Shopify is one of the most popular website-building and business management tools because you can control nearly every aspect of your business from one digital dashboard. This includes all search engine optimization (SEO) management and suggestion tools. SEO is a set of rules followed to optimize a website’s technical configuration, content, and inbound and outbound links so that the website is easy to find when people type certain keywords into a search engine.
Many of our customers use Shopify to start an e-commerce business or migrate to Shopify from another platform. We help them with both services and also help create content for Shopify sites. Most importantly, we help our clients understand SEO on Shopify or provide them with top-notch content, with SEO at the forefront of every word and image we choose.
Over 4.12 million websites are currently using Shopify to sell products and manage their business. There’s a good reason why. It’s an easy-to-use platform that gives you a lot of control over your site. For example, it allows you to:
- Analyze each webpage on your site to see if it’s optimized for search engines and get suggestions for how to fix the issues that are making it rank lower
- Create SEO-friendly pages from the start
- Revise pages that aren’t doing well when it comes to SEO
- Manage inventory
- Handle billing
- Control social media posting
- Create email marketing campaigns
- Provide customer service
- Process payments
- Monitor website traffic and user habits to see how well your SEO strategy is working
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What’s the Difference Between Understanding SEO in General and SEO on Shopify Specifically?
Many website builders and e-commerce platforms offer amazing pre-designed templates for websites and tools to monitor your website’s SEO. However, the SEO tools on Shopify are particularly sharp and relevant. When you set up a store on Shopify, SEO best practices are automatically implemented. These rules include:
- Content follows a logical hierarchy of categories
- Pages don’t use iframes
- URLs use standard characters (like letters only) and a simple, readable structure
That said, Shopify doesn’t take every SEO rule into account for you. for you. So, to properly optimize your website, you will need to learn the secret ingredients of SEO or let experienced SEO experts, like us at SEO Design Chicago, handle it for you.
SEO Best Practices: A Refresher Course
SEO is always changing. But there will always be a couple of items that are important:
- Using meaningful keywords in page titles
- Adding keywords to the meta description
- Using keywords in headers and in the content on web pages
- Making sure Google has indexed your website
- Writing alt tags for images
- Regularly posting content that demonstrates the concept of EAT. EAT stands for “Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.”
- Adding featured snippets to every piece of content you publish. These snippets need to be embedded into your CMS. A snippet is an answer to a question that appears above the search results on Google. It’s often called “People Also Ask.”
Following these guidelines can be challenging and time-consuming. You also have to remember that SEO best practices are always changing, so continuing education must be something you’re willing to commit to. That’s why many businesses turn to SEO Design Chicago to produce content for them. Content isn’t just about the main part of the page, whether that’s an article or product description and image. It’s also about doing the backend work for SEO, like adding alt tags to images and making sure you’ve added content that Google can use as a featured snippet.
Why Can’t AI Handle SEO?
You’re probably thinking, “Why can’t I just use ChatGPT? Everyone else does.”
Sure, AI can produce written text. And to be clear, you do need written text for your Shopify site. Product descriptions are what tips people into buying a product or not buying it. Improving your descriptions can help drive traffic to your site and increase conversions. So, you may be tempted to use AI for text writing. After all, writing doesn’t come naturally to everyone, and writer’s block is a real thing.
However, we strongly encourage you to resist relying entirely on AI for words. Google can already, and is developing more tools, to be able to detect AI-produced content. If they detect too much of it, they’ll “ding” your website, which means it will rank lower in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Google writes in their developer guide, “Google’s ranking systems aim to reward original, high-quality content that demonstrates qualities of what we call E-E-A-T: expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness….When it comes to automatically generated content, our guidance has been consistent for years. Using automation—including AI—to generate content with the primary purpose of manipulating ranking in search results is a violation of our spam policies.”
That’s right. While AI tools like ChatGPT will get you words fast – perhaps faster than you yourself can come up with them – Google will know it. It’s a violation of their policies, which could lead to penalties that include removing your Shopify site from their index.
How to Use AI Strategically
That’s not to say you can’t use AI at all for your Shopify content. We recommend using it as a jumping-off point. For example, if you sell home exercise equipment, you can ask ChatGPT to produce text about hand weights. You can even use a Shopify AI tool to generate a generic description of a product. It’s called Shopify Magic.
But don’t get too excited. AI tools produce vague and generic text. If you use Shopify’s AI tool to help you write a product description, it will generate the same text for other businesses that use Shopify to sell the same products. For example, if you use Shopify Magic to write a description for vases you sell, that tool may use the same text for other Shopify stores that sell vases.
Still, AI does serve a purpose. You can use it as a starting point. From there, you can customize the language and add details and your brand name to the text. You can also add calls to action, like “Try expert-designed hand weights for 30 days free.” This way, you’re making the text more SEO-friendly and adding your own spin on the AI-generated text.
That’s why it’s so important to make sure your content has a human touch and shows expertise and experience. If you have the time, you can write articles, create photo slideshows, produce infographics, and put together videos about your industry on your own. But this is a responsibility that takes a lot of time, which is why many companies turn to SEO Design Chicago for SEO Shopify content.
SEO Design Chicago and SEO Content for Shopify
We have a team of over 30 writers, experienced fact finders, and wordsmiths who regularly provide content to our clients that improves their websites’ SEO. Plus, our Content Creation Packages are custom-made to fit the unique needs of each business.
We are experts in SEO for Shopify. If you’d like to learn more about how we can help improve your Shopify site’s SEO, get in touch with us today!
FAQ:
- What features does Shopify have?
- Does SEO matter on Shopify?
- Can’t AI do all my SEO?
- What are some SEO best practices?
- Does Shopify do SEO for me?
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