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Shopify SEO 2020: How to Optimise Your Ecommerce Store for Better Rankings

Do you want to improve your Shopify store’s SEO rankings and find more customers online?

It’s no secret that Shopify is a leading eCommerce platform. According to a recent survey, merchants have processed more than a billion orders on the platform with sales amounting to more than $55 billion.

The platform is already powerful by itself, but businesses can maximise it even more by pairing it with SEO strategies honed to reel in more customers.

But how exactly do you do that?

In this blog post, you’re going to learn how to optimise your Shopify eCommerce store for better search engine rankings. We’re going to discuss each step along with tools you could use.

Let’s get started.

Organise your navigation bar.

Internal links are links from one webpage to another in the same domain. They’re important, because they show search engines how your website is organised. If there are no internal links to a webpage, search engines may fail to index it, rendering all the work you put into that page useless.

Most websites often have a homepage, an about page, service or product pages, and a contact page. These pages are considered your main pages while all the pages under them are sub-pages.

If you sell several products through your Shopify store, take a look at how you’re organising everything. Are you using too many product categories? Is there a product you could move to a more relevant category?

Organising your categories helps both search engines and users. Search engines can more easily index your pages, because you’re clearly showing them which pages are important. It will also be easier for users to find the products they want, improving your conversion rate.

Let’s say you sell clothing on Shopify. You could have a main category for shirts and sub-categories for long sleeve shirts and short sleeve shirts. You could then use relevant keywords for each sub-category.

Make your website responsive.

A responsive website is one that can adapt to the device being used to view it. In the age of mobile phones, having such a website is more important than ever.

According to a recent survey, 57% of users won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile website. This could cost you potential customers since word of mouth is as important online as it is offline.

You can use Responsive Website Design Tester to see if your website is currently responsive. All you have to do is type your URL and hit enter. It will then allow you to see how your website looks on all types of devices including iPads, iPhones, and more.

If you’re wondering how to make your website more responsive, Shopify has you covered. The platform has plenty of responsive themes you can start using right away. They have free and paid themes that you can choose from depending on your budget. You can start browsing the themes right here.

Do proper keyword research.

Keyword research is the act of determining which keywords will get you the best results. You essentially identify who your target audience is and determine which keywords they’ll use to find you. You then start targeting these keywords through your content, page titles, and more.

Before we proceed, let’s define a few key terms.

• Search Volume – The number of times a keyword is used during a specific period.
• Keyword Difficulty – This is how difficult it is to rank for a keyword. Usually, the higher the keyword volume, the higher the level of difficulty.
• User Intent – This is the reason why a user is searching for something. Some users could be looking for information, comparing products, or ready to purchase.
• Short-tail Keywords – These are keywords composed of one or two words. For example, “wedding ring” is a short-tail keyword.
• Long-tail Keywords – These are keywords composed of three words or more. They usually received less search volume than short-tail keywords, but they’re more specific and tell you more about user intent.

You can begin by creating an ideal customer profile. Determine your ideal customer’s age, location, spending power, likes, dislikes, pain points, and where they spend most of their time online. Once you determine these things, you can use the profile as a guide when choosing keywords.

Next, create a list of keywords they might use to find you online. Once you’ve run out of keywords, you can turn to Google for help. Every time you enter a keyword on Google, the search engine generates related keywords at the bottom of the results.

For example, if you enter “short sleeve shirts” in Google, the related searches include:

• short sleeve shirts women’s
• uniqlo short sleeve shirt
• short sleeve t-shirt
• short sleeve shirt formal
• short sleeve shirt singapore

You could also turn to Answer the Public for more keywords ideas. All you have to do is enter your keyword of choice, and it will generate hundreds of related keywords. You can then download its suggestions as images or Excel files.

Remove duplicate content.

Duplicate content is content that can be found in more than one URL.

Let’s say you sell iPhone cases in your Shopify store, and you’re using product descriptions provided by the manufacturer in all your product pages. If other stores are selling the same products, they will most likely be using the same content on their websites.

Google will be unable to index pages containing the same content. The search engine will most likely choose the “original” page and index it, destroying your chances of ranking in search engine results.

You can rectify this by creating unique product descriptions for your product pages.

Duplicate content can also occur in pages from the same Shopify store. There are cases where the platform categories products into both /product URLs and /collection URLs. This results in two pages containing the same content.

You will need to use canonical tags to rectify the issue. These are lines of codes that tell search engines which page is the “original” page, instructing them not to index the duplicate pages. You may need to add these tags manually on the Shopify platform.

Conclusion

Optimising your Shopify store is vital for better rankings and better sales. Consider implementing the steps we discussed in the blog post one by one.

Need help with SEO for your eCommerce site? Cornerstone Digital is an SEO agency in Sydney that can lead your ideal customer to your website. Call us on (02) 8211 0668 or email us at info@cornerstone-digital.com.au.

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Darlyn Herradura

A self-professed book and digital marketing nerd, Darlyn Herradura focuses on building trust between customers and businesses with the written word. She understands that creating valuable content is the best way to get found online and happily spends her time doing that.