If you want to serve local business owners, allying your company with their deepest needs matters. Recently, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance provided a valuable opportunity to hear directly from localism advocates and elected officials about small business owners’ goals and obstacles. If your brand is marketing software or other services to this largest sector of American commerce, I highly recommend setting aside an hour this week to watch the whole recording (embedded at the end of this post).
Today, I’ll briefly recap the information from this event that stood out to me as most illuminating, in hopes that you will be able to evaluate these messages to help you find common cause with clients and customers.
The present state of local economics in the U.S.
ILSR’s co-director, Stacy Mitchell, began the webinar by remarking that, just a decade ago, it was not common to hear much political talk surrounding small businesses versus monopolies, but that this is changing. Advocacy groups are gaining strength and political factions like the 100-member progressive caucus are increasingly getting out the message about the present state of U.S. local economics, which Mitchell summed up this way:
“Today, we know that economic concentration and the losses that we’ve seen both for working people and for small businesses have had devastating effects on communities; that the decline of small businesses and the growing concentration across our communities is really driving racial and economic inequality, ultimately undermining our democracy. And we know that the primary driver of this is corporate power, whether it’s the power these corporations wield in the market or the political power they have to rig government policy in their own favor and to undermine their smaller competitors.”
What local business owners want
Chanda Causer, the Co-Executive Director of The Main Street Alliance, gave this list of priorities she hears voiced by the SMB owners she speaks with every day:
Breaking up monopolies
A fair system of taxation
Healthcare
Paid family leave
Access to capital by non-dominant groups
The question was raised as to what business owners and organizers can do to get the public to care about these requirements, and about local economic health. Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, Brandi Collins-Dexter explained,
“I think that everybody I talk to cares about this; big business has such a ubiquitous role in our lives that I think people just don’t know what to do about it.”
This quote will resonate with every local search marketer who has been reading survey stats for the past two years that claim three-quarters or more of the public is committed to shopping more locally, and yet, sees how all of our choices have been whittled down to a frustrating dependence on Amazon, Walmart, Target, or dollar store-type options.
I believe that the majority of Americans genuinely do want to shop small and care sincerely about the communities in which they live, but when we need to buy a blender or a book, we increasingly face the stark reality that our town’s independent hardware store or bookshop was driven out of business by economic policy. Meanwhile, our intelligence is repeatedly insulted by monopolies portraying themselves as local heroes and using offensive scare tactics to warn SMBs and the public against any legislation that would limit their profits.
Solutions, obstacles, and hope
If industry surveys and local advocacy groups indicate that the public already cares about the survival of local business owners, we’re already part of the way to solving the dilemma of the economic role of small businesses being cut by 50% over the past 40 years.
What emerged from the ILSR event was a three-part approach to realizing the society that surveys say we want. If implemented, it would take local business owners on a journey from a place of fear to a place of respect and protection.
Education
First, Ms. Causer emphasized the need for continuing dialogue and education, encouraging individuals to take the time to speak about their concerns with their own neighbors, concerns like the effects of monopoly on the community. An educated public is one that can bring pressure to bear on representatives.
Pro-local legislation
Secondly, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, who represents the Seattle area and part of King County, is focused on a legislative approach. She is the vice-chair of the subcommittee on antitrust, which conducted a 16-month investigation into the operations of tech monopolies. She introduced HR 3825, designed to prevent corporations like Amazon from demoting merchants on their platforms while simultaneously preferencing their own cheaper product lines – a practice that has been devastating to small entrepreneurs. She is also attempting to directly address the dire needs of all business owners (and the general public) for healthcare amid the pandemic with her HR 1976 Medicare for All bill. As she stated, “The way that local communities do well is to have a thriving small business economy.”
However, Assemblymember Ron Kim, whose district has the largest proportion of small business owners in New York State, was frank about the obstacles standing in the way of the needs of local business owners and communities being met:
“As long as we’re spending, in a place like New York, $7-8 billion a year in tax breaks to subsidize the growth of mega-monopolies and big companies who, in return, donate millions and millions of dollars to executive officers and governors and mayors to keep this game going, we’re going to have a continuous problem.”
Make bribes illegal
This means that the third, and most essential, element in the three-part dynamic is to make it illegal to bribe political candidates and elected officials. Without this stipulation, even the most caring and educated public will find its needs ignored, and pro-local legislation will continue to be defeated by corrupt officials who have been paid by corporations to create policy that serves them.
The scenario may seem hopeless, but it isn’t, because you — who work in tech amid the long-shadowed boulders of monopoly — are reading this article and have a voice. Your co-workers have voices, too, and can advocate for your brands developing authentic allyship with clients and customers.
Our industry has published volumes on the necessity of building relationships with the communities we want to serve. It’s a worthy aspiration, which hinges on listening well and demonstrating solidarity. Honest chats with independent business owners produce stories like Assemblymember Kim’s, about how one of the oldest Korean-American restaurants in his community is becoming a worker co-op to be able to continue operating in a broken economy.
You’ll hear family stories like those of Ms. Collins-Dexter, whose great-grandfather was forced off his land by a powerful tobacco trust, and had to start over again as an auto mechanic whose shop became a major source of community aid during the Great Depression.
You’ll hear neighbors like Ms. Causer explain that 68% of respondents surveyed by her organization want to talk about monopoly, and that she’s advocating for people tp start singing the union songs again — that our grandmothers sang.
And you’ll hear the local business owners whom Congresswoman Jayapal said would only give comments to her antitrust committee in private, because they so fear punishment by the monopolies.
The takeaway
The next time you're asked how to build out the stages of your customer’s journey, consider asking your team and bosses to begin by donning the shoes of a local business owner. They're the people in your community who are living in real fear of being put out of business by national, state, and local policy, and of being made invisible by powerful platforms in daring to speak out. Empathy for this plight could be the start of the most genuine relationships your company has ever developed. It could even be the basis of a coalition of industry agencies and SaaS groups bringing their own, collective pressure to bear on public servants, to insist that we finally do get money out of politics and re-balance our economics to prioritize societal well-being.
As a local SEO, I’ve often looked at Google’s local guides program. There are roughly 150 million of these community interpreters globally, and they write an average of 62% of the reviews you read. That’s a lot of people with a lot of potential power, if they ever chose to organize on behalf of the local businesses they so abundantly grade. Why would they do that? Because there is little left to review when a local business landscape is reduced to just one or two monopolies. There is no fun or joy in that.
I think Brandi Collins-Dexter is right about good people not knowing what to do, and I suspect a lot of that feeling of powerlessness is rooted in a sense of isolation. But, just like there are a lot of local guides, there are a lot of tech workers, and together, we can help build the hope we seek from emboldened collaboration.
Maximizing the value in your keyword data is crucial if you're a brand trying to rank on the forever-changing SERPs. With that in mind, Moz Learning and Development Specialist Zoe Pegler walks you through the key features in STAT Search Analytics that will help you glean extra (and important) insights from that data.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hi and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Zoe. I work in the Learning team here at Moz, and my focus is on developing educational materials and resources to promote understanding of our STAT tool. Today, we're going to take a look at how you can use STAT to surface additional insights in your keyword data. Looking for value in your keyword data is important if you're a brand trying to stay visible and on top of the forever-changing SERPs. Looking for those additional insights is paramount to making informed SEO decisions.
What is STAT?
So what is STAT? If you haven't come across STAT before, it's a large-scale rank tracker, but it's also fantastic for many other things, SERP analysis and intent, a competitive landscape tool. Its value is really how you can dig into the data it provides.
Quick wins
So where are the quick wins here? Well, we know that usually improved ranking position means increased or at least some uplift in traffic for that term. Knowing where you sit on the SERPs and what features you're winning can make or break your content strategy. This is where STAT's dynamic tags can be hugely useful.
Dynamic tagging
Dynamic tagging allows you to group keywords together based on criteria you set. That group is then automatically populated daily with keywords based on changeable filter criteria. This means you have the ability to create a group of keywords with any criteria that's important to your business. A great grouping criteria to set here is keywords based on ranking position.
For example, flagging keywords which are sitting just outside the top 3, top 5, or top 10 positions and adding a traffic benchmark means you can easily discover which keywords with traffic potential need just a little bit of extra work to shift them into that better position.
So maybe your strategy includes hunting down a featured snippet. If so, you can use STAT to set up a dynamic tag that monitors keywords that result in featured snippets. If you see keywords that aren't ranking well within that grouping, they're not winning those snippets.
So if you're tracking keywords for a client, this is a great way of seeing where your client owns a snippet and where they don't. You can try to take the spot from their competitors by finding new opportunities to create optimized content. Using this feature is powerful for getting quick feedback on the intent and type of content that perform best in a keyword set, which ultimately is what you can use to guide your content strategy.
Data views
So we know that organizing your data is key. How do you organize your data so it's meaningful to you while allowing you to see potential opportunities to quickly report back to a client? In STAT, you can hold all your keyword groups, your tags in a single data view. So keeping selected tags in a data view means you get a single dashboard of metrics for those chosen keyword groups
For example, you could easily put together a data view of tags that reflect the tactical aspirations of your client. If you're a search marketer, you may choose to set up a data view containing keyword segments that cover stages of the conversion funnel. You really want to split keywords into segments that reflect what your clients want to target. So that could be industry sectors, services, or locations. If product categories are important to your client, you can set up a data view containing keywords tagged as shoes, sportswear, swimwear, or whatever specific attributes you need to track across a product line.
Tags tab
Okay. So maybe you're looking for a quick health check on how that specific set of keyword groupings are doing. Well, there's a smart little feature in STAT that allows you to compare all of your tags and how well each of those are performing in terms of visibility online, and it's called the Tags tab. So this feature is pretty cool because it allows you to see the performance of all those tags in one place. You'll get the overall picture of how your SEO strategy is progressing and where to focus your attention based on your most important metrics. You can set a specific date range. You can see average rank, top 10 change.
Visibility
Another key piece of information is finding out who you're up against for those keyword sets you just put together. You can use STAT to view share of voice across that specific set of keyword tags or for that entire market. The share of voice metric used in STAT measures the visibility of a given keyword set on Google. This means you can get invaluable insights, such as where competitors are increasing or decreasing in their visibility.
Now, you may have clients that need formalized insights into the progression of a campaign. What's the best way of displaying those reports? Well, in STAT, we have built connectors that allow you to pull live data from STAT into Google Data Studio reports. These visualizations make it easier to share insights with clients and for them to see those top level metrics really quickly.
So hopefully these tips and tools mean you can really investigate how much extra value and insights you can squeeze out of your keyword data. Have a great day and thank you for watching this edition of Whiteboard Friday.
Because of its broad field, SEO has many touch points with a variety of different marketing channels. As other channels' operations influence SEO, both directly and indirectly, it’s essential to deploy an integrated marketing approach in which each channel supports the other, in order to optimize marketing efforts and enhance your brand’s user experience.
This article provides you with a number of different actionable tips for combining SEO with the marketing channels listed below, that will not only save you time, resources, and money, but will lead to even better results for your team and company:
Both SEO and Search Engine Advertising (SEA) are keyword-driven processes that focus on ensuring a website reaches the top positions of the search engine results page (SERP).
While SEO is a slower process that focuses on organic positions with long-term results, SEA is a much faster approach that focuses on the position of ads with short-lived results.
Although SEO and SEA might seem like adversarial approaches, they actually complement each other — by sharing data, knowledge, and insights, both can be leveraged to achieve better performances.
Here are a few of the different ways that SEA and SEO can work in symbiosis:
Achieve SERP domination
SERP domination means achieving a prominent position on the SERPs for both paid and unpaid results. Maximizing SERP "real estate" increases a sites' visibility, credibility, and chances of getting clicks from searchers.
For some competitive terms, ranking in position one organically is insufficient to be visible above the fold, as the number of paid ads and SERP features pushes the organic results down. Both site awareness and confidence from potential visitors increase when a website is visible organically as well as through paid ads, which will result in the site showing up multiple times on the SERP.
Example of a search query where a website is prominently visible on both SEA and SEO positions on the SERP.
Use SEA to predict SEO
While SEO is a fundamental channel with tremendous potential ROI, it is a long-term and continuous process that requires initial resources and the passage of time before it begins to show results.
The difference between SEO and SEA in terms of Return on Investment (ROI) over time.
As SEA campaigns provide immediate results, they can help to make sure your SEO strategies are worthwhile by testing their initial priorities. Information like the conversion rate and potential of different keywords and pages in paid campaigns can help determine whether or not they should be optimized for long-term SEO strategies.
Optimize metadata
PPC campaigns provide precise results not only in terms of conversions, but also with regards to click-through rates (CTR), bounce rates, and time on site for different sessions. It allows for the assessment of the searchers' intent with regards to keywords and landing pages.
The data from A/B testing done by the SEA team can be used to enhance metadata for SEO. For example, using the copy from the best-performing ads to optimize page titles and meta descriptions can help improve organic CTR.
This strategy works the other way around, too: high-performing SEO snippets can be a source of inspiration for SEA ad copy.
Example of how SEO can be inspired by best performing SEA ads.
Improve Quality Score
Optimizing Google Quality Score is crucial for an effective SEA strategy, as it determines the performance and cost of PPC campaigns.
Overview of Google Quality Score factors with Landing Page Experience as a decisive factor.
One decisive Quality Score factor is the landing page's relevance and quality.
As SEO is all about providing the best experience to users, SEA can benefit from the help of SEO to make sure their ads direct users to highly relevant and optimized landing pages.
Optimize bidding strategy and budget management
SEO and SEA go hand-in-hand when aiming for an optimal and dynamic bidding strategy.
When organic rankings for certain keywords generate a relatively high number of conversions (without necessarily ranking in top positions), it would be wise to start advertising for these queries in PPC campaigns and/or increase their allocated budget.
Also, if you observe specific keywords generating high conversions through PPC campaigns, it would be a good idea to begin optimizing for them in your broader SEO strategy, in order to obtain better organic positions.
In the long-term, this also provides the opportunity to reduce the SEA budget for (expensive) keywords when they are already performing well in organic search, especially if the ad budget is limited.
Use SEA as a backup strategy
SEO isn't an exact science, and many variables influence organic rankings.
Results might take longer than initially expected, or rankings can decrease significantly in a short period of time. PPC can be used as a short-term solution to maintain a site's presence and generate traffic from the SERPs.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing and SEO both rely on links.
From the SEO side, backlinks contribute to a website’s authority in the eyes of the search engines, and are one of the most important ranking factors. The higher the authority, the higher the likelihood of ranking.
From the affiliate side, links are sales streams to generate conversions.
Finding the right partners to drive relevant traffic to a website that converts is the main goal. Unlike organic links, search engines do not see affiliate links as "votes" due to the obvious commercial relation with tracking parameters applied.
Both Affiliate Marketing and SEO need to build up a strong network of publishers to promote and enhance their content. There are three ways in which both channels can inspire each other:
Streamline partner research
SEO uses a variety of strategies to find relevant domains to obtain backlinks. For example, looking at competitors' referring domains and top-ranking domains for specific topics is the specialty of an off-page SEO.
Affiliate Marketing and SEO can sometimes target the same domains without being aware of it. Inefficient outreach due to channels not communicating internally costs unnecessary time and looks unprofessional.
Therefore, united research and sharing the list of potential affiliate and SEO partners can be beneficial before starting a campaign.
Combine partner acquisition
Streamlining outreach between different departments not only saves precious time, but can also save a significant amount of budget.
When a particular website is potentially valuable for both channels, it is favorable to negotiate a cooperation with its webmaster for the two channels simultaneously.
By killing two birds with one stone, it's possible to negotiate the best overall deal and conditions.
Seize content inspiration
Editorial affiliate links are placed in relevant context within a page copy. Whenever a referral partner generates many leads, it indicates that their content is trusted and appreciated by its readers.
SEO can use this as a source of inspiration for its own content creation strategy.
PR
The role of Public Relations (PR) is to create brand awareness and strengthen brand image and authority.
SEO's role is to increase a website's overall authority to acquire more organic traffic.
As both PR and SEO need to reach out to authoritative and relevant websites, they can help each other in the following ways:
Identify target audience and trending topics
PR aims to spread the message of a company, and communicate that message in the best possible way. Leveraging SEO for PR helps to detect who the target audience is and what their interests are in order to improve awareness and visibility.
A way to enhance this message is to associate it with currently trending affairs. SEO can provide great insights into search volume for specific keywords throughout the calendar year, and topics presently trending using Google Trend data.
Google Trends data for the search term dogecoin.
Utilize press releases for SEO
Press releases do not directly provide ranking benefits for SEO if the publication is clearly marked as such; as John Mueller of Google stated, the best practice for links in press releases is to put them in "Nofollow" according to Google's guidelines.
In addition, Google ignores most links within press releases.
Nevertheless, press releases might be of interest to publishers who will be willing to write a piece of content about your news and link back naturally to your website, thus providing SEO value.
For this reason, PR should inform SEO when press releases are being sent out, as they could be used by SEO as link baits to obtain organic publications and "Dofollow" backlinks.
Create link baits
Digital PR consists of acquiring qualitative backlinks through the promotion of valuable content.
SEO and PR should cooperate to create linkable assets (infographics, guestographics, studies, interviews, etc.), which are powerful elements to acquire backlinks and increase authority and brand awareness.
An example of a successful link bait created by AirHelp, which generated many organic backlinks from sources such as Forbes, CNBC, the Daily Mail, and others.
Convert unlinked brand mentions into backlinks
Some media platforms happily write about a brand without linking to their website in the publication.
SEOs can easily track these unlinked brand mentions using alerts from various tools in order to gain backlinks.
An example of an unlinked brand mention of Zalando.
Reaching out to the authors of articles and asking for a link back to the website will work in most cases, as it is editorially relevant for readers to gain more information about the brand and the product or service that they offer.
Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing (SMM) and SEO both need to serve users with engaging content to generate traffic and trigger conversions. They share common goals and can support each other in the following ways:
Get content indexed faster
Sharing new content on social media platforms stimulates pages to get (re)indexed faster as search engines noticing and following the links in the posts will be encouraged to (re)crawl the pages.
Understand user intent
SMM can generate tons of insights about the target audience, as it is often easier for users to share and interact with content on social media than on websites. This type of data allows for the creation of highly relevant landing pages that directly answer searcher intent.
By measuring which content generates the most engagement, how users interact with it, and which questions and/or problems they might encounter using a product or service, SEO can improve the communication and user experience on the website. Plus, social media can provide additional information regarding new trending topics and keywords related to the niche and company.
By using third-party tools, SMM can, for instance, analyze which topics on Twitter are frequently associated with either their brand or their competitors. By sharing this information, SEO can confirm that these themes are also present on the website.
SparkToro Audience Intelligence for hashtags related to Asos.
Optimize posts with relevant keywords
As social media platforms use algorithms that utilize keywords when deciding to display content to their users, SMM must optimize their hashtags and keywords in their posts.
SEO can assist SMM by providing the right set of keywords and queries optimized to reach the most relevant and largest possible audience on social media platforms. In addition, social media posts might appear on the SERPs for certain keywords in specific niches.
Pinterest posts showing up on the SERP.
Promote new content
SMM is an excellent and easy way to promote a website's new content to its audience. When a new piece of content comes online on the website, it's important to share on the different active social media accounts. This will encourage traffic and user engagement.
Stimulate link building
Although social links to a website don't directly influence SEO rankings, actively sharing content on social media is a great way to attract natural and high-quality backlinks to a website. Making influencers aware of a quality piece of highly relevant content might lead to them referencing it on their blog or platform.
Develop joint partnerships
As many website and blog owners are also active on social media, a joint approach between SEO and SMM in acquiring partnerships can save time, effort, and budget for the marketing channels and company as a whole.
Email Marketing
SEO and Email Marketing (EMM) focus on different aspects of marketing, but are both powerful acquisition channels. By sharing their respective data, both channels can highlight potential issues and discover opportunities:
Increase CTR and open rates
By knowing which email subject lines achieve the best open rates, SEO can take inspiration to further optimize page titles and meta descriptions to increase organic CTR.
Vice versa, it can also benefit EMM to copy headlines of landing pages with the highest CTR on the SERPs.
Improve content relevancy
Measuring email click-to-open rates (CTOR) and landing page bounce rates can be very insightful for both channels, to know what keeps users from taking the desired actions.
When adjustments in either lead to improvements in user behavior, the changes can be implemented in the other channel as well.
Recycle content
Newsletter content is not being indexed by search engines. Therefore, successful emails can be recycled, fine-tuned, and turned into blog posts that can be shared across different channels.
Promote content and earn backlinks
Sending out an email to customers and followers is a great way to make them aware of new content on the website that might interest them, leading to more traffic and user engagement.
Linking to blog posts within the emails can increase the chances that people will further link back to it, resulting in an increase in natural backlinks.
UX/UI
SEO + UX = SXO: Search Experience Optimization.
User experience is an essential aspect of SEO. In June 2021, Google released the Page Experience update, which rewards websites for providing an excellent on-site experience to their users.
Google Page Experience update ranking factors.
Communication and cooperation between SEO and User Experience (UX)/User Interface (UI) are both needed, as both can support each other on different elements such as:
Build information architecture
Logical site architecture is fundamental in order to allow search engines to crawl, index, and rank a website appropriately. From the user perspective, a good website structure allows one to easily navigate a website and get a clear understanding of it.
The deeper a page is buried in the site architecture, the harder it will be for it to rank, as it takes more effort for search engine crawlers and users to reach it.
Because navigational links are given more weight, only important and useful pages should be kept in the navigation.
Ensure mobile-friendliness
SEO and UX should ensure that a website is mobile-friendly.
Mobile-friendliness has been a ranking factor since 2015 and is becoming even more important with the Page Experience update.
Responsive design, text size, and tap targets size are examples of elements Google considers when evaluating if a site is mobile-friendly.
Some website design elements can be implemented on the website without consideration of their impact on website performance, and SEO has to monitor the effects that changes made by developers and designers have on the speed of a page.
Manage pop-ups and ads
While pop-ups and ads are an excellent way to catch and/or retain users, they can have a negative impact on your rankings.
Examples of accepted interstitials and intrusive interstitials that make content less accessible.
Content
Writing content that no one reads is the tragic reality companies that don't invest in SEO are facing.
The role of SEO is to make sure that the writers produce content that people are actually looking for. Although content is part of SEO work in many companies, both channels still work independently from each other.
There are several elements to consider where SEO can guide content creation to serve quality content, optimized for both visitors and search engines:
Provide content relevance
Qualitative and keyword-rich content, which answers and satisfies searchers' intent, will drive user engagement and enhance visibility on the SERPs.
SEOs can help content writers to make sure that the topics they write about are actually sought-after and relevant for a company's potential clients and customers.
Content format, structure, length, and freshness have to be defined with users' expectations in mind.
Ensure uniqueness
Each piece of content must be unique. Duplicate content, whether internal or external, can prevent pages from appearing in the search results.
SEO can ensure that every page has unique content, especially above the fold, to prevent duplicate content issues.
Enhance E-A-T
E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) is a concept used by Google Quality raters to assess web pages' quality.
It is essential to display information about the author(s) of the content on a website, especially for Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) websites.
Is E-A-T a ranking factor? Not if you mean there's some technical thing like with speed that we can measure directly.
We do use a variety of signals as a proxy to tell if content seems to match E-A-T as humans would assess it.
A piece of content is considered qualitative and is valued by users when its author has experience (in either an academic or professional capacity) in the field he or she is writing about. SEO can assist content creators in optimizing for E.AT. on the website.
Conclusion
SEO is a fundamental and powerful channel for increasing a website's presence and value. As we've seen from the above examples, there's massive potential for achieving dramatically better results when SEO is used in conjunction with other marketing channels. Whether this is SEA, Affiliate, EMM, or any of the other discussed examples, SEO can be integrated in order to achieve optimal results and greater conversions.
If you know Moz, you know the Beginner’s Guide to SEO. It’s the resource marketers the world over have used to learn SEO and get a taste for its potential and power. And while we offer a delectable buffet of guides in our content smörgåsbord, there hasn’t been one comprehensive resource to serve as a follow-up for those who’ve mastered the beginner level. That’s why we’ve developed the Professional’s Guide to SEO: a guide that will help folks take the next step, preparing them with all the baseline knowledge they need to practice SEO in a professional capacity.
Over the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing chapters and/or chapter excerpts here on the blog, with the full guide releasing at the end. Yes, we want to whet your appetite, but we’d also love to hear your feedback — if there’s something you know in your heart of hearts we should cover, get at us on Twitter (@moz) and let us know!
First up, we’re sharing a portion of our chapter on advanced SEO strategy. Brought to you by the inimitable Kavi Kardos, Moz alumni and SEO Manager at Automox, this chapter looks at getting started with a next-step strategy, tactics to implement, and resources for leveling up.
Bon appétit!
Advanced SEO Strategy
Getting started: SEO priorities & plausibility
In the beginning stages, it’s easy to audit a site and come up with long lists of pie-in-the-sky ideas for content, link building, technical, and so on. Most sites, especially those that have never been handled by an advanced SEO, need a lot of work, and the new strategist arriving on the scene often gets pulled in several directions by various teams seeking their expertise.
Prioritization of the tasks you’ll undertake and the tactics you’ll employ is a vital first step in developing an advanced SEO strategy. And it’s important to work on this step thoughtfully — ask questions, be realistic, and involve as many stakeholders as you’re able to meet with. A misstep in the prioritization stage can throw off your schedule for the whole quarter and cause important tasks to fall through the cracks.
Try a SWOT analysis
It may feel old-fashioned, but the classic SWOT analysis (identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) is a great way to frame your initial site audit because it will familiarize you with both the website itself and the competitive landscape in which it lives. As you explore both, jot down your thoughts in a Google Doc that you can return to whenever you discover something new.
Strengths: What is already working well? What high-value terms does the site already rank for? What high-authority sites already link to you? Does the site already score well in page speed and performance tests or avoid other common technical snafus?
Weaknesses: What is the site lacking? Is it difficult to navigate? Are its sitemaps and robots.txt file messy? Is the organization lacking insight because it doesn’t make use of basic reporting tools like Google Analytics? Does it have a lackluster content strategy?
Opportunities: What’s on the horizon that could be capitalized on as part of your strategy? Is there a highly valuable asset that’s already been created and is now begging for distribution? Is a tough competitor lagging behind in a certain content area?
Threats: What’s on the horizon that could be harmful to your search visibility? Is there an up-and-coming competitor with an obvious wealth of SEO resources? Is there a platform migration looming? Is the site likely to fall victim to the next algorithm update?
Being conscious of the site’s current standings, both in the SERPs and in terms of its overall health, will help you prioritize tactics based on urgency. The most dire threats should usually be addressed first, while minor weaknesses can often be moved to your “nice to have” list.
Assess the organization’s search maturity
Regardless of how urgent the need is or how simple a task seems to you, the difficulty of getting your SEO recommendations implemented will vary from organization to organization. The plausibility of executing your strategy depends largely on the organization’s search maturity, or how fully they understand and integrate SEO at all levels of the business.
The concept of search maturity was developed by Heather Physioc of VMLY&R, and her guidance on diagnosing where your organization falls along the maturity spectrum is an absolute must-read at this stage in the strategic planning process. Not only does using this model help you solidify your recommendations; it also makes it more likely that those recommendations will see the light of day because it allows you to communicate with stakeholders on their level.
How much buy-in can you expect from your department, your direct manager or client contact, and the rest of the larger team all the way up to the C-suite? If SEO has been socialized across the organization and is already a part of the company culture, you can probably expect your recommendations to be met with excitement. If not, you may experience some pushback when asking for necessary resources. At an agency, you’ll be dealing with the confines of existing SEO packages as well as the amount of time you’re expected to spend on each client each month. As an in-house SEO, you may have more autonomy but must often answer to more stakeholders and navigate more red tape.
How difficult will it be to get recommended changes implemented? If the content team has an existing calendar that tends to be jam-packed, new assets may not get slotted in as quickly as you’d like. If the web devs are slammed, working back-end fixes into their sprint cycle can be challenging.
What resources will be available for SEO? Resources come in many forms, and the most scarce of them tend to be headcount and tools. Are there writers on staff who are capable of creating best-in-class content? Does the marketing team have dedicated developers, or are the folks with access to the site’s code in a totally separate department? What tool subscriptions already exist, and how much budget is available to add to your tool kit?
Create an impact vs. effort matrix
Once you know which areas of the site need the most help the fastest, it’s time to make a list of recommended tactics and further prioritize that list by likely impact weighed against required effort, based on what you learned in the previous step.
Create a matrix like the one above, perhaps in a meeting with relevant stakeholders. The likely impact of a tactic could be small, medium, or large, and the same scale will apply to the level of effort required to complete it. Plot each planned tactic into its own cell. Your list of tactics for the quarter, the year, or whatever time frame is dictated by your organization can include granular tasks as well as larger-scale projects — just make sure you’ve broken down any bigger ideas into pieces that make sense within the plot.
Taking urgency into account, tackle the tactics that will have the highest impact and require the lowest effort first. You may also want to set in motion some more demanding, high-impact tactics at kickoff if they can be chipped away at simultaneously. Low-impact, high-effort tactics can often be reevaluated.
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Last year was an incredible year for Core Updates, and for changes to how SEOs improve page quality for users. Moving forward, we can expect to see increased diversification of SERPs, led by developments in Google’s algorithms, and new features from tools like Google Lens. These developments will change how we manage our SEO now and in the future.
Multimedia first
Why should you consider a multimedia-first SEO strategy?
MUM is the latest in Google’s suite of super-powerful algorithms, which help them to understand information in new and different ways. It runs alongside BERT, but it's actually much more powerful than BERT.
MUM stands for “multitask unified model”, and not only does it process natural language, but it does so in over 75 languages — and counting. It's also able to process text and images with a similar quality, and is increasing its ability to process video and audio in the near future. This means we’re likely to see the impact of this in the SERPs, specifically what they look like, which is also likely to shape some of the targeted algorithm updates in the future.
This shift in focus is a natural evolution of a mobile-first digital experience that allows users to engage with content dynamically using a mix of inputs, outputs, and tools, often simultaneously. Google’s push towards better understanding — and towards ranking media like image and video — will require SEOs to look at multimedia content with fresh eyes.
Which short-term multimedia optimizations should you prioritize in 2022?
Visual recognition for Google Lens
Google has invested significantly in image recognition solutions for almost 10 years, but they have recently picked up the pace and scale of its integration into everyday search.
As a result, improvements to and new uses for Google Lens have been front and center at flagship events like Google I/O and SearchOn during the last 12 months, while their future plans to move into health depend significantly on honing their visual search abilities.
In 2021, they added Google Lens directly into the search widget for Pixel, Android phones, and onto Chrome’s mobile search bar. Last year’s Google Lens updates included the ability to translate text in over 100 languages via AR and carry out targeted visual searches of screenshots. Add to this list of features their upcoming rollout of a MUM-enabled ability to “Add Questions” to Lens searches, and you can see that change is afoot.
How does Google Lens impact image SEO?
Standard image optimization elements like alt-text, schema markup, file names, image titles, and file sizes will continue to be important and relevant in regards to how search engines understand your image. Building upon this, though, elements like composition will also come to the fore. This means that SEOs might need to have more strategic conversations about what images look like, as well as how they’re rendered on a site.
This is because, while AI-driven image processing tools like Google Cloud’s Vision AI and Google Lens are developing rapidly, images that have clear composition will be better understood for visual search than images that are cluttered, complex, or partially visible.
Simply put, cleaner images mean that your content is surfaced with more relevant search results and business outcomes.
SEO value of image composition
Need to illustrate the point to stakeholders? Released in 2015, Vision AI’s image recognition tech underpins many of the functions of Google Lens, and their free demo tool can be used to demonstrate how images are interpreted at a high level. Pair this with real-time Google Lens results to illustrate where you should be concentrating your image optimization efforts as MUM matures.
Google's Vision AI API testing tool.
Case in point, in the diagram below, you can see two photos of the same enamel teapot as analyzed with Google Cloud’s Vision AI API testing tool and then with Google Lens.
In the image where you can’t see the handle and spout at the same time, the Vision AI interprets the photo as a Tableware object with 76% certainty and adds Kettle as the most relevant searchable label with 74% certainty. Conversely, the image with the teapot in the profile is understood as a Teapot with 94% certainty and given a Teapot label with 89% certainty.
How composition impacts Vision AI interpretation of images.
When we click through to the SERPs for kettle and teapot, we can see a clear difference in results. It is also clear that the latter is a much closer match to the actual object, thus more likely to satisfy customer needs, resulting in more click-throughs and driving better SEO for the site overall.
Left shows results for ‘Kettle’. Right shows results for ‘Teapot’
When we search the same images directly in Google Lens, the overall results are better: this time both are showing enamel teapots. But again, we see that the side profile photo is delivering near-exact matches to my IRL teapot. Thus, better photo composition equates to better search optimization.
Better images give more relevant in Google Lens.
In practice, this means that while there may be a desire to fill a site with stylish lifestyle or Instagram-ready images, for SEO purposes, it is important to prioritize clean, — dare I say “boring” — images, particularly for transactional pages like product listings.
While this methodology is not necessarily new, the accessibility and integration of “search what you see” tools in the daily search experience will make image composition considerations for SEO a priority moving forward.
AI is allowing Google to make comparable strides with video and audio analysis, meaning investment in the knowledge of audio quality and video aesthetics could pay SEO dividends in the future.
Security for speed
Security and speed are both established ranking factors. During the great Core Web Vitals push of 2021, many came to understand that the two elements are closely linked. On an individual account level, I've seen server security optimization improve page performance for multiple clients. On a larger scale, when hosting platform Wix tripled their year-over-year CWV performance, enhancements like universal HTTP/2 to improve SSL times were critical to the task.
In the coming year, we will see Google prioritize security in its products and search services. Chrome promises the rollout of increased security and privacy tools, with updates that will include security features for <iframes> and cross-site navigation that add more checks as users transfer between links and use certain features.
This could give sites with top-tier security a competitive advantage for speed, page experience, and conversions in the coming year. And as the desktop page experience ranking update arrives in February 2022, the impact may be seen across many more domains.
Add to this trend the enthusiastic adoption of high-speed HTTP/3 by big tech players like Facebook and Google, and you can see that legacy tech will struggle to keep pace with user and bot expectations.
The use of HTTP/3, the latest HTTP protocol, has seen a fivefold increase across the web in the last year and is now live on about 25% of domains. Though this protocol is active on Cloudflare and many other top cloud providers, it is not yet standard. If you want to make the most of the benefits here, you may need to manually enable the update for your main server and/or CDN. And if you’re considering a new CDN or server partner in the coming year, this should be a deciding factor.
SEO specialisms for Google channel diversity
Google continues to reduce friction as users move between their dedicated channels and apps. In the process, they’re creating a more dynamic and niche SERP that requires SEO specialism to gain traction.
Click-throughs for some SERP results go to Google managed channels and apps.
From a user experience, this makes for rich mobile-friendly SERPs, which take users directly into high-performance apps like Google Maps and dedicated channels like Google Travel. Furthermore, it affords Google the opportunity to access and combine the information users need in a highly contextualized manner. Since Google-managed properties give them control over many informational feeds at once, enhancing and connecting existing channels will be essential to their aims to serve ever more nuanced search results.
While this has long been the preserve of transactional verticals like shopping and hotels, Google’s commitment to multi-modality means this is likely to become more prevalent amongst queries at the top of the funnel as well. This means SEO efforts must also be made to optimize profiles and performance within each of the most relevant channels in order to maximize visibility in the SERPs. Due to the rate of change for each channel, SEO generalism is increasingly less likely to build a critical mass for impact. Instead, coordinated teams for SEO specialisms are likely to see the most gains.
If we look at Local Inventory Ads (LIA) for instance, we can see optimizations for multiple channels converge to make a complex, high-value search feature. Introduced last year, this free and paid Google Shopping feature allows users to find products in stock at shops near their location. Google uses data and content from websites, Google Business Profiles, Maps, and Merchant Center to surface this information when users need it. Ongoing optimization for LIA requires expertise in each of these channels, running in tandem with a collection of SEO skill sets.
All of this is to say that assembling a well-rounded SEO team will be essential to top performance as multimodal search evolves. Consider nurturing in-house channel champions and/or engaging external product experts via an agency or freelance support, and coordinate to achieve business goals in search.
Borderless international SEO
In the coming year, three factors will become significant drivers for international SEO: the rise of borderless e-commerce, the maturity of AI translation tools, and the rollout of MUM.
Borderless e-commerce
Digital acceleration has changed our digital experience significantly.
The relevance of a business’s physical location, currency, and time zone is shifting, and the barriers to entry for brands to go global are being significantly reduced. Brick-and-mortar businesses still have a significant impact on local SEO and local pack SERPs, but customers are increasingly more willing (and more often, expecting) to buy from retailers outside their country. Research shows that tentative markets, where around 40% of consumers were willing to purchase from overseas sellers in 2016, had shifted to 55% willingness in 2021.
Shopify launched Shopify Markets at the start of Q4 2021, full of confidence in this global retail trend and its potential for sellers, meaning that competition here is likely to heat up in the coming months.
As SEOs, our task is to meet customers where they are, and this change in customer expectations brings opportunities for business growth. To get started here, consider tried-and-tested international SEO tactics alongside low-cost, low-friction market entry channels like free Google Merchant Listings.
If your international growth includes selling on top international marketplaces like Amazon, Wish, AliExpress, or eBay, consider optimizing your landing pages and on-site e-commerce E-A-T to build trust with new customers. Finally, think mobile-first for shoppers in Asia and other emerging markets.
In summary
All in all, I’m optimistic. As MUM matures we should see more varied content types emerge from around the web. Improvements to speed and security are a win for everyone. More layered SERP features help to demonstrate the importance of SEO. And building a borderless customer base helps to make brands more resilient in a changeable marketplace. Some of the changes we are likely to see are substantial, but they should move SEO in a positive direction.
A trend we’ve been noticing at Go Fish Digital is that more and more of our clients have been using the Shopify platform. While we initially thought this was just a coincidence, we can see that the data tells a different story:
The Shopify platform has been steadily rising in popularity throughout the years. Looking at BuiltWith usage statistics, we can see that usage of the CMS has more than doubled since October 2017. Currently, 4.24 of the top 10,000 sites and 3.02% of the top 100,000 are using Shopify.
Since we’ve worked with a good amount of Shopify stores, we wanted to share our process for common SEO improvements we help our clients with. The guide below should outline some common adjustments we make on Shopify stores.
What is Shopify SEO?
Shopify SEO is a set of SEO adjustments that are unique to the Shopify platform. While Shopify stores come with some useful things for SEO, such as a blog and the ability to redirect, it can also create SEO issues such as duplicate content.
Some of the most common Shopify SEO recommendations are:
Remove duplicate URLs from internal linking architecture
Remove duplicate paginated URLs
Create blog content for keywords with informational intent
Add “Product,” “Article,” & “BreadcrumbList” structured data
We’ll go into how we handle each of these recommendations below:
Duplicate content
In terms of SEO, duplicate content is the highest priority issue we’ve seen created by Shopify. Duplicate content occurs when either duplicate or similar content exists on two separate URLs. This creates issues for search engines as they might not be able to determine which of the two pages should be the canonical version. On top of this, often times link signals are split between the pages.
We’ve seen Shopify create duplicate content in several different ways:
Duplicate product pages
Duplicate collections pages through pagination
Duplicate product pages
Shopify creates this issue within their product pages. By default, Shopify stores allow their /products/ pages to render at two different URL paths:
Canonical URL path: /products/
Non-canonical URL path: /collections/.*/products/
Shopify accounts for this by ensuring that all /collections/.*/products/ pages include a canonical tag to the associated /products/ page. Notice how the URL in the address differs from the “canonical” field:
While this certainly helps Google consolidate the duplicate content, a more alarming issue occurs when you look at the internal linking structure. By default, Shopify will link to the non-canonical version of all of your product pages.
As well, we’ve also seen Shopify link to the non-canonical versions of URLs when websites utilize “swatch” internal links that point to other color variants.
Thus, Shopify creates your entire site architecture around non-canonical links by default. This creates a high-priority SEO issue because the website is sending Google conflicting signals:
“Here are the pages we internally link to the most often”
“However, the pages we link to the most often are not the URLs we actually want to be ranking in Google. Please index these other URLs with few internal links”
While canonical tags are usually respected, remember Google does treat these as hints instead of directives. This means that you’re relying on Google to make a judgement about whether or not the content is duplicate each time that it crawls these pages. We prefer not to leave this up to chance, especially when dealing with content at scale.
Adjusting internal linking structure
Fortunately, there is a relatively easy fix for this. We’ve been able to work with our dev team to adjust the code in the product.grid-item.liquid file. Following those instructions will allow your Shopify site’s collections pages to point to the canonical /product/ URLs.
Duplicate collections pages
As well, we’ve seen many Shopify sites that create duplicate content through the site’s pagination. More specifically, a duplicate is created of the first collections page in a particular series. This is because once you're on a paginated URL in a series, the link to the first page will contain “?page=1”:
However, this will almost always be a duplicate page. A URL with “?page=1” will almost always contain the same content as the original non-parameterized URL. Once again, we recommend having a developer adjust the internal linking structure so that the first paginated result points to the canonical page.
Product variant pages
While this is technically an extension of Shopify’s duplicate content from above, we thought this warranted its own section because this isn’t necessarily always an SEO issue.
It’s not uncommon to see Shopify stores where multiple product URLs are created for the same product with slight variations. In this case, this can create duplicate content issues as often times the core product is the same, but only a slight attribute (color for instance) changes. This means that multiple pages can exist with duplicate/similar product descriptions and images. Here is an example of duplicate pages created by a variant: https://recordit.co/x6YRPkCDqG
If left alone, this once again creates an instance of duplicate content. However, variant URLs do not have to be an SEO issue. In fact, some sites could benefit from these URLs as they allow you to have indexable pages that could be optimized for very specific terms. Whether or not these are beneficial is going to differ on every site. Some key questions to ask yourself are:
Do your customers perform queries based on variant phrases?
Do you have the resources to create unique content for all of your product variants?
Is this content unique enough to stand on its own?
For a more in-depth guide, Jenny Halasz wrote a great article on determining the best course of action for product variations. If your Shopify store contains product variants, than it’s worth determining early on whether or not these pages should exist at a separate URL. If they should, then you should create unique content for every one and optimize each for that variant’s target keywords.
Crawling and indexing
After analyzing quite a few Shopify stores, we’ve found some SEO items that are unique to Shopify when it comes to crawling and indexing. Since this is very often an important component of e-commerce SEO, we thought it would be good to share the ones that apply to Shopify.
Robots.txt file
By default, Shopify creates a robots.txt file for your store with quite a few prewritten “Disallow” commands. We find that in most cases, Shopify’s default robots.txt rules are good enough for most store owners. You can see an example of Shopify’s default robots.txt rules here:
Here are some sections of the site that Shopify will disallow crawling in:
Admin area
Checkout
Orders
Shopping cart
Internal search
Policies page
However, as Shopify stores get bigger and more customized, there’s a greater chance that you might need to adjust the robots.txt file. Fortunately, as of June 2021, Shopify now let’s you update the robots.txt file.
In order to edit the Shopify robots.txt file, store owners must create a robots.txt.liquid file and then create custom rules to specify any changes.
In order to create a robots.txt.liquid file, store owners can perform the following steps:
Login to your Shopify admin area
In the left sidebar, go to Online Store > Themes
Choose Actions > Edit code
In “Templates”, select the “Add a new template” link
Find the left-most dropdown and choose “robots.txt”
Choose “Create template”
This should create your Shopify robots.txt.liquid file. You can then add rules to your robots.txt.liquid file by adding liquid code. Fortunately, this code isn’t too difficult to add, and Shopify does a good job of highlighting how to do it in their official documentation. Following these steps should allow you to have much more control over which URLs are crawled in your Shopify site.
Sitemap.xml
By default, Shopify will generate a sitemap.xml index file at the URL path “domain.com/sitemap.xml”. Shopify’s sitemap.xml index file will automatically create links to child sitemaps that contain URLs of the following page types:
Product Pages (sitemap_products_1.xml)
Collection Pages (sitemap_collections_1.xml)
Blog Posts (sitemap_blogs_1.xml)
Marketing Pages (sitemap_pages_1.xml)
This sitemap.xml file will dynamically update as new pages are added/removed from to the site. Generally, the Shopify sitemap.xml is good to go out of the box and doesn’t need to be adjusted.
One thing to be aware of is that Shopify will include any published pages in the sitemap.xml file. The most common issue we see is that legacy pages that are published but no longer linked to on the site get included in the sitemap.xml file. It’s worth crawling your sitemap.xml to find any instances of published pages that are included in the sitemap but are not important for search engines to crawl.
Adding the “noindex” tag
While you cannot adjust the robots.txt, Shopify does allow you to add the “noindex” tag. You can exclude a specific page from the index by adding the following code to your theme.liquid file.
As well, if you want to exclude an entire template, you can use this code:
Redirects
Shopify does allow you to implement redirects out-of-the-box, which is great. You can use this for consolidating old/expired pages or any other content that no longer exists. You can do this by going to:
Online Store
Navigation
URL Redirects
The big thing to keep in mind is that you will need to delete a page before you can implement a redirect on Shopify. This means that you’ll want to be really sure you’re not going to use the page in the future. To make this process a little less stressful, we recommend implementing the “Rewind Backups” app.
Log files
As of now, Shopify does not allow you to access log files directly through the platform. This has been confirmed by Shopify support.
Fast Simon implementation
Fast Simon is an enterprise solution that adds robust personalization features to your Shopify store, and is becoming increasingly popular. If your Shopify site is utilizing the Fast Simon technology, you’ll want to be sure that you’re taking steps to adjust any potential indexing issues from an improper implementation.
Confirm that Fast Simon is pre-rendering your website’s content so that Google doesn’t run into crawling and indexing issues. This will give Googlebot a server-side, rendered version of your site that will make it easier for it to interpret the content. For more details, you can read our case study here.
Structured data
Product structured data
Overall, Shopify does a pretty good job with structured data. Many Shopify themes should contain “Product” markup out-of-the-box that provides Google with key information such as your product’s name, description, price etc. This is probably the highest priority structured data to have on any e-commerce site, so it’s great that many themes do this for you.
Shopify sites might also benefit from expanding the Product structured data to collections pages as well. This involves adding the Product structured data to define each individual product link in a product listing page. The good folks at Distilled recommend including this structured data on category pages.
Article structured data
As well, if you use Shopify’s blog functionality, you should use “Article” structured data. This is a fantastic schema type that lets Google know that your blog content is more editorial in nature. Of all of the informational content schema, “Article” seems to be the one that Google may prefer since that’s what’s referenced in their official documentation. However, “BlogPosting” schema is also another type of structured data you could add to your Shopify blog
BreadcrumbList structured data
One addition that we routinely add to Shopify sites are breadcrumb internal links with BreadcrumbList structured data. We believe breadcrumbs are crucial to any e-commerce site, as they provide users with easy-to-use internal links that indicate where they’re at within the hierarchy of a website. As well, these breadcrumbs can help Google better understand the website’s structure. We typically suggest adding site breadcrumbs to Shopify sites and marking those up with BreadcrumbList structured data to help Google better understand those internal links.
Implementing structured data on Shopify
If you want to implement structured data and have a developer on hand, it can be good to have them add the above structured data types. This ensures that these schema elements will always be present on your site.
However, if your development resources are more limited, we find that Schema App Total Schema Markup is a great option. This will incorporate structured data types such as Product and BlogPosting schema on the proper pages of the site. As well, it will even add OfferCatalog schema to mark up every single product within a category page. Their support is also fantastic as they’re team helps you with any technical issues you might encounter.
Improving Shopify site speed
One of the biggest complaints we hear about Shopify is that it suffers from slower speeds. However, compared to other e-commerce platforms, we find that Shopify performs quite well. Out of the box, Shopify uses the Fastly CDN and leverages browser caching which gives you a solid performance foundation. In the past, we’ve actually benchmarked the average speed metrics of 400+ Shopify sites. Below are the average performance metrics of the Shopify sites we tested in our dataset.
First Contentful Paint: 3.8 seconds
Time To Interactive: 22.1 seconds
Total Page Size: 4.41 MB
Total Image Assets: 2.1 MB
Requests: 171
In terms of improving performance, below are the things we’ll generally advise our clients to do:
Manually resize and compress large images on high priority pages
Migrate tracking codes to Google Tag Manager
Keyword research
Performing keyword research for Shopify stores will be very similar to the research you would perform for other e-commerce stores.
Some general ways to generate keywords are:
Export your keyword data from Google AdWords. Track and optimize for those that generate the most revenue for the site.
Research your AdWords keywords that have high conversion rates. Even if the volume is lower, a high conversion rate indicates that this keyword is more transactional.
Review the keywords the site currently gets clicks/impressions for in Google Search Console.
Research your high priority keywords and generate new ideas using Moz’s Keyword Explorer.
Run your competitors through tools like Ahrefs. Using the “Content Gap” report, you can find keyword opportunities where competitor sites are ranking but yours is not.
If you have keywords that use similar modifiers, you can use MergeWords to automatically generate a large variety of keyword variations.
Keyword optimization
Similar to Yoast SEO, Shopify does allow you to optimize key elements such as your title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs. Where possible, you should be using your target keywords in these elements.
To adjust these elements, you simply need to navigate to the page you wish to adjust and scroll down to “Search Engine Listing Preview”:
Adding content to product pages
If you decide that each individual product should be indexed, ideally you’ll want to add unique content to each page. Initially, your Shopify products may not have unique on-page content associated with them. This is a common issue for Shopify stores, as oftentimes the same descriptions are used across multiple products or no descriptions are present. Adding product descriptions with on-page best practices will give your products the best chance of ranking in the SERPs.
However, we understand that it’s time-consuming to create unique content for every product that you offer. With clients in the past, we’ve taken a targeted approach as to which products to optimize first. We like to use the “Sales By Product” report which can help prioritize which are the most important products to start adding content to. You can find this report in Analytics > Dashboard > Top Products By Units Sold.
By taking this approach, we can quickly identify some of the highest priority pages in the store to optimize. We can then work with a copywriter to start creating content for each individual product. Also, keep in mind that your product descriptions should always be written from a user-focused view. Writing about the features of the product they care about the most will give your site the best chance at improving both conversions and SEO.
Shopify blog
Shopify does include the ability to create a blog, but we often see this missing from a large number of Shopify stores. It makes sense, as revenue is the primary goal of an e-commerce site, so the initial build of the site is product-focused.
However, we live in an era where it’s getting harder and harder to rank product pages in Google. For instance, the below screenshot illustrates the top 3 organic results for the term “cloth diapers”:
While many would assume that this is primarily a transactional query, we’re seeing Google is ranking two articles and a single product listing page in the top three results. This is just one instance of a major trend we’ve seen where Google is starting to prefer to rank more informational content above transactional.
By excluding a blog from a Shopify store, we think this results in a huge missed opportunity for many businesses. The inclusion of a blog allows you to have a natural place where you can create this informational content. If you’re seeing that Google is ranking more blog/article types of content for the keywords mapped to your Shopify store, your best bet is to go out and create that content yourself.
If you run a Shopify store (or any e-commerce site), we would urge you to take the following few steps:
Identify your highest priority keywords
Manually perform a Google query for each one
Make note of the types of content Google is ranking on the first page. Is it primarily informational, transactional, or a mix of both?
If you’re seeing primarily mixed or informational content, evaluate your own content to see if you have any that matches the user intent. If so, improve the quality and optimize.
If you do not have this content, consider creating new blog content around informational topics that seems to fulfill the user intent
As an example, we have a client that was interested in ranking for the term “CRM software,” an extremely competitive keyword. When analyzing the SERPs, we found that Google was ranking primarily informational pages about “What Is CRM Software?” Since they only had a product page that highlighted their specific CRM, we suggested the client create a more informational page that talked generally about what CRM software is and the benefits it provides. After creating and optimizing the page, we soon saw a significant increase in organic traffic (credit to Ally Mickler):
The issue that we see on many Shopify sites is that there is very little focus on informational pages despite the fact that those perform well in the search engines. Most Shopify sites should be using the blogging platform, as this will provide an avenue to create informational content that will result in organic traffic and revenue.
Apps
Similar to WordPress’s plugins, Shopify offers “Apps” that allow you to add advanced functionality to your site without having to manually adjust the code. However, unlike WordPress, most of the Shopify Apps you’ll find are paid. This will require either a one-time or monthly fee.
Shopify apps for SEO
While your best bet is likely teaming up with a developer who's comfortable with Shopify, here are some Shopify apps that can help improve the SEO of your site.
Crush.pics: A great automated way of compressing large image files. Crucial for most Shopify sites as many of these sites are heavily image-based.
Schema App Total Schema Markup: This app may be used if you do not have a Shopify developer who is able to add custom structured data to your site.
Smart SEO: An app that can add meta tags, alt tags, & JSON-LD
Yotpo Reviews: This app can help you add product reviews to your site, making your content eligible for rich review stars in the SERPs.
Rewind Backups: Creates backups of your site. Great to implement before making development changes or adding redirects.
Is Yoast SEO available for Shopify?
Yoast SEO is exclusively a WordPress plugin. There is currently no Yoast SEO Shopify App.
Limiting your Shopify apps
Similar to WordPress plugins, Shopify apps will inject additional code onto your site. This means that adding a large number of apps can slow down the site. Shopify sites are especially susceptible to bloat, as many apps are focused on improving conversions. Often times, these apps will add more JavaScript and CSS files which can hurt page load times. You’ll want to be sure that you regularly audit the apps you’re using and remove any that are not adding value or being utilized by the site.
Client results
We’ve seen pretty good success in our clients that use Shopify stores. Below you can find some of the results we’ve been able to achieve for them. However, please note that these case studies do not just include the recommendations above. For these clients, we have used a combination of some of the recommendations outlined above as well as other SEO initiatives.
In one example, we worked with a Shopify store that was interested in ranking for very competitive terms surrounding the main product their store focused on. We evaluated their top performing products in the “Sales by product” report. This resulted in a large effort to work with the client to add new content to their product pages as they were not initially optimized. This combined with other initiatives has helped improve their first page rankings by 113 keywords (credit to Jennifer Wright & LaRhonda Sparrow).
In another instance, a client came to us with an issue that they were not ranking for their branded keywords. Instead, third-party retailers that also carried their products were often outranking them. We worked with them to adjust their internal linking structure to point to the canonical pages instead of the duplicate pages created by Shopify. We also optimized their content to better utilize the branded terminology on relevant pages. As a result, they’ve seen a nice increase in overall rankings in just several months time.
Moving forward
As Shopify usage continues to grow, it will be increasingly important to understand the SEO implications that come with the platform. Hopefully, this guide has provided you with additional knowledge that will help make your Shopify store stronger in the search engines. If you’re interested in learning more about Shopify, you can also check out our Shopify SEO Learning Center.
