We live in the Internet age, more people are connected to the internet than ever before, and the majority of these people prefer to browse via smartphone or tablet rather than traditional PCs. This means that webmasters now have to ensure that their sites load quickly and consistently across a wide range of devices. The days of slow and steady are now long gone because only the websites that load the quickest find their way up the search engine rankings. Users are unwilling to compromise on site loading time, so slow pages are correlated heavily with low engagement, less traffic and high bounce rates.
In the world of e-commerce, some of the more adventurous businesses may choose to spin their own solutions but the vast majority of successful sites have opted to deploy the Shopify platform. Shopify has been around for 15 years now and is doing brilliantly, having crossed over 1 million clients in December 2018. Almost 5% of the top 10,000 sites use Shopify’s CMS, and this is not a fluke. The powerful platform opens a whole new world of functionalities to the user and guarantees a good ROI. Having taken the first step and adopted Shopify, here is how you can take your business to the next level with SEO.
The gig economy seems to be getting transformed just the way people buy produces, work, and travel. Some of the organizations behind these trends seem to be household names. Shopify, may not be one of those but this mini Canadian organization is certainly becoming incredibly successful in e-commerce. Recently managers had successfully unveiled an assortment of new services and products. Shares have gone up by a phenomenal 136 percent in the current year. The market cap seems to have gone up to $36.6 billion. Shopify is growing fast. In this context, you must know that the commission revenue has leaped to $1 billion in 2018. Moreover, Shopify is aggressively trying to build out its portfolio thanks to some of the top-class value-added services and products.
As per https://www.inc.com, there are numerous amazing options available while considering an online business platform; however, Shopify would be providing a lot more for small businesses that are aspiring to become something more. Let us explore ways to optimize your Shopify e-commerce site.
Consider Removing Duplicate Content
From SEO perspective, duplicate content seems to be treated as the highest priority concern created by Shopify. We know that duplicate content would be created when similar or duplicate content is found on two different URLs. This should pose a lot of problems for the search engines since they may not be in a position to determine which page out of the two similar pages must be regarded as the canonical version. Moreover, to make things worse, often link signals would be split between these two pages. We know that Shopify generates duplicate content in multiple different ways such as:
- Duplicate product pages
- Duplicate collections pages
It is pretty common to find Shopify stores with manifold product URLs built for one and the same product but with slight variations. In such a case, this could be creating duplicate content issues since the core product often seems to be the same, however, only a minor attribute change. This implies that manifold pages could exist with similar or duplicate images and product descriptions. If ignored, this could create another duplicate content issue. In this context, you must know that URL variants may not always be a search engine optimization issue. Often some sites could be benefitted from multiple URLs as they would be letting you have indexable pages and these pages could be optimized easily for very precise terms. Whether these would prove to be beneficial or not, would differ on each site.
Content-Rich Product Pages
If you choose to index each individual product, you should ensure that every page has unique, optimized content. One of the stumbling blocks for a number of existing Shopify websites is that they either forgo product descriptions entirely or tend to repeat the same boilerplate for a lot of different products. This is a big hit to your SEO prospects and should definitely be avoided. While it can be time-consuming to come up with descriptions for each product, it is certainly something that you need to look into. Try to come up with a strategy that lets you identify the pages and products that will be visited the most, so you can prioritize their content optimization. You can then start working on the individual product descriptions or outsource them to copywriters. You must ensure the content is not generic and focuses on the ways in which the product improves and brings value to the user’s life. All these choices help boost your rankings as well as your sales. You should pair it with a good analytics tool to ensure your campaigns are working well. Seek professional assistance from a reputed digital marketing agency such as SEO agency Online Impact
Blog as a Marketing Tool
Shopify CMS allows anyone to add a blog to their Shopify-powered website, but too few marketers understand how valuable a tool this can be. While the primary goal of your site can be to push more products, a site composed of just a bunch of product pages will not appeal too much to Google Search, which would like to serve more informational content to the user, even for queries that might look transactional. You should absolutely keep a blog as an extension of your site and constantly update it with content that is rich, useful to visitors, and able to reflect your brand image without being explicitly promotional.
A good way to start blogging is to identify the highest-priority keywords associated with your domain or the products you are pushing, followed by a Google search for each of these. Once you have an idea of the kind of content Google throws up on the first page of results, try to compare the same with what is available on your site. If you already have similar content, try to optimize and enrich it. If not, try to identify new topics that your visitors would like to read and develop content that serves informed opinions and detailed reviews of the same. This will organically drive traffic, engagement, and eventually sales.
Conclusion
As Shopify usage is gaining traction, it becomes increasingly critical to understand the various SEO implications associated with the platform. The information provided above should assist you in making your Shopify Store really strong in terms of the search engines.