The Expert's Guide to Digital Marketing for Shopify

What now?

So you've got your business a great website. You're all set to start selling. What now? Well, like any business, you now need to get people to see your products. There are a few techniques which can be used via the internet for marketing your business, getting people to visit your site and making people aware that your are there - after all, how can they buy from you if they don't know that you exist? SEO and digital marketing are central to the success of your business online, so it is important to be well-informed on how to use these to your benefits, use the tools provided by Shopify and really give your business a boost.

According to sources, about 70% of website visitors come through ‘organic’ search results, and over 90% of searches online come through Google, so ranking in Google’s first page of search results is essential. It is far easier t o set up your website with a focus on SEO from the beginning than to try and optimise it later. By getting it right from the beginning you will create much less work in the long run. So how can you as a Shopifier ensure that you are set up and optimised to be found easily by searchers?

Shopify have already set up some functions to help you:

• Editable title tags, meta descriptions and URLs for your pages – Set the title tag (the title which appears in the search engine results) for pages, blog p termine what your page is about and needs to be under 70 characters, include keywords strong and make it easily readable.
• You also have 156 characters to write a brief description which will persuade people that they want to go to your site in your meta description – you can use this as a marketing message, but make sure that each page has a unique meta description. If you are a local company, make sure that you have your phone number included in the meta description and try to always include a clear call to action. If you use keywords in your description that match the keywords which were searched for they will be highlighted. This will give your description more relevance to the searcher and make them more likely to visit your sight – so think carefully about adding in keywords to your meta description.
• URLs should also be set to be as readable as possible. If for example you are linking to a page which is showing a handbag selection, your URL would be better off being – http://yoursite.com/handbags, than, for example – http://yoursite.com/jusUGIb6kjbkjb_=bkj6568H8

Some other URL creation tips include:

• Think about getting your keywords into your URL – it helps in giving people who have been sent a link by email or social media, know what to expect.
• Another reason to get keywords in there is because if there is no anchor text, the link will be used.
• The URL shows up in the search results, so if you can show the link to your page, it will seem more relevant and people are more likely to click on your link.
• Try to keep your URLs as short as possible. This isn’t anything to do with search engines, it’s just that it makes it easy for people to copy and paste, remember, or share – generally get to your site.
• You might want to leave out the small words in your URL – the ‘and’, ‘in’, ‘at’ and likewise – they aren’t needed to be able to get your point across.
• Be careful which punctuation marks you chose to include in your URL as they can break certain crawlers, browsers or proper parsing.
• Use hyphens and underscores to separate words and avoid using spaces – hyphens and underscores are much preferred.

These can be changed in the Search Engines section of your site.

• Editable ALT tags for all images, customizable image file names – To help your images come up in searches, you can attach tags to them. This text is then what Google will use to find your image so make sure that you use as specific words as possible –including keywords, but not too many tags. You can change this by hovering over the image and clicking the ALT link.
• You can also customise your image file names – make sure that the file name relates to the image, and, without making it too complicated, try to get some keywords in there too.
  
  Automatically generated sitemap.xml and robots.txt files - Shopify will automatically generate an xml sitemap for you. Sitemaps are important, because they can verify to Google and other search engines that your content is yours, and original. They are a quick way of your site communicating with the search engine, and alerting it of any changes, as well as ensuring that the content is indexed faster. You should register your sitemap with Google and Bing, and any other search engines that you feel is relevant

To register your sitemap with Google

1. Make sure that your sitemap is on your web server and you can access it through its URL.
2. Go to https://support.google.com/sites/answer/100283?hl=en and log in.
3. Go to ‘Crawl’ then ‘Sitemaps’.
4. Click on the red button called ‘Add/Test Sitemap’ and enter the URL of your sitemap and click ‘Submit Sitemap’.

And with Bing,

1. Make sure that your sitemap is on your web server and you can access it through its URL.
2. Go to http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/how-to-submit-sitemaps-82a15bd4 and log in.
3. Click on ‘Configure My Site’ and then ‘Sitemaps’.
4. In the ‘Submit a Sitemap’ box, enter your sitemap URL.
5. Click ‘Submit’.

Robots.txt files or robots exclusion protocol (REP) are text files which instruct web crawlers such as search engines how to crawl and index the content of a website. They should be placed at the top of the directory of your website, and Shopify will automatically generate these files for you. Robot.txt files will tell crawlers what pages they can ignore on your site giving you the best SEO results.

Automatically generated canonical URL tags (to stop duplicate content) – In a world where search engines hate duplicated content, this is a useful tool. Unfortunately, websites with a lot of similar products will often find that there is a certain amount of duplicate content, meaning that these websites get penalised.

You can add a canonical URL to a page if you don’t want it to be indexed by a search engine. If you already have the same information somewhere else, you can not only tell the search engine to ignore it, you can also tell it where the original content is – the page that you do want to be indexed.

In Shopify, add this between the <head> and </head> tags:

1. Go to the Edit HTML/CSS page
2. Open your theme.liquid file, and remove any lines which refer to <title>, meta name=”description” or rel=”canonical”, from before the closing </head> tag.
3. Paste the following on the line before the closing </head> tag: <title>
{{ page_title }}{% if current_tags %} – tagged “{{ current_tags | join: ‘, ‘ }}”{% endif %}
{% if current_page != 1 %} – Page {{ current_page }}
{% endif %}
{% unless page_title contains shop.name %} – {{ shop.name }}{% endunless %}
</title>
{% if page_description %}
<meta name=”description” content=”{{ page_description | escape }}” />
{% endif %}
<link rel=”canonical” href=”{{ canonical_url }}” />
4. A blogging platform – Regular and consistent blogging has a number of benefits both in terms of SEO and for your business in general:
   1. The regular addition of new content shows to the search engines that your website is living and breathing and this is what they want to see.
   2. It gives you the chance to add key keywords onto your sight in a natural way.
   3. It allows you to show off your knowledge and passion for your field, talk about your products in depth and show some personality behind the business – all factors which potential customers like to see, and what will make them buy from you and not a rival.
5. You can use it to link through to social media and engage with your customers and potential customers.

Even if you don’t consider yourself to be a good writer, if you are writing about your passion, this will shine through. Your blog doesn’t have to be perfectly written, they can be short and sweet, link to interesting (and relevant) stories that you have found on the web, or post a video.

Some ideas for blog posts include:

Company updates, your company history, focus on single products, industry news and opinion, information about how to use your products, answering frequently asked questions, anything else that you want!

You can use tags to put each blog post into a category, meaning that it is easier for people to find information. For example, if you are selling guitars, drum kits and saxophones, and you write a blog post about a new guitar which has hit the market, you can tag the blog with a ‘guitar’ tag. This will then create separate pages for all of your ‘guitar’ tagged blog posts. Make sure that you don’t go mad with the number of tags which you create, as each tag creates its own unique page – meaning that you will need to input a unique meta description and title to each page to prevent duplicate content. Try to keep it to a maximum of 10 tags.

• Content Management (CMS) and Site Structure – Structure your store with a number of landing pages, which allows you to optimise groups of products with specific keywords.
• You need to make sure that your site is structured in a way that is logical and easy to understand for your visitors. There is nothing more off-putting to a potential customer than not being able to find the information or product that they are after. The best way to structure your site is the pyramid structure – like this:

At the top, you would put your homepage, followed by your category pages, then the subcategory pages, and finally your product pages.

You can then create unique URLs to show this structure to the search engines. For example:

If you set up your website in this structure it makes it easier, not just for people, but also for search engine.

Redirect Feature – If you no longer stock a product or have an old page, redirect your customers through the redirect feature in the navigation tab in your site admin. Google hates to see this:

Go to the bottom of the page and fill in the boxes –

It is not only annoying for people to link through to an old page, it will almost certainly increase your bounce rate, and this in turn could send you tumbling down those all-important search rankings.

In addition to the tools provided by Shopify, there are some other things that you should be doing to optimise your site effectively:

• It is important to keep your product descriptions new and individual – don’t just copy and paste from the manufacturer descriptions or you will find yourself sliding down the search engine rankings. Try to keep them rich in keywords, explain to people what they probably want to know and give them something interesting to think about.
• You can also optimise your anchor text. This means that you use keywords in the link text, so instead of writing ‘To see our selection of embroidered cushions, click here’, you should write ‘see our embroidered cushions here’.
• Shopify can also link directly to Google Analytics, which will give you all of the analytic data that you might need. You can see what works and what doesn’t work and then adjust your site accordingly. Google Analytics can tell you where people are coming to your site from, how much revenue you are making from each traffic source, what mobile devices your site visitors are using, amongst other useful information. This will allow you to tweek and develop your site and your business to maximise its effect, and your business’s success.

1. Go to Google Analytics and create Google account or log in with your existing one.
2. In Analytics, go to Create New Account and fill in the appropriate information, agree to the terms and conditions, complete and allow it to send you your ‘Tracking code page’.
3. Copy the Tracking ID Code.
4. In Shopify, go to Preferences – General Settings in admin.
5. Find the Google Analytics box near the bottom of the page and paste the ID code here.
6. Go back to your Google Analytics account, Admin – Profile Settings – E-Commerce Settings and say ‘yes’.