Using Shopify SEO strategies to rank your store at the top of organic search is one of the best ways to grow your online sales. But, the reality is, whether performing SEO in-house or choosing a Shopify SEO services provider to handle the campaign for you, landing top positions is no easy task. Below we’ll outline some of our top tips for creating a success eCommerce search engine optimization campaign.

• Optimize Website Speed:

  • Google PageSpeed is crucial for SEO for several reasons:

    1. User Experience: Google’s primary aim is to provide users with the best possible search results, which includes sites that load quickly and provide a good user experience.

    2. Ranking Factor: In 2018, Google announced that page speed would be a ranking factor for mobile searches. Therefore, a slow-loading site could negatively impact your site’s SEO.

    3. Engagement Metrics: Slow sites tend to have higher bounce rates and lower average time on page. These are metrics Google uses to understand a site’s quality and relevance to users.

    4. Indexing: Google has a crawl budget – the number of pages it will crawl on your site within a certain timeframe. If your pages are slow to load, Google may crawl fewer pages, affecting how they’re indexed.

    5. Mobile First Indexing: With Google’s shift to mobile-first indexing, site speed on mobile devices is more important than ever. If your site is slow on mobile, it could harm your visibility in search rankings.

    By optimizing your Shopify site for speed, you’re not just improving the user experience, but you’re also working to improve your site’s visibility and ranking in search results.

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    To optimize the speed of a Shopify website, you can follow these steps:

    1. Reduce Image Sizes: High-resolution images can cause slow page load times. Use compression tools like TinyPNG or Shopify’s image compression features to optimize images without losing quality.

    2. Minimize Apps and Themes: Uninstall any unnecessary Shopify apps and themes, as they can also contribute to slow loading times.

    3. Use a Fast and Mobile-Friendly Theme: Choose a theme that is well-optimized for speed and is also mobile-friendly.

    4. Minimize Redirects: Each redirect triggers an additional HTTP request-response cycle, which delays page rendering.

    5. Limit the Use of Render-Blocking Javascript: Render-blocking JavaScript prevents above-the-fold content on your page from being rendered until the JavaScript has finished loading. This can slow down your site, especially for mobile users.

    6. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): Shopify automatically uses a CDN, which stores copies of your site at various points around the world to serve content more quickly to users in different locations.

    7. Optimize CSS Delivery: Minimize CSS files and eliminate unnecessary code. CSS should be at the top of your HTML document to prevent the page from being displayed as unstyled content while the CSS loads.

    8. Optimize Liquid Code: Liquid is the template language used by Shopify. It’s a good practice to regularly check and clean the code for efficiency.

    9. Leverage Browser Caching: Shopify automatically does this for all files served from Shopify’s CDN, but be sure that any files served from other locations are cached as well.

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• Turn Categories In Landing Pages:

  Google loves to deliver great content to a website visitor and serve up that content high in their rankings. We all know content is a major ranking factor, but often we leave category pages bare with nothing more than product listings. Consider turning your category pages into landing pages by building out content at the top and bottom of the page. This content can include information about the products you sell, FAQs about the product category or product line and can give you a place to link to articles and buying guides you’ve created that are targeted around the same topic as the category.

• Create Sub-Category Pages:

  Product filtering is very commonly used on a Shopify store, but can actually have detrimental affects on SEO. For example, if you sell sofas online and have a main category page for sofas and filters for colors, you don’t really have a landing page for “grey sofas”, which is searched almost 4,000 times per month. Consider how you can create niche sub-category pages that will have the ability to rank for less competitive terms that will convert at a higher rate.

• Build Supporting Content & Your EEAT Score:

  Google’s EEAT score, which was formally EAT, stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust. Google reviews your content and uses these factors to determine where you should rank when a term is searched. One of the best ways to increase your EEAT score is to build authoritative content around your main topics. For example, if you sell running shoes, creative informational guides about the different types of running shoes available, which ones to choose based on needs, and other valuable information will help to boost your authority. Remember, while you built your website to sell products, it must also inform visitors and help them to make the best purchasing decisions possible.

• Create a Strong Internal Linking Structure:

  Interlinking your pages is a way to show Google what a page should rank for. Link from main category pages to sub-categories and from products to related products. Not only does this show Google that these pages exists, helping them to be indexed, but the keywords within the anchor text will boost those pages rankings. Also, review your articles and blogs seeing where there are opportunities to link back to categories and products and try to use keywords within those links. A strong internal linking campaign can boost traffic on a Shopify store in a major positive way.

• Get Pages Indexed:

  If you have a large Shopify store, sometimes getting all of your products or even categories indexed can be challenging. Typing this comes do to two main reasons:

  • 1) Google doesn’t know the pages exist – Be sure you’re linking to all of your pages within your site. If you’re not linking to them, it can be tough for Google to know they exist. Also, double check your not blocking pages in your robots.txt file and your pages are included in your sitemap.xml file.
  • 2) The pages don’t have value – If Google knows your page exists but it has little content, Google may determine it does not want to index the page. This often happens with products that may be similar to other products or product pages that do not have unique product descriptions. Be sure they page is valuable and offers content that a user would want to read.

• Build Your Brand Name:

  Outside of managing your website there are other ways to build your brand which can affect SEO. How many websites link to yours is a major ranking factor and if you build your brand name often other websites will link to yours. They may link to your website because of press you receive, an interview that you do, or because a piece of content you put on social media goes viral. Either way, getting your brand name out to the world is make a positive impact on the way Google looks at your website.