4 ways to improve your Shopify SEO in under one hour
One of the first and most important things to remember when journeying towards the perfect SEO optimized website using Shopify is that you are entering into an area of the web with perhaps the highest rate of failure anywhere, 90.63% to be exact. Yes, that was not a typo you are reading it correctly, 90.63 percent of the content on the internet receives no traffic from Google whatsoever, according to research conducted on over a billion web pages just this year. And although the reasons for this may vary, there is a general consensus that it is due to the shared misconception that great content alone is enough to carry you to the upper echelons of search engine rankings. Although this isn’t false in its entirety as good content does count, make no mistake about it, it is only a small fraction of a much larger equation to the SEO gold standard, one that only 9.37% of the internet seems to get right. And although it may seem like an impossible code to crack in the face of such depressing odds, it is possible to count yourself among that 9.37%, and we’ll show you how to do it in an hour!
1. Create relevant content with staying power.
Since search engine optimization is all about getting the content of your Shopify site on to the first thing a Google user comes across should he or she input a keyword onto their computer, it helps to make sure you build that content around things that people are looking for, or simply put, things that they search for. You can have the best, most SEO optimized content of all the internet on your website, but writing that content on an obscure, highly unknown topic only you are familiar with is as close to Shopify suicide as you can get.
- Determine your niche market, and develop content that caters to an audience within that niche. Content unrelated to the items you have on sale on your Shopify site will work against your site being optimized to show up first on search engines like Google.
- Keyword optimization. Keywords are a great way to ensure that articles and content from your store appear in a search engine whenever someone inputs a certain keyword. To generate decent keyword traffic it helps to conduct proper keyword research on keywords that are trending on the internet related to the niche market you serve. You can do this by conducting research in online forums, social media groups, and blogs related to your niche and documenting words and phrases common to all of them.
- Once you’ve done some basic keyword sleuthing of your own it helps to utilize professional research tools to help you establish a set of popular keywords for your niche. On Product Mafia, we employ world-class product research for all our products on offer, which includes everything you’ll need to establish the best keywords for your niche. With all kinds of information on products in your niche, from profit margins, analytics, engagement, and links to help you develop keywords, all for free too. And once your dropshipping store is off the ground you can upgrade to PRO Membership to have access to an exclusive range of products.
15 Minute’s
2. Make sure your page is indexed.
This is a very important entry on the list since Google does not rank pages that aren’t indexed. You can run a quick diagnostics test to see whether your Shopify site appears on Google’s search engine, simply input site:[url] to see whether your site or any of its contents are indexed on Google’s search engine. Whenever your site doesn’t appear on a browser's search engine it is usually due to minor bugs in your site’s layout and code, errors that can easily be rectified to fast track your Shopify site to the perfect SEO optimized frequency.
- One such error is a rogue noindex meta tag. Robot meta tags are HTML snippets that tell search engines how to crawl or index a certain page. They prevent search engines from pulling up any duplicate content, Admin pages, and internal search results from your site whenever content from it appears on their search engines.
- Robot meta tags go, rogue, when you don’t specify two of their biggest attributes: name and content. The name attribute specifies which web crawlers should follow which instructions. Often referred to by its technical term, user-agent (UA). Crawlers need to be identified with their UA to request a page.
- The name attribute of a robot meta tag prevents things like images from your site from appearing on a Google image search. The content attribute gives instructions on how to crawl and index information on a page. If there is no content robot meta tags available, crawlers interpret it as an index, which gives them permission to show the page in search results and crawl all the links on the page unless specified otherwise.
15 Minute’s
30 Minutes in total so far!
3. Set your page up to match up with search intent.
Search engines always return the most relevant results for a query, and most search engines know that most queries entered into their search engines are done so for research purposes rather than by individuals looking to make a purchase. This is why Google will bring up a site that recommends beauty products over one that sells them whenever beauty products are queried on their search engines. All search engines operate by this rule which may seem like a bad thing for anyone in the dropshipping business, but it needn’t be so if you follow these rules:
- Write articles on the products you sell through your dropshipping site. That way you generate organic traffic for your dropshipping site that both markets the products you have on offer to visitors, but also secures your sales in the long run.
- Good SEO optimized content about the products for sale on your website is a good way of ensuring you still appear on search engines even if the main money generating vehicle for your site is online sales. Ensuring you get your share of result hits and don’t lose out on any organic traffic because of it.
15 Minutes
45 Minutes so far, and you’ve already improved your SEO by 70%
4. Backlinks
This entry on the list is common to almost all SEO guides, either online or in print, and for good reason too. Backlinks are probably one of the most important deciding factors when it comes to gaining organic traffic from a search engine and it is the go-to for any SEO expert advising a client on how to improve their rankings. This is because the majority of websites that get SEO optimization right, have a solid base of backlinks behind them as a testament of its importance.
- There is a clear correlation between pages that have no backlinks, which almost always have no organic traffic and sites that do have backlinks that have tons of organic traffic a month.
- Links rank higher than keywords as a factor to Googles rankings in its search engine
- The more popular a website whose links you feature on your page, the higher your page will appear in Google's search engine rankings. Such links also act as their own referral traffic in the case of the link coming from a popular page or site.
- As the traffic to your site increases so too does the authority and power of your links.
- Paid links aren’t considered or factored into Googles search engine rankings
- Link placement is an important factor as search engines attribute more weight to certain types of links such as a text link from within content rather than a link from a sidebar or footer. A lot of the links that aid in improving one ranking on a search engine contain a phrase related to an article’s keywords or main topic, so be sure to include them in your content.
The hour is finally up and you have a better more optimized Shopify site that’s guaranteed to bring you tons of organic traffic and sales, come to the end of the month. Now that’s what I’d call an hour well spent, and as usual Product, Mafia is here to ensure you reach that fabled pot of gold at the end of the dropshipping rainbow.
