Build an SEO plan to scale your store’s growth
Reduce the file size of your images. In short, the larger the image file size, the longer it can take a load a page.
Reducing your image dimensions speeds up the loading of your images and the page. Resizing images can affect their quality. Be sure to use standard resolution, which is 72 pixels per square inch (PPI). If you’re new to this, we recommend you use Shopify’s free image resizer to get started.
Add images to your sitemap. It’s vital to have your images appear on search results, as many people are visual searchers, especially when it comes to products like apparel.
Adding images to your sitemap makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index them. Shopify includes your primary product page image in the sitemap, but if you want to include all images on your products pages, I recommend installing Image Sitemap ($4/month), an app that automatically builds and submits to Google Search Console an .xml Sitemap for all images associated with each product, blog article, and page in your Shopify store.
Optimize your alt attributes carefully. Alt attributes are the text alternative to images used when a browser can’t properly render them. They’re also used for web accessibility, meaning if a person with impaired vision is looking at your blog they will be read the alt text.
Alt text is important for ecommerce stores and image SEO as it helps products show up in Google images. Our advice here is to describe in plain language what’s in the image to help people with imparied vision have an idea what the image displays. In turn, this can also help your images rank. Instead of “facial toner 250ml” try “Image of Pixi’s Glow tonic facial toner in 250ml, a highly concentrated, invigorating facial toner to deep clean your pores”.
Name your images in plain language. This is the file name of your image when it’s saved to your computer.
When you upload it, its web address will be the same. Ideally, it should match the keyword on the page. For example, if our page is about habanero hot sauce, we want to save the image file name as “habanero-hot-sauce.jpg.” This means that alongside our product page appearing for queries “habanero hot sauce,” our product images hopefully also will appear under the images tab on search engines.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO is the primary method of directly telling readers and search engines what your page is about. Search engines look for certain on-page factors that can help them in ranking your page on search engine results pages (SERPs). On-page factors include keyword and topic relevance, meta information, the slug in the page URL, and your images, among other things. For more information on on-page factors, this Moz article is a great resource.
Here, we’re going to cover the basics of keyword research, how to decode search intent, and some content optimization tips to help your pages rank for their target keywords.
A simpler way to think about keywords is as queries people use and type into search engines. Often, this replicates how we talk when asking questions; sometimes it is more of a “caveman speak” format, where you might type “buy new iPhone” versus “I want to buy the new iPhone.”
Short tail keywords are two or three words in length and typically of high volume, e.g., “mens shorts,” which returns 38,000 monthly searches in ahrefs keyword explorer.
Long tail keywords are four words or more in length and generally of lower volume, e.g., “mens shorts with pockets,” which returns 40 monthly searches in ahrefs keyword explorer.
How people use keywords in search engines to buy products
When it comes to choosing a keyword you want your page to rank for, it helps to understand the intent behind the associated search query. Search queries fall into the following categories:
Navigational queries are searches entered with the intent of finding a particular website or webpage. For example, a user might enter “facebook” into a search bar to find Facebook’s site rather than entering the URL into a browser’s navigation bar or using a bookmark.
Informational queries normally begin with “how to,” “what,” “why,” etc. Content that genuinely provides helpful information relevant to the query ranks for these keywords.
Transactional queries are searches that indicate an intent to complete a transaction. This entails typing a product name directly into the search bar, e.g., “samsung galaxy.”
When it comes to the customer journey in search engines, it’s important to understand how people move from not knowing what product they are looking for or want to confidently making the choice to purchase.
Let’s start with a general product such as smartphones. If you’re a long-time smartphone user, then you may use or have considered using the current iPhone model. But what if you want to see what else is on the market before you jump to your next upgrade?
At this point, you’d turn to a search engine and type in an informational query such as “best smartphone.” You’d get a lot of buyer’s-guide-type articles listing the top 10 to 15 smartphones, and you’d most likely click the top result. After reading the article, you might come away thinking the new iPhone model doesn’t sound too bad after all, but you also like the look of the new Samsung Galaxy.
Here, you’d probably like to learn how they compare on features and reliability, so you’d turn back to a search engine and search another informational query, such as “apple iphone vs samsung galaxy.”
After reading one or more of the articles on the first page, you’d have a clearer idea of what smartphone is for you, and maybe you’d decide to give the new iPhone one more chance. You turn back to the search engine and type in a transactional query “buy iphone.” From there, you most likely find Apple’s site, and you complete your transaction.
How to choose a keyword
Now you know how users go through the purchase journey and how to understand the intent behind a search, so let’s now find ways to do keyword research.
Keyword research can feel overwhelming. You’ll have questions like, Where do I start, How do I find one, How do I know if my keyword is going to rank, and How long does it take? We’ll walk you through getting answers to these questions.
Where to start with keyword research. First, think about what your product is or what category it exists within. For example, Shopify is an ecommerce platform, so we want a page to rank for this search term. What’s a general term to describe your product?
Use paid tools or free tools to get competitive insight. There are a lot of free and paid tools available, but the best free tools for Chrome are Keyword Surfer and MozBar, both available as extensions. With Keyword Surfer, you type your keywords into Google and it gives you keyword volume in the address bar and on the SERP.
An important takeaway for on-page SEO
MozBar lets you know the domain authority and page authority of a website—essentially how reputable or strong a website is and how well trusted a page is, respectively.
No matter what type of search query your page is targeting, know that when it comes to choosing a keyword, Google and other search engines want to rank the pages that have the highest likelihood of concluding the searcher’s journey. In the specific case of Google, it wants no additional searches, and it doesn’t want the user to hit “Back” and click on another search result.
When you’re picking a keyword to target, you can get a good idea of what the search intent is from the top 10 results on a SERP.
To do this, simply search the term and make a note of whether the page is either an article or a product page. For now, pay attention to only the organic listings and not the ads, which are marked “Ads” to the left, or any SERP features like People Also Ask, images, videos, or local listings.
You’ll have a score such as “9/10 product pages,” and from there you get an understanding of the user’s search intent, which will be to make a transaction.
If you’re doing content marketing for your store, you’ll want to look for the majority of the 10 listings to be articles as articles best cater to informational searches.
As “habanero hot sauce” is a short tail keyword, if users get to result 10 and still don’t see a listing to click, these pre-populated terms might help get them to the query they’re really looking for but didn’t know how to phrase.
I can make a note of these phrases because some of them are good long tail keywords that I can use while creating my product page with the goal of getting it to rank.
I can use them as subheadings, in the product description, or in meta description and title. We’ll dig into how to do this below.
Build your keyword into the URL or slug
The URL is anything that you type into the address bar that ends with , .ca, etc.. The “slug” is what comes after the first forward slash. Slugs and URL paths are used interchangeably but mean the same thing.
Once you’ve chosen a domain name, your URL is set and you can’t change it. However, slugs can be changed or customized. Note: If you are changing slugs, be sure to add redirects to your new pages. We covered how to do that above.
The reason to build your keyword into the slug of each page is primarily to make it clear to both the user and the search engines what the page is about. Also, you want to be careful of keyword stuffing in your URL and slugs.
Build your keyword into your image naming system
Building your keyword into your image naming system means both saving files with the same name as the keyword target (e.g. habanero-hot-sauce.jpg) and using the keyword as its alt text when you upload the file to your store.
If you have more than one image being uploaded and you’re confused on what to name your files, use differentiators like habanero-hot-sauce-ingredients.jpg for a photo of the ingredient label and habanero-hot-sauce-example-dish.jpg for an action photo of a model applying sauce to food.
As we said above regarding optimizing images, you want to write your alt attributes carefully.
Alt text is used when a browser can’t properly render the image, and also for web accessibility. It’s best to describe in plain language what’s in the image to help people with imparied vision have an idea what the image displays.
If writing an accessible alt text attribute and you naturally use the target keyword, that’s great, but it’s recommended to prioritize this approach over keyword stuffing alt text.
Creating an SEO-friendly page is about making the information digestible for the reader, not necessarily the search engines. It’s the formatting that can get readers where they need to go, through use of headings, bullet lists, or numbered lists.
It’s about reducing friction for the reader experience by helping them get there and easily find what they want.
You may hear that length is a deciding factor on whether a page ranks or not. My take has always been, if you have a monster-sized article or page, that’s because the topic deserves it and is in need of a 101 or beginners’ guide.
It’s rarely a good idea to add more words to an article to hit a metric that promises a ranking page.
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO can include reputation management like customer service and being present on social media, but essentially it boils down to building backlinks, which are links that point to your site.
The more high quality, relevant backlinks you have, the better your pages will rank. You know the importance of having high ranking pages in search engines based on where clicks go from the earlier diagram above.
There are two methods in which you can build links to your website: active efforts and passive efforts.
Active link building
Active link building is when you put together a plan and strategy for the pages you want to build links from—with an understanding of why you want to build them—and then executing that plan.
Generally, active link building is time intensive, as it’s a competitive strategy to get into. Journalists, influencers, and other writers get pitches all the time, so your pitch has to be compelling.
There are a couple of principles you can take forward when requesting anything from another site:
Put what’s in it for them up front in your pitch. Yes, the nature of your request is to get something (a link), but what’s in it for them? Is what they’re linking to out of date or a page that no longer exists, or are they missing something vital in their list? Give them a reason to consider your request.
Don’t request links from people who are your competitors. This may seem obvious, but a lot of link requests come from people who want coverage in the same product and topic area because there’s an existing resource. For example, if you’re selling athletic gym shorts and you find a buyer’s guide on what to look for when buying gym shorts and it’s by a brand that also sells shorts aimed at your niche, it’s better not to waste time reaching out to them.
Now that you’ve got the principles down, let’s look at some active link building tactics:
Broken link building is where you find pages that link to sites that have a page removed, recreate content similar to that of the dead content, then tell anyone linking to the removed resource to instead link to your content. This works because it’s bad for a website's SEO to be linking to pages that don’t exist.
To perform this technique successfully you’ll need an SEO tool that allows you to crawl pages and find broken links and an outreach tool that lets you hunt down email addresses.
You’ll also need to find out what was once on that now broken page. Fortunately, you can do this with the Wayback Machine, a free archive of web pages from different moments in time.
Here’s the process you can expect to follow if you use this tactic:
Choose a website that exists within your niche and publishes content you would happily have a link from (e.g., If I owned a business that sold skin treatments and essential oils, I would look for a website within the aromatherapy space, which could be a competitor business or a blogger).
Use your SEO tool to find any 404 links, the pages with the most referring domains or links, or a page that you know you have a product or collection on. Use the Wayback Machine to get an idea of what was on that page and see if you can create similar content to what was covered on it. Note: You should never copy the text from a dead page, as this is copyright infringement.
Use your outreach email tool to find the content manager and reach out to let them know about the broken link, how this is bad for their SEO and reader experience, and that you have a page covering this topic. Hopefully, the end result will be they replace a broken link with a link to your business.
Unlinked mentions are when your business is written about on another site without a link back to you.
For instance, your business might be given as an example in an article that sells comfy loungewear apparel but doesn’t link to your homepage.
With tools like Google Alerts or some SEO tools that have this feature, like ahrefs, you can get a notification to your inbox if your site is mentioned.
Once you feel that getting a link from this site is worth reaching out to the writer or content manager, then go ahead and ask for a link to be credited to your mentioned business.
Passive link building
Passive link building involves daily duties or business as usual but can help compound your SEO efforts over time, even though they’re not typical SEO-enhancing activities.
Create an amazing product or service. The easiest way to get people talking about your business online is to have a great product or service that’s worth talking about. This is when people share your business with friends and family because you’re doing something special that makes you stand out. This takes a while to catch wind, but it’s the best way to build a business and a solid SEO tip.
Provide amazing customer service. Great customer service is spoken about. Equally terrible customer service is also spoken about. But it’s average customer service that goes under the radar. While bad customer service can get you written about, which, technically, is good for SEO (remember that time United Airlines dragged a passenger off one of their planes?), it’s obviously not good to be known for giving poor customer service. So focus on providing amazing service.
You don’t have to go above and beyond—it’s a matter of doing the little things really well and finding moments to deliver delight. Remember this saying: “People remember what you did long after they forget what you said.”
Responsive on social media.
Being responsive on social media isn’t about jumping on any and all conversations, or joining in on the banter between brands on Twitter. It’s about getting back to your customers when they reach out for help. Once you get the basics down, then you can consider liking or commenting on Instagram posts or Stories where your passionate fans tag your products.
What is SEO in digital marketing?
It comes down to building trust with these people. Once you have trust, then you have attention. Once you have attention, you have enrollment and permission to share ideas or your perspective.
Read more: Vietnam website design
As most business owners, you probably heard of the benefits SEO can provide for most businesses.
You probably understand how important it is to grow your business online.
With all that in mind, you might still wonder if you could truly benefit from SEO if you aren’t actively seeking SEO traffic currently. So, what is an SEO company?
SEO is quite complex. Browsing for an SEO agency can also be quite confusing since you won’t be able to tell a good agency from a bad one. With all the hype, it’s obvious most business owners have encountered many SEO agencies in the past.
Even if the agency talks about their service, what they do and what you can get from it, you might still find it hard to fully grasp what those companies do, especially with all the complex vocabulary.
Let me summarize what SEO companies do in a nutshell with this little diagram:
What do SEO Companies Offer?
SEO companies offer services that helps you optimize your search engine results which in turns helps you improve your visibility online.
Search engine optimization is about changing your website, its design, creating & optimizing your content and generating links back to make sure you appear in the search engine results.
The more optimized your website and content is, the more search engines like Google are likely to rank your website on the first pages of the search engine results (keywords or phrases relevant to your business) you are trying to appear for.
One of the biggest benefit to work with an SEO agency rather than having someone internally is that they have experience generating results for companies like yours.
SEO experts (not all of them) know what works and what doesn’t to make your brand appear in search engines such as Google, Bing or Yahoo.
Most SEO agency have a team of SEO experts that have a wide range of combined experiences. This combined experiences can be extremely valuable because they know exactly what to do to generate results efficiently.
SEO agencies generally provide a wide range of services, here are a few:
Website auditing
Tailored SEO strategy
Website speed optimization
Content marketing creation
In summary, they can help you create the right SEO strategy and then take care of implementing it for you. The best SEO agencies will work with you constantly to generate results. They will treat your business as their own, meaning they will be extremely dedicated to your business.
The goal of an SEO agency is to generate the best results based on your goals. Your goals could be generating a strong return on investment or gaining as much visibility as possible. The SEO team will be there to see your goal through.
How can they achieve such results? It’s a combined work of all their experience to make the right decisions and a relentless attitude to always find ways to improve & understand what worked and that didn’t.
At least, this is our attitude at K6 SEO Agency because we want you to get as much as possible from our work with you!
What are the true benefits of working with an SEO company?
Working with an SEO company has tons of benefits for your business because search engines are some of the most visited websites online which means you can gain a lot of visibility.
Here are the three most known ways an SEO company can help:
#1 – Improving Your Search Engine Results
With current knowledge, strategies and tools, an SEO company will be able to optimize your website to increase its authority on search engines.
The first step for an SEO agency is to do keyword research. This phase of the SEO process is really important because targeting the right keywords can attract the right audience to your website.
After this phase, they will also optimize your site architecture to let search engines crawl your website results. This means that the search engines will be able to see the pages on your website.
Your SEO company will be able to find which modifications are needed your site design & content to help your search engine rankings and help you implement those chances efficiently.
In summary, the higher you rank for your desired keyword, the more you will attract the right prospects who will have a high chance of becoming your customers.
#2 – Attracting The Right Target Audience
The goal of an SEO company is not to bring you any visibility, they want to target high intent keywords. High intent keywords are keywords your target audience might search that would signal that they are truly interested in what your company has to offer.
For instance, if at K6, we rank for “Facebook ads agency” rather than “Facebook sexy video”, we are much more likely to generate leads and sales from the first keyword than the second one.
This is what we call high intent keywords, keywords that are aligned with your products & services to bring relevant traffic.
In addition, as you bring more traffic to your website through the relevant keyword searches, you are much more likely to generate sales and leads. You could have 10,000 visitors through a low intent keyword and would make more money from 100 visitors with a high intent keyword.
According to Moz, the first page of Google captures 71% of search traffic clicks and has been reported to be as high as 92% in recent years.
Google is really good at showing to people what they are looking for. In other words, if you match your content with the intent of people, you will get a lot of quality traffic.
#3 – Trackable Results to Measure
Although the ranking for high intent keyword is the essence of SEO, it’s also important to know where results come from. It’s how we’re able to optimize and focus more on certain keywords overtime. SEO is easily trackable which can truly help you improve over time.
No matter what an SEO company has done in the past, your new SEO agency can help you generate strong results. In fact, you can ask your SEO company to send you a monthly report of the improvements in your ranking, the words you rank for and much more!
This can be extremely helpful to further understand what people search for when they want to learn more about your company.
By asking your SEO company for a monthly analytics report on your SEO campaigns, you can better understand how the SEO services provide value for your business.
It’s important to ask your SEO company to give you such information because it provides a breakdown of your results. This gives you control in knowing if you are generating satisfying results for your brand. You might find traffic volumes, keyword rankings, traffic sources, revenue generated, and much more.
What are SEO Services?
SEO services are quite vast but they represent the process of optimizing the pages of your website and its backlinks to increase your search engine rankings.
The SEO company provides such services for his client to rank on the first page of the search engine results page (SERP) in order to generate traffic for relevant keywords to their products and services.
In such SEO services include not only the strategy of changing certain things on your website but also doing it for you in order to help you rank higher for your desired keywords.
Knowing what an SEO company is and the benefits of working with one, let’s talk about the services they offer in more specifics. What do SEO experts do?
The job of an SEO expert is to analyze your website ranking and one of your competitors to find the relevant keywords you should rank for.
They then help you make the necessary modifications to get you to generate traffic from the searches of those keywords. The best way to fully grasp what they do is to understand the services they usually offer.
#1 – Website Analysis & Audit
Most SEO companies will begin working with your company by doing an audit of your website and your current SEO rankings. This includes:
Looking at your site’s architecture to make sure it appears in the search engines
Figuring out for which keywords your website ranks for
Analyzing the speed of your website
And much more
This helps the SEO company determine the low hanging fruits of your current website’s ranking. Those low hanging fruits can be weaknesses or strengths.
For example, maybe your website is extremely slow, then they could turn your weakness into a strength. On the flip side, you could already rank well for a desirable high intent keyword and they could capitalize on that in their SEO strategy.
The final step of the SEO audit & analysis is to look at who your competitors are in terms of SEO and what their strategy is. This will them a good idea of what they can do rapidly to get you up to par and eventually gain better results than them.
In summary, by better understanding your business and its competitor’s SEO rankings, your SEO company will be able to create a strong & pandemic-proof SEO game plan & strategy.
#2 – SEO Game Plan & Strategy
After completing a strong deep-dive analysis as we call it at K6, your SEO company is ready to create an SEO game plan & strategy tailored to your needs and goals. The analysis and audit gave us a good understanding of which keywords to aim for and who your target market is.
A good SEO strategy can make huge different in delivering strong results based on your SEO campaign goal. Every company is different, it’s why it’s important to have SEO goals that fit exactly your type of business.
For example, an SEO agency like K6can have the goal of generating leads while an eCommerce brand might want to generate sales on their website directly.
Not only will your SEO game plan & strategy include your long term goals but it should also include the tactics that will be used to take your business from where it is to where it can be.
One word of advice, if your SEO company can’t explain in simple words what their strategy is, it’s probably because they aren’t quite qualified. Fully understanding an SEO concept means you should be able to make anyone understand the different concepts.