eCommerce isn’t just the ‘Next Big Thing’, anymore. It’s already arrived and it is happening. The eCommerce market touched $3.5 Trillion in 2019, accounting for 14% of all retail sales across the globe.
eCommerce has been around for long enough that we’re also starting to see systemic changes: most recently, COVID-19 has brought a new wave of change. With people forced to stay home, eCommerce usage has increased exponentially this year. According to a Salesforce survey, 58% of consumers expect to make more eCommerce purchases after the pandemic than prior to it. In the case of B2B users, 80% of buyers are expected to make their purchases online.
What Should You Prioritize: Inbound Or Outbound?
Shopify is a leading eCommerce platform that lets users set up and run eCommerce websites with minimal investment, in terms of coding and website design. Shopify lets you quickly create critical pages, accept payments from a wide range of methods, and much more.
Shopify is easy to use, economical, and beginner-friendly, which is likely why it’s the preferred platform for over 600,000 businesses. Shopify takes away a lot of the development effort and cost, giving you basic, standardized eCommerce functionality.
Shopify gives you a range of customization options. Hundreds of paid and free apps within the Shopify environment add powerful custom functionality to your eCommerce website in a few simple steps.
But all the features in the world won’t help if you don’t get the right customers visiting your Shopify site. This is where Shopify SEO comes into the picture. By optimizing your Shopify site for SEO, you help search engines direct users to your products and services. This drives sales, increases your customer base, and gets those products off your virtual shelves. Let’s look at some actionable steps you can take to boost your Shopify SEO.
Blogs on Shopify
Great content is always important. Any SEO expert will tell you about the importance of having effective, relevant, and helpful content on your site for readers to access. It’s not any different on Shopify. One of the best ways to improve your page rank and draw more visitors is to publish quality content.
Shopify has an integrated blogging engine that allows you to publish content on your website. This makes the content side of things straightforward. You don’t need to look for other solutions like WordPress: just use what’s right there. The next logical question to ask would be “what should I write about?” Let’s try to answer that.
For your shopify blog content to be successful, it’s not enough to be SEO-optimized in terms of keywords: you need to deliver content that’s genuinely useful to your customers. Search engine algorithms are increasingly sophisticated. They’re able to understand natural language and prioritize content that adds concrete value. Write blogs that will help your customers make buying decisions about a particular product.
You could also focus on your process or key product lines in your posts and give your customers more insight into the various options they have when they are trying to make a purchase. Thought leadership-based content is also critical. It helps your audience understand your brand’s perspective and can provide solutions to challenges that they’re facing.
Focus on Load Times
Load times matter for your eCommerce website and eCommerce marketing in general. In a typical scenario, you can probably expect the user to look at multiple products before making a purchase decision. Unlike other websites, the number of pages a user visits tends to be on the higher side. One aspect to note is that slower page load times directly correlate to customer attrition. In simpler terms, the more time it takes for your pages to load, the more likely it is that the user will leave the site.
While this is true across any website, load times are especially important for eCommerce sites since customers open so many pages, and since the website is the actual point of sale. So how do you tackle this?
One of the most important steps is to make sure images and other media are compressed as best as possible, without losing out on quality. There are two strategies you can use to compress media on Shopify. You can use a suitable Shopify app like Crush Pics to compress images. Another way would be to use an external application to compress the images before you upload them to Shopify. Faster load times will ensure that your site gets a better ranking and reduces user attrition, directly impacting your overall revenue.
Be Strategic About Apps
The Shopify App Store is a wonderful collection of plugin applications that allows you to add functionality to your website. These apps speed up your site, help you to improve customer experience, and uncover insights you can use to optimize your strategy.
Not all apps are created equally, though. Many of them are developed by third-party developers. This means that there can be issues with security, speed, or privacy that you might not be aware of. Also, the more apps you use, the higher your load times tend to get.
One of the ways to ensure that you have optimized page loads is to weed out all the apps that aren’t critical to your site’s functioning. Make sure the apps you are using are optimized and bug-free and that they aren’t adversely affecting your page load times. You can always rely on ratings and reviews on the app store as a guide.
Keywords Are Important!
Shopify or otherwise, an SEO article is never complete without talking about keywords. One of the best ways to optimize SEO is to do rigorous keyword research and ensure you have products that are tagged to those keywords.
Use common tools like the Google Keyword Planner to figure out the keywords that generate the most searches. When you are putting up product pages for your products, ensure that you use the relevant keywords in the right places.
When you use popular keywords, it gives you a chance to be seen by more people. Keywords can even help when you’re thinking of product names: a name that incorporates a keyword people are looking for could appear more consistently in searches, enabling greater visibility.
Conclusion
SEO is always a long-term commitment, and it’s no different for your Shopify site. eCommerce is a highly competitive environment. With COVID-19 related disruptions, more brands are turning to eCommerce to serve their customers. This makes it all the more important for you to optimize your Shopify SEO to stand out.
Follow SEO guidelines right from the start: this’ll help you build an optimized site with great fundamentals. Based on insights and analytics, you can then make tweaks and changes to iterate and improve. There are no shortcuts to appearing on the front page. You need great content, an engaged audience, and keywords in the right places.
Getting started on Shopify can be overwhelming. Even if you’ve been in business for a while, building a robust SEO strategy takes practice. If you’re looking for reliable Shopify SEO experts, call Flying V Group today!
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