According to a study from Pew Research, 8 in 10 Americans do shopping online. And even 15% of Americans buy online every week.
It’s an explanation of why different online store constructors and ecommerce platforms, such as Shopify, are so popular. It’s very easy to create here your online shop even without special knowledge.
However, you should not just develop it, but also improve and promote it, to get good profit.
Your store ranking is one of the most important indexes of the site. It depends on it, how many people will visit your online shop and make a purchase in the future.
In this post, I’ll tell you about 8 the best and the easiest ways to increase your Shopify store rankings.
1. Choose a template with the most developed and understandable site navigation system
Shopify has a wide selection of different themes and templates. There are both free and premium options, alternatively, you can opt for custom theme development. The best for ecommerce sites are YourStore, Fastor, iOne, Foodly, Simolux, Material, Everything, and others.
Your main task here is to choose one that is appropriate for your goods since a template can help increase your conversion rate.
Also, don’t forget about your customers. Develop the portrait of your target audience and choose the template that would be the most understandable just for those people. You can customize every of them as templates have theme settings.
You can watch if the existing navigation is comfortable for your users using Google Analytics Behaviour Flow.
The Behaviour Flow report clearly demonstrates the user’s way from one page or event to another, thereby helping to understand what materials are the most interesting for visitors.
In addition, it helps to identify possible problems with site navigation and content. Having this information, you’ll be able to understand which categories or sections you need to add or reorganize.
It means a comfortable search of some goods or services for your store visitors. And the heart of the issue here is a huge amount of site sections and categories. One section should contain only one type of goods, don’t mix them up.
Comfortable search determines the number of purchases, durations of stay on site and site rankings as well.
2. Develop correct snippets
A snippet is a short text that describes your online store in SERP (search engine results pages) under the link.
In many cases, snippets are those words that influence the choice of many people.
Before creating them you should make sure you use a supported theme for your Shopify store. It has to use “structured data markup.” Otherwise, you’ll not be able to develop snippets for your ecommerce.
If everything is ok, then go ahead or change the theme. Choosing the supported theme is possible when you set up your store on Shopify.
The snippet should contain laconic info (about 160 symbols) about the page and keywords (1 or 2) by which it’s promoted. Search engines take this text from Description tag.
An extended snippet will represent your site in a more interesting and beautiful manner in SERP. It shows not only general information, but also additional ones such as phone numbers, addresses, social media buttons, reviews, and so on.
A snippet doesn’t affect the ranking and optimization of your store directly, but this block will be very useful for attracting users to the site.
3. Friendly URL
Create URLs that are understandable for every visitor of your site. For example, a page with iPhone X should be like the following — https://www.site’s_name/smartphones/apple/iphone_X
For a regular Internet user, such URLs are similar to breadcrumbs (links that show the way from the current page to the main one) and help a lot in navigation and search on the site.
Such URLs are well indexed by search engines since they are well correlated with the content of the page. So human-readable URLs are the factor of website promotion and, therefore, one of the aspects of its optimization.
4. Emphasize the reliability and convenience of your site
Fill to the maximum contacts, payments and shipping terms pages.
A large number of contacts will increase the user’s confidence in the site, and will also allow them to choose the most convenient way to order. So put the following contacts on a contact page and on other pages:
- phone number;
- email;
- address;
- driving map;
- photos of the building;
- Skype;
- social media accounts.
Ordering goods users are interested in methods of payment, the possibility, and options for shipping. So it’s necessary the section Delivery and Payment is available on all pages of the site.
Certificates, reviews, news, offers,discounts sections form the credibility of the site. Don’t forget about them. News pages always must contain up-to-date information.
Otherwise, it may deceive the visitor of the site and become a reason for doubts about the site’s efficiency and the quality of the company’s services. Offers, discounts, or any other bonuses positively affect the commercial attractiveness of the resource.
One more very important thing here is the comfortable order form. You should provide visitors the opportunity to order goods without registration. There should be as few fields for filling as possible on the order form.
For example, it can be a name, phone number, or email for communication, delivery method, and address.
Your online store ranking increases if visitors don’t leave it without purchase or the depth of site viewing is large. So don’t neglect these points.
5. Products’ category pages and product cards optimization
On the importance of the site promotion in search engines, pages with categories of goods are second only to the main one. But there can be dozens of them that means they are even more important.
So you should optimize category pages to get as high traffic as possible from them.
These pages should contain:
- a correctly structured list of similar goods;
- titles’ tags by a template with keywords and calls to action (motivating for the purchase phrases will bring a long tail of traffic from people who are looking for goods in the “ready to buy” mode);
- unique content, written according to the keywords list; it should contain anchors and hash-tags for promotion in social networks;
- the most popular products of this category are distinguished to the separate block.
You can collect the list of keywords for your store by Google AdWords. It’s easy to use, has a comfortable interface, and a variety of instruments for keyword selecting. To use it you should register by entering your Google email and blog domain in special fields.
Increase external link juice of each category page as on the mini-main page. However, the same page shouldn’t have loads of URLs pointing to it because it may cause over-indexing.
One more important part of your store improvement is the optimization of each product card.
Add reviews to these pages to make them unique.
There should be a separate unit dedicated to the characteristics of the product on the page. It’s the second most popular parameter that is of interest to users.
You can also add a description of the product or service and the main competitive advantages of no more than 80-100 words.
The first thing visitors pay attention to are images. They should be optimized at first. Use several high-quality images from different angles of one product.
Don’t forget about the alt-tag attribute during the optimization process. Search engines index content from them. Therefore, it should be registered and there should be a word or phrase from the keywords list of the site.
Also, remember to check the guide on how to optimize images’ size. If the page will be loaded for a long time due to a large amount of graphic content, it may not be indexed at all.
Combine images into CSS sprites. In this case, they’ll be downloaded from a separate CSS-file online store, rather than from its main code. It greatly speeds up pages’ loading into the user’s browser.
To promote other your goods or services add “Similar goods” and “Accompanying goods” blocks. Such information is intended to acquaint users with your assortment and the scale of your online store.
6. Switching to HTTPS
If you manage an online store, use the HTTPS protocol for all pages of the site.
There are many forms that collect personal information about users in online stores. A useful practice is to encrypt this information, not just credit card data.
Also, Google reluctantly confirms that sites using the HTTPS protocol are ranked slightly higher than those using the HTTP protocol.
7. Mobile version optimization
Optimizing your store’s mobile version you increase traffic to the whole store.
Google officially denied a link between optimizing a mobile version of the site and its ranking results in a desktop version.
At the same time, it says that behavioral factors are important criteria in ranking for any device. That is, if due to the bad mobile version, visitors will immediately leave your store, it will still affect the position of the site in the desktop version too.
Shopify provides free, built-in mobile commerce shopping cart features. It uses HTML 5 so your store will be great for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and other smartphones. Themes also adapt to mobile devices.
Although, this platform has the features mentioned above you should optimize your store a little more to get good results. First of all, re-read all texts on the site and make them shorter, but informative for the mobile version. Different lists, short titles, tables would be good here.
When optimizing an online store for mobile devices, make it be possible to determine the position of the user by GPS automatically or to form push notifications about the status of the order, deals, and bonuses, and so on.
Images optimization for the size of mobile devices screen, enlarged elements, and fonts, sufficient distance between interactive elements to avoid false pressures, minimum of all extra details – all these requirements are for mobile-optimized sites.
Don’t forget to also optimize your search for mobile. Phones have a smaller screen space, so you should adjust the number of products you suggest and make sure your solution can handle typos since these are common on mobile!
+1. Analysis
Search engines don’t stand still, they’re constantly improving ranking in their algorithms. So you should make an analysis of your site occasionally to maintain the result of SEO.
Also, to improve your online store rankings you can analyze your competitors and take into account their good and efficient ideas.
You can analyze sites comparing manually or using special SEO tools, such as Serpstat, SEMrush, Ahrefs.
I suggest using these tools to save your time, energy and to make the analysis more accurate.
I’ll go with Serpstat as it’s an all-in-one SEO platform that consists of five modules: Rank Tracking, Backlink Analysis, SEO-audit, Keyword Research, and Competitor Analysis. You can make everything you need in one place.
As a summary
Shopify is making ecommerce business creation easier and more comfortable. And to get more profit from your online store you should optimize it. Here commercial ranking is an up-to-date topic.
In this article, I tell about 7+1 easy but important methods of increasing Shopify store rankings. Of course, it isn’t a complete list of tips for SEO-optimizing an online store, but these 7+1 can provide 90% success. This checklist must be constantly updated as technologies are developing very fast.
Adding those or other items to the site from this checklist is just one of the stages on the way to the TOP and to the ideal site. I wish you success in your progress!
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