Shopify SEO Services

What is Included in our Managed Shopify SEO Services

When discussing search engine optimization, any improvement made to your Shopify storefront with the intention of increasing search ranking will fit within one of three categories: technical, on-page, or off-page. These are industry-recognized categories of search engine optimization, so it is valuable to understand each of them to better understand what your Shopify SEO team is working on.

Technical Shopify SEO Services

Most technical SEO improvements in Shopify require the assistance of an ecommerce developer familiar with the Shopify platform.

Here are some common aspects of technical SEO services for Shopify:

• Improving page speed to help you pass Google's Core Web Vitals.
• Fixing issues with ecommerce security, such as mixed content.
• Fixing coverage issues reported in Google Search Console.
• Improving the usability of your website on mobile and tablet devices.
• Implementing additional structured data so search engines better understand the content on your product pages and content pages.
• Improving Open Graph tags to help improve the appearance of your website and product pages in social media.
• Fixing issues reported by SEO audits or other ecommerce SEO scanning tools.

As a full-service digital agency specializing in Shopify, we have our own in-house team of ecommerce developers and digital marketers who work together to complete any necessary technical SEO improvements to your Shopify ecommerce website.

On-Page Shopify SEO Services

Most on-page SEO improvements in Shopify require the assistance of SEO content writers. While having a passion for content writing is helpful, much more is required to writing beneficial web copy and product descriptions. For instance, when building out effective product descriptions or website content you must understand the concepts of content silos, latent semantic indexing, keyword research, gap analysis, competitive metrics, and much more!

Here are some common aspects of on-page Shopify SEO services:

• Implementing SEO content silos to create highly relevant sections within your ecommerce website.
• Writing unique content for category, product, and landing pages that hasn't been spun through AI tools.
• Building out supporting content around your parent topics to establish authority.
• Performing keyword research to understand what you should be writing about.
• Adding a blog to your ecommerce store to help organize supporting content.
• Reviewing keyword frequency and latent semantic indexing.
• Optimizing the product and category URLs to be SEO-friendly.
• Planning out frequently asked questions to add into structured data snippets.
• Implementing an internal linking structure to prevent orphaned pages.
• Adding original images to the page content to break up text and provide value.
• Implementing outbound links to authority websites that support your content or opinions.
• Going through Google Search Console to understand the queries bringing in traffic.
• Improving the readability of your content through better typography or chunking it out.
• Working on call to actions and other conversion-related improvements to reduce bounces.
• Prioritizing helpful page content above the fold of the website on mobile.
• Improving page titles, meta descriptions, alt tags, and heading tags.

As you can see from those examples, the process of on-page search engine optimization for Shopify is more involved than writing a few paragraphs and tweaking some meta descriptions. You must approach on-page Shopify SEO in an organized manner.

For instance, the on-page optimization process we follow starts with a thorough review of your Shopify store to determine your starting point. From there, we compare your ecommerce website to other competitors to better understand what gaps you have in content writing and search rankings. This allows us to assemble a list of suggestions based on what will provide the fastest return on investment.

You really must pay attention to the return on investment when working through on-page Shopify search engine optimization. For instance, writing quality meta descriptions is often an overvalued service within on-page Shopify SEO. We often work on Shopify SEO projects with hundreds of categories and thousands of product pages. It simply isn't economical to write a high-quality meta description for thousands of store pages because you'd be looking at potentially spending hundreds of hours of billable time that would never see an appropriate return on investment. When managing your Shopify SEO services, we'll keep the concept of ROI in mind and provide suggestions that will benefit your bottom line.

Off-Page Shopify SEO Tactics

The most overlooked aspects of search engine optimization for Shopify stores are off-page ranking factors. When discussing off-page SEO for Shopify, we are referring to how your ecommerce store is perceived by search engines based on the quality of your backlink profile.

Your backlink profile is simply the collection of websites and web pages that link back to your Shopify ecommerce website. It is important to always maintain a healthy backlink profile for your Shopify store. You can work toward a healthy backlink profile by keeping the following link building concepts in mind:

• Build backlinks from relevant websites within your ecommerce niche.
• Focus on slowly building your backlink profile over months and years.
• Stay away from spam websites and low-quality PBNs as backlink opportunities.
• Maintain more backlinks with anchor texts of your business name or URL versus focus keywords.
• Try to build more low-authority backlinks than medium or high-authority backlinks.

To build out a backlink profile for your Shopify ecommerce website, you will want to choose white-hat SEO services that don't violate Google's terms of service. Here are some great ways to go about white-hat link building in a Shopify store:

• Create an account with HARO and respond to questions related to your ecommerce industry. This is often referred to as reporter outreach or HARO outreach.
• Reach out to blog authors in your niche to ask about guest posting opportunities. This is often referred to as guest post outreach.
• Take an active interest in promoting your Shopify business in social media campaigns. This is often referred to as social media management, which creates social citations.
• Write longform blog articles that provide expert advice on your products. This is often referred to as the skyscraper method to creating a bigger, better article.
• Add your Shopify business to any relevant directories you can find online. This is commonly referred to as NAP citations, citation building or citation management.

If you are interested in being more aggressive with your link building, you can choose grey-hat to black-hat link building schemes which carry much more risk, even when implemented with caution. These include the following link building methods:

• Paying for guest posts or niche edits on third-party websites.
• Purchasing backlinks from PBNs, which are known as Private Blog Networks.

Most off-page Shopify SEO improvements require the assistance of highly skilled link builders and relationship managers.

The Types of Shopify SEO Campaigns We Manage

When we get hired to perform technical, on-page, and off-page search engine optimization on Shopify storefronts it is often by local businesses running small ecommerce stores, or large corporations running enterprise ecommerce storefronts. Let's discuss how we help each of these types of ecommerce businesses improve their Shopify search rankings.

Enterprise Shopify SEO Services

While less common than small business Shopify SEO, we are often approached to handle enterprise-level SEO campaigns for ecommerce storefronts. This is simply a search engine optimization service for a Shopify website with hundreds of highly-competitive target keywords, or thousands of product pages that need to be managed, or extremely complex and expensive link building requirements.

A perfect example of an enterprise-level Shopify SEO campaign would be our own website, if it were built in Shopify. We maintain a website with more than 10,000 web pages targeting incredibly competitive keywords with an extensive white-hat focused backlink profile building. This type of complexity takes months to years of effort, so don't look at an enterprise Shopify SEO campaign as something you turn on and off every few months as budgets or priorities shift.

There are some key differences to handling enterprise Shopify SEO campaigns. For instance, enterprise SEO for Shopify typically involves these services:

• Targeting hundreds of highly competitive search phrases.
• Maintaining thousands of category or product pages in a complex website.
• Developing dynamic functionality to help improve ecommerce SEO.
• Managing extensive link building campaign budgets.

The average cost for enterprise SEO campaigns can range from $4,000 to $8,000 each month, based on the competitiveness of your industry, the depth of development work we'll be handling, and the extent of your link building requirements. For enterprises with highly aggressive link building requirements, it wouldn't be abnormal to see a monthly quote in the $10,000 to $20,000 range.

Shopify SEO Services for Small Businesses

We are often tasked with helping Shopify ecommerce businesses increase their online sales by helping them show up higher in search results. We typically must go up against broad competitors such as Amazon, eBay, and Etsy when performing ecommerce SEO in Shopify, not to mention the major online stores within specific industries.

As previously mentioned, it is critical to keep ROI in mind while managing a search engine optimization campaign. If you have thousands of Shopify products, it simply doesn't make sense to have our SEO team be paid to improve product descriptions, meta descriptions, page titles and other on-site factors on every single page. You would never see a return on investment if you paid us for that work. We can provide you basic training so your own internal or external staff can perform those Shopify SEO services for you.

To start a Shopify SEO campaign, we'd go through all of our previously mentioned technical, on-page, and off-page SEO services. This includes ecommerce SEO services such as:

• Building out ecommerce silos to provide better relevancy.
• Guiding you toward improving product and category descriptions.
• Breaking up category content to be above and below the Shopify product output.
• Improving product structured data and open graph tags.
• Adjusting product page layouts to include trust factors and social proof.
• Fixing Shopify page speed and usability issues to reduce bounce rates.
• Improving user experience within the Shopify page layouts.

The average cost for Shopify SEO campaigns can range from $1,200 to $4,000 each month. This is based on the estimated competition, workload, product data, and backlink requirements for your Shopify website. The cost can increase if you have higher expectations or have a more aggressive link building plan.

How We Measure Shopify SEO Results

Please understand it is not a good idea to expect or anticipate drastic improvement to your Shopify search rankings within the first few months of an ecommerce SEO service. Instead, you should view a Shopify SEO service as a long-term investment.

We are not a cheap Shopify SEO service. If you are looking for someone to provide guarantees of #1 Shopify search placements, which Google tells you not to trust, then look elsewhere. We are a professional Shopify SEO service and are only interested in onboarding and helping those ecommerce businesses who understand results take time.

If you've been struggling to get the Shopify search rankings you need, it isn't because a special switch hasn't been flipped yet. Google has reviewed your entire website presence, your category / product pages, your backlink profile, and your website's history to determine where you should be placed in search results. The problem is they simply haven't been given what they need to value your Shopify store as a first-page search result.

It is important to know how to gauge success in the early stages of Shopify SEO. You shouldn't be looking at Google Analytics to see traffic improvements in the first few months of an SEO service for your Shopify website. The best indicator for early success in a Shopify SEO campaign is looking for changes in the Search Engine Results Pages, or SERPs.

We'll start by working to get your Shopify store into the top 100 results, or from page 8 to page 4, or possibly from page 2 to page 1. You won't find measurable traffic improvements in Google Analytics until you get into the first page of search results for your ecommerce keywords.

That said, we do encounter early success in some Shopify SEO projects and are able to get traffic improvements in the first couple of months. However, this shouldn't be expected and if it happens you should instead view it as good fortune.

Why Choose WebCitz to Manage Your Shopify SEO

You should choose our expert Shopify SEO services because you feel confident we are the right team for your ecommerce business. Here are some of the reasons we suggest considering:

• We have been in business since 2004, which means we have more than 18 years of experience.
• Our primary source for leads and new client development is our own digital marketing success.
• You likely found our website after doing a Google search for a Shopify SEO service we offer.
• We do not outsource technical or on-site Shopify SEO services since we have our own in-house team of ecommerce marketers.
• If you call us during regular business hours, you'll likely be able to reach us within the first few rings.
• We have extensive experience marketing Shopify storefronts.