Below is a video I recorded on the topic above. Below that is a transcription of the video. It's probably just easier to watch the video....
Hi guys. Jono here from EcomXSEO. What is the best at Shopify SEO hack? Now, if you haven't subscribed to our channel before, make sure you hit the subscribe button and hit the link, and you can also go and check out our free private Facebook group where we have plenty of good discussion on Shopify SEO.
Now, this is a question that I get asked quite regularly. What's the best hack for SEO in general, but in particular for Shopify and Shopify stores? Now, essentially I hate the word hack and especially to do with SEO because SEO is a process and it can be part art, part scientific and part feel and you do need a little bit of experience to sort of get the most out of your SEO campaigns and the processes that you use and you need to understand how SEO works inherently and how you then can apply it to your site in the right way.
Now, if you've been following some of our videos, you'll know that Shopify has some issues when it comes to SEO and search engine optimization. It has structural issues that can cause problems, has speed issues which are not ideal. So there's many things that need to be worked on with Shopify to get the best out of it from an organic search point of view.
But when you do, Shopify stores rank no problem at all. So instead of pointing out a hack, what I will do is just point out something that we like to do on most of our stores and it's essentially just adding more content in the right way and on the right pages.
So I've just got an example here. This is actually not a Shopify store, but it just shows that the concept is sound and it works. So this is quite a large store in Australia here. It's an outdoor and camping store called Anaconda Stores and just looking at their organic growth from when they started their site or when at least this data started coming in for this site in 2016. And you can see they've had a nice, steady growth, a few ups and downs, and they're now sort of getting up to around half a million searches per month.
Now, if we just come and look at their top pages, so the pages that are providing the most traffic to their store. So obviously, their homepage is bringing the majority of the traffic, but then you can see that the next pages are not products. Actually, they're category pages so camping, hiking, tents, gazebos clothing, sleeping bags, swags. So it's their category pages that are bringing in the bulk of the traffic to their store and then users can browse to the particular products.
Now, what we find certainly with new store owners, new Shopify store owners, they try and focus on ranking or at least bringing users directly to their product pages. And while that can help if your products convert quite well, bringing them to a category, or in Shopify's case, a collection page can really help define what your store is selling in terms of a category and it gives us the... obviously, the user to browse through different products.
And if they're coming with their credit card in hand, they're going to purchase anyway so you can give them that little more information and options with a category page and a collection page and they can browse through the different products that you have.
Now, this is not a mistake or it's not by accident that Anaconda are ranking there and getting the most traffic from their category pages, because I do something that we like to do on our Shopify stores and I've used this example before. So let's just go to their store.
As I mentioned, this is not a Shopify store, but it doesn't matter because the concept is the same. So they're setting up their category pages and you've got a category page with a bit of a description here, and then their products. Now, most stores, most online stores, that's all they do for their category page. They have the H1 header, they have a bit of a description and then they've got their product grid, which is... it's a pretty common way of setting up.
They've got some filters on the left hand side here, but on all the collection page or category pages of Anaconda, they've got this content at the bottom of their category pages and it's just answering questions and providing more content, providing more relevance for that particular category page.
We did this for Shopify with a free app we use. It's actually our app that allows you to add content below the product grid and while it can answer questions and it helps the customer, which it's meant to do, also, you just have that opportunity to add in more content to your page so you just build the strength and the relevance of your page for that particular topic.
And now you can use this in your SEO efforts. You can internally link from this and to this. You can create blog posts that link to this content. When you're doing your off page and your external SEO campaigns, you can use these pages as targets where you can actually link to them and you've got nice relevant content that's going to help that process.
Now, these guys do it on all the category pages. So here we've got bike stands and they've done the same here. They've got content below the product grid. And the issue with Shopify is this, you can't do this natively so you either need to do it on an app, or you need to create a custom template to do this, but you can do it.
You just need to yeah, use the app or create a custom template. It'd be nice if Shopify allowed us to do it natively because it certainly does help.
This is a really good example of the sort of search volume you can bring in and how you can rank your category pages and bring in traffic purely by setting up the structure in the best way. And then when you go and look at some of the keywords are ranking for so not their brand and keywords, but hiking boots, for example, their positioned to in their ranking, their category page.
North Face, so that's a brand, but they're ranking the brand page, which is also a category page. Camping chairs, ranking the category page and not looking at ranking the products individually. And it's a much easier process when you look at your SEO campaigns as well, because you're not trying to target thousands and thousands of different pages, which can be overwhelming.
You're just being ultra targeted and ultra specific in looking at your category pages in a certain way. So while it's not a hack, it's just a sound process for search engine optimization. It works really well. We do it with a lot of our stores. It takes a little more work because you've got to create that content upfront.
But as you can see here, this is a good example, and we're seeing more and more stores starting to do this. So the big stores are starting to catch on that a strategy like this can work. Okay. Hope that all makes sense. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next video.
Insert your tweetable quote/phrase here