Have you taken the plunge and finally started creating an e-shop? It's a good start ! But you still need to attract visitors and make yourself known to make your project profitable. Welcome to the era of digital business transformation ! This is where the magic of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Search Engine Optimization, as it is called by industry professionals, comes in. Most of the time, website traffic comes mainly from search engines, such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo. It then becomes obvious and essential to be well positioned there.
Therefore, it becomes essential for you to be able to rely on a powerful and efficient e-shop creation platform. Shopify is the solution made for you , since it combines ease, speed and performance (thanks to its multiple features). It will allow you to create, manage and develop your business as quickly as possible.
⇒ At Pikka, we have already implemented a number of solutions to best support you in the creation of your Shopify e-store , and we are convinced that you doubt the possibility of doing SEO with Shopify. But we will explain everything to you.
Why is SEO so important for your development?
Today, digital is everywhere. We all have the same reflex: take our phone and start a search to find out information or find out about a given subject. It's not for nothing that 93% of online experiences start with a search engine (imForza) and that 94% of total natural traffic is attributed to Google. (Web Presence Solutions, 2017 via Hubspot). It is from this reflex that Google has been able to establish itself as the undisputed master of the searches carried out, and has thus imposed its algorithms which make it possible to define the position of a site . It therefore seems completely improbable to be able to hope to override this type of process.
The objective of SEO is to allow your site to become known on the web and thus, to attract more potential customers. Moreover, it is also an opportunity to provide a qualitative and worked product (your site) which will have a better chance of attracting potential targeted visitors , of proliferating your brand image, and ultimately, of increasing your sale number.
Search engines drive 10 times more traffic to e-commerce sites than social media (99firms). And if your SEO is done well, it can generate a conversion rate of 14.6% ( Crazyegg ), which is very good news to grow your business.
How does SEO work?
Despite this very intimidating side, shopify natural referencing is much more effective than it seems. Very concretely, it is the art and the way of persuading the search engines to highlight your website to their users, by classifying it as the best solution to their request .
To have a chance of appearing at the top of search results, it becomes imperative to produce quality, structured content , so that it is deemed relevant by the various algorithms. These will then establish a non-definitive ranking for display on their results pages and will allow you to considerably increase the number of visitors to your website .
In fact, 75% of users don't even scroll through the first page of search results. It is therefore imperative for you to appear on this first page of results.
The technical operation of this machine
It is important here to make the distinction between algorithms and indexing robots.
In order, it is the indexing robot (the Googlebot for the Google robot) which intervenes first. His job will be to go to a website and go through all its sections to copy its content and store it in the search engine's database. Every day, the Googlebot visits 20 billion websites and 130,000 billion pages are indexed by Google (information from February 11, 2021 by leblogdumoderator).
As for the algorithm, a search engine uses it when a query is submitted to it . It then suggests several possible solutions to meet your request. Google figures its number of queries every second at 80,000 (99firms). What you don't see is that the algorithm will, for its part, search its database for the answers that best match the keywords in your search .
Hence the importance of carefully choosing these "keywords" that you will disseminate everywhere on your website. They have a direct impact on you since they will determine your visibility with Internet users looking for a solution. These keywords are words or groups of words that will designate where and when your ad is likely to be broadcast. It is therefore important to choose relevant and high-quality keywords .
In summary, this technique aims to provide as much information as possible to indexing robots, hence the importance of choosing every detail carefully:
- qualitative content (storytelling with text, image, video or audio, related to what you sell) original and original, with good use of keywords, while avoiding repetition,
- regularly updated and structured content,
- catchy and structured titles with title tags that will help organize the different pages, and better orient visitors to Google, since they are visible from the search results page,
- optimized images with titles related to the subject treated, and a size not exceeding 200 KB, to avoid excessively long loading times,
- the consistency of the links between the pages which must each bring added value (Google hates being wandered around unnecessarily),
- the rewriting of URL links, so as not to keep these endless and incomprehensible links,
- the speed of loading the site, and the elimination of bugs, if they exist.
On the other hand, it sometimes happens to want to do too well, and to exaggerate on certain operations. In this case, the robot can detect an anomaly and penalize your website:
- too many backlinks. These are the links of third-party websites that point to your site,
- content duplication,
- excessive repetition of keywords,
- the creation of useless pages without added value on your site.
In summary, it is important to put yourself in the shoes of these visitors looking for an answer and therefore to provide quality content, which will completely correspond to their requests; but also to think like the indexing robot, and to provide easily accessible and understandable content, without overdoing it.
How to seduce search engines with Shopify?
SEO in Shopify
Good news, contrary to many preconceived ideas, Shopify is a solution that can be 100% optimized for SEO even if the constraints are not the same as with an open source solution, if you are in a hurry, you can read our 5 tips to optimize your Shopify SEO.
Optimize your meta tags
Meta titles and meta description tags are fully accessible in Shopify and can be optimized on a page-by-page, product-by-product, and collection-by-collection basis. In short, you can freely modify and optimize your tags without needing any application.
Optimize your categories
It is possible to create as many categories as you want in Shopify! And the categories can be more or less visible according to your preferences. You don't have to add them in the menu for example.
It is therefore ideal for creating an ultra-specialized category to target specific keywords, even if you do not have too many products. A few products, a very long description text, more than 500 characters, and presto, here you are with a beautiful page optimized for a keyword.
You can repeat this operation as many times as necessary depending on your keywords.
Optimize your product sheets
As the number of products in Shopify is not limited , you can also boost your SEO with great product descriptions, links to other parts of the catalog or even to include multiple "pages", in the form of tabs or tabs for example, on your product sheets, to further increase the amount of content.
Index content on demand
Since Shopify is a SaaS solution, the server administration part is not available, such as the robot.txt file or the server logs. But that does not mean that it is not possible to control the indexing, or not, of the pages.
Indeed, it is quite possible, with a Shopify agency competent in SEO like Pikka , to add no index tags in the header of the pages and to make it conditional. For example to not index tags or faceted filters.
Even without the robot.txt file, it is therefore possible to master your site indexing to perfection ! Obviously, this requires a technical mastery of SEO and Shopify and Shopify Plus .
Note that some SEO apps can be useful for managing this point without necessarily going into the code.
The Sitemap
Indispensable for many e-commerce sites, the sitemap file makes it possible to clearly indicate to Google and other search engines the list of pages on your site and their priority.
It therefore generally allows better indexing of the pages because otherwise the search engines are forced to discover them one by one.
No problem with Shopify, which even offers several sitemaps directly natively on all its versions. Remember to correct sitemap errors if you have any thanks to our complete guide
Simply fill in these sitemaps in your Google Webmaster tool console or in Bing Webmaster tool for example.
In short, you see that it is largely possible to boost your SEO with Shopify and that it is a tool perfectly suited to natural referencing . So yes, many compare wordpress VS Shopify for the SEO part but these are only tools! It's up to you and us to use them correctly to increase your site's positions on the main search engines and boost your traffic!
What solutions can Pikka bring you?
And by the way, how can we help you? What can an SEO agency do for Shopify?
Well to many things, we will try to present this to you as clearly as possible.
First of all, you should know that a natural referencing service is a long-term activity . Impossible to work for a month and have immediate results. It is therefore above all a long-term collaboration. SEO is a long-term activity.
The Shopify natural referencing strategy
We start all our services with an analysis phase. This step is essential to understand your site, its environment and its visibility. It is a sort of SEO audit that will lay a solid foundation for the SEO strategy.
Indeed, each site behaves differently with respect to Google and one of our objectives during an SEO mission is to understand the interactions and evolutions between your site and Google.
Creating a catalog of keywords
In order to be able to boost your Shopify merchant site on Google, Bing or any search engine, it is necessary to create a catalog of keywords . The catalog of keywords is simply the list of keywords on which it is possible to position yourself.
Please note, we are not talking about 10 to 15 words but thousands of keywords, sentences, questions or others on which content will have to be created.
We will do a detailed article on keyword catalogs for more details as it is an important part of a good SEO strategy.
SEO optimizations
Analysis is good, but optimizations are better. Once the catalog of keywords has been created, it is necessary to move on to optimizing the current pages on several levels:
- The contents
- The titles
- Meta tags
- Internal links
- External links
- Images
- The competitors
Why add competitors here? Well quite simply because we do not optimize a page in the same way if it has one or ten competitors. The stronger the competitive intensity and the more the product or collection is in demand, the more the page will have to be worked on.
This service represents the heart of our business because the optimization of the existing is often the No. 1 source of the increase in short-term traffic.
The conquest of new keywords.
In parallel with the work on the existing pages, we are also working on new pages to find new keywords, you know, those that we identified via the keyword catalog a little earlier.
Creation of new collections, blog content, links, partnership strategy... It is a continuous and meticulous work to identify growth targets and exceed the competition .
And as we are on an E-commerce site, it is also necessary to think carefully about conversion ! Creating traffic to create traffic makes no sense even if you don't pay for it on Shopify.
Training
Training is also one of our areas of work during all our services. You can count on us to train your teams in SEO to become more and more autonomous . Many e-merchants working with us have indeed a more or less large in-house SEO team. Often content writers but not only.
In any case, the dissemination of good SEO practices to your entire team is a priority for us in order to make you gain in autonomy and skills .
At Pikka, we know that the technical part of creating an e-store is not your job. You probably prefer to focus on what you know how to do, that is to say your products. Don't worry, we have thought of everything! Come and take advantage of our offer to create your turnkey e-commerce site with Shopify. Give us your idea, your jewel and we will make it a jewel!
