SEO can either be your best friend or your worst nightmare. It can drive your Shopify Store into relevancy on Google, or it can rank you lower than your (something funny here).
Don’t worry – if you’re concerned that your SEO is less than what it should be, we’ve got a fool-proof method for you to start ranking (even as a baby SEO expert)!
First – Focus on these 5 Places
- Your Product Pages
- Your Collections (and their meta-data)
- Your Blog Posts and content
- Your Base Website Pages (i.e. About, Contact, Home, etc.)
- Your Alt tags
You’re probably thinking that this all sounds intimidating. And truthfully, it can be – but the first four checkpoints on our list follow these simple steps!
- Optimize Your Title
Search engines like Google crawl for information in a top-down fashion! So the most important thing that you are going to want to rank, whether it’s your blog post or product page, is your title description. Start by looking at competitive terms for whatever keywords you’re trying to target and stick those in your title section.
Say you are selling iPhone 12 Pro Max cases… Instead of titling your product “Cute Bunny Phone Case”, you will want to write something like “iPhone 12 Pro Max | Fuzzy Bunny Case”! Put your key search terms first and then tell what your product is about later. Just remember… keep it short and sweet!
- Optimize Your Description
Next comes the description! Now, it’s important to understand that site’s like Google gobble up information based on heading priority and how soon you introduce your keywords in the description.
If you give our blog posts a once-over, you’ll see that we like to include our keywords within the first 1-2 sentences. For example in this one we have ‘SEO, Google, and Shopify Store in the first sentence. That way when someone looks for articles that focus on Shopify SEO, we have a higher chance of ranking!
Beyond that – I would include as much relevant information in the rest of the content as you can!
- Optimize Your Tags
Tags are super helpful when it comes to ranking your pages high in the search engines. Why? Because it’s literally like flagging your post, product or page with important terms that are relevant to what you’re selling and offering!
If you need a further explanation of tags and how to use them in your shopify store, check out these articles we found here and here.
However – we’re not done yet. Don’t forget your alt tags.
“What’s an alt tag?” you may ask…
An alt tag is “used by screen readers, which are browsers used by blind and visually impaired people. These screen readers tell them what is on the image by reading the alt tag” (source: Yoast).
Typically you can write your alt-tags not only in an customizable section your website provider offers you, but you can also take advantage of them by using them in your save file names!
For example, our feature image might be saved under the terms shopify-seo-top-tips-featured.jpeg. This let’s the little spiders of the web crawl for that important information and even pull up our post by use of our image title too! If you need more help or explanation of alt tags, Moz has a great article we’d recommend checking out.
What do you think? If you’re feeling overwhelmed, we have experts that can help you out! But the real truth is that SEO is really just a ‘practice makes perfect’ kind of ordeal. You may get it right the first time, or it will take a couple tries to nail it. Either way, just be patient and keep working on your business, you superstar!
