What is SEO Marketing and How Does it Work? (2023)

To appear first in a Google search result, your store’s content must fit the intent of a potential user. Optimizing your site for SEO can sound overwhelming and time-consuming, but it really comes down to knowing how search engines function and how searchers use them, incorporating that knowledge into your page copy, and then methodically running through some fully usable backend tinkering.

We’ve put together a step-by-step guide to optimizing your Shopify store—no prior knowledge of SEO is needed.

Why is SEO so important?

1. The majority of traffic is generated by organic search.

If you do not have an SEO strategy in place for your store, you will be losing traffic and sales. According to Wolfgang Digital, online retailers should predict 35 percent of overall traffic and 33 percent of revenue from search engine results sites, making it the marketing platform that can generate the most traffic and revenue.

2. Paid advertising costs are increasing and SEO is “free traffic”

If you get the majority of your revenue from paid advertising platforms like Facebook or Instagram, your profit margins will suffer. While it takes time to generate organic traffic, it can ultimately become the best acquisition channel, making its costs manageable. Investing in SEO to increase organic traffic may take time and effort, but the compounding effect makes organic traffic the best value for money channel for generating customers. Even if the return is not immediate, SEO should never be an afterthought.

3. Ranking first in search engines can get you up to 30% more daily traffic

In the SEO world, it’s said that if you wanted to cover a dead body, you’d put it on page two. This is due to the fact that ranking first generates a disproportionate number of clicks as opposed to ranking eleventh.

If you have a page that is doing well for organic traffic despite not having done any search optimization, there is a good chance you can boost the page to pull in more traffic, even with minor changes.

Before you start: Essentials to improve your Shopify SEO

Before you begin working on improving the SEO of your Shopify store, there are a few items you must do first. They are as follows: 

• Purchase a custom domain.  Simply put, in order to thrive in SEO, your store must have its own domain. Custom domains instil greater confidence in potential customers who click through from search engines, and they are also more memorable. If you’re still using brandname.myshopify.com, it’s time to move to a custom domain like brandname.com. A custom domain will cost you between $10 and $20 per year. We have a resource on how to select a domain name for your store if you need it.
• Ensure you have Google Analytics installed on your site. Google Analytics is free to instal on your website and allows you to see how much traffic comes to your site and what it does. Discover how to instal Google Analytics on your Shopify store.

• Ensure you have Google Search Console installed on your site. Google Search Console provides information such as which pages rank for which keywords, where they rank, and how many clicks you get, among other things. Discover how to instal Google Search Console on your Shopify store.
• Have a mobile ready theme. Shopify provides a few free themes, all of which are designed with Responsive Web in mind. Even if you haven’t made any changes to your theme or had one developed, it’s a good idea to test its mobile readiness with this Google app.

• Remove password protection. you’re still working on getting your product pages created and organised, you may want to hold off on opening your store to the public and search engines. However, if your store is password-protected, search engines would be unable to see past your homepage and crawl or rate your pages in their search engine results pages.
• Be on a paid plan.  Although free trial stores can be crawled and indexed, if you are not on a paid plan, you can put in all of this work and not see the fruits of your labour until your trial period is over because waiting for a new store to rank will take longer than 14 days. 

You’re ready to go once you’ve checked that all of these items are in order. Use this SEO guide to increase organic traffic and popularity in search engines such as Google and Bing. 

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is SEO that is done on the back end. It is sometimes invisible, just like the fresh engine oil that keeps a car going, but it can significantly boost your website’s search results. Technical SEO ensures that your website is search engine crawler friendly, has a quick page load time, and is mobile device friendly. It also optimises the site for humans by ensuring that its layout, navigation, and internal links are user-friendly, and that meta tags are filled out so that both search engines and humans understand what the website is about. 

If your website has inconsistencies in these fields, it can stifle your rankings before the issues are resolved. You will profit from correcting these errors in the following ways: 

• Users are more engaged with the web because it is easier and all relevant content and pages are easily accessible.
• Crawl bot activity has increased because the platform is easier to crawl, which increases organic traffic over time.

1. Create a logical internal linking strategy with your menus

Internal linking is easy to overlook, particularly in the early stages of developing your online store. I understand—it simply does not appear to be as relevant as publishing new pages and promoting your company. 

Internal linking is more than just pasting links to relevant anchor text on your website. It is all about developing the requisite pillar pages that will transfer authority to hundreds of other related website pages and blog posts, and/or vice versa. This can be accomplished by providing a simple navigation system from your homepage that is optimised for both user experience and search engine crawlers. 

“How do I apply this to my business?” is the question now. 

As an example, consider our content demo store, Kinda Hot Sauce, which sells hot sauces. Assume we hear from consumers that they like our habanero hot sauce and would like to see more flavours of it, so we’ve added three new flavours to our habanero lineup. Here’s what we’re going to do next: 

• Conduct keyword research. We use a free SEO tool like Ubersuggest and enter “habanero hot sauce” into the keyword analyzer to get an idea of how many people search for that phrase on a monthly basis (4,400). Excellent! We’ve found a new category to nest our new product line in.
• Create product pages. To build the product listing in our Shopify store, we go to Products > Add product and make sure that everything is filled in, from the title and descriptions to the SKUs and shipping details.
• Create a collection page. To add the three new product pages, go to Products > Collections and build a new list. We make sure to follow on-page SEO best practises when filling out the Search engine listing preview for the collections page by striving to include “habanero hot sauce” in the page title, definition, URL, and handle.

• Add our new page to the menu. We navigate to Online store > Navigation > Main menu in our Shopify store. We can easily connect our latest habanero hot sauce range to our navigation system under Shop from there.
• Add a breadcrumbs app to your store. Category Breadcrumbs ($4/month) allows it simple to show your customers the direction they’ve taken across your category tree. By clicking on the appropriate connection, they can follow their “breadcrumb trail” back to their starting point. For example, if you’re reading this blog post on the Shopify blog, you can return to the blog homepage by clicking “Shopify blog.”

2. Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console and fix site errors

We stated in the beginning of this article that you should build a Google Search Console account. After that, the next move is to apply your sitemap. Submitting your sitemap to Google Search Console helps search engines to crawl and index your shop. This basically means that a crawl bot visits your ecommerce site, explores the homepage, and then proceeds to browse all of your product types, collections, and product pages before returning to the top. This is done so that they can be mentioned on search engine results pages. 

The good news is that Shopify automatically generates a sitemap for all shops. You would not need to create your own—this is only recommended for highly skilled SEO managers. If you have the Basic plan, you will receive one auto-generated sitemap; if you have the Shopify plan or higher and use international domains, you must upload a sitemap file for each domain. 

This three-minute video will walk you through the process of submitting your Shopify store sitemap to Google Search Console. 

If you’ve just submitted your sitemap, you’ll have to wait for a crawl to get this information, so bookmark this section and return to it in a week or so. Here’s what you can do: 

• Log in to Search Console and view the Coverage reportOn the left, choose Index > Coverage. A graph will appear with the tick boxes Error, Valid with alerts, Valid, and Excluded. For the time being, you can concentrate solely on Error. 
• Identify any 404 or redirect errors (if they have been reported). This will be recorded in the list by Search Console as: 

• “Submitted URL not found (404),” which occurs when a page on your site does not exist. It shows a page-not-found message to the user. This error occurs because you are referring to this broken page somewhere on your web, or another site is, and the search engine crawler is attempting to index it. This is terrible for SEO and users because you are leading them astray. It is critical that we address this problem. When you click on “Submitted URL not found (404),” you will be presented with a list of all the URLs that are returning errors. Click the “Export” button in the upper right corner of the screen to export to your preferred spreadsheet software.
• When a Googlebot crawls a URL but the page does not immediately update to the new location for the user, this is referred to as a “redirect error.” This is because the chain has become too long, there is a redirect loop, the URL reaches the maximum URL length, or the redirect chain contains a poor or null URL. As previously mentioned, click on “Redirect error” to obtain a complete list of these URLs and export the document.

• Fix 404 and redirect errors in your store. This is where your familiarity with spreadsheets can come in handy. These issues can be difficult to resolve, so here’s what you can do: 

• Refer to your 404 error spreadsheet (the sheet labelled “Table”). You must now locate the most appropriate page to redirect to. For example, if we discontinued a product on our Kinda Hot Sauce demo store, it would make sense to redirect the page to either the closet match or the collections page. Notice these down next to the URL (you may delete or mask the “Last crawled” column). If you can’t find a match, reverting to the home page is a nice fallback option.
• Navigate to Online Store > Navigation in your Shopify admin. Click “URL Redirects” and then “Add URL redirect.” Here, refer to your spreadsheet of 404 errors and type them into the appropriate fields before clicking “Save redirect.” For more specific instructions, see our support article on creating redirects. If you need to generate a lot of redirects, you should consider using the bulk import feature for URLs.
• Following that, I’ll make a quick recommendation about how to resolve redirect errors. Redirect loops practically put tourists and search engines in a loop by attempting to load a series of two more pages on your website that all point to one another. The redirect is set up such that page C should load page A, page A should load page B, and page B should load page C.
• Follow the steps below to export your Shopify store’s list of URL redirects. You must now determine which redirects are broken by referring to both your Google Search Console and Shopify redirect exports. If you’re comfortable with spreadsheet programmes, merge the sheets and filter them to get a rundown of where the errors are. If not, copying the URL error cell and then using the Find feature (“Cmd+F” on Mac, “Ctrl+F” on Windows) can work, but it requires a lot of clicking and back and forth.
• Make a note in your spreadsheet of where you want the redirect to go, then navigate to Online Store > Navigation > URL redirects. Use the search box to locate the redirect you want to change, then click on it to update it.
• After all of this, the next step is to ensure that your efforts have been rewarded. Return to Search Console and review the Coverage tab every few days or weeks until you have caught all of the errors. 

3. Optimize your images to load quickly and be found by search engines

Search engines crawl not only the text on your website, but also the photos. You can still show beautiful photography when optimising your images. In reality, it improves the way you show off and present your photos to customers. 

Image size reduction should be a top priority for your shop. According to HTTP Archive, photos account for 46 percent of the average webpage’s total size, implying that images are huge and may cause a page to load slowly if not configured. The good news is that because Shopify is hosted ecommerce software, you don’t have to think about the technological aspects of finding a CDN that is safe and quickly loads your photos because that is included in your package. However, here are several easy ways to reduce the file size of your images so that they can be found and indexed more easily by search engines: 

• Use images in JPG or PNG formats. Shopify automatically serves images in WebP, a format that offers superior compression for images on the web, with an average file size savings of more than 30% over conventional file formats like JPEG and PNG. In addition, use only JPEGs and PNGs for images when uploading them to your web, as they are the smallest image file formats. This is possible for the majority of native image programmes that come with your setup. On a Mac, for example, you can use the Preview app to save images in various formats by going to File > Export and then selecting JPG or PNG from the dropdown menu. 

Note: A good rule of thumb is to use JPEGs for photography, PNGs for custom graphics     or illustrations, and never GIFs unless they are for a moving image.

• Reduce the file size of your images. In other words, the larger the image file size, the longer it will take to load a page. Reducing the size of your images and the page speeds up the loading of your images and the page. Image resizing may have an impact on their consistency. Be sure to use normal resolution (72 pixels per square inch) (PPI). If you’re new to this, we suggest starting with Shopify’s free image resizer.
• Add images to your sitemap. Many people are visual searchers, particularly when it comes to items like clothing, so having your photos appear in search results is critical. Using photos in your sitemap facilitates crawling and indexing by search engines. Shopify uses your primary product page image in the sitemap, but if you want to include all images on your product pages, I suggest downloading Image Sitemap ($4/month), an app that automatically creates and submits an.xml Sitemap to Google Search Console for all images associated with each product, blog post, and page in your Shopify store.
• Optimize your alt attributes carefully.  Alt attributes are text alternatives to images that are used when a browser is unable to render them properly. They are often used for web accessibility, which means that if a person with low vision visits your site, the alt text can be read. Alt text is useful for ecommerce stores and image SEO because it makes items appear in Google images. Our recommendation here is to explain what’s in the picture in plain language so that people with low vision can understand what’s going on. As a result, your images will rank higher. Try “Image of Pixi’s Glow tonic facial toner in 250ml, a highly concentrated, invigorating facial toner to deep clean your pores” instead of “facial toner 250ml.”
• Name your images in plain language.  When you save your picture to your machine, this is the file name it will be saved as. Its web address will remain the same after you upload it. It should ideally fit the keyword on the tab. For example, if our page is about habanero hot sauce, we can save the image file name as “habanero-hot-sauce.jpg.” This means that, in addition to our product page appearing for queries like “habanero hot sauce,” our product images should appear under the images tab on search engines.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is the primary method of specifically informing readers and search engines about the content of your page. Search engines look for specific on-page factors that can help them rank your page higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). On-page considerations include, among other things, keyword and topic relevance, meta information, the slug in the page URL, and your photos. This Moz article is a great resource for more detail on on-page variables. 

We’ll go through the fundamentals of keyword analysis, how to decipher search intent, and some content optimization tips to help your pages rank for their target keywords. 

1. Keyword research

Keywords can be thought of as questions that people use and type into search engines. This sometimes mimics how we speak when asking questions; other times, it is more of a “caveman speak” format, where you could type “buy new iPhone” rather than “I want to buy the new iPhone.”

First, let me explain the distinction between short tail and long tail keywords. 

• Short tail keywords are two or three words long and usually have a large number of searches, such as “mens shorts,” which returns 38,000 monthly searches in ahrefs keyword explorer.
• Long tail keywords are four words or more in length and have a lower search rate, such as “mens shorts with pockets,” which returns 40 monthly searches in ahrefs keyword explorer. 

How people use keywords in search engines to buy products

When deciding on a keyword for which you want your page to rank, it is helpful to understand the intent behind the related search query. The following types of search queries exist: 

1. Searches entered with the intent of finding a specific website or webpage are known as Navigational  queries. For example, rather than entering the URL into a browser’s navigation bar or using a bookmark, a user can enter “facebook” into a search bar to find Facebook’s site.
2. Informational queries usually begin with “how to,” “what,” “why,” and so on. For these keywords, content that truly offers useful information related to the query ranks high.
3. Transactional queries are searches that show a desire to complete a transaction. This involves actually typing a product name into the search bar, such as “samsung galaxy.” 

When it comes to the consumer experience in search engines, it’s critical to consider how customers go from not understanding what product they’re looking for or want to making a positive buying decision. 

Let us begin with a broad product, such as smartphones. If you’ve had a smartphone for a long time, you’ve probably used or considered using the current iPhone model. But what if you want to see what else is available before making your next purchase? 

At this point, you’d go to a search engine and type in an informational question like “best smartphone.” You’d get a lot of buyer’s guide-style articles listing the top 10 to 15 smartphones, and you’d probably select the top result. After reading the article, you may conclude that the new iPhone model isn’t so bad after all, but you also like the look of the new Samsung Galaxy. You’d probably like to know how they compare in terms of features and dependability, so you’d return to a search engine and type in another informational question, such as “apple iphone vs samsung galaxy.” After reading one or more of the articles on the first page, you’d have a better idea of which smartphone is right for you, and you could decide to give the new iPhone another chance. You return to the search engine and enter the transactional query “buy iphone.”

You’ll most likely end up on Apple’s website, where you’ll complete your purchase. 

How to choose a keyword

Now that you understand how users go through the purchasing journey and how to decipher the meaning behind a quest, let’s look at ways to conduct keyword research. 

It is easy to become overwhelmed when conducting keyword research. You’ll wonder where to begin, how to find one, how to know if your keyword will rank, and how long it will take. We’ll guide you through the process of obtaining answers to these questions. 

• Where to start with keyword research. First, consider what your product is or what group it belongs to. Shopify, for example, is an ecommerce website, so we want a page to rank for this search word. What is the broadest word you can use to describe your product?
• Use paid tools or free tools to get competitive insight. There are several paid and free tools available, but the best free tools for Chrome are Keyword Surfer and MozBar, both of which are available as extensions. When you use Keyword Surfer, you enter your keywords into Google and it displays keyword volume in the address bar and on the SERP. MozBar displays a website’s domain authority and page authority, which indicate how trustworthy or powerful a website is and how well trusted a page is, respectively. 

• What to do with this data. You now understand what a short tail keyword is. Begin to narrow down on a long tail keyword that corresponds to it. If you are a new or developing company, these short tail keywords can be difficult to rank for, so you must find a differentiator. Remember that the company gained an advantage and a foothold in the industry by offering a specific selling proposition. It’s time to channel that into a long tail keyword, which can help your product get discovered and more traffic. If you’re using Keyword Surfer, press the star in the address bar to copy the long tail keyword. Do this when browsing the “Keyword ideas” page for long tail keywords. When you’re done, select “Clipboard,” “Three Dots,” and “Export.” This data is now stored in a CSV file, which you can use to create or optimise your website. 

2. Match search intent and create pages relevant to your keyword

Whatever form of search query your page is addressing, keep in mind that when it comes to selecting a keyword, Google and other search engines want to rank the pages that have the best chance of completing the searcher’s journey. In Google’s case, it doesn’t want any more searches, and it doesn’t want the user to press “Back” and click on another search result. 

When choosing a keyword to target, the top 10 results on a SERP will give you a clear idea of what the search goal is. Simply search for the word and make a note of whether the page is an article or a product page. For the time being, focus solely on organic listings rather than advertising, which are labelled “Ads” to the left, or any SERP features such as People Also Ask, photographs, videos, or local listings. 

You’ll get a score like “9/10 product pages,” and from there you’ll get an idea of the user’s search goal, which is to make a purchase. If you’re doing content marketing for your shop, you’ll want to look for articles to make up the majority of the top ten listings, as articles are better suited to informational searches. 

You can get ideas from Google or other search engines to narrow down your search intent even further. For example, if I’m considering creating a page to target “habanero hot sauce,” I’ll look at the “Related searches” box at the bottom of the SERP. In a nutshell, this list tells me what users want to learn from their search queries. 

Since “habanero hot sauce” is a short tail keyword, if users reach result 10 and still don’t see a listing to press, these pre-populated words can help them get to the question they really want but didn’t know how to phrase. 

I should make a note of these phrases because some of them are strong long tail keywords that I can use while making my product page in order to rate it. They can be used as subheadings, in product descriptions, or in meta descriptions and titles. We’ll go into how to do this further down.

3. Content optimization to make your pages visible

Content optimization raises the visibility of your sites in search results for their target keyword. Modifying or optimising a page’s content, meta description, and title tags are examples. When you have a specific keyword in mind for which you want to rank, content optimization becomes much simpler. 

The most straightforward way to understand content optimization is to ask yourself, “How can I make it clear to visitors what this page is about?” You can then run a health search on your pages: 

• Is the heading explicit about what’s on the page?
• Is the keyword, or a variant of it, used in subheadings or the page’s body content?
• Is the keyword present in the URL slug? Is it too long or too short?
• Is the page’s title enticing? Is the meta description enticing enough to make you want to click on this page?
• What are the names of the image files? Do they have alt text that clearly explains what’s shown in the image? 

Let’s look at how we can optimise basic on-page material. 

1. Build your keyword into your heading

Using the target keyword in page titles on transactional pages, such as product pages, can make sense if it’s an identifier, but this is normally better reserved for collections pages. Ideally, the goods will be called something appealing. As an example, consider The Lip Bar. It has a collection with the target keyword “concealer,” but its product pages within the collection are specific to which shade range the product is within and the product’s function (e.g., for the product 6:00 Ebony Caffeine Concealer, “6:00 Ebony” is the range, “Caffeine” is the function it serves (to help wake the skin), and “Concealer” is the product’s wildy known name.

 Which can It is better to use the intent, or what role the page serves, on navigational pages such as your About or Contact pages (e.g., “Contact us,” “Get in touch with us at [brand name],” or “How can we help?”) The aim is to keep it easy and straightforward. 

2. Understand the topic behind the keyword and build it into your page

Building keywords into your pages does not imply keyword stuffing or attempting to use awkward long tail keywords in grammatically incorrect ways. Around ten years ago, this was a trick to get pages to rank for target keywords, and search engines have since developed to be able to understand what a page is about and how to rank it accordingly without them. 

Instead, when optimising pages to rank for keywords, the first move is and try to grasp the subject at hand (as discussed above), and then do your best to cover it. 

It becomes much easier to gather keywords around a subject if you use a paid SEO tool to get keyword insight. However, using free software, this is still possible. Let me show you how I can optimise Kinda Hot Sauce’s new collection page on habanero hot sauce. 

• Start with Google.  We’d like to look at the bottom of the search results, where Google lists similar searches, as this provides suggestions for related searches for “habanero hot sauce” as well as what the autocomplete implies. 

• List what’s in the related searches and autocomplete. I’d then open a new Google Doc and enter all of the above information into it. I can already tell which phrases I can use and which I should strike out or remove from this list. Then I’ll try my hand at writing a summary for my collections website.
• Draft out a title and description. To help me write a good summary for both users and SEO, I ask myself the following questions about some of these phrases: 

• Is it possible for me to have mango, pineapple, or garlic flavours? If so, how do I share it on the page? 
• Is it appropriate for me to use words like “spicy” or “ghost pepper” if my brand focuses on delicious, but not overly spicy, hot sauces? 
• Are my hot sauces fermented during production? 
• What significance do Scoville levels have for my customers? 

I can easily use the answers to these questions to assist me in writing. As previously said, I am not attempting to include any of these words. I want to use specific terms and clearly tick them off when I use them. 

• Upload to your store. Now that I’ve written a collections page that I’m satisfied with, I can upload it to my shop. 

Although this example focuses on collections pages, the method can be applied to any page of your choice, such as product pages or blog posts. 

3. Build your keyword into the URL or slug

The URL is something you type into the address bar that ends in.com,.ca, and so on. The “slug” is what follows the first forward cut. Slugs and URL paths are terms that are used interchangeably but have the same meaning. 

If you’ve decided on a domain name, you won’t be able to change it. Slugs, on the other hand, can be modified or personalised. Remember to add redirects to your new pages if you change your slugs. We went over how to do it earlier. 

The reason for incorporating your keyword into the slug of each website is to make it clear to both the user and the search engines what the page is about. You should also avoid keyword stuffing in your URLs and slugs. 

Why is this so? This form of keyword stuffing does not help your search rankings. Search engines have progressed well beyond algorithms that reward a keyword appearing several times in a URL string. Don’t jeopardise your chances of getting a click by keyword stuffing or over-matching in your URLs. 

In general,

• Avoid hashes/the pound sign in URLs. The hash key is a method of directing a visitor to a particular position on a given page by using hyperlinks that, when clicked, take you to a subheading (like within the table of contents on this page). Slugs are slugs.

• Be wary of case sensitivity. Even for nouns, avoid capitalization in URLs or slugs. Though most CMSs aren’t case sensitive these days, it’s best to stick to lowercase.
• Use hyphens to separate words. The phrase “/collections/mens-short-with-pockets” is much more readable than “/collections/mens shorts with pockets.” Both underscores and spaces should be avoided because they appear in URLs as percent 20. 

Refer to Perishable Press’s Character Encoding Chart for a complete list of safe characters to use in your URLs.

4. Build your keyword into the meta title and description

Your meta title and summary are ways for users and search engines to understand what your page is about and to encourage people to click on it from a SERP. Shopify pre-fills the title and meta description with the product/collection name and product/category description, so there are no obvious errors with empty meta fields. However, if you haven’t tailored these for each page, it’s possible that the meta data isn’t communicating what your page is about to users and search engines, or isn’t tempting a click. 

Here’s how to get your meta title and definition ready for your pages: 

• Write a page title with less than 55 characters.  Find a way to include your target keyword to assist search engines in indexing the website, just make sure it’s legible and not written in “caveman speak,” as search engines are smart enough to know what the page is about even if words are separated by stop words (the, if, and, a, etc.). 
• Write a meta description with a max of 145 characters. This is the place where you can make your product page or blog post more appealing to the searcher. While using your keyword here can help it rank higher, it is not needed. Instead, concentrate on the client. Learn more about writing meta descriptions.

5. Build your keyword into your image naming system

Using the keyword in your picture naming scheme entails both saving files with the same name as the keyword aim (for example, habanero-hot-sauce.jpg) and using the keyword as the alt text when uploading the file to your shop. 

If you’re uploading several images and aren’t sure what to call them, use differentiators like habanero-hot-sauce-ingredients.jpg for a snapshot of the ingredient label and habanero-hot-sauce-example-dish.jpg for an action shot of a model adding sauce to food. 

As we mentioned earlier when discussing image optimization, you should take care when writing your alt attributes. When a browser cannot properly render an image, alt text is used, as well as for web accessibility. It’s best to explain what’s in the picture in plain language so that people with low vision can understand what’s going on. It’s awesome if you write an open alt text attribute and naturally use the target keyword, but it’s best to prioritise this approach over keyword stuffing alt text.

6. Build rich snippets with product details and user generated content

Rich snippets are search results that provide details about a product’s price, availability, and unique information about a group of products in a category. User-generated content is derived from the customers’ feedback and ratings. They’re useful for quickly learning more about a product from the search results page without having to visit it.

According to Search Engine Land, rich snippets will increase the number of people who click on your product from SERPs by up to 30%. Compare a 30% rise in organic clicks to a 30% increase in paid search ad budget—a that’s lot of clicks to your product page for free. Though creating rich snippets and schema falls squarely into the realm of technical SEO, the end results can be well worth the learning curve. 

Before you prioritise rich snippets, keep in mind that all of Shopify’s free themes provide organised data and rich snippet features for your product pages out of the box. This means you don’t have to think about applying standardised data markup to get the product information to appear in SERPs. Price and availability (in stock/out of stock) will be automatically grabbed and displayed on a SERP, but only if Google wishes to display them. 

Before you start, consult with your theme creator to see whether it contains structured data and rich snippet features whether you’re using a third-party theme or a custom-built one. If it lacks product schema structured data capabilities, you have two options: 

• Write the code into your theme. As previously said, if you are technically savvy enough to make improvements to code, you can learn how to write this into your theme yourself. To learn which values to join, consult Schema.org’s product resources as well as Google’s structured data resources.
• Pay for an app or hire an expert.  If the thought of editing your theme makes you nervous, consider hiring a professional or experimenting with some apps that can help you create structured data into your pages:

• App for Smart SEO Schema Schema Markup in Total 
• Schema Plus for SEO
• Rich Snippets for SEO 

Displaying user-generated content and star ratings in SERPs necessitates the use of an app or custom coding. However, before you dive in, consider the following: 

• Do you have an app for product reviews? 
• Are your ratings favourable or unfavourable? 
• What is the overall rating? 

If you don’t already have a product reviews app, Shopify offers a free one that supports review snippets. When users leave feedback, the markup is added to your website, and the reviews appear when Google crawls the page and reads the markup details. There are other product reviews apps in the app store as well, just make sure they support schema markup. 

Rich fragments will take some time to appear in search results, so don’t be surprised if you don’t see them right away. To ensure that there are no display issues, use the Google Structured Data Testing Tool to search for errors.

An important takeaway for on-page SEO

Making information digestible for the reader, rather than the search engines, is the aim of creating an SEO-friendly website. The use of headings, bullet lists, or numbered lists will help readers get to where they need to go. It’s about reducing friction for the reader experience by assisting them in getting there and quickly finding what they’re looking for. You may have heard that the length of a page determines whether or not it ranks. My belief has always been that if you have a massive article or page, it is because the subject deserves it and is in need of a 101 or beginners’ guide. It is rarely a good idea to lengthen an article in order to meet a metric that guarantees a ranking page.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO may involve reputation management such as customer support and social media presence, but it simply comes down to creating backlinks, which are links that point to your site. The greater the number of high-quality, related backlinks you have, the higher your pages will rank. Based on the earlier diagram above, you understand the significance of getting high ranking pages in search engines. 

There are two ways to create links to your website: active efforts and passive efforts.

Active link building

Active connection building is the process of creating a plan and strategy for the pages from which you want to create links, as well as knowing why you want to build them, and then implementing the plan. Active connection building is generally time consuming because it is a strategic strategy to join. Journalists, influencers, and other authors are bombarded with pitches all the time, so yours must be convincing. 

When requesting something from another place, you should follow a couple of rules: 

1. Put what’s in it for them up front in your pitch.  Yes, the nature of your request is to obtain something (a link), but what do they gain from it? Is what they’re linking to out of date, or is it a page that no longer exists, or are they omitting anything important from their list? Give them a reason to think about your appeal.
2. Don’t request links from people who are your competitors. This may seem obvious, but often connection requests come from people who want coverage in the same product and subject field because there is already a resource available. For example, if you sell athletic gym shorts and come across a buyer’s guide on what to look for when purchasing gym shorts written by a brand that also sells shorts aimed at your niche, it’s best not to waste time contacting them. 

Now that you understand the fundamentals, let’s look at some successful connection building strategies:

1. Foundational links

Links from social networking accounts, local business directories, and specialty directories are examples of foundational links. If you haven’t already, sign up for social media accounts on sites like Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter. It is also suggested that you build a Google My Business profile, whether or not you have a physical retail store, as this will boost your local SEO and help you attract local customers. The SEO benefits are minor, but they are simple to implement and improve your brand’s discoverability across multiple platforms. 

2. Pitch gift guides

A gift guide is a list of suggested items or gift ideas that are usually based on a holiday (such as Christmas) or an individual (like your dad). If you’ve ever searched for gift ideas on Google, you’ve probably come across a few gift guides. 

Having your product featured in the right gift guides will boost sales and traffic to your website. Inclusion in these manuals, on the other hand, does not happen by chance and necessitates some effort. Many times, business owners will petition to get their goods included. You must contact gift guide publishers and request that your product be included. There is no guarantee, but if your product is a good match, you might be included.

3. PR campaigns

Traditionally, a press release campaign entails sending a release to the media in the hopes of having it published in local, regional, global, or industry press. Press publications have a decent chance of sending visitors to your website as well as providing you with a high authority and trustworthy link to your website—all of which are good things for SEO. 

Instead of hiring a public relations firm, try your hand at generating your own attention. Put it out there if you have a fantastic storey or an interesting product that people would want to talk about. Contact writers and journalists who cover companies similar to yours and let them know what you’re up to. 

Although most authors are swamped with requests, they are always on the lookout for a good storey. To increase your chances of success, make sure you approach the right publications (for example, don’t ask a tech writer to cover your clothing line) and give them a convincing storey. 

4. Skyscraper technique

If your company uses or is thinking about using content marketing, the skyscraper technique could help you create ties. It is named after internet marketer Brian Dean, who describes it as a system in which you find link-worthy content created by your rivals, improve it, and then reach out to the right people to steal their links. 

To execute this technique effectively, you’ll need an SEO tool to find links to your competitors’ websites, as well as a tool to help you find emails to contact. Remember that you must invest in producing high-quality content and organising an outreach programme, which requires time and effort.

5. Guest blog

If you’re writing on your own blog to drive traffic, you’re aware that it takes time to see results. Guest blogging allows you to reach out to someone else’s audience while increasing your own. It not only drives traffic back to your website, but it also aids in search engine optimization. 

Find and link with other blogs, magazines, or business bloggers that have the audience you’re looking for. Offer to write a guest post that their readers would enjoy. Make sure the subject you write about is also relevant to your company or it will not generate any traffic. 

6. Broken link building

Broken link building is the process of locating pages that link to sites that have had a page removed, recreating content that is close to the removed content, and informing everyone who is linking to the removed resource to instead link to your content. This works because it is detrimental to a website’s SEO to connect to pages that do not exist. 

To successfully use this technique, you will need an SEO tool that allows you to crawl pages and find broken ties, as well as an outreach tool that allows you to find email addresses. You’ll also have to figure out what used to be on the now-broken page. Fortunately, you can do this using the Wayback Machine, a free collection of web pages from various points in time. 

This is the procedure you should expect to go through if you use this tactic: 

• Choose a website that exists within your niche and publishes content to which you will gladly connect (e.g., If I owned a business that sold skin treatments and essential oils, I would look for a website within the aromatherapy space, which could be a competitor business or a blogger). 
• Use your SEO tool to find any 404 links, pages with the most referring domains or links, or a page where you know you have a product or set. Use the Wayback Machine to see what was on that website to see if you can make material that is close to what was covered on it. Please keep in mind that copying text from a dead page is a form of copyright infringement. 
• Use your outreach email tool to find the content manager and contact them to inform them of the broken connection, how it is detrimental to their SEO and reader experience, and that you have a page dedicated to this subject. Hopefully, as a result, they will replace a broken connection with a link to your business. 

On ahref’s blog, you will learn more about broken connection construction. 

7. Unlinked mentions

Unlinked mentions occur when your company is mentioned on another website without a connection back to you. For example, your company may be used as an example in an article that sells comfortable loungewear but does not include a link to your website. If your site is listed, you can receive a notification in your inbox using tools like Google Alerts or some SEO tools that have this feature, such as ahrefs. If you believe that obtaining a connection from this site is worthwhile, contact the writer or content manager and request that the link be attributed to your listed company.

Passive link building

Passive connection building entails routine tasks or business as normal, but it can help compound the SEO efforts over time, despite the fact that it is not a traditional SEO-enhancing activity.

• Create an amazing product or service. The only way to get people talking about your company online is to have a fantastic product or service that people want to talk about. This is when people tell their friends and family about your company because you’re doing something unique that sets you apart. This takes time to catch on, but it is the best way to develop a company and a great SEO tip.
• Provide amazing customer service. Great customer service is listed. Customer service is often listed as being subpar. Average customer service, on the other hand, flies under the radar. Although bad customer service can get you written about, which is technically good for SEO (remember when United Airlines pulled a passenger off one of their planes? ), it is clearly not good to be recognised for providing poor customer service. So concentrate on delivering excellent service. You don’t have to go above and beyond; it’s just a matter of doing the little things exceptionally well and seeking opportunities to delight. Know the adage, “People remember what you do long after they forget what you say.”
• Responsive on social media. you should be sensitive. Being open on social media does not imply jumping into any and all conversations or engaging in Twitter banter between brands. It is all about responding to your customers when they contact you for assistance. If you’ve mastered the fundamentals, consider liking or commenting on Instagram posts or Stories where your ardent fans have tagged your stuff.
• Build connections with social media and online influencers.  This is often referred to as networking, but a better way to think of it is as attempting to make friends online. If you know what an industry influencer or enthusiastic writer is looking for, give them the article or product, or leave a thoughtful comment on their message. It all comes down to trusting these people. You have attention until you have confidence. You have registration and permission to share ideas or your point of view until you have someone’s attention.
• Converse on forums and discussion boards and comment on blogs. Being present in online communities such as Reddit, Quora, or niche industry forums where your ideal audience congregates will help you develop a strong reputation and, ultimately, customers. Use these areas to spark discussions with the right people, to react thoughtfully, and to generate excitement and enthusiasm. However, be wary of over-promotion of your business. Just do so if the individual is looking for recommendations or if your product solves the problem described in the comment. 

Build an SEO plan to scale your store’s growth

As consumers look for items in your category, you want your store to appear at the top of the search results. However, the only way for them to see your page in the results is for you to invest time and effort in studying the rules that govern search engines and applying those rules to the layout and content of your web. 

Working on SEO for your store can be daunting at first, but once you’ve gotten the hang of it and ironed out some kinks, it can be as easy as changing pages to make them rank better and finding new keywords to build pages for. Slowly, but steadily, you will begin to see results, and SEO will be a great flywheel for bringing in new customers for your company.