You’ve set up your Shopify store and visitors are starting to trickle in. But your shop is still nowhere to be seen in the SERPs. You did everything that you could to organise your Shopify store to sell more products except some basic SEO practises.

While knowing which platform to use for your store is important, your store is only as successful as your customers make it. Before you can even make a sale, your customers need to be able to find you.

Ecommerce SEO is crucial for new stores to compete online. This is why SEO for your Shopify store is so important.

While SEO seems like a complicated process, there are actionable steps you can take right now to drastically improve the online visibility of your store.

So, let’s jump in.

What is Shopify SEO?

SEO, or search engine optimisation, is the process by which you make your website more easily crawled and ranked by Google to increase the amount of visitors, or traffic, to your site. However, the principles of SEO don’t just apply to standard websites. Your Shopify store stands to benefit from optimisation also.

In fact, 93% of all online activitybegins with a search. Not taking the time to rank your online store means that you are missing out on major selling opportunities.

Luckily, Shopify’s ecommerce CMS and their built in shopping cart are already set up for SEO with built in SEO help and customisable headers, meta and descriptions. Changes to these elements is called on-page SEO. Small changes here are quickly updated by Shopify and will automatically appear in search.

Taking advantage of built in tools will speed up your SEO process but there are a few steps to get it right.

Here are seven SEO practices you should focus on to optimise your Shopify store:

1. Understanding Shopify Keyword Research

Just like market research when creating a new product, the key to SEO is understanding what your ideal customers are searching for. When you know how customers are best likely to find you, you can target your SEO to put your products in front of them.

So, what does this involve?

Keyword research begins with Google Keyword Planner. Here you will be able to see what customers are searching for in your target niche and better plan your SEO strategy to target the keywords potential customers are searching with.

Shopify has created an excellent tutorial explaining this further:

2. Planning your site architecture for user experience

The layout, or site architecture, of your Shopify site is not only vital to ranking your site but is also important in how visitors experience your site. The way you lay out your content and how easy it is to navigate for your customers is actually directly correlated with both sales and rankings.

This is the intricacy of SEO: delicately balancing the needs of your customers with the needs of Google.

These key resources will show you how to best layout your Shopify store for better user experience AND higher rankings.

3. Getting technical to rank higher

Technical SEO may seem complicated but with a high quality guide you will be able to make changes to your store yourself to make sure that web crawlers to move through your site and index it.

Some of the technical elements you may need to optimise will include:

  • Site speed
  • Responsive site design for mobile and,
  • Duplicate content

These guides explore technical SEO for Shopify as well as revisiting some important keyword research points.

4. Optimising on-page SEO

The purpose of on-page SEO is to target all content and written elements on your site to the keywords you have chosen. How well you do this will be reflected in your sites ranking.

So, what exactly is an optimised homepage? What is an optimised image?

Your main considerations for on-page SEO will include:

  • Shopify product tags
  • Meta descriptions
  • Product descriptions
  • Titles and headers including <H1>’s and other content structure

Did you know that 70% of eCommerce site users rank the ability to zoom in on product images among their top reasons for making a purchase?

These guides will take you through the importance of on-page SEO for both your website AND your Shopify store.

5. Content marketing for Shopify

Content marketing is an essential focus of any business to reach out to their audience in the places they search online. Consider the value of how-to videos on YouTube that capture your leads when they are learning to use a product you sell.

Helpful FAQ blog posts build trust between your buyer and your brand and stylised photography shows off your products to entice browsing customers.

In a recent study by Animoto, 64% of consumers said that “watching a video on social media influenced them to make a purchase.”

Consistent and fresh content that appeals to your audience has been shown to directly improve both rankings and ecommerce store sales.

6. Outreach and link-building for Shopify

Backlinks are the way your website shows authority in your niche. If many high-quality sites link back to your content, this indicates that your site and content is not only trustworthy but also the most relevant for searchers using your keywords. The reverse is also true of no backlinks, negatively impacting your ability to rank.

Some link-building strategies might include:

  • Guest posting
  • Broken link correction
  • Relationship building

These resources discuss the tried and approved methods to attract quality backlinks from reputable sites.

7. Video for Shopify

We already highlighted the importance of video for Shopify in section 5. However, we cannot understate the value of ranking your content on Youtube. The video sharing platform is currently visited by 30+ million active users per day and is predicted to become the most used search engine within the next two years.

Video is an essential tool for Shopify site owners.

But, just like all of your other visual and written content, your videos must be optimised to perform.

The following posts outline the most essential SEO tips for video for Shopify store owners:

Final thoughts

SEO remains a delicate balancing act between following the needs of Google and considering the needs of customers. While it is vital to rank so that customers can find your site, ensuring your customers have the ultimate experience while there is just as important. However following the process through keyword research, considered technical and on-page SEO and creative content creation can quickly boost your business’ position in both the SERPs and on your sales sheet.

If SEO is something that you are not across it pays in the long term to hire a professional agency that can deliver you results!