7 tips to get more traffic to your Shopify store with SEO

You’ve got your Shopify store up and running, so now it’s time to welcome that traffic! Just roll out the red carpet and get those customers rummaging through the virtual shelves. Easy, right? Getting decent traffic is the hardest part of running an online store. Luckily, SEO can help you bring a steady stream of customers. Here are seven tips to get more traffic to your Shopify store with SEO.

It sounds easy, but it’s hard: getting a dependable stream of traffic

Thanks to platforms like Shopify, building and launching an online store has become easier. It’s now so accessible that everyone can run one! But launching a store is one thing; getting customers to your store and getting them to buy something is another!

Many stores are trying to get up and running with all kinds of marketing, with paid ads being very popular. But to get people to notice you, one essential tactic should have much of your attention: Shopify SEO. Doing SEO properly helps you build a stream of traffic that you can depend on.

You can do many things to improve the SEO of your online store, and in this article, we’ll highlight seven. For more tips and tricks, please read our Shopify SEO ultimate guide.

Improve structured data for products and store

A big part of SEO is making your store’s content easy to read and understand for search engines. You can focus on removing any technical hurdles a bot might have to crawl your pages. For the understanding part, structured data is essential.

Schema structured data gives search engines a sort of glossary of your site. You can precisely describe what the different parts mean to search engines with structured data. In addition, you can determine how everything connects by adding as much valuable information for search engines as possible.

There’s structured data for almost every part of your site, but a couple of significant ones for Shopify stores are review and product. These two give Google information about your products and show where it can find customer reviews. It can use this data to understand your products and what people think of them fully.

The result, of course, is a better listing in the search results. Your product might appear as a highlighted rich result with star ratings and more.

It’s vital to get your structured data right. Luckily, several SEO apps in the Shopify app store can help you do this, like the Yoast SEO for Shopify app. Below is an example of product structured data that Yoast SEO outputs automatically for all your products. This is tied into the rest of the structured data for your Shopify store.

{
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "@graph": [
        {
            "@type": "Product",
            "@id": "https://www.example.com/products/example-product/#/schema/Product",
            "mainEntityOfPage": {
                "@id": "https://www.example.com/products/example-product"
            },
            "name": "Example product",
            "image": {
                  "@id": "https://www.example.com/#/schema/image/abc123"
            },
            "description": "Product description",
            "sku": "abc123",
            "url": "https://www.example.com/products/example-product",
            "offers": {
                "@type": "AggregateOffer",
                "@id": "https://www.example.com/products/example-product/#/schema/AggregateOffer",
                "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock",
                "offerCount": 1,
                "lowPrice": 10.0,
                "highPrice": 10.0,
                "priceCurrency": "EUR",
                "url": "https://www.example.com/products/example-product",
                "priceSpecification": {
                    "@type": "PriceSpecification",
                    "valueAddedTaxIncluded": true
                }
            }
        }
    ]
}

Another critical piece in getting traffic with the SEO puzzle is product descriptions. Both customers and search engines use product descriptions to learn about your product. It helps them understand the product and how they might experience it. But, simply listing a few features or relying on generic descriptions from manufacturers won’t do — you must stand out and write your own.

Good product descriptions give your store a voice and help build customer trust. It also provides search engines more clues on what to rank those products for — thus increasing the chance of showing up for relevant terms.

The same goes for your product titles and meta descriptions. All of these items offer insights for search engines to rank your products. Plus, they should appeal to potential customers by scanning the search results to pick the correct link. Be sure to put a lot of energy into your product content, which will pay dividends! Yoast SEO for Shopify has several features that can help you do this.

Build solid collection pages in Shopify

While you might want to rank individual product pages, most of the time, the collection pages rank for a higher-level product term. While you might jump at the chance of adding a thousand words of SEO content to your collection pages, that might backfire. Be careful, but test if changes to your collection pages have a positive or negative effect.

Check your collections in Shopify, and don’t make many of them with just one product. Those two might compete if you have a product and a product page collection. If you set them up correctly, fill them with the products needed, and add relevant content, collections can provide the groundwork for your Shopify SEO. Don’t forget to fit them into your navigation.

Don’t forget to add proper metadata on your collection pages, like an SEO title, meta description, images, etc. Please give it a title that adequately describes the product, and don’t forget to add the keyphrase.

Read more: 6 reasons why the Yoast SEO Shopify solution will boost your rankings »

Set up a blog on Shopify and write high-quality content

Content marketing is a great way to get your products noticed by a larger audience and search engines. Adding a blog to your Shopify store should be at the top of your list of things to do. A blog lets you talk more in-depth about your products and company, helping you build relationships with your potential customers.

On average, blogs are much wordier than product pages, so you have a bigger chance of those words appearing in search engines. In addition, you can use a blog to help customers with their buying journey. Not many people instantly buy a product in a store they’ve never been to before. Giving them several ways to read up on your product and store is good.

Of course, please do keyword research for your Shopify store. This will give you insights into which words your customers use and how much search volume they achieve. Don’t forget to look at long-tail keywords, as these have a better chance of converting. And, of course, set up a content strategy so that what you do makes sense.

Set up an internal linking strategy

Internal linking is one of the main ingredients of good SEO. With a solid internal linking strategy, you identify your most important articles and link them so that they receive a boost from other related articles on your site. Internal linking not only helps search engines discover your content but also helps them get a sense of the most important pieces.

Internal linking can also work wonders on ecommerce sites. Of course, you don’t want to put too many — if any? — links in your product descriptions as you want your customers to convert and not head off to another page. Other spots on your store are great for linking to valuable content or places where people and machines can discover content that helps them understand your product. Adding related products helps as well. Just don’t overdo it on the links.

For instance, the blog we discussed earlier offers an excellent opportunity to describe your business and products while linking to the proper product pages. Ensure that the links are relevant and that you use an adequate anchor text to describe the link correctly. You can enrich your collection pages this way as well.

Another thing to focus on is your navigation. Are your most essential pages quickly reachable from your navigation?

Use a Shopify SEO app to fast-track the process

It wasn’t that long ago that doing SEO meant getting your hands dirty to get down in the nitty-gritty. A fair bit of coding was necessary to get online stores to do what you want them to do. Today, much of that work is “solved” by Shopify SEO apps. These apps ensure that your store is up for the task in a technical sense. In addition, adding structured data has become much easier thanks to the apps.

SEO apps come in all sorts and sizes, from small ones focused on solving a particular issue to suites that seem to do almost everything. One of the newest apps is Yoast SEO for Shopify. As we had years of experience helping WordPress users get good results with their sites — and even WooCommerce stores — we thought the time had come to bring our expertise to Shopify.

Yoast SEO for Shopify helps you set up your store in the best possible way for getting traffic with SEO. That’s not all, though, because the app also comes with SEO and readability analyses that help you make your content SEO-friendly and reader-friendly!

Keep your store clean and focused

Getting traffic to your Shopify store with SEO is also about keeping those people. Seeing all those potential customers bounce back to the search results is in nobody’s interest. Many competitors lurk in those search results pages and gladly take those customers!

Part of Shopify SEO is making your store lean and mean. This goes for the design of the store, but also for the loading times. Speed is of the essence. Fast-loading stores offer a better user experience and have a bigger chance of converting those visitors into paying — and returning! — customers. Check the Shopify Online Store Report to see how your store is doing.

While Shopify handles many of the technical parts for you, you can still do a lot to keep loading times down. For instance, don’t install so many apps in your Shopify store. And properly optimize and resize your product images. You could also optimize your store’s theme if you know how to code. Improve the code and dispel pieces that block the quick loading of your store.

How to get more traffic to your Shopify store with SEO

In this post, we’ve highlighted seven key areas in SEO you should focus on to get more traffic to your Shopify store. Make sure that your structured data is complete and valid. Write fantastic titles and meta descriptions, level up your content marketing with an excellent topical blog, and work on your internal links. And don’t forget to run an SEO app like Yoast SEO for Shopify!

If you want to keep reading about Shopify, we have an article about tips to get more sales on Shopify that could be very useful!

Keep reading: How the right Shopify SEO tools can boost your traffic »