Shopify has been helping eCommerce businesses grow for the past few years and has gained wide acceptance due to its ease of use, security, and customizable solutions. Besides, Shopify offers an efficient toolkit that caters to the specific need of both amateur and professional retailers.
However, in the face of rising competition, online merchants must learn about the updated SEO trends for driving more traffic to their Shopify store. The following tips would help improve your search engine rankings and reach potential customers.
1. Optimize Your Shopify Store Structure
If you want to add value to your visitors and enhance their navigating experiences, organizing your Shopify store is a must! A simple and easy-to-use UX means higher rankings for your store. By a simple UX/UI, we mean your visitors must be able to find the information they have been looking for.
Do you know that your conversions and your visitors’ time-on-site are directly proportional to how easily one can navigate your site? Eliminate or simplify all the barriers that may hamper one’s user experience, such as heavy images, videos, etc. Optimize your images and other multimedia to improve page load speeds and help search engines crawl your site more easily.
An efficient Shopify store structure would look something like this:
Homepage > Category Page title > Sub-Category Page title > Product Page title
Such a structure would help users find their desired items faster and increase your conversions.
2. Do Proper Keyword Research
Keywords are the vital aspects of any eCommerce store, and putting the right keywords and keyphrases in the right place would skyrocket your sales significantly. Use keyword tools like SEMrush, Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, Google Keyword Planner, Long Tail Pro, AnswerThePublic, etc. These tools and platforms would help you find ultra-targeted keywords specific to your business and your customer interests.
You can also study your competitors’ meta descriptions, content types, keywords they are ranking on, alt texts, and other such resources. To identify the right keywords, you may also search social media pages and various forums associated with your niche.
You may also try creating buyer personas that enable you to understand whom to attract and how to serve. Again, buyer personas would allow you to gather crucial customer data, such as their interests, hobbies, needs, search histories, buying patterns, and so on. This information would further be beneficial in creating the most appropriate marketing strategies.
3. Optimize Your Products Pages
Product pages are the heart and soul of your Shopify store and should design them in a way that increases your sales. To make your item listings rank higher and convert, you need to ensure that specific things are present on your products page.
Some of the must-have components of any products page include –
- Numerous high-quality product images (and that can be achievable with smartphone cameras too)
- Compelling and unique product descriptions
- Get as many customer reviews and ratings as possible
- Link related products your buyers may be interested in
- Add additional information that you feel relevant, such as materials used, dimensions, return/replacement policies, shipping charges, and so on.
Try adding relevant keywords in your product descriptions and make sure your details are real. If customers find the delivered products different from the information provided, you may notice a high number of returns.
4. Work on Link Building for Your Shopify Store
Backlinks are crucial for any eCommerce store or website as they act as determiners for search engines to check your site’s value in a wider community. Backlinks are important aspects of SEO and effective off-page optimization strategies. These links are created when one site links to another, such as through blogs, infographics, videos, etc.
Backlinks enhance the credibility of a website or online store. You can think of them as word of mouth for search engines. To get backlinks, you can –
- Email various suppliers or manufacturers to ask whether they can link to your Shopify store.
- In places where you have been mentioned without a link, you can go ahead and email them requesting a mention by linking to your store.
- Reach out to influencers and popular industry leaders to generate links and other promotional content.
- Search for broken links for similar products and services that you serve. If you find one, you can offer the site owner a solution by asking them to link to your site instead. Since broken links are harmful to a site from the SEO perspective, this can be a win-win solution for both parties.
5. Send Cart Abandonment Emails
Cart abandonment is a serious problem that eCommerce retailers worry about these days. Now, this can be due to a variety of factors, like high shipping charges, insufficient payment options, complicated checkout processes, forcing buyers to create an account, security concerns, improper return/replacement policies, and so on. But you need to reduce cart abandonment by learning the ways to win your consumers back.
Whatever be the reason, you ought to solve certain issues and offer something special to regain your lost customers. One of the best ways to get them to complete their purchases is to send them reminder emails, prompting them to complete the checkout process.
Studies show that 45% of people would open a cart abandonment email, and 21% of them would initiate a click-through. Out of these recipients who generated a click-through, 50% would actually complete the purchase.
The good news for Shopify store owners is they can employ a range of free plugins to reduce cart abandonment rates. Besides, cart abandonment emails help optimize your Shopify store and increase its reach.
6. Invest in Content Marketing for Higher Ranks
Last but not least, content marketing continues to be one of the crucial ranking factors for any eCommerce store. Good content is the reason your visitors are in your store in the first place. Hire a good writer to talk about various educational and interesting topics in your niche to let people know your expertise in your particular industry.
After all, people would trust you only when they find you knowledgeable in your field. You can start a blog or YouTube channel to provide valuable tips, facts, Q&As, suggestions, tutorials, and so on. Use targeted keywords to gain maximum traffic and make your blogs or video content as informative as possible.
Wondering what kind of topics would receive more engagement? Try asking your customers about their likes and dislikes, and note down all the questions they have ever asked you. No, your buyers don’t just want to know about product information; try offering real answers that help to solve real-life issues they have been facing. Your blogs and videos must provide practical solutions to various problems and make your customers’ lives easier.
Besides, you can actually enable your customers to know you better through content marketing, and soon they will want to engage with your brand. Further, it also helps to build a good number of backlinks that are excellent for ranking higher on the SERPs.
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