Shopify 101 - Improving your stores visibility

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We thought it was about time that we share a few quick tips you can implement on your Shopify store to boost your visibility and bring in more visitors. Ready? Let's jump in.

1- Create a logical site structure

Your store structure helps both shoppers and search engines to navigate your site, so it's a good idea to make it as intuitive as possible. Structure your main categories up the top first such as shop by men, women and sale. Then follow it up with a broader more detailed range of sub categories such as hats, top and trousers. Each of these subcategories should then contain a collection of specific products that relate to these sub categories.

Another real world example would be that of an apparel store. A top level category would be Footwear, then a sub category would be sneakers, then this sub category would contain a list of sneaker products.

2- Determine the right keywords

SEO here again. We know you think its boring but trust us, it is important! Keyword research is so easy to do nowadays so there is no excuse not to do it. Keywords on Shopify work the same as any other website. The trick is to look for keywords which have a high conversion rate and don't be worried by low keyword volumes after all, you don't want to be everything to everyone, imagine how many products that would take! The best thing to remember is to pick keywords which are suitable for your brand and not just popular.

3- Unique URL's

Shopify is somewhat limited when it come to its URL structure, one of the places in which is does not stack up against offerings like WooCommerce. URL's all need to follow the same structure containing the word collections for a collection URL and the word product for a specific product URL. However, it is still possible to make fairly unique URL's the trick is to include keywords inside them where possible.

4- Remove duplicate content

A common challenge with Shopify is that the platform allows search engines to index both the custom domain and myshopify.com version of the store which results in a lot of duplicate content. The good news is, most modern search engines are somewhat tolerant of duplicate content from the same source but it is still recommended to try and prevent it where possible. Shopify tends to redirect the myshopify version of the store to the custom domain version automatically to indicate to search engines that the custom domain version is the one that should be indexed, but its worth testing this out to be sure this is setup correctly.

Use plagiarism tools available online to check your page content for issues.

5- Optimise images

As ever, optimise your assets! There is a good chance that your store has a lot of images and videos, how else will you show off your product? So please use any of the popular optimisation apps available on Shopify to easily optimise your media with a few clicks. Nice and easy.

6- Generate backlinks

We're really trying hard not to turn this into another SEO post but to be honest site visibility is basically achieved with good SEO. While we're on the topic, backlinks are a great way to build your site's reputation. Research indicates that pages with more backlinks generally receive more organic traffic. A good idea of the type of brands that could be a good fit to offer backlinks is to look at some of your competitors and see who is providing backlinks for them. Ahref's Link Intersect tool is a great way to find this info out. Grab a free trial and see for yourself.

7- 301 redirects

Imagine you have a really popular product and it sells out, you don't want shoppers searching for similar products to be served up this product page in the results for it to 404, that's how you loose them! Setting up a 301 redirect tells search engines when a page is no longer available sending it to another page of your choosing. This also stops Google from thinking that your page is no longer useful when users click on it, see the product is out of stock and bounce off the site which could negatively impact your rankings.

8- Implement structured data

This one focuses on Schema markup to signal specific content types such as products or reviews. Google actually rewards sites that use structured data with rich results that display content like images and reviews. Many Shopify themes actually make it simple to add product markup which is a bonus.

Summary

Well we hope you found this one useful. Please let us know what you want us to discuss next. We really want to shape our content to be as informative as possible, so reach out!

Bye for now :)