Emma Welsby

12/01/2022

Are you using Google Analytics to measure your Shopify store success? The analytics that Shopify provides is average at best, if you want the real deal - here is how to do it:

Set up Google Analytics on your online Shopify store.

04/01/2022

Happy new year people! I hope you had a restful one. This is the year to get your Shopify SEO going in order to get you great rankings for keywords in Google and get your traffic levels up. Let's make some $$$!
Today I'm talking about keyword competitiveness. If you've just started out and are thinking 'Yeah, lets rank for the keyword shoes' or any other generics - you're going to be waiting a LONG time to show for such a competitive keyword. I'm talking maybe years. When you do keyword research to figure out which keywords people search for that are relevant to your business and would be great for you to show for - you also need to factor in what we call 'Keyword competitiveness'. Both Google Ads keyword planner tool and another tool we use called Wordtracker to do keyword research show keyword competitiveness. Check out the screenshot below and you will see what I mean.

It's not all doom and gloom - you can still go for keywords relevant to your business, but pick ones which are less competitive. This is not to say you will never rank for something crazy competitive, but start out with short and medium term goals so you can get some traffic in first.

17/12/2021

Understand where your traffic and sales are coming from! This Google Analytics report (Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels) is a way of seeing which channels are driving traffic to your website - is it from free search engine results (organic search in this graph) or is it referral traffic coming form another site or social media? Which one is driving your traffic and revenue the best? If you haven't got Google Analytics already then you can get it here http://www.google.com/analytics/ - don't forget to install it on your Shopify store so it talks to each other in order to collect your data.

16/12/2021

What do you struggle with most with your Shopify store? Do you wish you had more visitors or more revenue or both?! Share your problems in the comments below! We are here to help :)

14/12/2021

🛑 Do your collection pages have no content on them? 🛑 Your collection pages can rank in Google for keywords - for example, if you had a clothing store and you had a collection called 'Mens Shoes' but the collection page has no collection description on it, you are missing out on a huge opportunity to add keywords to your page. By adding keyword rich content, Google can understand the relevance of the page (what it is about) and then it can decide where you should rank for your relevant keywords in Google. Not sure what your keywords should be? Use this keyword research tool here

The best FREE alternative to the Keyword Planner. Use Wordtracker to reveal 1000s of profitable longtail keywords with up to 10,000 results per search

10/12/2021

I posted about signing up and starting to use Google Search Console yesterday because it tells you which keywords in Google that your website is showing for, where the keywords rank in Google and how much traffic you are getting from those keywords. Why this is useful? Because if you have keywords sitting in position 5-10 at the bottom of page one, with a few tweaks on the page, you could get them in positions 1-5 and get more traffic!

Here is a screenshot of what this actually looks like in practice inside a Google Search Console account. You can see where the keywords appear (where it says 'keyword here' - I've put this over the actual keywords that was showing so you don't know what I'm ranking highly for 😉 ) and you can see the data I can see for those keywords under the arrows.

This is 'Clicks', 'Impressions' (number of times shown in the search engine but not clicked), 'CTR' which means click through rate (3% is good!) and 'Position' (where you rank in Google!)

If you haven't got Google Console yet....you need it like yesterday! You can get it here: https://search.google.com/search-console/about

09/12/2021

Are you using Google Search Console? This free tool gives you data on which keywords are driving traffic to your website from the Google search engine. It shows you how many impressions your website has had (how many times it was shown in the search engine when someone ran a search), how many clicks you got and where you rank for that keyword. If you haven't already got one, sign up to get your account for free here https://search.google.com/search-console/about
If you need help in setting up you can watch this video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZq17GkMW4Q

08/12/2021

When you are writing content either in your products, collection pages or blog posts it's important how you code up your headings and paragraphs. Google sees h1's (text coded up as a header) more important than paragraph text. This is because it sees headers (or section titles) as showing more relevance about what a page is about than it does the paragraph text. This means that if you have a title in your content, make sure you highlight the text and select either H1, H2, H3 etc. You do this by highlighting the text, and then clicking the 'A' with an arrow drop down as you can see in the image below. When you are writing paragraphs make sure you have 'paragraph' selected.

07/12/2021

Have you made a keyword map for your website? This should be the backbone of your SEO strategy. By assigning keywords to your home page, collection, product pages and blog posts, you can focus on which page should be ranking for which keyword. If you don't have a plan, you can end up with keyword cannibalization problems (when you have identical or similar keywords spread throughout multiple pages on your website). This is a great video (with text transcribe if you can't watch it now!) which explains how to make a rock solid keyword map.

You've got content on your site that doesn't intentionally target any keyword. But how do you identify those opportunities and, most importantly, capitalize on them? In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand illustrates the process of creating your own content-to-keyword map to discover where to optimize,....

06/12/2021

Are you wondering how many people search for the keywords you are trying to optimise for? This wordtracker tool will allow you to do keyword research to find out which keywords are worth optimising for. All your keyword targeting should be data driven, not guess work and therefore this tool is really handy! Simply visit this URL, put in your keyword that you are interested in, make sure your territory is set to the country you are wanting to show in, and look at the volumn column - this is how many people are searching for your keyword! 👌

The best FREE alternative to the Keyword Planner. Use Wordtracker to reveal 1000s of profitable longtail keywords with up to 10,000 results per search

03/12/2021

Your page title, or otherwise known as your 'Title tag' is the heaviest weighted ranking factor you have. It is one of the many factors that search engines such as Google look at to decide where your pages should show for which keywords in their search engine. It is therefore important to make sure that you have your keywords included on your home page, collection pages and product page title tag fields. You can find these fields in Shopify by doing this:

Home page - Click 'Online Store' and then 'Preferences' and fill out the 'Home page title' field

Collections & Products - Open up your collection page in the back end of Shopify, scroll down the and page title field is at the bottom (as per the image on this post)

We will be covering how to choose which keywords to put in there on another post as that is another topic entirely, but as a starting point you can put in keywords that make sense to the page you are looking at.

For example, if you run a clothing Shopify store your home page title could be 'Women & Mens Clothing - [Insert Your Brand Name]'.
Your dresses collection page could be something like 'Womens Dresses - [Insert Your Brand Name]'
Your product page for your polka dot dress could be something like 'Polka Dot Dress - [Insert Your Brand Name]'

If you've got any questions simply comment below, good luck!

03/12/2021

Here is a great blog post by Shopify which is an SEO checklist to make sure you have everything in place that you need to help you get free traffic to your store. Be sure to take a look!

Ready to invest in SEO? We’re sharing an easy-to-follow SEO checklist for new ecommerce entrepreneurs. Learn to set your store up for success.