Shopify SEO Guide: Your Ultimate Step-by-Step Guide to Rank #1 (2021)

Table of Contents

Intro

Shopify comes with several SEO-friendly features right out the box, but there’s so much more you can do to climb up in the rankings. While SEO relies on keywords, it takes more than just sprinkling some keywords into your site’s content to get your site ranking higher. In this Shopify SEO guide, we’re going to walk you through 8 key steps to master SEO for your Shopify store and rank #1 in 2020: Optimize Your Shopify Site Structure Improve the User Experience Research the Right Target Keywords Optimize Your Shopify Products Pages Build Links to Your Store Rank Higher With Content Marketing Use the Best Shopify SEO Apps and Tools Let’s dive in…

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Step 1. Optimize the structure of your Shopify site

When creating a Shopify store, be sure to optimize your site structure and create a unique checkout flow. Optimize Your Shopify Site Structure Optimize your Shopify site structure by stripping away the fluff, adding keywords, and optimizing the use of internal linking. Think of your Shopify store as an ocean. The surface area is your navigation, the deep water is the content, and the deepest depths are the subpages. Using a Google search engine, type “supermarket shopping carts.” This one, simple search has thousands of subcategories, but the most important are probably the ones on the first page.

Step 2. Improve the User Experience

So far you’ve outlined your objectives and started mapping out the best approach to your SEO strategy. Now the next step is to take things a step further and streamline the user experience on your Shopify site. You may have heard of this as the “UX” of the site – the feeling of using the site or app. A good UX is made up of three parts – great product/performance design, and even better customer support, to name just a few of the important factors. While you have more than enough help in designing your site, it may be a good idea to take some of your own user experience design ideas to the next level with the help of the most popular app development services on the market.

Step 3. Optimize Your Marketing Efforts with the Correct Keywords

When I was just starting out as an online business owner, I used “best-selling t-shirt” as a key keyword. I figured that since my company had gotten such a great response to our t-shirt selection, people would want to buy a shirt from us. But within a week of me highlighting that keyword, I got a call from a huge online retailer. They wanted to meet to discuss doing business together. I was flattered that they wanted to talk to me, but my then-business wasn’t taking off. I knew there were much better keywords to choose than “best-selling t-shirt”! It was a horrible mistake on my part to go with a keyword that wasn’t working. We sold zero shirts that month, and I learned my lesson!

Step 4. Shopify Product Pages you Should Optimize

For starters, make sure your shopify product pages are optimized. Most of them are fully optimized and ready to go, but make sure you keep them updated. Most of your customers will not understand what a link is or what the process is to acquire them, so you can get away with an occasional link (even if it is buried deep). But if you want to keep that flow, you need to make sure you optimize it for every page. The second thing you should do is start promoting different categories to help you rank for those keywords. You don’t want all your products (or products) to show up on the same page. You can also start promoting the different categories to generate more traffic to that product page. Step 5.

Step 5. Increase the number of links your store receives

When it comes to getting your store rank higher in search results, links are king. In fact, according to Google themselves: Links are one of the best signals of a site’s quality, and they’re one of the most important factors in determining whether you rank highly for any given keyword. If your website has enough links, it has a high level of authority, and that should translate to more authority and links on a global scale. According to Google, when you’re starting, link building is not as important as when you’re starting to scale. Therefore, you want to make sure that you’re focused on improving your content before you start increasing the number of links that you’re receiving from your visitors.

Step 6. Rank Higher With Content Marketing

Branding is one of the most powerful things a business can do, but it can be hard to get it right. Too often, we try to use one type of marketing approach without looking at the other—with one goal in mind: creating as much content as possible. Too often, we only focus on building eCommerce stores, which could be detrimental. SEO can be just as important for your eCommerce stores as it is for your blogs. Don’t discount it. If you’re just starting out, we recommend looking at 2 content marketing methods that Shopify can help with. The Power of Affiliate Marketing The power of affiliate marketing comes from giving your customers a compelling reason to trust you. Instead of selling the best business software, you’re selling other items.

Step 7. Optimize your Shopify SEO campaigns with the best tools and apps available.

Since there are over 7,700 merchant solutions to choose from, it can be hard to decipher which solutions are best for you. Our Shopify SEO tool lets you set up campaigns that target all Shopify keywords and rank for those keywords using Shopify keyword-search stats. It also lets you target ad variants and helps you with keyword research, targeting, and optimization. Here’s a screenshot of our Shopify SEO tool in action: Make sure you set up the exact keywords you want to rank for by entering the exact phrase you want to rank for into the Search Engine Optimization Toolbar. Once you’ve determined the keywords that you want to rank for, create campaigns with these keywords in mind.