Visibility is key to success for eCommerce. Try to wrap your head around it. If customers cannot find you, they cannot buy from you. Instead, they’ll probably buy from your competition. Nearly 93% of all online interactions begin with a search engine, yet 75% of users never click past the first search engine results page (SERP). However, some basic eCommerce SEO tactics can boost your Shopify website’s search engine rankings and attract visitors. Check out Premiere Creative’s expert insights to help your DTC brand maximize online sales in a cutthroat digital landscape.
How Google Search Console and Google Analytics Help Your Shopify SEO
Before diving into the nitty-gritty of your site structuring, connect your domain to Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Both free tools are compatible with Shopify and crucial for implementing the right SEO strategy. Google Search Console monitors and troubleshoots your eCommerce site’s presence in Google’s search results. It reports essential metrics for your Shopify site, such as clicks, impressions, and average SERP position for a given keyword. Google Search Console also identifies potentially hazardous site errors that you may want to rectify, such as blocked URLs, 404 errors, server errors, or redirect errors.
Google Analytics serves up valuable data on eCommerce transactions, revenues, consumer traits, behaviors, and web traffic. It also reports demographic information, including gender, age, device usage, device type, and location of visitors. Google Analytics tracks how visitors interact with your DTC brand, including how long the visitor spent on a page, the site’s bounce rate, the page’s exit rate, what source drove the visitor to your site, and hundreds of more relevant quantifiable data points. You can tailor your Shopify site’s structure and content using this valuable information. For example, if your site has a high bounce rate, you may consider editing your landing page. If your core audience is women between the ages of 18 to 25, you may want to feature a product that appeals to this group on your Shopify site’s home page.
Best Shopify On-Page SEO Tactics to Boost Awareness and Engagement
On-page SEO refers to optimizing the individual web pages of your eCommerce Shopify DTC to improve its SERP rank. Devising a Shopify on-page SEO strategy helps to ensure that visitors both find and engage with your site.
Optimizing Your Shopify Pages for SEO
From your Shopify admin, go to ‘Online Store’ then ‘Pages.’ From here, you can format content and edit the search engine listings for your web pages. Make sure you pay attention to the following page elements:
- The page title and subtitle are critical for a Shopify site’s search engine ranking. Thus, use concise titles (under 50 characters) and include keywords that correlate with the written copy on the page.
- The meta description (the HTML element that summarizes a page) also influences ranking and should include keywords. Do not load it with so many keywords that it becomes gibberish; the objective is to be impactful, not overwhelming.
- The URL should describe the page, utilize keywords, and use hyphens—not underscores; keep it simple, as less is more.
- Product descriptions should be original and contain keywords.
- Informational pages and blogs should be clear and concise.
Selecting the Best Keywords for Your DTC Shopify Store
Keywords, keywords, keywords! Keywords are what people search for, and as you probably already gathered by now, you should include keywords in every element of your Shopify site’s pages. Free and paid tools exist to aid your quest for identifying optimal keywords for your DTR Shopify site. When choosing keywords, consider the following tactics:
- Look at relevancy, search volume, and ranking difficulty of potential keywords.
- Be wary of choosing very broad or competitive keywords.
- Avoid trying to rank for the same keyword on different web pages. This forces Google to choose the better page.
- Write blog articles that target supplemental keywords.
- Utilize long-tail keywords (more specific keyword phrases) in blogs and informational pages. For example, if your eCommerce shop sells makeup, a long-tail keyword may be “lightweight foundation for oily skin” rather than simply “skin foundation.”
- These phrases have lower search volumes, but they drive higher quality leads with more converting potential.
- Adding Additional Improvements to Push Your Shopify Page Over the Top
Approximately 90% of buyers read online reviews before purchasing a product. Therefore, you can increase your Shopify site’s conversion rates by adding product reviews. You can also add rich HTML snippets that offer valuable, visually appealing search results. Snippets may include a rating, a photo, or a review. These help your Shopify site look more enticing, professional, and trustworthy.
Best Shopify Technical SEO Strategies to Ensure Site Usability
Technical SEO refers to site and server optimization that allow spiders to crawl and index your site more effectively. Search engines rank your eCommerce site higher if it displays technical characteristics. Ultimately, technical SEO improves the user’s experience with your DTC Shopify site.
Increasing Your DTC Shopify Site Speed
A reported 40% of users will abandon a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. You can decrease your Shopify site’s loading time by:
- Selecting one of Shopify’s quick-loading themes or purchase one from a third-party website.
- Compressing product images to the appropriate file formats. JPEGs typically load quicker than PNGs.
- Implementing a lazy loading functionality. Rather than loading all images at once, the visitor’s browser will render images as they scroll through the page.
- Deleting any apps that you have installed on your Shopify but no longer use.
Organizing Your Shopify DTC Site Architecture
The way you organize all your product pages matter! Visualizing the structure of a Shopify site with applications like LucidChart can prove useful. To optimize consumer usability and search engine crawlability, you should:
- Avoid burying pages too deep within your Shopify site. This hinders search engines’ abilities to crawl the site effectively and diminishes the site’s usability.
- Add navigation tools such as menus and search bars.
- Ensure that your site is mobile-friendly. According to a Google survey, 50% of users said that even if they like a brand, they will engage with it less if it is not mobile-friendly. Nearly 61% of users reported leaving a mobile site when they cannot find what they are looking for right away .
Creating a Linking Strategy for Your Shopify
Internal links are hyperlinks that direct traffic from one page on your Shopify site to another. These links aid in navigation and define the site’s hierarchy. However, search engines have difficulty determining the primary URL if too many internal links exist. To avoid this, develop a strategy to use links sparingly and only when it seems natural. For example, provide links to direct customers to related products or your site’s most important pages. Linking to your site’s best pages shows customers the value your brand has to offer, and it puts this content on the search engine’s radar.
From an off-page SEO perspective, you should build up links to your Shopify site by focusing on partnerships. Google will penalize a site if low-quality sites link to your site. Therefore, it is helpful to earn links from sites with higher domain authority. Quality is always better than quantity.
Strategizing Your SEO for Shopify Techniques
The best Shopify SEO strategies require deep research and meticulous planning—do not make decisions arbitrarily. From keyword selection to designing website architecture, every aspect of your eCommerce site should have a clear purpose. As a leader in digital marketing, Premiere Creative has the expertise, experience, and internal resources necessary to build an exceptional SEO strategy for Shopify websites. To optimize your eCommerce site, contact our team by dialing (973) 346-8100 today!
