Summary
The first result on Google generates 33% of clicks.
This means that if you are not well-positioned, you are missing out on potential traffic to your online store.
While improving your Shopify SEO can take time to implement, it's an effort that will eventually pay off with visitors automatically landing on your product pages.
Shopify SEO, is the CMS compatible with optimization?
As the owner of a Shopify online store, the question to answer is how to reach potential customers and bring them to your store. One of the answers lies in the acronym SEO for Search Engine Optimization.
People who want to buy a product or service will tend to use a search engine to find relevant results corresponding to their request. We generally talk about Google, as it alone holds +90% of the market. But there are also Microsoft's Bing engine, Yahoo!, or even DuckDuckGo - It's important to know them, at least partially, so as not to neglect any source of traffic.
Search engines rank e-commerce sites using relevance criteria that can be listed by importance to get your site to the top of the results:
>> Authority links from other websites
>> Keyword relevance
>> Optimization of h1, h2, h3 title structure
>> Regular content publication
>> Metadata optimization
Shopify offers the possibility to optimize your store by incorporating each of the previous points and much more to always better meet algorithm requirements.
Shopify SEO, just like on a traditional website, takes time. It is estimated that the first results will be visible after 3 to 6 months of hard work. But unlike a paid acquisition strategy via advertising, SEO is a sustainable source of traffic if you regularly update your content.
Positions taken today can be maintained over time with actions aimed at improving natural referencing in the long term.
Should you create a Shopify SEO blog alongside your store?
An internet user typing a query on Google may have two search intentions:
- Informational: they want to get information on a given topic.
- Transactional: this is a query for which the internet user wants to find a particular product/service.
In both cases, your store can benefit.
E-commerce merchants with a Shopify SEO blog can write informational articles related to their niche. The goal is to discuss a topic that addresses a significant search volume in order to rank for one or more keywords related to their store's theme.
Other texts can address a transactional intent to highlight a product, for example, or to write an explanatory guide on its use, always keeping in mind the importance of choosing relevant keywords.
1. Improve your Shopify SEO through keyword research
While tools like SEMRush or Ubbersuggest provide considerable help in finding the right keywords, knowledge of your market will allow you to list more relevant and less generic keywords.
Keywords are added to improve your ranking on search engines. An upstream research process will allow you to list expressions that correspond to queries.
The combination of several criteria such as monthly search volume and competition is essential to rank at the highest position on the SERP.
It is important to define two types of keywords:
<> Short-tail keywords, example: organic shop
<> Long-tail keywords, example: online organic shop Paris
Most e-commerce merchants will try to rank for overly competitive keywords and will end up failing their SEO strategy. In fact, it is preferable to populate your content with long-tail keywords where the volume is certainly smaller, but the competition is weaker.
Good keyword research requires creativity so as not to settle for overly basic suggestions that would yield no results.
2. Shopify optimization requires high-quality content production
To generate more traffic to your site through SEO, it is essential to give visitors a reason to return to your store.
And this, notably through quality content, which is both recent and captivating.
One of Google's algorithm criteria is visitor retention on your site. It is certain that with a very high bounce rate, Google will consider that your content is not good enough to be offered in the best search results.
3. Improve your Shopify store's loading speed
The download speed of a URL was not a criterion for judging the relevance of a site. Today, that has changed with the American firm's desire to offer an optimal experience for internet users. This is where we get into more technical aspects, such as image optimization (compression and size reduction), deleting unused code snippets, or even Shopify apps that slow down performance.
Should you start with SEO? The answer is yes. However, it's important to understand that once the work begins, you need to be patient, but also and especially consistent in your optimization.