Effective Steps in SEO for Shopify to Increase Sales

As a businessman, using a platform that can support sales activities is very important. Shopify is a platform for creating online stores and managing products. Users who use Shopify are increasing year by year, which is why many sellers want to be at the forefront of this platform.

To help achieve your business objectives, you will need SEO for Shopify in order to dominate the market. The strategy applied will certainly be slightly different from SEO in general. Find out the effective Shopify SEO steps in this guide.

What is Shopify and SEO for Shopify?

Shopify is a content management system (CMS) specifically designed for e-commerce to create a custom online store without the need for programming skills. You can use Shopify to manage products, publish content, manage payments, and deliver goods.

Websites created with the Shopify CMS need to be optimized with SEO in order to get high performance. SEO for Shopify is an optimization strategy for websites that use the Shopify platform in order to get a high position in search results.

The Shopify SEO strategy is not much different from the general SEO strategy, much like in the WordPress CMS. However, the optimization method is characteristically different from the ones implemented on the other CMS platforms.

This is because Shopify provides various features and built-in SEO that can optimize website content. Therefore, it is necessary to learn about SEO for Shopify so that you can take advantage of the various features available on this platform and identify the issues you need to solve.

Advantages of Applying Shopify SEO

Shopify provides various conveniences for webmasters in implementing SEO. This is because of the various features that simplify the website optimization process. For example, auto-generated canonical tags are automatically added to each page so that this feature can prevent duplicate content issues from occurring.

Shopify will also automatically add sitemap.xml and robots.txt files to your website, so you don't have to create them anymore. With the sitemap and robots.txt files, your online store will be easier for web crawlers to find.

Not only that, but there are several other optimization features available on Shopify, namely:

• A Shopify theme that automatically adds a title tag to every online store page.
• There is an on-page optimization feature where you can change the title tag, meta description, URL, and alt image on article or product pages.
• Each theme on Shopify is connected to various social media and provides sharing features to make it easier for you to market your online store on social media.

All the conveniences provided by Shopify can be beneficial to those of you who run a Shopify-based e-commerce website.

Shopify SEO Ranking Factors

Search engines work by collecting information on the internet and presenting it to users according to the queries they enter. The list of information is presented by ranking, where the website with the best quality and most relevant content will get the highest ranking.

There are various factors used by search engines in determining the quality and relevance of a website, including e-commerce websites such as Shopify, so that it deserves a high ranking. These factors include:

• How high is the domain authority of a website?
• How well the website navigation and content on the online store is.
• The number of backlinks that online stores get naturally from other websites (not paid or from social media).
• How long is the domain used in the online store?

To be able to maximize the four ranking factors is certainly not an easy thing. You need to establish a long-term strategy to improve the reputation of the online store. The implementation of SEO for Shopify will make the optimization process of the ranking factor run more effectively.

SEO for Shopify Implementation

If you decide to use the Shopify platform to create an e-commerce website, then you need to understand what steps you need to take to implement Shopify SEO.

How to implement SEO for Shopify is not much different from the implementation of SEO in general. However, there are some specific guides regarding Shopify's built-in SEO features that you should study. Here is the guide:

Keyword Research and Optimization

As a website manager, the first thing you need to do before creating content is keyword research. Do keyword research by paying attention to several factors, such as the type of keyword, search volume, and keyword difficulty.

In addition to keyword research, another important thing that you should pay attention to is keyword placement. There are four parts in the content that you need to provide keywords for, namely:

1. Meta title & meta description: The title and short description that will appear on the search results page (SERP). How to change the meta title and meta description in Shopify are:
   1. Click 'Edit website SEO' in the preview of the search engine listing.
   2. After that, you just change the title and description in each column.
2. Alt image: A tag that contains a description of the image used so that search engines can understand the content of the image. Here's how to add an alt image in Shopify: 
   1. Open the 'Product' menu in Shopify Admin.
   2. Select the product you want to assign an alt tag to.
   3. Click the product image, then click 'Edit alt text'.
   4. Enter your target keywords.
   5. Click on 'Save alt text'.
3. Heading tags: Headings are used as content structure. You can put keywords in H1. Here’s how to edit heading tags in Shopify:
   1. Select the product page, collection, webpage, or blog post that you want to modify.
   2. In the 'Title' column, enter a page title accompanied by keywords.
   3. Click 'Save'.
4. First paragraph: Keywords also need to be placed at the beginning of the paragraph in the content. You can enter these keywords when writing product descriptions on Shopify.

Fix Duplicate Content Issues

One of the most common SEO issues on the Shopify platform is duplicate content. Duplicate content issues occur when a website has two pieces of similar content on different URLs. This issue needs to be resolved so that search engines can determine which content should be displayed on the SERPs.

Duplicate content issues are common on the Shopify platform, especially on product pages and collections pages. To prevent duplicate content on both types of pages. You can follow these guidelines:

Product Page Duplicate

The issue of duplicate content on product pages usually occurs because Shopify allows a product page to be accessed via two different URLs, namely:

• URL canonical: example.com/products/
• URL non-canonical: example.com/collections/*/products/

To determine the original page, Shopify makes the URL /products/ the canonical page. Thus, any page with the URL /collections/*/products/ will have a canonical tag pointing to the original page at the URL /products/.

The problem arises when non-canonical URL pages get more internal links. This will confuse search engines because pages that are not supposed to be displayed on the SERP actually get a lot of internal links. This is what causes the issue of duplication of content to often arise.

The way to prevent this is to make adjustments to the internal links. Increase internal links pointing to canonical URLs and reduce links pointing to non-canonical URLs.

Duplicate Collection Page

Duplication issues that occur in collection pages are usually caused by pagination. Content with pagination will be divided into several interrelated and sequential pages. Usually, pagination is used on category/collection pages that display a list of products or articles.

Each collection page will have the same URL but with different parameters in the order. Here are some of the examples:

• URL on of the first page: example.com/collections/
• URL on the second page: example.com/collections?page=2
• URL on the third page: example.com/collections?page=3

This can cause duplicate content issues if the collection page in the first order has two URLs, namely /collections/ and /collections?page=1. To avoid this, you can coordinate with the web developer so that the collection page in the first order only has one URL.

Maximize Crawling and Indexing

E-commerce websites usually have a large number of pages, especially if the products you sell are diverse. Therefore, optimization of the crawling and indexing processes is very important so that all important pages on the website can be indexed by search engines.

If your website uses Shopify, then you don't have to worry about this. The Shopify SEO feature ensures that web crawlers can access every important page on your website. Automatically, Shopify will optimize the website structure so that it is easy to navigate.

Check Robot.txt and Sitemap.xml Files

Shopify will automatically create robots.txt and sitemap.xml files on every website that uses the platform. These two files are very important in the crawling and indexing process.

Robots.txt serves to tell web crawlers which pages should not be visited, such as payment or check out pages, so that these pages will not be displayed in the SERP. While sitemap.xml is used by web crawlers as a map to find out what pages are on a website and want to be displayed on the SERP.

Add Structured Data 

There are three types of structured data that websites with the Shopify platform can often use, namely:

• Product: Shopify helps your page to show information related to product name, description, and price to Google so that your page will have a product snippet on the SERP.
• Articles: You can also create structured data for article content on Shopify so that Google will understand the content of Articles.
• BreadcrumbList: This structured data will make it easier for Google and users to understand the hierarchy of web pages.

Increase Site Speed

Website speed is no less important for an e-commerce website. Of course, if users have to wait a long time for a product to load when they want to see it, their chances of making a purchase will be reduced.

Here are some solutions that you can implement to increase website speed:

1. Convert product image formats with WebP for lighter file sizes.
2. Use a lightweight Shopify website theme.
3. Reduce the use of applications or plug-ins on the website.
4. Take advantage of AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) technology.

Thus, a complete explanation of SEO for Shopify and its implementation guide. Hopefully, with this article, you can better understand how to run an SEO strategy on your Shopify online store.

For a more optimized SEO for Shopify implementation, you can rely on SEO services that will help develop your online store.