Congratulations on launching your new Shopify store! Now that you have made the first steps to building your brand, it’s time to focus on one crucial aspect of your success—getting found by your target audience. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is key to improving your store’s visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs) and driving organic traffic to your website. 

When SEO tactics are used effectively you will see improvements in search rankings, and increased website traffic. The goal behind improving and establishing strong SEO practices is to maintain success in driving traffic to your site. 

Today, we will explore five essential tactics that you can implement right now to secure long-term SEO and success driving traffic to your website. These tactics include optimizing your site structure and navigation, blogs, page speed, titles, and meta tags. Each of these tactics requires minimal effort. We’ll even provide tools to help you optimize your site.  

By following these strategies, you’ll get your store on the right track to improve your online presence and discovery and secure your long-term SEO success. 

Site Structure & Navigation Organization:

Let's start with the basics. One of the most important components of an online store is how it is structured. Site structure and user-friendly navigation are crucial for both visitors and search engines. So, ensure your site is clear and intuitive to make it easy for search engines to crawl and index your pages.

You don't want dead links or pages not placed properly within categories. The better organized your site is, the better search engines can categorize it. This also has the added benefit of helping customers navigate through. We have all been to a website with horrible navigation and confusing structure. It is not a good feeling for a customer and reflects poorly on your brand. 

Do yourself a favor and use organized categories, subcategories, and internal linking to guide users and search engines. Your customers and organic growth with thank you in the long run. If you start now, you will have an easier time building off the structure and maintaining the organization.

Check out Sitemapper Pro to help your customers find what they are looking for. List all of your products on one easy-to-navigate page.

Blog Post Creation:

Creating a blog section for your Shopify store is a powerful strategy to boost your online visibility. If done correctly, you can attract more customers, and when optimized just right, you can reach a wider audience. 

You can optimize your blogs by focusing on the following:

• Targeted keywords & topics
• Compelling content
• Internal linking
• Optimized URL structure
• Regular publishing schedule

Some of these optimization tactics will require research. However, the results will be worth the effort you put into it. Be sure to choose topics your customer base will appreciate and engage with, not just generic posts everyone else has already covered. Implementing these tactics will help to establish your store as an authoritative source of information and improve your rankings and performance. 

Check out Blog Pilot for an automated and efficient way of generating engaging blog content. Set it, and forget it.

Page Speed Optimization:

Page speed optimization goes hand and hand with site structure. Nobody wants to get onto a site that takes forever to load. It’s a very detouring experience and harms your rankings. Ensure you improve your website’s landing speed to improve those experiences and increase your ranks.

Keep in mind that images and videos play a critical role in site speed. If your site is running slow, you might want to do the following:

• Compress images
• Compress or convert videos
• Enable browser caching
• Minify CSS and JavaScript

Doing these things will help reduce page load times and make your site feel more professional. 

If you are still having issues check out Smart SEO. It contains tools to help you fully optimize your site.

Title & Meta Tag Optimization:

Optimizations aren’t limited to files and pages, it also applies to your titles and meta tags. If you aren’t familiar with meta tags, they are HTML tags that provide search engines and other clients with additional information about your page. If you aren’t already using them you should start now. Ensure that each page on your site has a unique and descriptive title tag. These title tags are also HTML elements that define the title of your webpage and appear as a clickable headline in search engines.

Keywords are your best friend when creating these titles and meta tags. Be sure to incorporate relevant keywords in your titles and meta descriptions keeping them concise yet informative. Use your meta descriptions to entice customers to click through your store. Your meta descriptions should be similar to the title tag but more descriptive and engaging. 

Check out Optim for a fast and easy way of applying titles and meta descriptions to your site.

Image Optimization:

Finally, ensure that your product images are optimized to improve SEO. You’re bound to have hundreds of product images scattered around your site. This will impact how well your site runs, so making sure they are properly compressed is crucial. Compressed images don’t always have to be lower quality. With the right tools, you can reduce file sizes without compromising quality. 

Additionally, rename image files with descriptive names that include relevant keywords, and use alt tags to provide search engines with contextual information about the images. This will help massively boost search engine rankings. Alt tags also assist visually impaired users who rely on screen readers. Ensuring your images are fully optimized and labeled is all-around beneficial for everyone involved.

Check out Crush to increase the speed of your site and boost image SEO. Set parameters and have your images compressed automatically.

Wrap up:

By implementing these five SEO tactics—site & navigation organization, page speed optimization, title & meta tag optimization, blog creation, and image optimization, you can give your Shopify a competitive edge in the online marketplace. Laying the groundwork for future expansions and additions to your store will also prove beneficial when you don’t have to go back and optimize retroactively.

Investing time and effort into SEO will pay off in the long run, helping to build a sustainable organic traffic avenue and increase conversions as you build a strong online presence. Remember to consistently iterate and optimize your site as you continue to grow. You’ll be happy you did.