Just getting started with Shopify SEO as an artist, maker or handmade business?
In this video, I chatted with my friend and Shopify expert Holly Marsh about some beginner Shopify SEO tips and quick wins that you can use to improve your search engine optimization on Shopify.
Holly Marsh is the founder of Ecommerce Arcade, where you can level up your ecommerce game with strategy, design, and heart. She specializes in the Shopify ecommerce platform, as well as Klaviyo for ecommerce email marketing.
Holly is an illustrator and branding designer, and has a decade of experience selling products online and in-person. She springboarded into services after spending 10 years at the helm of her handmade business named Marshmueller, a line of accessories for babies and kids using colorful and quirky fabrics.
How can you get started with SEO on Shopify?
A lot of folks getting started with Shopify (and honestly even people who have been on Shopify for years) feel that SEO is this scary, complicated, very technical and complex thing.
And it can definitely seem that way!
But there are some simple things that pretty much anyone can learn and do to improve the search visibility of their Shopify website.
Also, it’s important to note that Shopify online stores have many built-in SEO features, and some aspects of SEO are taken care of automatically for you by Shopify.
Here are the 5 quick wins for Shopify SEO for beginners that Holly and I discussed:
1. Use descriptive words throughout your website.
The first thing is to remember that words are king when it comes to SEO!
While it can be fun to create all sorts of really cool graphics in Canva, put the text on the image, save it as a JPEG, and just upload it to your site...
Don't do that!
UNLESS you also include descriptive alt text to clearly and accurately explain what is "seen" in the graphic or image.
Google and other search engines can't "read" those images unless you include descriptive words as alt text for your images.
Shopify makes it really easy to go into each image on a product page and add alt text for each of your product photos.
Alt text is one of those things where it has a couple of different purposes:
First, it's actually geared toward accessibility. So folks who are needing assistive devices like a screen reader can actually kind of "see" what is happening in that image.
A good rule of thumb when it comes to what to write in your alt text is to pretend you're on the phone with someone who can't see what you're looking at. (We're talking about an old-fashioned phone call!)
Just talk about what you see in that image. Write your alt text as if you were describing the photo or image to someone who can't see what you're looking at right now.
Adding descriptive alt text also helps with SEO because Google likes words.
By using words to describe what is on that page, whether it's using descriptive words and keyword phrases to describe your products or by including descriptive alt text for images, you're helping the search engines understand the information on your website.
2. Be strategic about website navigation.
When you're just getting started with Shopify, you should also be thinking strategically about your website navigation.
The menus people use to navigate your online shop are really important, because if you aren't very specific or if you use cutesy names or jargon to describe your categories, people aren't going to understand it.
User experience aka UX is really important to SEO, and your website's navigation is a big part of this.
Think about how people will be using your website.
Where will they be coming from? (A search engine? A social media platform?)
Which pages are they landing on first? (It's not always your homepage!)
Holly also suggests breaking out your navigation, using some of your most important categories as the primary links in your navigation, instead of having a navigation that only says "Shop" with a drop-down that people have to dig through.
The main navigation on your website, at the top, should stay fairly simple and streamlined. Focus on the most important parts of your website that you want people to get to.
Adding too many options in your Shopify website’s main navigation area can create confusion.
Holly also recommends having navigation in your footer where you can repeat some of those most important shopping links.
She said that, "Homepages are really long nowadays, and we can thank social media for that because we're really accustomed to scrolling. People get down to the bottom of the page, and then if you give them some shopping links as part of the links available in your footer, it helps them get back to what they were looking for."
You can also create special landing pages for products that you've featured on social media.
For instance, if you frequently post your products on TikTok or Instagram, you might want to create a special collection page of products "Featured on TikTok" and link directly to that page from your TikTok profile.
3. Improve your SEO with blog content.
Speaking of social media, we discussed how many artists and makers spend a lot of time creating content for social media, but sometimes we forget to repurpose that content for our blogs.
Holly says, "When it comes to social media. I know it's really easy for all of us to post a video or a picture, and just write a caption (and sometimes it's a novel!), and then just move on after you've posted it. But sometimes you can actually take some of those social media posts and put them in as a blog post on your website. I always harp on clients to please, please, please do a blog! Blogging can add more flavor to a topic. Blog posts can also establish you as a subject matter expert."
Holly shared how she has a client who sells dahlia flower bulbs, whose blog is full of great tips for gardening. She uses bits of those blog posts to repurpose and post on social media. It's a win-win for Holly's client. She gets content for social media, but she also makes all of the search engines happy by having lots of blog content.
Holly and I both recommend focusing on "evergreen" blog content.
Think about topics related to what you make or sell that people frequently search for or ask you questions about.
What are the topics related to your business that are always in season, always useful?
Those are great topics for your blog!
Gift guides are an example of a blog post topic that I often recommend for ecommerce brands.
If you can create gift guides that are relevant to your products and your particular audience, that can be a great way for people to find your products.
You can even collaborate with other business friends and share the backlink love to help strengthen your standing in the search engine rankings.
How might you collaborate with other creative small business owners who aren't necessarily competitors, but they're your community?
Are there other artists or makers who have similar audiences, but make a different type of product or have a different style from yours?
4. Use descriptive headings to break up text.
As you're creating that helpful, evergreen blog post content, you'll want to use headings to break up text and add information.
Shopify has a "What you see is what you get" aka WYSIWYG editor. They also refer to it as a rich text editor.
You'll find text formatting options similar to if you were using a Word document or Google Docs. This includes options for formatting headings.
Whether you're writing a blog or just using the editor for product pages, it's a really good idea to use headings to help you organize and structure the content on the page.
There are six heading levels: Headings 1-6.
Heading 1 is the most important and should only be used once per page. (Use it for the main title that someone sees on the page.)
Heading 6 is least important.
For most websites, you really just need to pay attention to Headings 1-3.
Headings tell the search engines that what's inside the headings are things to pay attention to.
You can break up posts using images and headings. It's always a good idea to break up a lot of text, so that the information on your site is easy to read.
5. Optimize & resize images before uploading.
Speaking of making things easy, we also want to make our Shopify websites easy & quick to load.
Make sure to resize and optimize your images before you upload them to your website.
You don't want images to be loading really slowly.
That's a bad experience for your customers, and it's another thing that can really affect your SEO ranking.
If your images are humongous and they're taking a really long time to load, your potential customers won't stick around.
Holly says, "Shopify does do a little bit of compression, but not a ton. They do have recommendations for the minimum size that images should be. I know it's a delicate balance between needing larger images because of retina devices so that they look nice and crisp, but also having an image that loads really quick. There's a few image compression tools out there that can optimize your images and strip all of the unnecessary metadata."
Check out this blog post by Shopify for more info: 10 Image Optimization Tips for Your Website
Ready to level up your Shopify website?
If you need help setting up your new Shopify website or improving your existing online shop, Holly can help!
Holly offers custom website projects that are tailored just for you and your business. She can even help you get everything moved over to Shopify from other platforms like Squarespace, WordPress, or even Etsy.
Learn more and check out her portfolio at Ecommerce Arcade.
