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10-Step Shopify SEO Process to rank #1 on Google in 2023

With thousands of eCommerce companies contending for first place in search engine results, the battle does not appear to be subsiding anytime soon. It is obvious that your Shopify eCommerce business must be configured for search engine results in order to rank at the top of the search results. Creating an aesthetically pleasing store is important to convert customers, but does not help bring more traffic.

Previously, rating your site on Google was simple. With limited competition, a website owner only needed to cram their website content with the relevant keywords, and everything else would fall into place. People ranked their websites at the top of search engines simply by adding lots of keywords into their pages or by purchasing backlinks. That era has long passed.

Google has imposed a penalty for keyword-stuffed webpages. Aside from that, Google’s ranking system is more sophisticated than ever. So merely putting a handful of relevant keywords is not enough. To optimise your website for search engine ranking, you must consider various on-site and off-site aspects. This Shopify optimization guide is for eCommerce business owners who want to rank first on Google. Let’s get this ball rolling.

What exactly is Shopify SEO?

Have you been wondering what exactly is Shopify SEO?

What is SEO?

Well, Shopify SEO is the procedure of optimizing your Shopify website so that it appears higher on search engine result pages (SERP). The more qualified prospects find your website on Google, the more revenue your business will generate. Organic search is among the most cost-effective and profitable strategies to drive traffic to your website. Based on comparison between all Digital Marketing strategies, SEO has the best ROI.

According to Google, 49 percent of buyers use Google to find new products. If you appear during these results, you will attract potential customers, who are actively shopping for your products. However, if you have a Shopify store, you have to do more than simply use conventional SEO techniques.

While Shopify platform includes basic SEO options out of the box, they are not enough. For having the best chance of ranking on top of search results, you have to check off all boxes. Shopify also presents unique SEO issues, such as duplicate content or bulky plugins that slow down website speed. If you want to boost your chances of SEO success, you need to be aware of these issues and customize your SEO approach accordingly. That’s where Shopify SEO comes into play.

Shopify SEO refers to a collection of modifications aimed to optimize Shopify stores for search engines such as Google and Bing. By following the 10 simple steps listed below, you have the best chance of being on top of search engine rankings.

shopify SEO

Shopify SEO Steps to rank #1 on Google

1. Site Structure and User Experience Optimization

shopify SEO

To get started with Shopify SEO, we’ll start with site structure and user experience (UX). The reason is that at the end of the day, your consumers are the ones who buy your items. So the e-Commerce store needs to look good and be user-friendly. This entails developing a basic navigation system that is straightforward for consumers to utilize. Customers are the heart of any digital product, and a great UX design guarantees that they have a pleasant experience when shopping on your website.

With so much time spent online these days, it is critical that consumers can navigate easily through different pages, product collections, and product pages. This allows the user to locate not just what you’re offering, but also who you are and any other relevant information about your shop. The better the user experience, the more probable it is that users will stay on your website and make purchases.

Providing an excellent user experience (UX) is critical for every Shopify shop. After all, consumers are less likely to remain on your website and buy the product if it is complicated to browse or looks terrible on multiple devices. It is also beneficial to collaborate with a Shopify SEO agency to get the best results.

2. Connect with free Google Tools

When Google gives you free yet effective and powerful tools, why not take advantage of them?

The second step is to ensure that you have Google Analytics and Google Search Console installed and linked to your Shopify website. All online businesses who are serious about search engine optimization should register their site with Google Search Console and Google Analytics. You are informing the Internet universe (metaphorically speaking) that this website exists, which will assist it in ranking better in SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). Google Analytics and Google Search Console are some of the most essential Shopify SEO expert tools. They give you important data about your site’s activity and effectiveness in search engine results (SERPs). Here are some relevant details on both of them.

● GOOGLE ANALYTICS
Google Analytics is significant for SEO since it gives details on your site’s traffic sources, time on page, bounce rates, and which pages your customers are visiting. Google Analytics can also be configured to track ‘add to carts’, ‘transactions’, and so much more.

Log into your Google Analytics account and choose “Admin” at the top to connect your Google Analytics account to Shopify. Choose “Tracking Code” from the “Tracking Info” menu. Log in to your Shopify store and copy your code. Select the Google Analytics area under Preferences:

To finish your Google Analytics installation, paste your tracking code into Shopify’s “Google Analytics account” section. Google Analytics should be activated once you’ve properly entered your international site tag to the Google Analytics account box. You may then enable eCommerce tracking to get more purchase and income statistics about your website.

If you are looking for a step by step guide, here’s a detailed article:
https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/reports-and-analytics/google-analytics/google-analytics-setup

● GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE:
Google Search Console is useful for SEO since it informs you about your site’s presence in Google search results. It shows you how frequently your site displays in search results, what searches prompted it to emerge, and how much traffic your site receives from Google searches. This data can assist you in determining which keywords are doing well for you and which require work. It may also assist you in identifying any possible problems with your site that may be affecting its appearance in Google search results.

Sign in to your google search console account and open the property selector dropdown menu. From that menu, click add property and choose the type of property to add.

3. Submit sitemap to Google Search Console

If you are just starting out with Shopify, the first thing you should do is submit your sitemap to Google Search Console. A sitemap.xml file is generated dynamically for all Shopify stores. All of your products, pages, photos, categories, and blog entries are linked in a sitemap.xml file. Sitemaps are used by Google and other search engines to crawl your Shopify store’s webpages so that they appear in SERPs.

conversion web design

While search engines can explore and evaluate your business on their own, there is no certainty when they will do so. Posting your sitemap to Google Search Console ensures that Google, which controls 87.35 percent of the search engine market, can locate your store’s web content. Here are the specific methods for locating your sitemap, integrating Search Console into Shopify, and submitting your sitemap.

  • First, locate your sitemap. The sitemap for your Ecommerce store can be located at yourstore.com/sitemap.xml.
  • When you add or delete items from your site, Shopify’s sitemap dynamically refreshes. Make sure your site is not password secured in order for Google to scan and analyse it.
  • Following the discovery of your Shopify store’s sitemap, Google Search Console verification follows. This validates that you are the legitimate owner of the shop before GSC allows you to use their services.
  • Go to Google Search Console > Settings » Ownership verification » HTML tag and copy the meta tag, Including the angle brackets in the meta tag.
  • Navigate to Online Store » Themes in Shopify.
  • Find the theme you wish to change, then go to Actions » Edit code.
  • Click theme.liquid in the Layout tab to open the file in the code editor.
  • Copy and paste the meta tag underneath the opening head> tag on a blank line.
  • Then click the Save button.
  • It is now time to submit your sitemap to Google.
  • Go to Google Search Console » Sitemaps to get started.
  • Simply type sitemap.xml in the field box and click SUBMIT under the Add a new sitemap area.
  • Google typically takes four days to one month to begin crawling your website.

4. Website Speed Optimization

Nobody loves slow loading and sluggish websites so website speed optimization is a must!

Google specifically says that Page Speed and Page Experience are important ranking factors. Users are less inclined to browse on your website and place an order if it is sluggish. There are various ways to improve the performance of your Shopify store’s website.

As per SEMrush, “if your website displays in 2.9 seconds, it is quicker than about 50% of the internet.” If your website loads in 1.7 seconds, it is quicker than over 75% of the internet. If your website displays in 0.8 seconds, it is quicker than nearly 94% of the web.”

ecommerce-website-5

Using a cache plugin is one technique to improve the performance of your website. A cache plugin accelerates your site by storing a duplicate of your web pages and documents so that they may be viewed faster. Another technique to improve site speed is to reduce picture sizes to 100KB or less. Compressing your photos minimizes their file size, which increases the speed with which your websites load.

Browser caching is another technique for speeding up your site. Shopify will already have your platform’s inner contents cached by default. This implies that you might have some of the material, such as pictures, JavaScript, and CSS, securely stored within consumers’ web browser, which they will be able to view quicker from a single visit instead of requiring all new downloads each time somebody else views this same resource in their searching session—saving a great deal of broadband!

5. Keyword Analysis and Targeting

shopify SEO

One of the most critical things to do when optimizing your website for SEO is to study keywords and see which one’s customers are looking for on Google. You have two possibilities for doing so: You may use a free application like Google’s Keyword Planner, or you can use paid tools like SEMrush, aHrefs, or Moz. Once you’ve decided on which terms to target, make absolutely sure your site’s meta titles and descriptions are optimized for those keywords. You may also utilize them into your article to assist increase your SERP rankings.

6. Slug Optimization

The slug is the part of the URL that follows the domain name. Slugs are significant for SEO since they are among the elements that Google utilizes to assess how related a website is to a specific keyword. To optimize your slugs, add your target keyword as near to the beginning as feasible and make sure it appears in the title tag as well. Both search engine crawlers and users will be able to grasp what is on a particular page if URL slugs are pleasant and easily readable. It’s like giving each web page a name tag!

7. Optimization of Images

image optimization

Pictures are all the buzz right now. From websites to social media sites, they rule the digital media!
Pictures are also vital in every eCommerce website since we need to be able to present what consumers are looking to buy! However, photographs may use up a lot of space. So it’s crucial to optimize them for speed by shrinking their image size as much as possible without sacrificing quality. There are two most common ways of using images to help with SEO efforts:

● COMPRESSED IMAGES:
Compression is the practice of lowering file sizes in order to facilitate more storage and faster speed. There are two techniques to lower the size of your pictures: Lossless compression decreases the size of photographs without removing any data, allowing them to take up less space without compromising on image quality. Lossy compression is where you may lose resolution but have to trade-off between quality choices such as “lower” options, which keep more colour fidelity than higher-quality alternatives while still obtaining decent file size reductions.

Returning to the topic of site performance, image compression does play a role in site speed, which, as previously said, is another aspect that determines how highly your site appears in search results pages (SERPs).

● ALT IMAGES:
Including alt text to your photographs is an excellent technique to boost the SEO of your website. It not only assists you rank better in search results, but it also assists your viewers comprehend what’s on the website if the image doesn’t load correctly. You may increase your rating even further by including keywords in your alt text. Use meaningful alt text for all of your photos, and remember to incorporate your target keywords wherever feasible.

8. Product Page and Title Optimization

Product pages are one of the most significant components of any eCommerce website since they are what visitors view when they land on a product listing in the Google search results page (SERP). To ensure that these product pages stand out from the crowd, they must be optimized for both SEO and usability. A smart method to achieve this is to use header tags appropriately and write meta descriptions that describe what people will find when they click on it by searching through the website.

The header tags show at the head of a website page and often feature your site’s title or logo as well as any key data about your items or services. With Shopify, you may select from a number of pre-made headlines, such as the headline for your shop and web pages. Shopify sets the default tag as your H1, but you can also use H2 through H6 tags to signify different parts inside a post or page on Shopify.

These should be utilized appropriately so that search engines understand where each part starts and finishes, as well as so that people can easily locate what they’re searching for on different pages. Basically, header tags are utilized in the same way that opening paragraphs are to designate what the next part of body content will be about.

9. Content Creation and Marketing

So far, we’ve discussed a lot about on-page SEO, but what about getting quality traffic to your store via informative and insightful content?

Well, among the most successful ways to drive visitors to your website is through content marketing. You may produce more revenue by obtaining your visitors’ information and persuading them to subscribe to your email campaign by generating high-quality content that is relevant to your target demographic. Many online shops underestimate the benefits of an eCommerce blog. A blog may not only boost conversions, but it can also help to develop trust and loyalty with prospective future consumers.

A successful eCommerce blogging approach will increase brand recognition while attracting new readers who may ultimately become devoted customers.
One of the most essential benefits of blogs for an eCommerce company, believe it or not, is the opportunity to create more visitors from organic searches. You can produce long-form content that ranks on Google by providing high-quality material that is relevant to the audience.

You don’t want to upload your blog content all by yourself. Your blogging should be part of a larger content marketing strategy, so that your marketing strategy is not just focused on blogs, but rather complements the broader marketing approach with improved social media content and email marketing activities. For a real multichannel marketing strategy, your content should be cohesive and compliment well together to attract visitors from all channels.

10. Quality Link Building

The practice of obtaining connections or links from other domains to your own is known as link building. To establish the rating of each page, search engines scour the internet and look at the connections between websites. The more high-quality backlinks your site has referring to it, the better it will appear on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Internal links also help PageRank move across your site. Simply said, the greater a page’s PageRank, the more internal links it has. However, it is not only about the number; the quality of the link is also important.

link building

You may obtain links for your eCommerce business through a variety of link-building approaches such as content creation, guest blogging, directory uploads, and social networking outreach. Guest posting on high-authority publications is among the most efficient strategies to create high-quality links for your eCommerce company. The technique of producing a blog article for another website and putting a link back to your own is known as guest blogging. This will not only assist you in developing high-quality links, but it would also assist you enhance traffic and business exposure.

Adding your website to internet directories is another excellent technique to create high-quality backlinks for your eCommerce company. Sites that permit companies to include their website or company in a directory of relevant websites are known as online directories. You may add your eCommerce shop to a variety of internet directories, including Google My Business, Bing Places for Business, and Yelp.

Another wonderful technique to create high-quality backlinks for your eCommerce company is through social media marketing. You may forge friendships with other company owners by contacting them on social networking sites and working on content initiatives. This will help you get high-quality backlinks for your page.

Final Thoughts

That concludes the most effective step-by-step Shopify SEO expert guide to take your eCommerce website to the top of search results. Shopify has numerous SEO-friendly capabilities out of the box, but there’s so much more you can do to improve your ranking. While SEO depends on keywords, getting your website to rank higher requires more than merely scattering some keywords into your website and content. Follow the procedures outlined above to thoroughly optimize your Shopify site and generate more organic visitors in order to rank better in search results. Also, try to contact a good Shopify SEO agency to get the best possible result of your SEO efforts.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Shopify SEO friendly?

Shopify is not only an eCommerce website creator, but it is also a superb SEO system that is filled with a number of tools that will help your website rank better in search results pages. It is also an SEO eCommerce platform for individuals who operate online stores.

How should a Shopify website be optimized for search engines?

There are several techniques to SEO a Shopify website, such as content optimization and organization, enhanced user experience, top SEO plugins for Shopify, focused keywords, link building, and so on. Choosing the finest Shopify product tags SEO also helps you reach your objectives.

How critical is SEO for my Shopify store?

Higher ranking is extremely vital for your Shopify business, as it will drive more customers to your website. Since those customers used specific keywords on Google and found your website, they are looking specifically for your products. Now it is just a matter of converting that visitor into a customer via product details and user experience. So you must ensure that the website is fully optimized for SEO.

Is Shopify SEO different from regular e-commerce SEO?

No, it is not any different from standard e-commerce SEO; both operate under the same set of principles that is defined by Google. Because Shopify SEO is simpler than that of other e-commerce sites, we recommend that you select the finest Shopify SEO expert for a higher position in no time. Indeed, as per a recent study on the best eCommerce platform for SEO, WooCommerce and Shopify rank first and second, with 97 and 98 points, respectively.

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