What is SEO?

With hundreds of thousands of virtual storefronts, getting people to click on yours can be a daunting task. This is where search engines come into play.

What Google and other search engines do is comb through their vast database of web pages to deliver a search engine results page (SERP) with web pages ranked by relevance and popularity. In plain English this means that when a potential customer goes online looking for a product, Google displays the best options ranked by relevance and popularity.

Search engines use sophisticated algorithms to determine what relevancy and popularity are, and they change them with overwhelming frequency. It means that store owners need to routinely re-optimize their product pages if they do not want to see their rankings fall.

SEO experts are professionals who know exactly the steps that should be taken in order to stay on top of searches. This translates into higher traffic and a definite boost on sales.

Keep reading if you want to know more about the Shopify SEO process

What is Shopify?

E-Commerce is on the rise and everyone knows that. The fact that 2017 has seen the most dramatic increase in physical store closings since the recent 2008 recession, has put E-Commerce on the spotlight once again.

However, building an online store requires a huge investment in time and resources. Designing an appealing and functional online storefront is not an easy task if you are doing it from scratch. When you add inventory management, shipping options and payment methods, it all becomes a lot more complicated.

Shopify solved all these problems by giving business owners an easy way of creating and managing a full-fledged online store. The best part is that you can customize almost every aspect of your E-Commerce without having to learn about graphic design or acquiring any web development skills.

What´s more, it is the easiest E-Commerce business builder out there. This is great for those who want to focus on doing business instead of entering the eternal technology trial and error cycle. If you want to start selling online right now, you definitely want to use Shopify.

What Are the Advantages of Using Shopify?

Beyond the obvious perks of reaching millions of customers from all around the world, Shopify offers a number of advantages that certainly help you improve your customer´s user experience and make running a business a breeze.

Today, the market, and search engines, do not forgive those who do not ride the mobile bandwagon. Online businesses need to be always within reach of their customers, and allowing them to browse and place orders from their smartphones is more important than ever.

Shopify seamlessly takes your E-Commerce site to smartphone users, making it look great, organized, intuitive and professional. It even lets you manage your store from your own cellphone.

Are you ready to set your E-Commerce?

We know the answer is “yes”, but you still need to know how to open up a Shopify powered online store by yourself.

Setting up your Online Store

If you haven´t done it already, go to Shopify.com and sign up. This step is pretty straightforward as you only have to fill out a form. Shopify does not allow duplicate names for E-Commerces, so make sure you come up with a unique name for your store.

During this process you will also be asked about the products you want to offer. After you provide everything they ask for, you can click on “I´m Done”.

You will immediately be taken to the admin screen and the real fun will start.

One of the best parts of building an E-Commerce nowadays is that most platforms have a wealth of great layout templates to choose from. Shopify excels at this. They have their own official theme store with hundreds of professionally looking layout templates.

All of them can be customized to varied degrees. Premium themes offer awesome flexibility, but free ones are designed to give you a lot of leg room as well. If you are not happy with the limits set by the template of your liking, you can always hire a Shopify SEO Expert to help you out with your store´s customization need. With the right knowledge, anything can be done on Shopify.

If you are a bit overwhelmed with the quantity of available options, you can use the various filters they have in place for browsing through the theme store. Take a look at the most popular themes, or see what people in your industry are doing.

Browse the Theme Store Log into Shopify and visit the Shopify Theme Store at themes.shopify.com. Here you’ll find over 180 theme variations to choose from, including a good selection of free ones.

You can filter by paid or free, industry and by features. You can also sort themes by price, popularity, and most recent. What I like doing the most is to check out the reviews. A theme with many positive reviews is certainly a blessing for those who tend to overthink everything.

After you decide on a theme you just have to click the green button there. Then you can confirm your purchase. If you are still in doubt whether you have chosen a good theme, you can always read the reviews. Knowing how something has worked out for others is always a good way to tell its value.

You can purchase as many themes as you´d like. Then you can select the one you feel the most comfortable with and click Publish as My Shop´s Theme. This will install it and you will have the option to Go to your Theme Manager. There, you will see all your most recently published themes.

If you´re not happy with one, you can publish another. It is as simple as that.

Have fun Customizing Themes are basically templates. You can choose the one that better serves your business and you are ready to go. But where is the fun in that? Here is where the real customization process starts.

The themes themselves allow you to perform limited changes. But my use of the word “limited” should not scare you. Customization options can make a theme look radically different from one page to another, leaving you enough room to play and get creative. It is actually very hard for you to end up looking like a clone of your competition.

We recommend going to the admin screen and select Themes from the navigation menu on your left. You will see a small box appear at the top. It will show you your live theme and will change in real time whenever you make an adjustment to your website settings.

The little box also has a couple of buttons at the top right corner. The triple dot button allows you to perform additional changes and useful actions. Try creating a duplicate of your current layout in case you make changes that you don´t like. This is a time saver as it is sometimes hard to keep count of all the changes we make, so backtracking becomes almost impossible.

The next button allows you to customize your theme. It will take you to a page where all your site´s functionalities can be controlled. This is your test room. We encourage you to have fun and try all the different options. However, you are warned: This is a time sink. We loved trying every option and possible combination so much, that we spent almost a week just toying around with themes.

Fill Up Your Shop Windows

After we are done playing with our themes and options, it is time for the actual work.

Shopify makes it really easy for you to add your products and services to your store. Just go to the navigation bar on the left and select “Products”. Then it will prompt you to add a new product. When you click on the Add a Product button, you will be taken to another screen where you can add information and details about your product.

Here, having a Shopify SEO expert is really important. Some people just add the product name, size/weight details, and default descriptions provided by the manufacturer. While that is a time saver, it actually might hurt you in the long run. The best route is to write your own product descriptions and to use keywords that would help potential customers find what they want on your website.

You can also add product pictures. Again, try to use your own pictures but make sure they are appealing and have the correct tagging. Also, size matters. Having pictures of different sizes is not recommended. People have problems when browsing through uneven picture sizes.

Once you are happy with your product descriptions and pictures, click the Save Product button.

Organize Your Product Collections

One of the advantages of having your store on Shopify is that it was created by people who understand how a shop should be organized.

It allows you to group products based in common features so they are displayed together when visitors are looking at similar goods. It is just like going to a department store.

You can group them using any category you can think of. Group clothes for men, women or children, or sort items by type. You can even organize your products based on color or height. The possibilities are endless.

And depending on how many tags you assign to a product, it can appear in any number of collections.

This is the best way to help your customers find what they are looking for without having to browse through your whole site.

All these options were created to let you, the business owner, decide on the best way to put your products in front of your customers with ease. However, there are ways that work better than others, and are proven to generate thousands of visits and conversions.

If you really need to start your next business venture with sure footing, or if you want to make sure the transition of your physical store to the online world really pays off, your best shot is to hire a Shopify SEO expert agency.

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