If you have created a Shopify storefront, you may be proud of the effort you put into it. The sales should start coming in now that it is live.
Unfortunately, your Shopify store may not yield the results you hoped for without the proper SEO efforts. One of the best ways to ensure that the right technical SEO efforts are used is by contacting us and learning about our affordable SEO for small businesses, which includes technical SEO.
In the meantime, consider using the tips here to help improve your Shopify store’s results.
1. Pagination
Pagination is sometimes required for Shopify websites (and all e-commerce sites) to help separate the content on category pages into segments that are easier to digest. However, pagination methods can impact overall SEO performance.
A common method for utilizing pagination is “infinite scroll.” This feature loads more products automatically when a visitor gets close to the bottom of the page. This is similar to how social media sites work.
Infinite scroll offers several benefits for people on the page; however, if it is not done properly, it may result in some products not being indexed by search engines.
To ensure search engines can access all the products, it is necessary to have some static pages. There are a few ways to do this, and we offer these options as part of our affordable SEO for small businesses.
2. Social Media, Payment, and Internationalizing
If you plan to internationalize your Shopify store, be sure you consider the way customers will interact with the website. You should include social media preferences and payment options for your target country.
Popular social media platforms are different in each country. For example, many popular western platforms, like Twitter and Facebook, are banned in China. Be sure it is possible to change the template you use so that you don’t link to sites that people can’t or don’t want to use.
With payment options, you need to consider what people from each country prefer. For example, India commonly uses cash on delivery, while China prefers payments made through platforms like WeChat or AliPay.
When you add the preferred payment methods to your checkout page, ensure they are not hidden at the bottom. Instead, make the options clear and easily seen, which can help encourage more conversions.
3. Faceted Navigation
It is also wise to implement faceted navigation for your Shopify store. With this, customers can use filter options to select what products they want to see based on characteristics like style, color, size, etc.
While this is a smart option for improving your Shopify store, you do have to be careful that there are no duplicate URLs. This is something that would harm your SEO results.
Make sure that just the master version of the page in question that is unfiltered by the facets is indexed. To do this, you can use noindex, robots.txt rules, and canonical tags. If you choose to use filters and have filtered pages, make sure you eliminate any duplicate content, which would also hurt SEO results.
4. Internal Navigation and Orphaned Pages
When you go to retail sites, you may notice that some have huge menus and all types of product categories. There is a reason for this – ensuring the products are properly indexed is essential.
This is especially important if you sell seasonal products. In the past, the items would be removed from the site in the off-season. However, this may cause the pages to become “orphaned” on your site. If this happens, your overall visibility may take a hit.
A better option is to use a combination of footer links and HTML sitemaps. You can also keep some off-season pages linked to your main menu. There will likely be customers who still want to purchase these items, even in the off-season.
5. Product Options
Something you need to be careful about is making various pages for every option of a product you have. For example, if you sell one pair of shoes in seven different colors, you may think setting up seven product pages (one for each color) is smart.
Unfortunately, it can lead to cannibalization. This means that the search engines will not know what page to rank for a specific keyword, and your page will compete against one another in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
It is necessary to make sure all the options for a product are included on a single page. It will help you avoid duplication and put the focus on the product rankings.
6. Out-of-Stock Items
If you do not handle out-of-stock products properly, it may have a negative impact on your Shopify store performance.
From an SEO standpoint, a good option to deal with these items is to keep the products live and mark them as out of stock. This will let users know that they cannot purchase them. If you cannot keep your out-of-stock products live, then you can redirect people visiting your store to the landing page for the category. For situations where the product will never be back in stock, use 301 redirects. If the product may be offered again, you can use a 302 redirect, which is taken away when the item is available again.
If you have a product category with no products available, you need to make sure it remains live and linked so that you do not wind up with any orphaned pages on your store. The pages may be removed from the main menu and then added to the HTML sitemap files you have linked in the page’s footer.
7. Seasonal Product Refreshes
If your Shopify store is seasonal and the product changes for spring, summer, fall, and winter, it is only natural to have fluctuations in visibility.
From the search engine perspective, if you remove all of one season’s products and add new products, you are basically migrating your site every six months. This is because the pages that the search engines have ranked your store for are now gone.
Keeping your category landing pages live is smart if you plan to refresh your products every season. This will allow visitors to find your site based on the main keywords. It also lets you have a page to maintain your rankings for the keywords that are now out of season. With this strategy, you will not have to deal with a huge drop in your store’s visibility. Also, you do not have to start completely over when it comes to your new products for the season.
When you name your product and category pages, be sure they are completely keyword focused. You need to eliminate any delimiters since these are things that you must update each year. With delimiters in place, you must make a new page for each season. This is going to impact traffic and visibility.
8. Optimization Options and Recommendations
If your Shopify store has thousands of products listed, the optimization process can take some time. However, you can do a few things to help ensure your pages are optimized and have unique meta descriptions and title tags.
The first step is keyword research. To ensure that you have a strong foundation to start optimizing, you need to integrate short- and long-tail keywords. While it may be tempting to focus on shorter keywords, this is not a smart strategy. You want to ensure that you focus on unique keywords across all your pages. When you optimize your Shopify store, you may wind up with a bank of hundreds (or more) of keywords. These should be split into different categories based on the product groups that are sold in your store.
If you have paginated category pages (described above), it is easy to optimize these. You must add the pagination element to the end of your meta description and title tag. This will ensure that you have some unique elements for every page.
With product pages, the number can be addressed with a boilerplate. You can also use the taxonomy-based optimization rules you upload to your store. The rules are determined based on the user interest you discover during the keyword research stage. It can include specific product names and the stock-keeping unit. This ensures that each one is unique. Doing this means you do not have to worry about writing thousands of different meta descriptions and title tags – which can be tedious and time-consuming.
Getting the Best SEO Results for Your Shopify Store
As you can see, there are more than a few ways to improve the SEO of your Shopify store to increase visibility and conversions.
However, these tips are based on technical SEO, which can be challenging and confusing for many people. If this is the case, you can reach out to us and learn about our affordable SEO for small businesses. Our services will ensure that your Shopify store is properly optimized and that it is getting the visibility, attention, and conversions necessary for the best possible results.
