NARRATOR: When you're trying to sell online, you have an important problem to solve-- how do you get customers to find your store? People who find your online store in a search engine are probably looking for products like yours, so they're more likely to buy something. You can use search engine optimization, or SEO, to improve the search engine ranking for your store and help customers find your products. This means taking steps in your Shopify admin to help search engines understand your store and trust your content and increase the chances that your store populates when potential customers search the web.
Subscribe now for upcoming videos with step-by-step instructions on optimizing your store's SEO. For now, a quick overview outlining multiple ways to optimize your store's SEO. One, consider adding keywords to your Shopify store. Keywords should match typical search queries that people enter in search engines. For example, a person might search for blue shoes in Canada.
The keywords in this search would be "blue shoes" and "Canada." To make your store appear higher in search results, you should try to find out which keywords your customers might use to find your products, and then make sure to use those keywords when you're writing product descriptions and other content for your store. Find ways to use keywords in the following four places-- page titles, image Alt text, meta descriptions, page content.
Now, a little more about how to add keywords in those places. Page titles. Search engines compare the title tag with your page content to determine whether the page title matches what the page is about. Meta descriptions. A meta description is a text that is shown in search engine results after the title tag. You can set the meta description for web pages, product pages, collection pages, and blog posts in Shopify.
Alt text. Search engines can read the text in your content but can't read the images. You can use descriptive alternative text to help search engines find your content. Alt text is also an important accessibility feature for people who have visual impairments. A page's body content. When you write content for a product or a collection description, web page, or blog post, use readable, unique phrases that include some of your keywords.
Two, another SEO strategy is optimizing the site structure for your online store. In general, when you're selling with a Shopify online store, you don't need to worry about your site structure because Shopify has SEO features built in. However, you can do a few things yourself to optimize your site structure for search engines. Optimize your online store menus. See the video link above to learn more about best practices with menus.
Use descriptive file names for your images. Before you upload your images to Shopify, rename the files to something describing the image. Search engines won't understand what the image is unless you tell it. Be sure to edit the image's file name before you upload it to Shopify. Use descriptive link text for internal links. You can link to different parts of your site when you write body content for a page.
The text in the link should describe the page that you're linking to because search engines try to match the link with the page. For example, this blog post links to a yoga mat product. Instead of highlighting the entire sentence to a link, highlight yoga mat because that text describes the content on the product page. Three, another SEO strategy is submitting your store sitemap to Google.
A sitemap is a list of all the pages on your website that a customer could navigate to, starting from your home page. Submitting your store sitemap to Google Search Console helps Google find and index valuable pages on your site. This means that your store populates in Google search results, potentially bringing in more customers. Before you submit your sitemap, you must first verify your site with Google to ensure you are the correct owner.
Check out the videos linked below to see step-by-step instructions on submitting a sitemap and verifying your website with Google. Four, hide a particular page from search engines. Search engines, like Google, constantly crawl the internet in search of new data. A file called robots.txt is a text file that tells search engines what pages of your site to index.
The text file also blocks page content that might otherwise reduce the effectiveness of your SEO strategy. Although you can't edit the content of your store's robots.txt file, you can still hide pages that aren't included in the file. See the link in the description for more details on hiding pages. For frequently asked questions about SEO, check out the link in the description.
Subscribe now for upcoming videos on how to optimize your store's SEO with step-by-step instructions. If you still have questions, comment below or contact the Shopify support team directly.
