November 21, 2018

Selling products online is no easy task. Not only do you have to worry about customers price matching at local brick and mortar shops, you also have to deal with online behemoths like Amazon and Walmart slashing prices and stealing away potential sales.

Thankfully, startups like Shopify and CMS platforms like WordPress are making it easier and easier for small businesses to compete. Within a few days business owners can setup a full-blown e-commerce website which lists all of their products and is fully capable of processing online transactions via credit card and/or PayPal.

My personal preference when it comes to setting up an e-commerce website is almost always Shopify. This is especially the case if you’re selling hundreds of products and need to integrate your online sales with an on-site POS (Point of Sale) system. A combination of WordPress + the plugin WooCommerce can also achieve the same outcome but I still prefer to go with Shopify for the ease of integration, simple setup and the fact that they’re a Canadian company – eh!

The other benefit of working with Shopify is that they provide several easy ways to optimize your website for search engines. Having worked with several online Shopify stores including: Rain Fitness, Dan’s Nautical Shop and Tea Desire, I’ve come up with a few hacks that should help you compete when it comes to Google rankings.

1. Add a Title and META Description to Homepage

This one is pretty much a no-brainer but sometimes gets missed if you’re unsure where to find it. Click the “Preferences” link under “Online Store” and in the area where it says “Title and meta description” add a descriptive title and description for your business. Remember to include your keywords at least once in each and be sure to keep your title text under 60 characters and your description text under 160.

*Note: Shopify suggests a title of 70 characters and a description of 320, ignore these amounts as most search engines stick to the 60/160 rule.

2. Add a Description to Each Collection

The more descriptive text you can add to a website, the more likely you’ll be to find favour with search engines. Regardless of how well they “read” photos these days, search engines will always prefer text. That’s why adding a brief 1-2 paragraph description on each Collection page on your Shopify site is crucial. To do this, visit each of your individual Collection pages and add 1-2 paragraphs to the “Description” section. Shopify lists this as “Optional” but it’s mandatory when it comes to SEO.

3. Optimize the “Search Engine Listing Preview”

Optimizing the “Search Engine Listing Preview” on all Collection and Product pages probably seems like a daunting task (and it is) but it will help each of your individual Collection and Product pages with search engine optimization. Similar to hack #1, optimizing this text will optimize the title and META description for the individual Collection and Product pages. Simply visit the Collection or Product you’d like to optimize, scroll to the bottom and click the blue “Edit Website SEO” link. Again, similar to hack #1, add a descriptive text and description and click “Save”. The 60/160 character rule applies here as well.

4. Increase Amount of Text on Homepage

Most Shopify Themes put an emphasis on displaying products on the homepage which makes complete sense. After all, it is an e-commerce platform meant to sell products. The problem with this approach is that most of the products don’t include much more than a product title and photo of the product and as mentioned in hack #2 search engines prefer text. For this hack, you may need some help from a web developer or Shopify but you should add 2-3 paragraphs of descriptive text to your homepage. The text should include a brief synopsis of your business as well as details on the products you sell. This text should include 1-2 of your keywords and should also link a few of those keywords to specific products or Collection pages.