Shopify SEO Basics for Ecommerce Brands

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Driving traffic to your site is at the top of your to-do list to get your Shopify store off the ground. Allowing easy access and clear paths to your site is vital in developing those early connections with customers.

But these critical pieces to your early success are heavily affected by your ability to use SEO to your advantage correctly. When you can make your shop easy to find and trigger a search response based on consumer interest, you’ll drive higher sales by presenting yourself to shoppers as the retailer of choice. Let’s look at the Shopify SEO essentials you’ll need for your Shopify store, how they affect your success, and how to best take advantage of them.

SEO for Shopify: Keywords

When you think of SEO in practice, likely the first thing that comes to mind is using keywords throughout the copy on your site. While not the only way to use SEO to boost your store’s visibility, keywords are one of the most important elements. You want to use the same terminology that people do when looking for the kinds of products you offer, especially when your brand isn’t at an established point where new customers would be looking for you by name.

Many free or affordable tools allow you to search for keywords that would fit your business and catalog, from Chrome extensions to third-party apps. Beyond just driving initial interest based on product, keywords can also be hugely helpful in developing your support team. With Gladly, you can structure your help center FAQ pages using commonly searched keywords related to support queries about your business or products. Including these SEO terms in the context of your self-service platform makes the customer support process even more streamlined and helps take a bit off the plate of your customer support staff as well.

SEO for Shopify: Store Structure

Optimizing your Shopify store means appealing to the customers and the search engines themselves. You’ll want to build your store using a simple structure with a logical sequence of categories, which helps search engines better rank your site when users seek out your products.

Some simple ways to optimize your site’s structure are through the text you use for links and imagery. Descriptive file names connected to images embedded in the store will increase the frequency of high placement for your products in shopping searches. Meanwhile, using descriptive text for internal links helps a search engine match the keyword phrases to what shoppers are typing into their search bar.

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SEO for Shopify: Crawling & Indexing a Site

One of the most important early steps for your Shopify store to succeed with SEO is finding your sitemap and indexing it with major search engines. Your sitemap is essentially a digital blueprint of your website, giving search engines the ability to quickly find, crawl, and index your site’s content on their platforms. The sitemap makes your site accessible by the Googles and the Bings of the world, which helps potential shoppers find your site through their search results.

Indexing your sitemap isn’t as technically complex as it may sound, and Shopify offers help finding your map and following the steps to get your store correctly set up. Luckily, all Shopify domains have their existing sitemap that you can use, meaning no matter your subscription plan, you’ll be able to implement indexing yourself. Beyond those basics, higher-tier Shopify subscriptions can help simplify having multiple international domains with sitemaps for each, giving larger ecommerce companies the ability to expand their SEO reach even further.

Implementing SEO in Shopify creates a massive opportunity for generating awareness for your ecommerce business. These essential Shopify SEO starting points scratch the surface of what else you can do to improve the visibility of your Shopify store. The more you explore the possibilities and start experimenting, the more you’ll see the impact of this low-cost solution on increasing your traffic and, ultimately, your sales and revenue. Through the strategic use of SEO in Shopify, you’ll improve your business’s odds of being found by potential customers, enhance the customer experience by matching your products to their searches, and set your store up for long-term success.

Looking for more tips to boost your SEO in Shopify? Read Gladly’s blog post Shopify SEO Tricks.

About Gladly

Gladly is a customer service platform for digitally-focused B2C companies who want to maximize the lifetime value of their customers. Unlike the legacy approach to customer service software, which is designed around a ticket or case to enable workflows, Gladly enables radically personal customer service centered around people to sustain customer loyalty and drive more revenue.

The world’s most innovative consumer companies like Godiva, JOANN, and TUMI use Gladly to create lasting customer relationships, not one-off experiences. 

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