How to Optimize Shopify Stores: Basic SEO Features
You can have a range of unique products on your Shopify stores, but if you cannot drive converting traffic to your stores, you will not be able to see any sales. So optimizing your Shopify online stores for search engines is critical for letting customers discover your store. The convenient it is to find and navigate your Shopify online store, the more customers are to shop with your brand.
Source: Pixabay
It is vital to be mindful of all the SEO features that Shopify provides to improve traffic, so we have laid down some steps to help you rank your multiple Shopify stores.
So let's start with the basics of Shopify SEO.
Basic SEO Features For Shopify Stores
Page Editor
Shopify CMS comes with a page editor with a simple interface – it allows you to build pages, blog posts, and landing pages. You can perform some basic formatting such as Headings and HTML editing with the editor. Based on your content, which you'd enter into the page details section, the editor will automatically create page title and meta descriptions.
The page title is one of the essential ranking factors. Search engines use your page titles to understand what your page is all about. Page titles often appear for your search results as a headline.
Note: With the Shopify store API feature, you can manage SEO such as product data and more if you are an Admin.
What you typically see under the title on search engines is the meta description. They summarize the content of your page. They can help improve click-through rate because a user can get an idea from meta description if the provided information is relevant.
Analytics
You can connect your Shopify store with Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Google Search Console will help you monitor and troubleshoot your store's presence in Google search results. Google Analytics will show you all about your traffic's behavior, how people are coming, and behaving once they arrive. Successful Shopify stores owner knows how to extract useful data and make effective decisions.
You will have to add a piece of code to your Shopify homepage for Google Search Console to work. Please note that Google will index your current theme and that too when it is live.
You can enable Google Analytics in your Shopify Store's preferences by getting a tracking ID and then pasting it into an associated field.
Source: Pixabay
Domain and SSL
You must add your custom domain to get good ranks within search engines. Shopify allows you to purchase a custom domain from its platform and then transfer it from ".myshopify.com" to a custom domain – the price starts from $11. You can set up your custom domain by going to "Online Store" and then to "Domains." Make sure that you check that option on Shopify with which would allow all your traffic to redirect to your primary domain and not to ".myshopify.com."
You can use an SSL certificate on all of your Shopify stores, irrespective of any plan you use. Having an SSL allows you to get good ranks in Google Search Engines. SSL certificate ensures that whatever data is being exchanged between you and your customers will remain encrypted and safe.
Site Speed
Best Shopify stores load quickly, and that's what Google appreciates and makes it one of the critical factors. Your customers will leave your site before your page even loads if the website takes too much time to load.
Make sure to select a lightweight theme for your store.
Since online stores usually feature a lot of images, so make sure to use compressed pictures in such a way that it helps in optimizing store loading speed while keeping quality intact. Implement lazy loading functionality. With this functionality, you can let the images load in the customer's browser as they scroll down. It will decrease the upfront loading time. Ensure that you use the right image format – JPEGs will give you smaller file sizes than other formats. Shopify provides an image sitemap that will help Google to find images on your site.
Source: Pixabay
Make sure to use relevant Shopify Apps as they can also impact your site speed. You may use various tools such as Google PageSpeedInsights to get more information on speed optimization. You can also perform an audit of top Shopify stores to see how they perform and what steps they have taken to optimize their sites. You can get Shopify stores list from Shopify and various other mediums on the internet – make sure to audit every possible store to get better insights.
App Store Shopify
You can use App like SEO Image Optimizer Auto SEO to perform alt-text optimization and fix broken links. Not only that, but you can also markup your images with JSON-LD structured data.
SEO Booster-SEO Marketing will help deal with the SEO basics such as meta tags and image alt attributes.
Source: Pixabay
Sitemaps
Sitemaps allow search engines to crawl and index your website – it contains all the relevant information about your website. Shopify generates a sitemap.xml file automatically, which you can submit to Google for indexing purposes.
Make a Website Prototype
We have covered all the basics SEO features if you are looking to optimize your Shopify stores. Do you wish to build a Shopify multi store? Go ahead but make sure you make some arrangements to optimize it as well.
Remember, before you start developing your Shopify website, create a prototype with Wondershare Mockitt to finalize your design. You will not want to make repetitive changes during development as it would waste a lot of your time. So it is best practice to have your prototype with you throughout your website development process.
Mockitt is a design prototyping tool that allows you to create stunning design prototypes just by using Drag – Drop functionality.
You do not need to be a professional designer to use it. Mockitt is a user-friendly tool that makes it a popular's choice.
Mockitt allows you to either use its template or start a new project from scratch – so if you are short of time, you can select any suitable template and can start with the customization process. However, creating a new project would allow you to exercise your creative muscles in a better way.
Mockitt works on Windows, Linux, Mac, so you do not have to be worried about your system.
You can use Mockitt on your web browser, making it easy for you not to wait for longer installations.
Mockitt is an excellent choice if you want to make your web development process a seamless one. So use Mockitt and let your creative juices flow.