FREE ANALYSIS

One of the most popular methods of attracting new business to your e-commerce store is to perform SEO (or Search Engine Optimisation for those who have been living under a rock for the past 10 years). This is essentially the term given to a series of optimization actions taken on your site itself which will cause Search Engines (such as Google) to bring your website closer to the first page of terms that are commonly searched by your customers.

Search Engines are by far the most popular and direct way to search for products and services available from all over the world and the potential for businesses to generate new customers should be apparent. Investing in an SEO strategy is a long-term strategy for those looking to make lasting gains and establish a solid footprint on the web; most strategies will take at least 6 months to see any major changes worth writing home about. It is reported, however, that the first page positions for any given Google search dominate at least 71%+ of the clicks generated from that term, which is exactly why competition for those top spots is so fierce.

Contrary to popular belief, you can perform SEO on Shopify the same as you would with any other site in many ways, despite the fact that the platform is hosted by Shopify themselves as opposed to being just a platform. However, like anything profitable in life, it requires a certain degree of research into proper Shopify SEO techniques as well as your industries’ market on the web.

Another aspect that most people overlook going into this is appropriate keyword research, which can be a tedious and time-consuming task. Making sure that your website will trigger search terms that are actually relevant to what your company sells and that actually drive real business is critical. After all, it is no good advertising for apples if you only have oranges!

After this there is a fair amount of technical onsite work which is more specific to Shopify like ensuring that you remove duplicate URLs in the sites internal linking structure, properly structuring the site’s data under “Product”, “Article” and “Breadcrumb list” data respectively and removing any superfluous Shopify apps you may have installed. Another massive SEO blunder many Shopify users make is having a lot of duplicate content on their site, which is looked upon very poorly by the likes of Google and Bing. They want their users to see fresh and unique content populating every page of your site in order to then recommend the best fitting piece to their users.

Another more recent focus of Google, in particular, has been the experience that people using their search engine have with sites that are suggested to them by Google. They only want their users to experience sites that provide answers or solutions to their search terms in a user-friendly and honest way, which means that optimizing your site to do this is also important.

Being an e-commerce platform, businesses establishing themselves on Shopify need to make sure they understand what they are doing and how their work on their website will affect their sales through the platform. If you are selling it, there are hundreds of others selling it and when performing SEO for Shopify it is important to remember that you must follow the general rules of White Hat SEO as well as taking the individual intricacies and challenges of building a site on a platform like Shopify into consideration.

As with any SEO campaign, you will need to focus on targeting the right audience online. This includes identifying what keywords they are searching for. Therefore, with most e-Commerce campaigns, the key is to ensure that the correct pages are targeting the most relevant keywords. If you have many products, this can be extremely time-consuming. So, employing the services of a professional and reputable digital marketing agency can sometimes be the best move, especially when dealing with a niche platform such as Shopify.

Shopify is as effective in terms of SEO as any other platform really. While it can be slightly more complex and nuanced in operation, ultimately it will just take educating yourself on how to effectively perform SEO on Shopify. Certainly, if you run an e-commerce business, the practicalities that Shopify provides to your business definitely outweigh the time spent on this new learning curve. If you are planning to use an SEO agency to perform this work for you then it’s important that they have the knowledge and experience of Shopify required to perform effective and ethical white-hat SEO on the platform. Many agencies will simply claim they can do something before actually evaluating whether they can with the technical team who will be undertaking the work.

So, in short, yes, Shopify is good for SEO once you know exactly how it differs from other platforms and learns how to perform the same work using Shopify. While it differs from many traditional CMSs in a lot of significant ways, ultimately driving a car is the same for any model, it just takes getting used to, and this learning curve shouldn’t be a put-off if Shopify can benefit your online business.