Top 7 Powerful Online Store & Shopify SEO Optimization Strategies for Organic Search
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Every modern business owner, be it a small-sized online or a multinational eCommerce site like Shopify, is always looking for ways to grow their business with time. Online store SEO is the most common practice of improving the usability of a web page to drive traffic. Although it has the highest ROI compared to any marketing campaign, most online shops are still unaware of its uses. They instead rely on social media or paid ads, which are indeed great but require a high amount of constant effort and streamline income. SEO, alternatively, only requires an effort that is easy to understand and effective to use with no recurring expense.
We will share 7 strategies that will help you to optimize your online store for more organic search and profitable traffic at the same time. Below are the 7 ways on how you can score good points in SEO and put yourself in front of the right customers using organic search:
1. Keyword Research & Optimization
Keyword research is the first step in every campaign of eCommerce SEO. It helps to make sure that you are targeting those keywords that are suitable for improved ranking, have a good volume of search, and also have high conversion rates. To choose the best keywords that will increase online store traffic, you need to keep the buyer intent factor in your mind. To begin this process of keyword optimization, at first you should have a deep and complete understanding of your buyers’ personas to identify their interests or relative questions that are related to your products and services offerings
You can take help from online niche forums to have an idea about your potential buyers, their interest, their current demand, or expectations from online vendors. You can use websites or applications to find yourself a good keyword collection or you can analyze your competitors as well to help you in this regard.
One best technique to keep in mind is to select one separate keyword for each web page of your website. This will help you to list down your pages and rank them separately to lift up the whole ranking of your website.
2. On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is the technique of optimizing individual pages of a website to improve its visual appeal and performance that drives more organic traffic ultimately. It makes sure your selected keywords are in the right places and format. It also helps to ensure that Google understands exactly what your website is all about. Some critical points that are included in On-page SEO are:
- Keywords management
- Smooth website structure
- Add interlinks where required
- Enhance usability and engagement
- Enhance usability and engagement
By keenly performing the above mentioned five steps your website is optimized efficiently and good to go.
3. Mobile Optimization
In the past decade, we all have witnessed the boom of technology in all industrial sectors. Mobile phones are the most commonly used smart devices that have to bring ease in everyone’s life. Considering their usages and demand, the algorithm of Google now gives a high ranking to those websites that are mobile-friendly.
If your eCommerce site is not optimized to make a fast and seamless mobile user experience for the potential customers, not only you will be held back by the Google but you will also lose out on other major success factors such as long dwell times or low bounce rates that could boost SEO.
Optimizing an online website site for mobile is much more than minimizing the size of all the content into a smaller screen. The following are some easy steps to optimize your website that can improve mobile users’ experience.
- Reduce page loading speed with the help of minifying code
- Leverage browser caching
- Optimize graphics
- Reduce redirects
- Try user-friendly designs of a site such as HTML5 that offer special effects.
- Design content in large format to make it easy for users
4. Perform technical SEO
By technical SEO it does not mean that you should have the developer’s knowledge to change everything on your website. By simply following some steps, you can easily eliminate the technical problems that interrupt the functioning of an eCommerce website and increase Shopify traffic. These steps are;
Improve page load speed;
- Streamline elements that can minimize HTTP requests
- Reduce the response time of your server
- Enable browser caching and compression
- Improve the quality and size of graphics
- Reduce the number of plug-ins usages that have redirects
- Resolve site errors: lookup for error codes like 404, 500, 403, etc. that highly effects the user experience. Many applications can help you to identify these errors and provide respective solutions to minimize the chances of such site errors.
- High visibility and usability of a site. You can enhance the user experience by;
- Using readable font styles, sizes, and typefaces.
- Using bold font type and colors that are sparingly and strategically important to highlight vital information.
- Use short paragraphs and left ample spaces between each one of the paragraphs.
- Use bullets and numbered lists.
- Always include contact information so that interested prospectus can locate and reach you on time.
You should also Check Google Page Speed Check or GTMetrix for Website Speed Check
5. Add Blog section
Like everyone else, Google also likes new and fresh content as it is an indicator to them that your website is active and relevant at the same time. If you are publishing blog posts frequently on your website, you can help yourself to stay in front of search engines’ radars. Blog posts give your customers more than one way to find your website and multiple reasons to keep coming back to your site. When you publish informative articles, there are more chances that the visitors will spend more time on your site. Blogging and articles posting are a great strategy for acquiring useful search traffics. In addition to this, you can use your blog for other purposes such as sharing seasonal content to drive more organic traffic.
6. Put a special focus on Link building
The link building improves the overall performance of SEO for a website. It shows search engines that your display content is relevant and up to the mark. There are two major types of link building that can help you to improve your website ranking. The two types are;
- Inbound links
- Outbound links
By using inbound links you can have a link of other websites to your pages that other websites can use on their different but relevant webpages. The quality of inbound links will affect your overall SEO ranking, therefore, be very careful while adding them to your website. Below are some ways you can use to build quality inbound links;
- Use authority sites to submit articles or co-author content.
- Contact a few influencers to write your product review and provide a link to your product pages.
- Reach influencers and ask them to share their positive feedback on your content on their social media profiles.
Outbound links, on the other hand, are the links that go out to external websites. By adding outbound links, you can have positive effects on SEO. It will help you by giving appropriate signals to Google to indicate the relevancy of your pages. They also make your content more useful by linking them to helpful resources so that the readers can more get in-depth and useful information.
7. Introduce Google shopping
You may have noticed that when you type in a name of a product on the Google search bar, several images are displayed at the top of the search result that is above the other paid ads as well. This is known as google shopping. It is one way to list your products directly with Google Shopping. It is one of the fastest ways to get in front of your potential customers who are already searching for the products that you sell.
To list your products on Google Shopping, you will need a free merchant account. You can sign up on the Google Merchant Center to create a free account there. Once you are done with creating your website, you can upload product data on their servers and it will put your website in front of millions of shoppers across the globe. In addition to this, you can take advantage of location-based technology of Google to direct various online shoppers towards your online store by introducing features like “in-stock” availability. Make sure to use high-quality images and follow Google’s image guidelines when you upload your product information. You can set up a data feed to automate the process that makes sure that your listing is always up-to-date.