Boost Your Shopify Store with Free Google Traffic: Best SEO Apps
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- SEO Results of a Recent Shopify Store
- Best Shopify SEO Apps
- Importance of SEO Hygiene
- Incomplete URLs and Page Rank
- No Indexing Pages
- Importance of Loading Speed
- Conclusion
- FAQs
Introduction
In this article, we will discuss the three best Shopify apps for free Google traffic. If you are new here, my name is David, and welcome to the Nerds of E-commerce. Andrew and I started this channel because of our love for e-commerce. In this article, we will mainly focus on improving the SEO of your Shopify store to increase visibility and drive organic traffic. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) plays a crucial role in driving targeted traffic to your store, increasing sales, and bringing long-term success. So, let's dive in and explore the best Shopify SEO apps that can help you achieve your SEO goals.
SEO Results of a Recent Shopify Store
Before we discuss the best Shopify SEO apps, let's take a look at the SEO results of a recent Shopify store. The store we worked on is an Australian bed linen brand, and they were heavily reliant on Facebook ads and Google ads. However, they wanted to explore the opportunity of improving their SEO to increase profitability. After implementing basic SEO hygiene work, such as optimizing collection and product descriptions and creating a solid internal linking strategy, they were able to increase sales by over 80% compared to the previous year. This shows the power of SEO and the impact it can have on your store's success.
Best Shopify SEO Apps
Now, let's move on to discussing the best Shopify SEO apps that can help you improve your store's SEO and drive more organic traffic.
SEO Optimizer for Booster Apps
The first app on our list is SEO Optimizer for Booster Apps. This all-in-one Shopify SEO app provides several useful features to improve your website's SEO. Firstly, it helps detect and redirect broken links, ensuring a seamless user experience and preventing Google from penalizing your website for having too many 404 errors. It also offers meta title and description optimization, allowing you to customize these crucial elements for every page and product on your site. Additionally, it helps optimize image alt text, allowing Google to understand the content of your images and potentially rank them in Google Images search results. Overall, this app automates many repetitive SEO tasks, saving you time and improving your store's SEO hygiene.
Crush Picks
The second app on our list is Crush Picks. While not a must-have, this app can significantly improve your website's loading speed, which is crucial for both user experience and SEO. Crush Picks helps compress high-quality images on your site, reducing their file size without compromising their visual quality. By optimizing your images, you can significantly improve your website's loading speed, which in turn can positively impact your organic rankings on Google. Additionally, Crush Picks allows you to add customizable alt text to your images, further optimizing them for SEO and improving your chances of appearing in Google Images search results.
AMP by Shop Sheriff
The third app on our list is AMP by Shop Sheriff. AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a technology introduced by Google to improve the loading speed of mobile websites. As more and more users browse the internet on mobile devices, having a fast-loading mobile site has become essential. AMP pages are designed to load almost instantaneously, providing a seamless mobile browsing experience. By implementing AMP on your Shopify store, you can improve your website's mobile loading speed, potentially boosting your organic rankings on Google. AMP by Shop Sheriff allows you to easily set up and manage AMP pages for your Shopify store, ensuring that your mobile visitors have a lightning-fast browsing experience.
Importance of SEO Hygiene
Maintaining good SEO hygiene is essential for the long-term success of your Shopify store. It involves implementing best practices that make your website more search engine-friendly, resulting in higher organic rankings and increased visibility. Let's explore some key aspects of SEO hygiene and how Shopify SEO apps can help automate these tasks.
Detecting and Redirecting Broken Links
Broken links can negatively impact your website's user experience and SEO. When users encounter broken links, they are less likely to stay on your site or make a purchase. Moreover, search engines like Google consider broken links as a sign of poor website quality, which can affect your organic rankings. The SEO Optimizer app mentioned earlier can help you detect and redirect broken links, providing a smooth user experience and preserving your website's SEO performance. By automating this process, you save time and ensure that your website is free from broken links.
Meta Title and Description Optimization
Meta titles and descriptions play a crucial role in attracting users to click on your website's search results. When properly optimized, they provide concise and compelling information about your pages or products, increasing the likelihood of users clicking through to your site. The SEO Optimizer app allows you to customize meta titles and descriptions for each page and product on your Shopify store, ensuring they accurately represent your content and entice users to click. By optimizing these elements, you improve your organic click-through rate and potentially boost your search engine rankings.
Image Alt Text Optimization
Search engines cannot directly interpret the content of images, which is why providing descriptive alt text is crucial for SEO. Alt text allows you to describe the content of your images to search engines, helping them understand the context and potentially rank your images in search results. The SEO Optimizer app mentioned earlier enables you to automate alt text generation, saving you time when dealing with a large number of images. By optimizing your image alt text, you increase the chances of your images appearing in relevant search results and driving organic traffic to your store.
Controlling Pages to Show in Google
Having control over which pages to show in the Google search results is an important aspect of SEO. Not all pages on your Shopify store may be valuable or relevant for potential customers. By selectively indexing pages that matter, you can focus Google's attention on your most important and high-quality content, increasing your chances of ranking well. The SEO Optimizer app provides features that allow you to control which pages to show and which to exclude from Google's index. By utilizing these features, you can prioritize the visibility of essential pages, such as product pages, while excluding less valuable pages like login or search result pages.
Incomplete URLs and Page Rank
When managing your Shopify store's SEO, it's crucial to understand the concept of page rank and how incomplete URLs can affect it. Page rank is a metric used by Google to determine the authority and relevance of web pages. Page rank is distributed among the linked pages, with the most authoritative pages having higher page ranks. In a water demonstration analogy, think of page rank as the amount of water in a cup, which represents the authority of a particular webpage.
Incomplete URLs, such as auto-generated Shopify URLs, can dilute the page rank of your important pages. When page rank is divided among multiple URLs, each URL receives a smaller share, potentially affecting their organic rankings. The SEO Optimizer app mentioned earlier helps prevent this issue by allowing you to detect and control incomplete or unwanted URLs. By removing or no-indexing these unnecessary pages, you ensure that your page rank is distributed more effectively among your important pages, increasing their chances of ranking higher in search results.
No Indexing Pages
No-indexing certain pages on your Shopify store can be beneficial for your SEO strategy. Let's explore which pages you should consider no-indexing and why.
Login Pages, Register Pages, and Checkout Pages
Login pages, register pages, and checkout pages are essential for your e-commerce business, but they might not provide any value when it comes to organic search traffic. These pages usually contain personal user information, transactional data, or form fields, which are not relevant to search engines. By no-indexing these pages, you prevent search engines from crawling and indexing them, ensuring that users can only access these pages through your website's navigation or specific links.
Search Results, Pagination, and 404s
Search results pages, pagination, and 404 error pages are other examples of pages that you may want to consider no-indexing. Search results pages often contain duplicate content, as they dynamically display variations of the same content based on user searches. Since search engines prefer unique and original content, it's best to prevent them from indexing these pages. Similarly, pagination pages, such as page one, two, three, and so on, of a collection page, generally contain duplicate content and should be no-indexed.
404 error pages indicate that a requested page does not exist. While it's essential to customize your 404 error page to provide a good user experience, there's no reason for search engines to index these pages. No-indexing 404 error pages ensures that search engines don't consider them as part of your website's indexed content, preventing any negative impact on your SEO performance.
Tags, Vendors, and Collection Types
Tags, vendors, and collection types are other types of pages that you may want to consider no-indexing. Tags, though useful for internal categorization and organization, often create auto-generated URLs that can result in duplicate content. No-indexing tags pages can help avoid this issue. Similarly, vendor and collection type pages may not provide any valuable content or differ significantly from individual product pages. No-indexing these pages ensures that search engines direct their attention towards more relevant and high-quality content on your website.
Importance of Loading Speed
Loading speed is a vital aspect of your website's user experience and SEO performance. A slow-loading website can frustrate users, leading to higher bounce rates and lower conversions. Moreover, search engines like Google consider loading speed as one of the ranking factors, meaning that slow websites may be positioned lower in search results. Therefore, improving your website's loading speed is crucial for both user satisfaction and SEO success.
Compressing Images with Crush Picks
As mentioned earlier, having high-quality images on your website is essential for providing an excellent user experience. However, large image file sizes can significantly impact loading speed. Crush Picks, the Shopify app, offers image compression features to reduce the file sizes of your images without compromising their quality. By compressing images, you can significantly improve your website's loading speed and ensure that users can quickly access your content. With faster loading times, your website becomes more user-friendly and search engine-friendly, potentially leading to higher organic rankings.
AMP Pages for Instantaneous Mobile Loading
For Shopify stores, mobile traffic is becoming increasingly important for e-commerce success. As users shift towards mobile devices for browsing and shopping, it's crucial to provide a seamless and fast-loading mobile experience. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a technology introduced by Google to address this need. AMP pages load nearly instantaneously, offering a superior browsing experience on mobile devices. Implementing AMP for your Shopify store can significantly improve your mobile loading speed, potentially boosting your organic rankings and attracting more mobile traffic. AMP by Shop Sheriff is a Shopify app that allows you to easily set up and manage AMP pages for your store, ensuring that you stay ahead of the competition in the mobile realm.
Conclusion
In this article, we discussed the importance of SEO for Shopify stores and explored the three best Shopify apps for improving SEO. SEO Optimizer for Booster Apps, Crush Picks, and AMP by Shop Sheriff provide important features such as broken link detection, meta title and description optimization, image alt text optimization, image compression, and AMP page implementation. By utilizing these apps and following good SEO hygiene practices, you can enhance your store's visibility, drive organic traffic, and improve your chances of long-term success in the competitive e-commerce landscape.
FAQs
Q: How often should I optimize meta titles and descriptions?
A: It's a good practice to regularly review and optimize your meta titles and descriptions to ensure they accurately reflect your content and entice users to click. Consider reevaluating them whenever you add new products or make significant updates to your existing pages.
Q: Should I compress all the images on my Shopify store?
A: It's best to compress images that have large file sizes and could potentially slow down your website's loading speed. However, be sure to maintain a balance between image quality and file size reduction to ensure that your images remain visually appealing to your customers.
Q: Are AMP pages necessary for my Shopify store?
A: While AMP pages are not mandatory, implementing them can significantly improve your mobile loading speed, which is crucial for providing a seamless mobile browsing experience. Considering the significant growth in mobile e-commerce, investing in AMP pages can give you a competitive edge and potentially boost your organic rankings on Google.
Q: Can I no-index all my blog pages?
A: No, it's not advisable to no-index all your blog pages. Blog content can be valuable for attracting organic traffic and establishing your authority in your industry. Instead, focus on optimizing your blog posts with relevant keywords and providing high-quality content to improve their visibility in search results.
Q: Do SEO apps guarantee high organic rankings?
A: While SEO apps can enhance your SEO efforts, it's important to note that organic rankings are influenced by various factors, including competition, website quality, and content relevance. SEO apps provide tools and automation to optimize your website, but success ultimately relies on comprehensive SEO strategies and ongoing improvement efforts.
Resources:
- SEO Optimizer for Booster Apps
- Crush Picks
- AMP by Shop Sheriff
