Before opening your web page, you have to choose the CMS well. What is the CMS? It stands for Content Management System, that is, a content management system for web pages.
It is important to know what type of CMS best suits your needs, since depending on whether it is an online store or a service page, you will have some needs compared to others.
In recent years, in the case of online stores, Shopify has become very relevant because it is a very easy platform for the user to handle, but what?How to improve the positioning of your ecommerce in Shopify? You want to know more? We tell you everything here, do not miss it.
What is Shopify?
First of all, let’s see what is Shopify. Well, it is neither more nor less than a CMS, that is, a content management system for a web page, as we have mentioned before.
Many small companies or start-ups have opted to create their online stores in a simple way since they do not need programming knowledge to manage it, as could happen with other CMS, such as Magento or PrestaShop, where a programming base would be needed.
Within the panel you can easily create the collections (product categories) and incorporate the products. In addition, on a visual level, web pages can be created according to style and corporate needs based on predetermined designs.
How does Shopify work?
To use Shopify you will need a domain and choose one of the rates that are offered. They have several monthly plans, one basic, one normal and one advanced. Depending on the needs you have for your ecommerce, you will have to choose the one that best suits.
Later, within the store you have a theme section where you can choose one of the available templates, you have two options or choose a free theme or choose a paid theme and customize it to your liking.
Advantages and disadvantages of using Shopify
After seeing what shopify is, it is normal for you to wonder what kind of advantages and disadvantages this type of CMS has. Some advantages that we can see with respect to Shopify are:
✔️ It is a SAAS (software as a service) you do not have to worry about choosing a hosting for your store since you configure your ecommerce directly in Shopify.
✔️ Technical support in Spanish, they have detailed documentation to help you create your online store.
✔️ Marketplace: they have the section to include more functionalities to your online store in a simple and fast way.
✔️ Speed: being a Saas you don’t have to worry about the bandwidth it consumes, even if you have high traffic peaks, the store will work perfectly.
✔️ Very easy to use for businesses with few resources at first.
But we can also observe certain disadvantages:
❌ Not recommended for e-commerce that want to do a little advanced SEO optimization.
❌ Product search engine: it fails a bit because you have to put exactly the keywords of the product or category, otherwise it does not give results.
❌ Unable to control the generation of crawl files (sitemap and robots.txt).
❌ Fixed monthly payment fee, sell or don’t sell.
❌ Cost of the applications that you include within the ecommerce.
❌ High commissions from payment gateways, whether you do it within shopify or external ones such as Paypal.
What SEO optimizations can we do?
It is one of the most important questions, to what extent can we optimize our page from Shopify? We tell you some optimizations for search engines and some good practices to apply to your online store, so you can see improvements in traffic and visibility.
keyword research
The first step for a good SEO strategy is to have a good keyword analysis to establish actions, and thus be able to achieve the objectives of organic positioning. To do this, you can search through tools to find the target keywords of your ecommerce.
When conducting this study, keep in mind that there are two types of keywords:
- informational keyword “differences between organic eggs and raised in soil”
- transactional keyword “buy organic eggs”
Given all the competitors in the market, it is very difficult to position yourself in very generic keywords such as “organic eggsTherefore, your strategy should also focus on attacking the long tail keywords “buy organic eggs Madrid”. In this way it will be easier to gain a foothold in the market.
This step cannot be missing in any type of positioning strategy, regardless of whether it is Shopify or any other CMS. In addition, the buyer person and the competitors must be taken into account.
If we have this well defined, we will have more possibilities to be successful in our work.
web architecture
You have to have a solid and well-defined web structure of the main categories, subcategories and products. If you have a very clear and polished web architecture, it will be easier for Google bots to crawl your content and index it.
Something that happens in Shopify and makes it difficult for us in SEO is that different URLs of a product are created, why does this happen? If we have a product but it can be in several categories, the URLs are modified and we can end up with a large list of unordered URLs. So for this, we have to have well controlled the internal linking of the web, the structure of the URL’s and the canonicals.
Not everything was going to be so easy. Shopify also gives us the odd surprise that hampers our ranking progress. One of the difficulties at the SEO level that Shopify still needs to solve is the exaggerated and massive generation of different URLs for each product.
Product sheet
It is very important that we have well optimized the product file, in the end it is the showcase of our store. We have to take into account several aspects:
- Quality images with the possibility of seeing the product in detail.
- Incorporate both a short and long description to detail the product, but make it a single text and do not copy the same from the manufacturer. Also, if possible, include a technical sheet; in the case of a food, include ingredients, nutritional value…
- Have a catchy title, product name and add something descriptive of the product (keep in mind that you can have the same product in different colors or shapes)
Titles and Meta descriptions
The title and meta description is what appears in the search engine results, so you have to optimize this so that your result is more attractive compared to the competition.
For this we have to have unique and original titles; and in the meta description, condense the information in a more attractive way that encourages the user to click.
With this we can increase the CTR (Click Through Rate), that is, increase the number of clicks that a link obtains with respect to its number of impressions.
How to edit the title and meta description in Shopify?
To edit the title or meta description, for example of a category, you have to:
- From the admin panel, go to Products > Collections
- Enter a title and a meta description.
- Click Save
Robots.txt
The robots.txt file blocks page content that we don’t want to be crawled, as search engines like Google continually crawl the internet for new data.
Where is the robots.txt file located in Shopify?
It’s in the root directory of your store’s main domain name: example.com/robots.txt
In Shopify we have a problem and it is that the robots.txt file of your online store cannot be edited. This is not as easy as doing it in other CMS like WordPress or PrestaShop.
In the event that you need to block a page that is not included in the archive so that the bots do not find it, you can tell them not to crawl one or more pages by customizing the section Do you want to include a specific page?
- From your Shopify admin go to Online Store > Themes.
- Find the theme you want to edit, and then click Actions > Edit Code .
- Click on the theme.liquid layout file.
- Include code to block specific pages:
{% if handle contains ‘page-handle-you-want-to-exclude’ %}
{% endif %}
sitemap
The sitemap is a file that helps search engines like Google to index our content. Also, it is important to submit our sitemap to Google Search Console so that it can better crawl our site.
The good thing about Shopify is that the sitemap.xml is automatically created where it contains all the links to the collections, products, posts, pages, product images. But depending on the plan you have contracted, you will have more extensive or more limited functionalities.
If you’re on the Basic Shopify plan, you’ll only have one sitemap file generated, and for the Shopify, Advanced Shopify, or Shopify Plus plan, you can use the international domains feature to create country- or region-specific domains .
How to find your sitemap of your online store?
You’ll find it in the root directory of your main domain: example.com/sitemap.xml
Text
You already know that for Google, content is king, so for a good optimization of the categories, Shopify allows you to incorporate text at the top. And within the products you can enter a brief description of them and below, a long description to expand the product information. In this way, in addition to helping us in positioning, it allows us to give the user the functionality, characteristics or technical specifications of our product in detail.
headings
The headers allow us to incorporate and facilitate the bots on the topic we are dealing with on each page. Within our strategy we must establish and include keywords from the same semantic family.
Within the text box that we will put within the main pages, we can incorporate and define what type of heading it is, h2, h3 or h4. By default, the H1 will always be the title of the page. If we want to modify this, we will have to resort to a developer to modify this for us from the theme.
structured data
To implement structured data in Shopify, it is necessary to implement a module to be able to incorporate the necessary scripts. We recommend or .
Types of structured data that you can incorporate:
- Products
- Local business
- blog posts
- Prescriptions
- Breadcrumbs
- Frequent questions
- Comments and ratings
- and I enter others more
Local SEO
In the event that you have a physical store where you offer your products in addition to the online store, you must have the Google My Business file.
From here you will be able to give the necessary information for your clients about contact, website, hours… You can also upload products, offers, events. In addition, the file will help in the search results of users in a geolocated way.
We also recommend establishing strategies to get reviews from your customers so that together with the optimizations of…
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