We want to make sure your brand new store is SEO ready so we have curated this checklist that you can implement with relative ease to get you on the right ranking path.
1- Setup essential tools
First, before doing anything else we need to setup a few essential tools to enable us to track users and conversions as well as overall site performance.
Google Analytics:
Setting up GA is easy and enables us to collect and view so much web related information. Setting up GA for example, allows us to check out the total number of conversions and average conversion rate, how much revenue is obtained on your store via organic SEO and which pages on your site offer you the most value / giving you the best return.
To setup Google Analytics, follow this handy guide here.
Google Search Console:
Another handy free tool offered by google to help understand issues and site performance that could impact SEO. For example we can find information about which keywords are bringing traffic to your site, the CTR (Click Through Rate) of your page and how keyword ranking is changing over time.
With Google Search Console, you can also submit your sitemap and instruct Google to crawl your site to get it indexed quicker.
To get started with Google Search Console, check this guide here.
2- SEO keyword research
There are a few key concepts that you need to know about.
- Keyword difficulty - how hard it is to rank for your chosen set of keywords (the amount of competition there is etc)
- Search volume - The amount of people that searched for a specific query, the higher the volume, the more popular it is.
- Search intent - What the user who searches for a query is likely looking for (what is meant by the query eg. food recipe vs takeout food)
Where can I edit SEO keywords in Shopify?
Keywords can be added in several places within Shopify. Alt tags, Meta descriptions, Page titles and page content.
Keyword research tools:
There are a plethora of SEO keyword research tools available, most of which require a paid subscription, but are worth it to gain insight into the kinds of keywords you should try and rank for. Our favourite is Semrush.
With these tools, you can analyse the keywords your competitors are ranking for, find related keywords for you to rank against, check a websites backlink authority and much more.
Keyword cannibalisation:
This one is important to keep in mind when creating content. You must ensure that you are not overusing keywords across multiple pages on your website, this could cause pages to compete against each other for the same keywords.
3- Optimise content for your Shopify store
Meta tags:
Meta titles and descriptions are still some of the most important on page elements to get right for SEO. A title tag is what users will see when looking at your site in search results.
H1s:
It is vital to only use a single H1 element on each of your sites pages, they are used as a headline of a page and usually include keywords so we don't want to be adding multiple of these to confuse search engines.
Title length:
It is recommended to also ensure that the length of these titles are under 60 characters. This ensures that they show fully on google search listings. Similarly, the same thing should be considered for meta descriptions at a max length of 155 characters.
Optimising titles:
Titles can be optimised by adding keywords you are trying to rank for, using emotive words that drive clicks, the current date - to show relevance and above all else try and make these compelling to encourage users to click through to your page from search results.
Page Urls:
It is recommended to include keywords inside the urls themselves too, but try and keep them as short as possible.
File names:
Any files that are available on your store, digital download products for example, should have relevant names and ideally the same keywords as the product titles or urls.
LSI keywords:
The terms given to terms conceptually liked together used by Google to understand the context of a page.
Internal linking strategy:
Linking internally on your site can be a good way of passing some of the SEO value from one page to another. For example, on a product page, it is useful to have a section of related products that the user can click on from that page to purchase these easily. Strategies like this are a great way of converting customers even when products are out of stock.
4- Fix technical SEO issues
There are a few things to keep on top of for this one, including checking Google Search Console for indexing and crawling errors. It should also be mentioned that a badly optimised mobile website also has the potential to effect SEO so make sure you are using a theme which is optimised for speed and is also fully responsive, ideally built using the mobile-first approach.
You should also regularly check your site for any broken links to products and external links from articles. Having a lot of broken links on a page can lead Google to presume that the page is out of date a thus not rank it as highly.
5- Use Shopify apps to rank higher
Why not make use of the vast range of apps available on the Shopify app store to maximise the value of traffic sent to your site? For example, apps like Omnisend can be used to add mailing lists popups and create email sequences to send to prospective customers who land on your store and convert them at a later date.
6- Content marketing
The content you write on your pages is what drives clicks and builds your brand. It can be difficult to decide what to write in things like blog posts and product descriptions but the key things to remember are to include keywords based on your keyword research, ideally niche keywords that other brands are not trying to rank for (but they still need to be relevant!).
Just remember to create content that provides value to your users and answers there questions, they are for more likely to make a purchase when they have all the information they need!
Summary
Phew, that was a lot! This list should provide a good starting point to go off and research more into keywords and general SEO strategy, it is worth spending the time getting to know the above and putting it into practice, you can save so much by doing this yourself! Of course, we'd be doing ourselves out of a job if we didn't also mention that of course, we can assist you with all of this to really get things moving. Just reach out to find out more.
Bye for now :)