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3 Google-Friendly Shopify SEO Tips for eCommerce Entrepreneurs

by Manish Singh

The increase of online shoppers has seen a steep upward curve over the past decade. With over 230 million online shoppers projected for 2021, understanding eCommerce SEO has never been more critical.

Among the most popular platforms for businesses to transition online, two eCommerce platforms dominate the U.S. marketplace. WooCommerce and Shopify rank as the most popular.

Combined, they are responsible for helping one in two online shops sell their products or services. That’s a significant market share.

If you have an online shop or want to create a new one, keep reading to discover three Shopify SEO tips to maintain a competitive edge.

Enhance Loading Times

Shopify SEO practices are fundamentally similar to traditional SEO, except that it means making improvements specific to Shopify.  One easily missed SEO optimization on Shopify is doing something about slow loading pages.

Loading time is an issue for eCommerce sites when most consumers won’t wait for more than three seconds.

And even though Shopify boasts better performance speeds than its competitors, slow loading times can still be an issue for many store owners. One solution to this problem is to “lazy load” the images.

Instead of bulk loading the entire page at once, it loads section by section. This way, the large images don’t take up any unnecessary bandwidth until it’s needed.

A second solution is to remove any Shopify apps that don’t hold much significance to running the business. While it may be time-consuming, the change with the best effect is to compress and resize any large images.

Keyword Research and Optimization

SEO tips for eCommerce sites and regular sites have the same foundation. However, eCommerce websites want to target commercial keywords, while standard websites target informational keywords.

For example, an online retailer will look to rank for keywords that represent purchase intent, such as “men’s t-shirts,” while blogs and news websites will target keywords like “how to save a million dollars.”

That said, informational keywords that have indirect buying intent can be considered commercial.

A conventional method to generate keywords is to hunt for ones that have high conversion rates. But you shouldn’t disregard lower-volume words if there’s any indication that it might be a high converter. Because if a keyword has a low search volume but a high conversion rate, a higher number of transactions use that keyword.

Once you put together the list, it’s time to get optimizing! Shopify allows for central elements to be optimized. This includes the meta descriptions, URLs, and title tags. And if possible, you want to place the target keywords wherever and as naturally as possible.

Keyword research and optimization can seem daunting at first, but don’t let that get you down. You can learn more from the numerous sites online providing free information.

Include a Blog

Many business owners assume that an online store and a blog have to be two separate websites. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

Ranking products on the first page of Google has become much more challenging over the years. In fact, try searching for a keyword like “baby diapers,” and you’re likely to find that a majority of the first page ranks blogs over product pages.

Take any keyword you want to rank and manually conduct a Google search. Are there more blog posts or product pages ranking for that word?

If there are more blogs ranking, it might be time to consider creating content around the keyword to drive quality traffic to your store.

Getting Ranked

Shopify SEO doesn’t have to involve hair-pulling all-nighters. With these three Google-friendly tips, you’re well on your way to getting that first-page rank you’ve been striving for!

If you enjoyed reading this article, check out our other recent posts for more SEO tips.

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