Shopify SEO: Are you looking for the best tip on How to Rank Shopify store on first page on google ? getting free organic traffic consistently?
Indeed you are ! Google and other search engines websites uses robots and sophisticated algorithms to rank websites, knowing some of SEO (search engines optimization) Technics, will help you getting at least on first page on Google or may be the number one in this page
Letโs have a look at the two types of SEO: On-site SEO and Off-site SEO.
Table of contents
- Domain name
- How to Rank Shopify store on first page on google? On-site SEO
- 1. Optimize Your Shopify Store Structure
- 2. Optimize Your Shopify Store Speed
- 3. Use the right keywords
- 4. Use Outbound Links:
- 5. Consistency
- 6. Internal Linking
- 7. Images and video ALT text
- 8. Add title attribute to your links
- 9 – Use appropriate heading tags in a Blog Post (h1 through h6)
- 10 – Fast and SEO friendly filter sidebar
- How to Rank Shopify store on first page on google ? Off-site SEO
- Conclusion
Domain name
Before jumping to On-site & Off-site SEO details, the first thing to think of to get a great ranking in search engines, is choosing the most suitable domain name for your Shopify store.
>> Learn more How to come up with an e-commerce domain name
How to Rank Shopify store on first page on google? On-site SEO
On-site SEO is the practice of optimizing “locally” your website and its pages in order to get a higher ranking in search engines and earn qualified free organic traffic, let’s enumerate the most important on-site SEO tricks to get on first page on google
1. Optimize Your Shopify Store Structure
Your website pages structure must be well organized, this helps search engines understand your website content and therefore getting a higher ranking on first page on google.
When visitors can easily navigate in your website, they will surely spend more time on your website and view more than one page, this will undoubtedly increase the following on-site SEO factors
- Number of visits/user
- Session duration/user
- Bounce rate (the percentage of visitors to a website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page).
Here is a schema example of a simple and SEO-friendly website structure
2. Optimize Your Shopify Store Speed
Google and other search engines has introduced the site speed as one of the most important factors into their their algorithms to rank websites in the first page. That is to say, the more your website is faster, the more you’ll have chance to get Ranked on first page on google
Stats show that 46% of e-shoppers hate slow websites, mainly on mobile devices, and 76% of e-shoppers will leave the website from the first landing page if the website has a loading time of 5 seconds or more.
Improving its Shopify store requires a deep knowledge of coding in order to fix all the possible issues that make it slow, the solution ?
- Hire a professional Shopify expert to speed up your website
- Purchase the fastest Shopify theme
3. Use the right keywords
If you use the right keywords, people will most likely land on your website from a search engines. But misaddressed or inappropriate keywords can decrease your SEO score.
But how do you find the right keywords to rank on first page on Google and get free traffic to your shopify store?
The first to think about is by using an online keyword researches tool, but the mot prominent way is by using the Google autocomplete research bar to get the recent most searched keywords as showed in the screenshot below
4. Use Outbound Links:
An outbound link is a link which will redirect users to an external website, like THIS ONE.
Outbound links show Google that the page is both valid and informative. You must in another hand make sure that the external links are relevant enough to your content and from authentic and high-quality sources.
Important : always use the external link to open in new tab, this way your visitor will sill have your website opened in a tab and may return to it.
5. Consistency
Have you ever came across an article or a product when searching for it on Google and this article/product was last updated in 2003 for example ? Surely no ! And you know why ? Because Google has also introduced the consistency factor as a ranking factor, indeed ! Google loves fresh and frequently updated content.
How to update your Shopify store when you have thousands and thousands of products ?
Easy ! you can use a bulk product edit app such as THIS ONE to automate your updates, this way all your products will be fresh and you will guarantee to rank your Shopify store on first page on Google.
6. Internal Linking
Another Technic to rank your Shopify store on first page on Google is by building internal linking, this will not just reduce the bounce rate but also it will increase the user experiences by providing more details within your website pages.
>> Learn more about internal links
7. Images and video ALT text
Most of Shopify store owners focus on products, pricing, … and forget about adding alt text (also called alt tag) to their images.
Google recognize an image by its alt text, by adding this alt text, you will have chance to have your products featured in images tab in Google search
Learn more about videos ALT tag
8. Add title attribute to your links
When hovering over a link, the link title attribute gives additional information about the page being linked to.
Most of Shopify themes except Plak are not SEO friendly, and they don’t have link title attributes built-in, so if you have other theme than Plak, don’t forget to add title attributes to your links.
9 – Use appropriate heading tags in a Blog Post (h1 through h6)
The most important tag. is h1 Every page should have a single h1 tag reserved for the title of the article. H2 through h6 are then used for decreasingly significant titles. We do not break the chain or skip levels of the hierarchy as we write to maintain on-page SEO. For example, if your page title is an h1 tag and you immediately follow that with an h4 tag, the hierarchy is broken. It makes the heading structure harder for the search engine to crawl and categorize.
Fortunately is you are using Plak Shopify Theme, you don’t have to bother about this, as this Theme by default SEO friendly. Once you give your blog post a title, it will be assigned with a h1 tag, then you can write your article starting from h2, then h3, ..
Learn more about H1 tag on homepage
Below is an example (the current article) of how your blog post will be rendered when someone looks for something on Google
10 – Fast and SEO friendly filter sidebar
Beyond homepage and product page, visitors may land on your collection page too, you will need then to have a fast collection and SEO friendly.
Most of Shopify themes don’t have SEO friendly filter sidebar, due to the non-use of link attributes on the link, featured product image doesn’t have an ALT TAG.
More important : Except for Plak theme, which is completely SEO friendly Shopify theme, the other themes that have the option for infinite scrolling, use a script to hide the content on the view-port until it is reached. But this will have a negative impact on the collection SEO, as search engines like Google will not be able to index the hidden part.
In Plak theme, the entire content is preloaded to let search engines recognize the content inside the collection page, except for the images to not to damage the site speed.
>> Learn more about Plak theme filter sidebar
How to Rank Shopify store on first page on google ? Off-site SEO
Off-site SEO refers to the SEO Technics and improvements done externally
1. Broken links fixing
You must identify broken (died) links on websites and either remove them or replace them with another functional link
If you feel that you have lot of broken links in your current website and you have lot of suspected pages, the best free tool to use for broken link checking is Check My Links. Use it to fix your broken links to Rank Shopify store on first page on google
2. Guest posting
By writing guest posts on external blog websites will help you build high quality backlinks and trigger more free traffic to your website.
This will also increase your DA/PA (Domain authority/ Page authority)
3. Social media sharing
Sharing your website links and products to social media, such as Facebook, twitter, Instagram, … or pining to Pinterest is a great way to get high quality backlinks and increase your business trust.
And if you are more into videos, you can create a Youtube chanel and add a link to your landing page in the video description.
4. Commenting and posting on forums
You can also have high quality backlinks from commenting on other’s blogs/forums/websites or you can also also answer questions or post your own questions by including a link to your website/products
Conclusion
Improving its SEO requires hard daily working in order to rank on first page on Google.
Getting free organic traffic will take some time (few weeks to few months) to see a significant improvement, if you have the budget and feel a little bit lazy to maintain a sustainable SEO Technic improvements, hiring a SEO professional is then a must
[yasr_visitor_votes]
Thanks for the great info, do you have a service or could you recommend someone in order to increase my shopify store seo ?
Hi Carole, we have an in-house service for custom tasks, where you can hire one of our expert in order to optimize your Shopify store SEO, HERE IS THE LINK thank you
thanks for the great plak theme and those great resources, i really didn’t know some of the tricks mentioned in your blog to increase the SEO.
Thanks a lot again
It is a pleasure Danielle ๐
thanks for the great article and info, SEO is very important for me, I didn’t some stuff like broken links fixing
This is by far the best article about Shopify SEO, I have learnt new things from you, thanks a lot
It is a pleasure to serve you jessy ๐
We are happy for you Laila that this tutorial has helped you getting the first position in Google.
Feel free to contact us anytime you need help ๐
Thanks a lot for the great tricks ๐
It is a pleasure Patrick ๐
Extremely useful tricks, thanks so much, i’ll start today apply to advises, i hope i’ll rank on first page on google ๐
We are happy to hear that, stay tuned for more useful tricks to increase your Shopify sales ๐
I followed your advices and reindexed my website to google.
For some blog posts and some keywords, I really jumped to the first page of google, thank you so much Plak team
We are Happy Alan Kane that you could get to the first page of Google by following the tricks given in this blog ๐