actions (notoriety).

Combined with a good conversion rate for your site, organic traffic forms the basis of the site's turnover.

Furthermore, as a brand, it is essential that a user is offered your site when searching for your brand or product, and not your distributors or worse... your competitors.

In this article, we will detail how Shopify and SEO coexist and how you can optimize your referencing.

Summary

• Working on your natural referencing: is it worth it?
• The two aspects of referencing
• Shopify's strengths for SEO
• Optimizing your site for referencing
• Conclusion

Working on your natural referencing: is it worth it?

This is a legitimate question when you consider the competition that exists for most keywords. One might be tempted to think that the battle is lost before it even begins against sites that produce dozens of pieces of content per day (blogs, online magazines, etc.) or distributors who optimize their referencing for thousands of references with dedicated teams.

This is true if you want to position yourself on generic category keywords such as:

• "day cream" in cosmetics,
• "dress" in fashion,
• "jewelry" in jewelry.

It is unlikely that you can achieve significant results with a brand site and possibly a blog.

Nevertheless, there is a territory on which you can and must fight: "proprietary" keywords: your brand name and your product names.

When you want to expand your semantic territory and seek more organic traffic, then you will have to consider the return on investment. By sizing the allocated resources (time, team, agency...) and measuring the additional turnover.

The two aspects of referencing

Natural referencing is not just a matter of content. There are two aspects to consider:

• technical natural referencing, i.e., which contributes to "readability" by search engines
• semantic natural referencing, i.e., related to the content and the user's query

Technical aspect

The principle is to make sure that Google understands how your site is organized:

• what is the structure and hierarchy of the content,
• how to move from one page to another,
• which pages to index and which pages not to index,

A second aspect is related to ergonomics in general, and in particular:

• page loading speed
• the site's "responsiveness," or the adaptation of the site to the device (desktop / mobile / tablet)

Semantic aspect

The SEO strategy consists of ensuring that your content is the answer that Google proposes to a user's question.

Google uses hundreds of criteria to propose, from among hundreds of thousands/millions of pages, the most relevant content to a user's query.

The objective is, on the one hand, to make your site the reference on the theme of the user's search, and on the other hand, to position one of your site's contents as the page to present to the user.

In the case of a brand e-commerce site, the theme will be the brand name and the page to display will be the product page.

Shopify's strengths for SEO

Page loading speed

Shopify does everything possible to optimize the referencing of its sites, particularly by optimizing loading speed:

• Thousands of servers optimized for the platform guarantee unparalleled speeds
• Images are "cached" on CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) distributed worldwide for fast display

Site ergonomics

The themes offered on the Shopify Themes Store are all "responsive", ensuring compatibility with mobiles and tablets.

Furthermore, the clarity of the purchase funnel, the absence of technical friction (speed), and the readability of Shopify themes have an indirect effect on:

• Time on site
• Pages per session
• Bounce rate

which are items that have a very significant impact on the site's referencing.

URL readability

The platform offers an architecture that is easily understood by Google:

• a file called "sitemap" tells Google the site map (it is generally available at: https://myurlofsite.sitemap.xml)
• simple URL structures to decipher: mysite.fr/collections/collection_name or mysite.fr/products/product_name

Security

Shopify automatically and freely secures stores with SSL. The enhanced security provided by HTTPS is rewarded by Google with a better position in search results.

Optimizing your site for referencing

While Shopify is natively SEO friendly, you must, on your side, implement (or ensure that your provider has implemented) the basic actions to properly reference your brand and your products:

• Correctly set up domain names
• Fill in the meta information for the site, product pages, collections, content pages
• Check that the theme is optimized for SEO
• Follow SEO best practices when writing content

Setting up domain names

You must tell Google which is the primary domain name, i.e., the domain name you want to appear in the search results.

Between my-brand.com and my-brand.fr, you may want to favor my-brand.com. But have you made a choice between my-brand.com and www.my-brand.com which are considered two different addresses by Google?

You must check with the provider who manages your domain names that all redirects are correctly made to the primary domain.

Otherwise, this can lead to penalties for duplicate content (identical content hosted on different sites).

Completing Shopify meta information

Meta information is the information that appears in search results.

In Shopify, you can modify the default meta information. On the one hand, to optimize referencing for the keywords you want to position. On the other hand, to increase your click-through rate with engaging text.

Site meta information

By default, the store title will be the store name. Use the recommended 70 characters to strengthen your branding and insert keywords. For example:

My brand

is much less explicit and appealing than:

My brand | Manufacturer of natural soaps since 1970 | Made in France

Similarly, for the description, you have 320 characters to insert keywords and convince people to visit your store rather than a competitor's. For example:

Discover My Brand natural soaps. Our soaps are made in Provence, using traditional cold saponification methods. Our soaps are 100% natural and organic. Our hand soaps, body soaps, and hair soaps are available in our online store. Free delivery from 25€.

By respecting the number of available characters, you guarantee the correct display of important information.

Important: Do not "stuff" your metas with keywords. The texts are primarily intended to be read by humans. Google prioritizes relevance (characterized notably by the click-through rate) over technical optimization.

Product pages, collection pages, content pages

Like the home page, you can modify the title and description. You can also modify the page's URL.

This is a new opportunity to insert keywords and make the page content explicit for the search engine.

For example:

my-store.fr/products/love

is less explicit than

my-store.fr/products/24-carat-gold-ring-love

In the same way as before, do not cram the URL with keywords. Use natural language. Also, prefer the hyphen "-" to separate words, as it is interpreted as a space by most search engines.

Theme choice

The choice of theme also has an impact on natural referencing. The theme may or may not include features offered by search engines and a structure that is more or less consistent with best practices.

Themes can, for example, integrate:

• markup (microdata, schema.org) and rich snippets that allow search engines to display additional information about a product: price, availability, rating, etc.

• Integration with Facebook's OpenGraph to improve user experience (image, name, product description when sharing, for example).

In terms of respecting best practices, we can cite:

• the use of the highest level h1 tag for the product title, other title tags for the rest of the content, in order to properly hierarchize the content.
• The use of canonical tags which tell search engines which product page URL to highlight in search engines, in order to avoid duplicate content. For example, my-brand.fr/products/article1 is preferred over my-brand.fr/collections/product-category/products/article1

Working on content

Content creation for natural referencing is based on a well-thought-out strategy. In particular, as we mentioned in the introduction, if you want to position yourself in a general semantic field.

With a view to referencing your products and brand name, focus on product sheets. Here is a non-exhaustive list of best practices to implement on your product sheets:

• use heading levels: Heading 2 (

  tag), Heading 3 (

  tag)...

• use bulleted lists
• use a maximum of images
• explicitly name files. For example: green-scarf-lisa-my-brand.jpg rather than file-021452.jpg
• fill in the alt tags of your images, i.e., the field to describe the image. For example: young girl wearing a camel scarf in a studio
• use simple vocabulary, relevant to your consumer, in human language.
• Do not try to keyword stuff, but try to identify and address any doubts your customer might have before purchasing on your page.

Conclusion

By following these recommendations, you ensure that you comply with good SEO practices, avoid being penalized by search engines (especially due to duplicate content), and maximize your chances of properly positioning keywords related to your brand and products.

To go further, a real SEO strategy must be implemented: definition of a semantic field, inbound link acquisition strategy, technical optimization, content production...

The implementation of such a strategy requires an upstream audit, which we would be delighted to carry out for you!