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An e-commerce platform that gives you the ability to sell out of the trunk of your car, from the comfort of your home using an electronic device – a mobile phone or a laptop. Could you guess which platform I am referring to? That’s right, it’s Shopify and the popularity of this platform has made businesses wonder how they can leverage Shopify SEO to their advantage. 

But before I dive into telling you about optimising for Shopify, you need to know what the platform is, its capabilities and whether or not it is good for your business. 

What Is Shopify? How Does It Work?

According to Shopify reports, entrepreneurs from over 175 countries use Shopify to sell their products and services. That’s right, even services. So if you are a musician who wants to sell their mixtape, you can do so on Shopify. 

Here’s a list of things you can sell on Shopify: 

• Physical products (of course!)
• Digital products like eBooks, photographs, templates, courses, etc. 
• Consultations (Example, dentists, freelancer consultants)
• Memberships 
• Rental services 
• Workshops 

The best part about this is that you don’t need to own a domain or have a website to operate on Shopify. The platform takes care of everything. So, the sky is the limit when it comes to selling on Shopify. 

You can build your own brand, get a logo, leverage Shopify SEO to rank your business on the first page of Google and so much more. There are so many themes and so many elements for Shopify users that it can almost get confusing. If you are new to this and don’t know how to use the platform to maximise the potential for your business, you can hire Shopify developers to get the work done.  

How Does Shopify SEO Work? 

Now, if you don’t want to take the help of an SEO agency or other professionals to get your Shopify store ranking, it may benefit you to learn how the SEO for this platform works. In the rest of the blog, we tell you exactly how to play out Shopify SEO. 

Now, there are only a few minor differences between Shopify SEO and standard search engine optimization. 

For instance, you should take additional effort to include important keywords in your product descriptions and image alt texts to improve the visibility of your store’s products on Google.

In addition, managing duplicate content on your website is another aspect of Shopify SEO. One issue specific to Shopify, as opposed to WordPress, is duplicate content.

Here are a few things you should follow to maximise the potential of your Shopify business: 

Use Tools For Keywords & Add It To Your Content 

Although the auto-suggest functions on Google and Amazon are excellent, their capabilities are constrained. They won’t reveal information about these search queries’ keyword difficulty and search volume, for instance. 

However, specialised keyword tools like Ahref and Google Keyword Planner can. Additionally, they might produce a long list of associated keywords. You will be able to note the competitors using the keywords, the search volume and average monthly searches amongst other things. 

You should now have a list of terms you wish to focus on. Making it simple for Google to find your pages using those keywords is the next stage. However, you must first choose the sites to which you will add the keywords. The ideal locations to start are your homepage, product pages, and product category pages. 

Where specifically on those pages should the keywords be added? The best locations are the page title, meta description, page body content, and picture Alt texts. Follow the tips to optimise your website for SEO & conversion to learn more about optimisation. 

Develop A Backlink Network 

Developing a backlink network is one of the best white hat SEO techniques that you can perform for optimisation. In the 23 years that Google has been around, link-building strategies have advanced. Today, Google gives high-quality links the upper hand over low-quality links to promote websites with useful information.

That is to say, in order to get backlinks, your content must not only offer solutions to problems and answers to questions, but it must also do it in a unique way. For this, you need to listen to your target audience carefully and offer solutions as a response to their queries. 

It may be a bit tricky to find find the pain points of your target users and build content around them so that you get high-quality backlinks. For this, take the help of content writers so that they can build valuable content that is relevant to your target audience.

Optimise For Speed 

Now, just because you do not need your own website to run a business on Shopify, does not mean you don’t need to pay attention to its speed. As I mentioned above, Shopify SEO is not all that different from your regular SEO. Therefore, you need to optimise your Shopify POS (point of sale) so that it can be caught by Google and does not rank your search ranking. 

You can do the following things to speed up the loading of your website:

• Before adding your product photographs, compress them.
• Use Jpeg images because they are smaller.
• Don’t use a complicated theme that may time to load. 
• Include the technologies for accelerated mobile pages. They enable lightning-fast page load time.
• Fewer plugins should be installed on your website.

 Speed optimisation is indispensable if you want your Shopify website to rank well. 

Mobile-First Approach 

Global internet users access the web 90% of the time via a mobile device, according to Statista data. Even Shopify has added a feature that allows mobile POS for sellers. Therefore, when properly used, the mobile-first strategy can lower website bounce rates and increase conversion rates. 

The “mobile-first design” approach instructs web designers to build websites first for mobile devices. This can be achieved by designing the web application first for the smallest screen size and progressively expanding it to greater screen sizes.

Shopify is a great tool for small businesses that want to increase their online visibility and do not have humongous operating budgets. This blog is a great starting point for those who are learning to optimise their website for the first time using Shopify. 

All the best!