Want to get more visitors and CUSTOMERS to your Shopify store?

In this video, search engine optimization expert Kai Davis is sharing his proven 5-step SEO strategy for Shopify ecommerce websites.

In our conversation, Kai Davis shares his recommendations for optimizing a Shopify site for search engines.

Kai Davis, founder of Double Your Ecommerce, is a seasoned expert in Shopify SEO and Growth Marketing. With over a decade of experience, he has helped over 100 Shopify merchants expand their businesses.

He emphasizes the importance of understanding your target audience and narrowing down the target market as much as possible. Kai suggests conducting keyword research using tools like Google Search Console, Keywords Everywhere, and Ahrefs.

We also talk about the importance of optimizing Shopify collection pages, targeting your homepage for a general search term and your brand name, and optimizing product pages with unique content and customer reviews.

Takeaways

• Understand your target audience and narrow down your target market as much as possible.

• Conduct keyword research using tools like Google Search Console, Keywords Everywhere, and Ahrefs.

• Optimize collection pages to target broad yet specific terms in the market.

• Target the homepage for a general term in the market and optimize it with relevant content.

• Prioritize product pages that have higher profit margins, high demand, or are ranking on the cusp for a keyword.

• Utilize customer reviews to add unique content and social proof to product pages.

• Consider incorporating video content, such as YouTube videos, into the SEO strategy.

Kai's general SEO strategy for an ecommerce (Shopify) website:

Step 1: Narrow down your audience

First, narrow down the part of your audience you’re focusing on as ideal customers in order to understand what they’re searching for.

Don’t worry about demographics for Shopify SEO. You’ll struggle to use info like “our best customers are women 35-65 with a second home” in SEO.

Instead, focus on understanding the problems your specific audience is experiencing that drive them to seek out solutions like yours.

For example, if you’re selling quilting supplies, it could be the desire to commemorate a family event or create a handmade gift. If you’re selling chocolate, it might be the desire to send a gift or an upcoming holiday as a purchasing nudge.

This kind of information helps you understand what your customers are searching for, how that aligns with your product, and what content to create.

Consider the difference in execution if you’re building collection pages for your products. If I tell you:

1. The person you want to reach is 35-60, female, loves travel, and owns two homes.

2. The person you want to reach is shopping for holiday-themed chocolate gift boxes for their relatives (e.g., father's day, mother's day)

The first gives you a vague idea of what keywords and terms to look into.

The second gives you a specific idea that aligns with a particular search intent: people looking for chocolate gift boxes for Father’s day.

Focusing on search intent rather than demographics ensures your SEO efforts are targeted and effective, aligning your content with what your audience is actively looking for.

Step 2: Keyword research

Focus on keywords that make sense for what your audience is searching for.

How can you identify which keywords to focus on? There are a few processes. I’m going to talk about processes first and then suggest tools, some free and some paid.

My favorite processes for keyword research:

1. Look at the keywords your pages are currently ranking for. Identify keyword opportunities to optimize pages or create new pages.

2. Look at keyword suggestions and ideas while searching. That helps you identify new (sometimes more specific) keywords to target.

3. Look at the keywords your competitors are ranking for, and get ideas on the content and keywords that make sense for your niche

When I do keyword research for my clients, I’m doing a combination of these three. The exact process differs based on my client’s strategy and their niche, audience, and products.

But often the process looks like:

• Jumping into the keyword data in a tool

• Searching around in Google as if I were part of my customers’ audience

• Identifying relevant + specific keywords with some amount of search volume

• Making an action plan of ‘optimize this page for this keyword in these ways’

How can you do this keyword research yourself? I’ll tell you the tools to use.

• Google Search Console - It’s free and a great tool you should be running. The performance report in Search Console will tell you the specific keywords that your pages are ranking for and the amount of impressions that keyword gets.

• Keywords Everywhere - This is a freemium Chrome extension (I pay $6/mo for it) that adds keyword search data to search results on sites like Google or Amazon. The search volume near the search box is very useful, and the topical and long-tail keywords suggestions are great when brainstorming for more specific keywords.

• Ahrefs’s new $29/mo plan - This is a more advanced paid product but pretty affordable. Ahrefs runs a site full of SEO tools, including a keyword research tool where you can enter a URL and see the keywords that URL is ranking for and the positions they’re in. Very useful for competitive research or understanding how a piece of your content or competitor’s content is ranking.

Keyword research is often about combining your knowledge of your audience with the big messy pile of keyword information and mixing them together until you start to see insights and ideas.

Step 3: Focus on Shopify collection pages

After narrowing down your target audience and doing some keyword research, then we'll turn to on-page SEO, or making edits to the content on our ecommerce website that will help impact our search rankings.

We'll start by ranking Shopify collection pages for relevant + specific category terms.

Almost every single store I work with isn’t creating enough collection pages. Collection pages are a great way to get new, targeted landing pages ranking in Google.

I find that most of the time, stores see the highest amounts of revenue from search come through their collection pages.

That means that the searchers who start their browsing journey on collection pages are often more valuable than customers who come in through blogs or product pages.

You want to rank your collection pages for category terms.

• If you’re selling quilting supplies, these are terms like ‘notions’ or ‘quarter panels.’

• If you’re selling chocolate, these are terms like ‘chocolate truffles’ and ‘chocolate bonbons’

• If you’re selling greeting cards, these are terms like ‘mother’s day illustrated greeting cards’ or ‘illustrated graduation cards’

You want to optimize your collection pages with a few very important pieces of content:

• A collection title (page headline). That’s the bit you enter at the top of the page:

• A collection description. That’s the bit you enter right under the headline. A 50-100 word description is incredibly impactful for your store’s SEO:

• An SEO title - This is the bit you enter way down at the bottom of the page in the ‘search engine listing’ section. An SEO title (also known as meta title) is very high impact for SEO. It’s what Google often displays in the search results:

For every collection page you create, you want to make sure you’ve entered those three things. And if you’re optimizing your collection for a keyword, you want to make sure you’ve mentioned that keyword in each place.

Step 4: Rank your homepage

Next, rank your homepage for a more general term for your market.

Homepages are often a powerful page on your site. Most of the time, people link to your homepage instead of a collection or product page. And Google sees your homepage as the doorway to the rest of your site.

Those factors combine to make your homepage an influential page for your SEO. One way to leverage that is to have your homepage target a general term for your market with the brand name also mentioned.

• If you’re a quilting store, maybe your homepage targets the term ‘quilting supplies - brand name’

• If you’re a chocolate store, maybe your homepage targets the term ‘chocolate gifts [location] - brand name’

• If you’re a greeting card store, maybe your homepage targets the term ‘illustrated greeting cards - brand name’

Targeting a general term is often more attainable with your homepage than other pages on your site. This approach helps capture a broad audience, driving an audience searching for that relevant + broader term to your homepage.

In Shopify, you can set your homepage’s SEO title on Online Store→ Preferences → Homepage Title:

Step 5: Rank your product pages

Finally, rank your product pages for niche product terms relevant to your ecommerce business.

Your product pages are where potential customers make their final purchasing decisions.

Your product pages do their job by targeting very niche, product-specific terms. That helps them rank when people are searching for exactly *that* product, which can attract highly relevant traffic that is more likely to convert.

• If you’re selling quilting supplies, you might have a collection targeting ‘quilting supplies and notions’ and a product in that collection targeting ‘Probe & Stabilizer Tool 4pc. Set’

• If you’re selling chocolate, a collection page might target ‘dark chocolate gift boxes’ and a product page might target ‘dark chocolate sea salt caramel gift box (20 pieces)’

• If you’re selling greeting cards, a collection page might target ‘university graduation celebration cards’ and a product might target ‘hand-painted university of Oregon graduation card with envelope’

In all cases, your collection page are targeting a broad-yet-specific term, and your product pages are targeting more niche and product-specific terms.

In all cases, you want to optimize your product pages with these details:

• An optimized product title and product description

• Unique content if you’re reselling products; don’t reuse the content from the manufacturer verbatum. Rewrite it in your own words.

• Attributes in your product title like size, weight, color, material, quantity, or fabric, depending on what you’re selling and what your audience cares about.

Oftentimes, product SEO can be overwhelming. You have lots of products! I recommend focusing, first, on optimizing priority products:

• Products that are higher profit margin for your store

• Products that are high demand by your customers

• Products that rank ‘on the cusp’ for a keyword in Google Search Console (~15 - 30th)

Those are the best opportunities to start with when prioritizing your Shopify SEO strategy.

And there you have it!

That’s your general ecommerce SEO strategy for your Shopify store:

1. Narrow down your audience

2. Understand what they’re searching for

3. Optimize your collection pages for category terms

4. Optimize your homepage for a more general term in your niche

5. Optimize your products for ultra-specific product search terms

Beyond that? Make sure to revisit your SEO regularly. Check in on how your pages are ranking and growing every ~2-4 weeks at minimum.

Need help with your Shopify SEO strategy?

Check out Kai's Shopify SEO services at his website, DoubleYourEcommerce.com.

Want Mallory's help with your overall marketing strategy? Schedule a 1:1 consulting session or check out the Badass Creatives Marketing Accelerator.

You can also check out this playlist for more videos about SEO for artists and creatives.