Shopify is a great eCommerce platform that is becoming more and more popular for retail businesses. The platform provides a strong foundation to start growing your business.
A good platform is not enough though. If you want to get more traffic there are some things you can do to make your website more SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) friendly.
Keyword Research and Optimisation
To gain more traffic to your website, you need to know the words that people are typing into search engines. Keyword research allows you to identify keywords people are entering into search engines and the volume of searches for those particular keywords.
Once you know the keywords you can incorporate them through your website to boost its search engine ranking. Be wary of keyword stuffing as this can harm organic rankings.
Quality Content
Whilst content on your site should make use of SEO, your first audience should always be the customers and not search engines.
Creating fresh and engaging content that appeals to your target audience is more likely to be consumed and fuel customer interaction. With great content, people may leave comments and share on social media. This can help you get more brand exposure.
Greater brand exposure will build trust in your business. This will boost you in search engine rankings as your website is viewed as more authoritative and help you beat out the competition.
Optimise Metadata
Metadata is the information that search engines use to index your site. Optimising your metadata is important to get your website climbing up the rankings of search engines.
Threading keywords through URLs, title tags and meta descriptions will help search engines better understand what your site is about. With better placement, people searching for what you provide can find you more easily.
Site Hierarchy
This is how the information on your website is laid out. Through clear structuring, customers can more easily navigate your sites. You can do this structuring by creating categories and subcategories.
You shouldn’t overload on subcategories as you don’t want your customers to get lost on your site. Simple websites also make it easier for search engines to crawl through your website and index the content.
Add Alt Text to Images
Alt text is information describing what an image shows. It’s important to site accessibility as it helps visually impaired customers understand what is on the page. This improves user experience.
Search engines also use this text to help rank your site so making use of SEO here will also help get your images indexed correctly and boost their ranking.
Create a Shopify Blog
One of the many features of Shopify is it provides a platform for you to blog.
Creating a stream of quality content via blogs will help grow your brand and online presence through social media. Updating your website regularly with blogs keeps you relevant and the more pages you have the more chance of them appearing in searches.
Improve Page Speed
Slow loading pages can be the bane of your business, causing customers to look elsewhere. Online shopping is supposed to be convenient and time-saving. You need to make sure your site is as fast as it can be.
Besides the benefit of keeping potential customers on your site, quicker page speed means that Google can crawl and index more pages.
You can increase your site speed by compressing images, using a fast and responsive Shopify theme and reducing the number of installed apps.
Create Engaging Videos and Images
Google doesn’t just look at the text to determine the quality of your content and its relevance to what people are searching for. It also looks at other types of media including videos and images. Widening your scope to other mediums can boost your search ranking.
Videos can be more engaging to audiences and are much more likely to be shared on social media sites, keeping people on your site for longer.
Mobile Compatibility
More and more people are using their phones to do their shopping. Ensuring your site is compatible with mobile browsing will help you gain more traffic that turns into paying customers.
A slick and simple website design is better for mobile. Simplifying site navigation means that customers can find what they need quicker.
To make your site more mobile compatible then don’t have pop-ups and ads that disrupt the customer’s experience and the flow of the page. If a pop-up is vital then make it easy to dismiss.
Consider User Experience
Putting the customer at the centre of your goals is paramount to growing your customer base.
Keep your website simple and utilise responsive design so that it looks good on all devices. It’s easy to make a website look slick if you just break up blocks of text and exploit whitespace.
To find out what your target audience wants in their browsing experience do user research and ask for customer feedback.
Create Backlinks
Backlinks are links from one website that go to a page on another. They are good for SEO because they represent authority and a vote of confidence in your website. With authoritative backlinks, you can boost your ranking and it’s a major component in how Google ranks content.
It’s easy to get started as you can use internal linking to improve page authority and you can create store profiles on trusted sites like Amazon.
Ensure There is No Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is when the same or similar content is present on multiple pages of your website. This will confuse search engines and bring nothing new to customers, potentially turning them away.
Many methods are available to eliminate duplicate content such as using a plagiarism checker and canonical tags. Page redirects allow you to funnel customers and search engines to the newer page when the original has been moved, deleted, you’ve merged websites or redeveloped your site.
Get In Touch Today
If you are interested in enacting these optimisation tips and don’t know where to begin, Maxweb Solutions can help you. For a range of digital marketing services including PPC & AdWords management and email marketing, call us on 0151 652 4777.
Posted on Friday, September 23rd, 2022 in E-commerce.
