Shopify has answered the call of entrepreneurs who want to become successful in eCommerce. The company’s Shopify Plus is the enterprise offering that goes to the next level.
If you are trying to build your business into something big, you need to pour petrol onto your SEO. To get scorching hot results, Shopify Plus could be the tank that you need to open today.
Shopify Plus Is Rich with Plugins and Apps
When you need that SEO boost to grow your business, Shopify Plus is the platform to begin with because of its dedication to SEO.
You can see this through the various plugins it offers that are SEO-focused. These include plugins such as Smart SEO SEO Doctor SEO Image Optimizer Plugins are important because they add that extra push that your site needs to stand on its own two feet without requiring you to be an expert coder. This is why Shopify Plus is well-suited for eCommerce.
Building an eCommerce business requires you to be quick and fast because the competition moves fast. These Shopify plugins will help increase your speed on your journey to success. Choose the SEO plugins that suit the needs of your site.
Use Multiple Sales Channels
One of the elements that make Shopify Plus unique is the fact that it has multiple sales channels offerings that are suited for different kinds of digital shopping brands. You can launch multiple sales channels across social, mobile, and marketplaces. By launching through various sales channels, you give yourself the chance to improve on the SEO for your website and your brand.
Take a look at how it can be done all through Shopify Plus with mobile and sales examples:
Mobile Sales Channel: When you focus on mobile via the enterprise platform, you can improve on mobile SEO by increasing the amount of content that you have targeting mobile shoppers. You can also edit and include new mobile product descriptions that are faster to read.
Social Sales Channel: If your eCommerce brand is powered by social media, you can also build it through the Plus platform. You can include as many social platforms as you want, and as long as you create a solid strategy, you will watch them grow through Shopify. The more people who connect with your social sales channel through Shopify, the more visible your brand will be. Multiple sales channels give your brand the chance to reach as many people as possible.
With edits and a strategy, you will see SEO benefits arise because you won’t be relying on just one path to get your results.
Grow Traffic
The company noted that across the client base for the Plus platform, the average growth rate in a year for an eCommerce site was around 126%. With such a huge amount of growth on the table, it’s clear Plus is the platform for brands that want to increase the number of people who visit the website.
Increasing traffic is a by-product of excellent eCommerce SEO. Brands and retailers that should consider Plus include mass-market retailers with a focus on consumer products that are affordable. If this is your B2C focus, Shopify Plus is the platform that you need.
Create Evergreen Content
One in 10 blog posts are compounding, according to HubSpot research. This means their traffic increases over time due to organic search. This statistic highlights the power of creating evergreen content instead of news-focused articles for your eCommerce site. The reason why the former matters more is because it will rank better in search engines for you.
Whether a customer is searching for your product today or 6 months from now does not matter because the article will still have the same importance to him or her. You need to have a content marketing strategy to figure out how much evergreen content you can create and what your budget is for this type of content. It does pay off in the long term for your SEO goals and targets.
Here are some evergreen content ideas that you can use for your eCommerce website to boost SEO:
- Beginner’s Guides: These can explain how to understand a complex or popular product for people who have no knowledge of it. For example, if you sell baby and parenting-related products, you could write a beginner’s guide to baby rattles, and this guide can be targeted to new parents.
- Checklists: If you are selling kitchen supplies, you can write a checklist on the products that every single kitchen needs to look good and be functional.
- Cheat Sheets: Your eCommerce site sells sleep-related products. You could create a cheat sheet for the customer who wants to improve how they sleep from the products to buy to how to improve their sleep patterns.
- Infographics: People love images over reading. By combining the two together, you will ensure that your content is saved and shared.
- Ultimate Guides: These types of guides should be detailed and explain how things work for customers who care about the products they are buying. By creating evergreen content on your Shopify-powered site, you make it easier for your website to rank well in search engines and you can upload content without any hassle by using Shopify Plus.
Make Images Fit Correctly
Every eCommerce store wants its website to load immediately to avoid losing potential customers. However, images can be the source of turmoil and stress if they are oversized because they can increase the time it takes for your page to load. Shopify Plus is suited to fix this problem. If you love large images for your eCommerce site, you are in luck because the enterprise heavy benefits from Plus can handle the traffic.
Take a look at this example from Rainbow OPTX, a brand hosted on Shopify Plus. This image shows how the homepage looks as of publishing however as you can see, the images are large. You can use large images if you are using Plus because the technology used to power Shopify’s enterprise option can handle the high volume of traffic from people who want to see the products on sale. Beauty eCommerce websites require high-quality pictures however the website still needs to load fast.
With Shopify Plus, you can optimize the size of the images to fit the needs of your customer without making page loading speed slow. Beauty, fashion, and lifestyle eCommerce websites will need larger optimized images. On the other hand, grocery and mass-market eCommerce websites can use smaller images.
Use the Platform for Meta and Product Descriptions
Catching the attention of shoppers is hard. People are bombarded with messages, ads, and calls to action every single day. To truly stand out from the crowd, you need to understand how to make meta and product descriptions work for you. An excellent example of a brand that does this is Halo Top Creamery.
Due to the fact meta titles are fetched by search engines, it makes it vital for your brand to get them right. You won’t have many chances to execute on this because once your first meta description has been read, it will set the tone for whether a customer will click on your link or not.
The Halo Top Creamery example works because it instantly tells you what the website is about: healthy ice cream. It also points to the fact it is low in calories (this targets dieters), high in protein (surfs the popular protein craze), and low in sugar (for people who want to decrease sugar intake). By touching on three demographics, the meta title is like a scoop of SEO that is rich in flavor when it comes to delivering for this brand.
You can build on your meta descriptions within Shopify Plus in order to write captivating descriptions such as this one. Product descriptions don’t need to be long when using Plus. You should approach them with the same focus and care that you do for the meta title. The content that you include on your website is taking up prime real estate. Use the Shopify Plus admin to make this happen so your eCommerce site is full of the right meta titles and descriptions to appeal to shoppers.
Integrate Google Analytics
To grow traffic and conversions through SEO, you need to understand the types of traffic that you are attracting. Each unique visitor who comes to your eCommerce website has different needs and requirements from the products that you are selling. Google Analytics can shed some light on what the visitors to your site are doing and how to encourage them to spend more money with your website.
Ensure URLs Are Matched to Your Brand
Nothing is more annoying than seeing mismatched URLs for a product that is for sale on a website. Shopify Plus will assign the relevant subdomains to your eCommerce site. However, you will need to create a detailed URL ending for each product depending on what you are selling. The clearer your URLs are, the better it is for SEO.
Utilize Your Sitemap
Shopify allows you to submit your sitemap to Google. By doing this, you will help your website be seen by more people because Google will be able to scan your website to see what are the key pages on it. You do not have to create your sitemap from scratch because Shopify will make one for you once you have started using the platform.
Add Structured Data
Structured data in eCommerce is information such as the SKU number (stock-keeping unit), product description, currency, reviews and price. This data is critical to include on your website because it adds color and depth to your eCommerce website. You can include product review apps from Shopify and integrate them into your website.
Look at how Amazon built an incredible eCommerce empire by leveraging the power of reviews written by customers who have purchased the product. Shopify Plus makes it easier to add structured data and to do it in a way that is simple for customers to understand and take action on. With product reviews being vital for eCommerce sales, this is the type of microdata that is essential for the growth of your business.
Shopify Plus eCommerce SEO Checklist
To make your eCommerce site sizzle, here is a checklist of what you need to do:
- Make sure that your website works on mobile devices: The last thing you want is an incoherent website that makes no sense for mobile shoppers.
- Use descriptive file names for images: Avoid cardinal mistakes such as calling your image files ‘image’ or ‘pic’. You need to give them descriptive images because this will help your SEO, and it helps people to search for your website. As more people use Google Images and Pinterest, the importance of descriptive file names will continue to increase.
- Avoid duplicate content: This is one of the ultimate no-nos in the world of SEO. In Shopify Plus, it can wreak havoc if you are not careful. Double-check your site’s content before submitting it to Google to ensure that your website has not repeated itself too much.
- Include a FAQ section: FAQ sections help fill out your website. They can include keywords and they help customers make decisions.
- Submit your sitemap to all search engines: Search engines need your sitemap in order to index your website.
- Test website load times: Remember, you want a fast page loading speed to retain the visitors you have.
- Don’t overuse H1 tags: Keep this to a minimum of once on your page.
- Spend more time on meta content: Make metadata a top priority for your site.
Armed with these 10 reasons, the above checklist will help incite a brilliant beginning to improve SEO on Shopify Plus. Because SEO is so important for making your website the success that it deserves to be – follow these top tips and work against the checklist to ensure that your eCommerce website is in good shape.