Shopify is among the most popular e-commerce platforms in the world. It allows different sellers to create online stores and sell their products to the ever-growing online market. However, for a seller to showcase their products to the larger market, increase traffic and rank higher on search engines, they need to optimise their Shopify store for SEO.
With a well-optimised store, shoppers will find it easy to locate your site, increasing your chances of making sales. SEO optimisation also improves the site’s efficiency, ensuring a seamless user experience for your customers. This article guides you on optimising a Shopify Website in 2023 and helps you understand how site speed affects user experience and SEO.
How to Optimise a Shopify Website in 2023
The purpose of setting up any business is to reach as many customers as possible, make sales and increase revenue. As a Shopify store owner, you will require adequate SEO optimisation to achieve these objectives. Without adequate store optimisation, your site will barely rank on search engines and customers will fail to locate your store or view your products from the Shopify platform. Below are proven tips you may apply to help optimise your Shopify store.
Optimise your Site’s Structure
Your site’s structure determines how your content and products appear on your store. A well-optimised site structure makes it easy for search engines to crawl the site for easier ranking. Customers also interact better with an optimised structure as they can easily locate what they require from the store and spend more time on the site looking for other related products from the website due to the ease of navigation. To optimise your store’s structure, consider the following tips.
a) Make your site easier to navigate
Simplify your site’s navigation by avoiding too many categories and subcategories. Instead, settle for a simple site structure where your products will appear only a few clicks from the homepage. Also, ensure that all the crucial pages appear on the navigation menu for an easy user experience.
b) Use product categories in the navigation
Using product categories in your site’s navigation is another way of optimising your Shopify’s store structure. Shopify has made this easier for store owners by creating the Shopify collections, that allow you to group your products for easier access by your customers.
c) Build your site for your customers
When building a site structure, keep your customers in mind. Consider adding ‘About Us’ and ‘Contact Us’ pages to help shoppers and search engines know that your site is credible and trustworthy. You may also include a search box on your store to help customers locate products easily.
d) Develop a relevant homepage design
A homepage lets you capture your visitor’s attention within the few minutes they visit your store. To make maximum use of these few minutes, choose a simple design that allows your visitors to understand and navigate your site’s content without a hassle.
e) Add contextual links to crucial pages on your site
Contextual links help direct visitors to other related pages. With contextual links, your visitors will easily move from one page to another without returning to the homepage, allowing them to save time on the website. With such convenience, these buyers will likely stay longer on the site looking for other products to purchase, which sends a positive sign to search engines, helping your site rank higher.
Perform Keyword Research
Marketable keywords enable search engines to optimise your site for higher ranking and improved traffic. To know which keywords to use, consider conducting extensive keyword research using different online tools to help you apply only the relevant keywords to your web content. Another way is to research the most common phrases your buyers may use when searching for specific products from your store.
Types of Keywords
There are four types of keywords, for instance informational, navigational, transactional and commercial. Transactional and commercial keywords fit better on product and service pages, while informational and navigational keywords are better suited for the homepage. Consider optimising your site’s content for SEO by incorporating keywords in URL and meta descriptions, titles, the body and ALT tags.
Optimise Titles and Meta Descriptions
At one point, when creating your Shopify store, you will require to add titles and meta descriptions for your products. To ensure that these descriptions help your content rank on search engines, consider optimising them using relevant keywords. Ensure you naturally blend keywords to fit in with these product titles and meta descriptions. Using relevant keywords helps your customers locate you quickly and allows search engines to crawl and rank your store, improving traffic.
Since titles and meta descriptions are the first elements that users interact with on a site, optimising them also helps increase click-through rates on search engine ranking pages (SERPs). Check out our Shopify seo on page for more info.
Tips for Titles and Meta Descriptions
Below are tips for creating SEO-friendly titles and meta descriptions for your Shopify store:
- Include your selected keyword in your meta descriptions and titles. This allows search engines to understand the webpage’s topic and differentiate one page from the other.
- You may include power words in your meta descriptions and titles to increase your CTR. Click-through rates refer to the number of visitors who click a specific link on your site divided by the total number of visitors.
- Ensure your meta description has a clear call to action. Call to action helps prompt immediate responses from buyers, improving your chances of making a sale.
- Keep your title and meta descriptions short and precise. Ensure your title length is between 50 and 60 characters long. Further, 50 and 160 characters for your meta description to prevent Google from truncating relevant information from your description.
Build Back Links to Your Store
Backlinks are another crucial ranking factor in websites. They refer to links from other sites that direct users to your Shopify store. Consider building quality backlinks from relevant domains to help your site rank higher on search engines.
You may achieve this by looking out for link-building opportunities, creating guest posts in reputable sites containing links to your store, or encouraging websites with broken links to consider replacing them with relevant links to your site.
Use Content Marketing
Content marketing is a perfect way of letting your customers interact with your brand in a special way that does not involve selling. A major way of achieving this is through blogging, where you deliver informative content to your readers. Although it is easy to consider product descriptions enough content, offering informative and relevant information through blogs further attracts visitors. Blogging is also the easiest way to rank for more keywords and get more backlinks.
Add Structured Data
Although search engines are intelligent, they still rely on algorithms, explaining why Google may fail to separate a product page from other content on the site unless it receives extra information. This extra information is referred to as structured data and helps search engines understand the site better and generate rich snippets that enable easier ranking. For your Shopify store, use Shopify apps that automatically generate and insert structured data into your site for better ranking.
Enhance Your Site Speed
People browsing the internet expect a site to load within 2 to 3 seconds, past which they are likely to consider that site slow. Consider enhancing your Shopify store’s speed to grab your user’s attention and keep it amid numerous internet distractions. Below is a detailed explanation of how your site speed might affect your customers’ shopping experiences and ways you may enhance your site speed to prevent poor user experiences.
How Site Speed Affects a Shopify User Experience
Internet users enjoy visiting sites that take less time to load and may not wait for a slow site to load, explaining why site speed is a crucial aspect to consider when creating your Shopify store. As a Shopify seller, your site could have the best products, an attractive design and affordable prices, but with low load speed, your customers may not stick long enough to interact with the site, reducing your chances of making a sale.
A low site speed also increases users’ frustrations, resulting in a high bounce-back rate, which search engines interpret as a sign of irrelevant products. Below are tips to help speed up your Shopify site and improve the chances of attracting and maintaining more customers:
- Choose a fast Shopify theme
- Compress images to reduce their size
- Reduce the number of background applications.
- Consider professional help from a Shopify developer to help you increase your site speed.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Is the Shopify website SEO friendly?
Yes. The Shopify website has basic SEO features that allow your site to rank for customers to locate your store easily. However, consider optimising your store for SEO to increase your traffic and rank your store higher on Google and the Shopify platform.
2. How may I attract more customers to my Shopify store?
Optimising your Shopify site for SEO is the major way of attracting more customers. This will enable search engines to rank your content higher, increasing your site’s traffic. An optimised site also creates a seamless user experience which attracts more customers to your store. You may also attract more customers by running social media campaigns, using influencer marketing to reach new audiences or use content marketing to provide information or solve problems for your audience.
3. Does my Shopify site speed affect sales?
Absolutely. Your site’s speed determines the number of customers that stick around long enough to make a purchase from your store. If your site has slow speed, your sales will likely drop as buyers shift to other sites in search of quicker services. To optimise your site for speed, consider using a fast Shopify theme, compress your images and reduce applications running on the background to reduce load time.
