Recruiting International Students: 3 Key Strategies

Universities in the United States are widely regarded as some of the best. According to a survey, 59% of people outside the U.S. believe American universities to be above average compared to universities in other developed countries. Naturally, such a belief is associated with high numbers of international students interested in studying at universities in the U.S.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, in the 2019/20 academic year, there were 1,075,496 international students following their studies in the U.S.—making up around 5.5 percent of the total number of students in the U.S. However, the following year, there was a significant decline due to travel restrictions that prevented students from traveling to the U.S. During the 2020/21 academic year, there were 914,095 international students in the U.S.—a 15% decrease from the previous year, with only a small percentage of them being new international students. 

Now that travel restrictions have eased, it is important to update your higher institution’s enrollment strategies and begin recruiting international students.

To increase the number of international students recruited for your higher education institution, you must center your international enrollment strategies on resource efficiency by utilizing various technology and digital marketing techniques. So, read on and find out the top three strategies that will help refine your recruitment plan with effective international student recruitment strategies for 2023.

International Recruitment Strategy #1: Optimising Your Website

Optimizing your website for international students is crucial since websites are often the first exposure potential students have to higher education institutions. Before deciding whether they want to apply to your study programs, they need to learn more about your institution and the opportunities you offer. Therefore, you should pay close attention to what you present on your website and how you present it.

Similar to techniques typically used for growing college enrollment through SEO, you should improve your site’s landing pages and contact forms in order to increase click-through rates and convert website visitors into qualified leads. To begin, make sure you include all the information potential students must know about your institution on the landing pages. 

Next, make the text readable and minimize using complex language or colloquialisms that your international audience might have difficulty understanding. Keep the content engaging—include visual elements such as infographics and videos that explain topics relevant to potential students and their decision-making process, like tuition fees, accommodation, and program structure, including information specific to international students. 

Do not forget to include keywords relevant to your target audience in order to increase lead generation by improving your site’s visibility and pushing its content through the ranking in organic search results.

As you work on optimizing your website, focus on the following elements:

International Recruitment Strategy #2: Incorporating Virtual Campus Tours and Zoom 

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Even prior to the pandemic, international students have faced challenges traveling to the U.S. or other countries for in-person campus visits. However, these visits are crucial for students to make informed decisions about the institutions they are considering, as they offer a glimpse into the facilities, atmosphere, and culture associated with the institution. In light of this challenge, a useful strategy to bridge this gap is to offer virtual campus tours and Zoom meetings.

Virtual campus tours allow prospective students to engage with your institution and experience what it is like to walk around your campus from the comfort of their homes. Many universities have already developed 360-degree tours using virtual reality technology or Google Maps Street View, and there are numerous benefits to incorporating these tours. By offering virtual campus tours, you can:

  1. Provide equal access for all: Regardless of the reason why potential students cannot visit your campus in person, whether it be because of financial limitations, time constraints, or something else, with virtual campus tours, you help provide the same experience to anyone interested in joining your study programs. Virtual campus tours are cost-affordable for both students and institutions to upkeep.
  2. Improve interaction: Students can have little to no interaction with the tour guide because of the large tour groups. Therefore, they will not be learning much about the institution. However, with virtual tours, the information and visuals are on the screen for students to access and go through as many times as they want.
  3. Better accessibility: Unlike physical tours, virtual campus tours are not affected by factors such as weather conditions or time constraints. Therefore, students can choose to visit your higher education institution’s campus on a Monday morning, Saturday at midnight, or any other time of the week and day.
  4. More inclusive: Virtual tours can easily incorporate live captions, ASL translation, audio descriptions, and other elements that help students with disabilities navigate better throughout the campus tour. 

In addition to the tours, your institution can make use of several web-conferencing tools, such as Zoom, that help provide potential international students with a more personalized interaction between them and your admissions committee. 

Regardless of the distance, your counselors can communicate with potential students and help them by clarifying any information needed, sharing relevant documents, and guiding them throughout the whole process.

International Recruitment Strategy #3:  International Student Success Stories 

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Providing proof of successful international student experiences is a surefire way to make potential international students feel more connected, included, and comfortable choosing your institution. Therefore, you should focus your recruitment efforts on improving the experience of your current international students in order to generate better referrals and leads.

It would be best for you to work toward ensuring that international students have an environment where they can thrive in your higher education institution, as well as dedicating a portion of your website to displaying their success stories. This way, you can expand your reach and influence over your target audience. After all, when it comes to studying abroad, students want to enroll in a school where they are most likely to grow and progress academically and socially. Therefore, they will research the experience of other students in similar circumstances before committing to the school.

You can also expand your strategic international partnerships in order to enhance your brand’s reputation and improve the student experience. Consider research collaboration opportunities and exchange programs that might benefit your international students.

Use all opportunities presented to you and provide a good experience for international students that choose your school. In turn, they will help advocate your brand and share their success stories that inspire other students to join your college as well.

The Bottom Line

Spread your wings and generate leads from all over the world. Attract potential international students by optimizing your website for international students, incorporating virtual campus tours and web-conferencing tools, as well as leveraging the success stories of existing international students and alumni. With these three strategies, you can ensure a better and easier experience for students getting to know your school.

Are you interested in learning more about how to improve your higher education institution’s website? Contact us for a free SEO gap analysis and learn more about your website’s potential. Join us and become our next success story!

Maximizing Your SEO Strategy for Enterprise-Level Success

SEO is one of the most effective long-term marketing strategies for any company, regardless of size. A site’s organic traffic can account for up to 94% of click-through rates for online browsers. Therefore, enterprises have much to gain or lose based on their SEO strategies.

This article will help you maximize your SEO strategy for enterprise-level success by introducing key concepts, establishing the difference between Enterprise SEO and traditional SEO, key components, and some of the best practices you can use. So read on and begin your journey toward boosting organic traffic for your enterprise website.

Understanding Enterprise SEO

Before diving into ways to maximize your SEO strategy for enterprise-level success, let us first understand what enterprise SEO is. Below we define the term and discuss the importance of this type of SEO, as well as why it is necessary to have enterprise SEO strategies for some particular businesses.

Why is enterprise SEO important?

At its core, enterprise SEO is no different from any other type of SEO. Your goal when implementing any SEO strategy is the same—to help your content rank higher on SERPs and attract organic traffic. However, one thing to remember is that the big difference between large enterprise websites and typical sites for smaller companies is usually the number of pages needing search engine optimization. 

Therefore, enterprise SEO is crucial to some websites because the rules and strategies that apply to search engine optimization for smaller businesses, mainly how they are utilized, only sometimes work for larger enterprises.

When a website is on an enterprise level, the SEO strategy must target more competitive keywords, keep track and maintain organic ranking for several areas of their business and site, and upgrade the content to stay competitive. 

That is why there is a need for a different kind of SEO and a team of skilled professionals that understand how to maximize an enterprise’s online presence in various areas instead of having one person deal with it all and not reach the site’s full potential.

Who needs enterprise SEO?

Enterprise SEO will make a massive difference to the websites of large corporations. These enterprises need this specific type of SEO since they encompass thousands and thousands of pages displaying a myriad of products, services, and other content. 

Realistically, their SEO issues will be more complex due to the number of pages, starting from the number of backlinks acquired to the domain authority and more. However, you can solve all these issues with the help of specialized tools and enterprise SEO experts skilled in handling large brands online.

Key Components of Enterprise SEO

It is worth mentioning that enterprise SEO encompasses all components commonly found in any SEO. Just like how small sites optimize their content through keyword research and link building, so do large enterprises. However, it is the way these same strategies are utilized that creates this division.

Below, we review some key components of enterprise SEO strategies and discuss ways to incorporate them for large company settings.

Technical SEO

No surprise here—technical SEO is one of the crucial aspects of a website that you must optimize in order to increase its ranking. Some of the pillars of technical SEO include page speed, ease of navigation for site visitors, the ability of search engines to access your site and crawl its content, sitemaps, and more.

For Google and other search engines to rank your content, they must be able to find it first. Therefore, your enterprise SEO strategies must enable search engines to access, render, crawl, and then index all the pages within your site. To achieve this goal, you must improve your website’s architecture. 

Consider your site’s hierarchical structure and aim to create a clear site architecture that is easy to navigate for visitors and crawlable for search engines. Some other tasks you should add to your technical SEO checklist include:

Content marketing

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Large enterprises must produce high-quality content and market it well to increase the brand’s visibility and credibility. Enterprises must begin their content marketing strategy by creating a content plan since they have to deal with a set of challenges smaller businesses do not due to their size. 

Research shows that content marketers struggle with the following difficulties of enterprise SEO:

Creating a strong and thorough content plan before implementing any content marketing tactics can go a long way in minimizing some of the mentioned challenges of enterprise SEO.

The benefits of content marketing are as influential and necessary for enterprise SEO as they are for any other site. Link-building and keywords are still among the most important Google rankings factors, so you should pay close attention to them when producing content. Creating consistent, relevant, and valuable content incorporating the right keywords is a sure way to gain external links. 

There are many types of content you can create, as well as ways to incorporate them into your enterprise SEO strategies. Statistics show that the top two types of content forms that enterprise marketers use are blog posts or short articles and pre-produced videos, operated by 89% and 81% of enterprises, respectively. 

Furthermore, reports show that virtual events, webinars, online courses, blog posts, and short articles generally produced the best content marketing results for their enterprises.

Social media integration

Although social media does not directly contribute to SEO ranking, it is still a key component of enterprise SEO for several reasons. Firstly, sharing your posts across various social media platforms helps guarantee extensive content distribution. Then it also helps increase brand exposure, recognition, and reputation. 

Additionally, social media helps generate social signals to indicate your content is helpful to your target audience through shares from people. Although social signals are not a ranking factor, research shows an equivocal link between SEO and social shares. The likes, comments, and shares that your posts receive do not have a direct influence on SEO, but they indirectly have a positive effect on search ranking.

Best Practices for Enterprise SEO

To identify problems that your enterprise website is having and find ways to fix these issues, you must conduct a comprehensive SEO audit, develop SEO strategies based on data, and invest in the right SEO tools and technology to help you along the way. Let’s go through each of these practices in more detail to understand better how to maximize your SEO strategy.

Conducting a comprehensive SEO audit

Conducting a comprehensive SEO audit is your first action to developing a successful enterprise SEO strategy. Through this audit, you can evaluate your website by identifying issues preventing it from ranking highly in search engine result pages. Only by understanding your site’s strengths and weaknesses can you tailor your SEO campaigns accordingly and benefit from them. In addition, regular SEO audits also help your team direct time, resources and budget accordingly to ensure the most significant impact.

Because Google uses over 200 ranking factors, auditing an enterprise’s website can be pretty demanding. To ensure a successful audit, we would advise you to separate your audit into these five areas:

As mentioned in the previous paragraphs, each of these components has a significant influence on your website’s ranking. Thus, they should be a crucial part of your SEO audit checklist.

Developing a data-driven SEO strategy

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As with most disciplines nowadays, SEO must also develop strategies through the accumulation and analysis of data. You can achieve lucrative search traffic by examining the existing data of your website, determining what it represents, and how to move forward. To make informed and perceptive judgments about your SEO strategy, closely analyze data about user behavior.

Keywords are one of the most common ways enterprises can use data in their SEO. You can generate content that benefits your site by conducting an in-depth analysis of the most common search queries related to your business, determining which keywords would be most effective, and analyzing your target audience’s browsing trends and behaviors. Then, you can also benefit significantly by gathering and analyzing data about how visitors interact with your site, such as the:

Investing in the right SEO tools and technology

The challenges of optimizing an enterprise website for search engines require some technical assistance. There are many SEO tools on the market that vary in price and functionality. Some tools and technology worth investing in include:

Measuring and Reporting on Enterprise SEO

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To improve your site’s performance and content production, you must stay on top of your SEO strategies by constantly measuring them. To track, measure, and report on your SEO activities, you need to organize your metrics, identify and measure key performance indicators, create reports, and communicate them to the rest of your team.

Identifying the right KPIs for enterprise SEO

KPIs are key performance indicators, representing a control system that allows you to identify your strategies’ strengths and weaknesses. Some of the key indicators you should pay close attention to include the following:

By identifying the right KPIs for enterprise SEO and analyzing the results, you can avoid spending your resources on strategies that are not effective or beneficial for your enterprise.

Building effective SEO dashboards and reports

Dashboards and reports are a great way to present the success or failure of your enterprise SEO campaign in accomplishing a set of goals. To build an effective SEO dashboard or report, you must include information about metrics such as the ones mentioned above.

Communicating SEO results to stakeholders

Once you have measured all that needs to be measured, analyzed the results, and created dashboards and reports to present to your team and stakeholders, it is time to communicate all your findings. 

When communicating SEO results to stakeholders, remember that they might not necessarily be SEO experts; therefore, you must introduce the information clearly and concisely by using understandable language and providing answers or clarifications to any questions or confusion they might have.

Conclusion

Enterprise SEO is the backbone of your website’s digital marketing. You need to modify your SEO strategy to fit the scale of your enterprise to enhance its authority, gain an advantage over your competitors, boost conversion, and succeed in the digital landscape.

To maximize the positive effect of your enterprise SEO, you should:

  1. Enhance the technical side of your search engine optimization strategies, content marketing, and social media integration.
  2. Stay on top of your competition by continuously conducting audits and measuring key performance indicators.
  3. After designing dashboards and reports showcasing the results of your efforts, use the data gathered to update your strategy as well as utilize various tools and technology available for a more effortless procedure.

Questions Commonly Asked About Enterprise SEO

Below we’ll go through some of the most commonly asked questions about enterprise SEO with the intention of removing any doubts you might have about implementing enterprise SEO on your website.

What is enterprise SEO, and how is it different from regular SEO?

Enterprise SEO refers to the strategic execution of search engine optimization for sites of enterprise-level organizations. It differs from regular SEO because it requires a higher level of orchestration due to the thousands of pages typically found in them.

What are the key challenges in implementing an enterprise SEO strategy?

Some of the key challenges in implementing an enterprise SEO strategy include but are not limited to complex technical issues, the number of pages that require maintenance, indexability, crawlability, lack of automation, content quality, and more.

What are the best practices for managing SEO across multiple websites and platforms?

Some of the best practices for managing SEO across multiple websites and platforms include conducting regular audits for all areas of your website, identifying key metrics and utilizing the data gathered when developing strategies and making decisions, investing in practical tools and technologies, and other similar practices.

How can data be used to measure the success of an enterprise SEO campaign?

Success is related to achieving your objectives, and the primary goals of SEO are to increase organic traffic and improve ranking. Therefore, by analyzing the data gathered from KPIs related to traffic, visibility, and ranking, you can measure the success of your enterprise SEO campaign.

What are the emerging trends in enterprise SEO and how can businesses stay ahead of the curve?

Some emerging trends in enterprise SEO that businesses can implement in their campaigns and use to stay ahead of the curve include:

10 Best Shopify SEO Apps and Tools for 2023

In this day and age, online shopping is becoming the norm. More and more people are taking advantage of e-commerce stores that enable them to browse, purchase, and receive various products without leaving the comfort of their homes.

In 2021, retail e-commerce sales encompassed around 5.2 trillion dollars worldwide, and this number is expected to reach 8.1 trillion dollars by 2026. Based on these numbers and the growing importance of e-commerce stores, it is time for you to take the plunge and move or start your business online.

Instead of struggling with the challenges of creating your e-commerce website, you can join Shopify—a commerce platform that provides the space and tools needed to start, grow, and manage your business. The platform is cloud-based and hosted, with automatic upgrades and maintenance provided to your software and web servers. However, the same rules of SEO apply to your Shopify store as well. To increase your store’s organic traffic, you need to optimize your site for search engines and improve its visibility.

Shopify offers over 8,000 apps to help users customize their store and enhance its capabilities. Statistics show that around 87% of Shopify merchants use third-party apps. On average, each one has six apps installed for their store. Among these thousands of options, there are also SEO-oriented apps and tools. In this article, we will review the ten best Shopify SEO apps and tools to help you elevate your store and succeed in the e-commerce marketplace.

What To Consider When Choosing a Shopify SEO App

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As you look through SEO app choices for Shopify, consider a few factors:

  1. Keep in mind what features the app offers and its capabilities. 
  2. Read customer reviews and decipher the app’s pros and cons regarding ease of use and expected results.
  3. Think about the pricing in relation to those features and whether it is worth it.
  4. Consider your store’s goals and needs and whether the app aligns with them.

Based on these factors, we have created a list of the ten best SEO apps, SEO tools, and SEO plug-ins for Shopify. Each one can make a significant difference to your Shopify store.

Types of Shopify SEO Apps

Shopify offers a diverse range of SEO apps designed to optimize various aspects of your e-commerce store, such as keywords, site architecture, page speed, and schema markup. These apps are categorized into several categories, including keyword research tools, link-building tools, on-page optimization tools, and more.

Using apps dedicated to finding relevant keywords can significantly enhance the quality of your content and help search engines discover and rank your store higher in search results. In addition, you can directly improve your site’s speed by utilizing tools that optimize image or video load speeds.

By implementing these types of Shopify SEO apps and tools, you can expect a substantial boost in the quality and quantity of your store’s organic traffic. With improved SEO performance, you can attract more visitors to your store and ultimately drive more sales.

Best Shopify SEO Apps

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We have established that online stores can lead to significant profitability and that Shopify, in particular, is a platform that can help throughout your e-commerce business journey. However, having a Shopify store is not enough; you need to optimize your store’s SEO to drive traffic and increase sales. However, there are many SEO apps available. But how do you know which ones are the best?

Below we’ll go through ten of the best Shopify SEO apps that can take your store’s SEO to the next level.

1. SEO Optimizer

To begin, SEO Optimizer, an app by Booster apps exclusively built for Shopify, was first launched on March 28th of, 2016. This all-in-one SEO tool is designed to optimize organic traffic and enhance on-page SEO, which is crucial for improving a website’s ranking in search results, including image search traffic.

The app offers several features that help boost your SEO efforts, making it a popular choice among Shopify store owners. With a 4.8/5 rating based on 4,243 reviews in the Shopify app store, SEO Optimizer has proven to be a reliable tool for optimizing your website’s SEO and driving organic traffic to your store.

Top features & capabilities

Pros

Cons

Suitable for:

The SEO Optimizer is suitable for various types of Shopify stores. However, the stores that can benefit most from it are the ones that need to manage their image usage in order not to damage the store’s loading speed.

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2. SEO Booster – SEO Marketing by Secomapp

Next, the SEO Booster app developed by Secomapp is an excellent tool for Shopify stores, ranging from the newly founded stores of beginners to professionals that have been in the game for a long time. The app’s name, in particular, directly reflects the benefits expected—a general boost on your store’s SEO and marketing strategies.

The SEO Booster – SEO Marketing by Secomapp app has a 4.9/5 rating based on 2,962 reviews in the Shopify app store.

Top features & capabilities

Pros

Cons

Suitable for:

The SEO Booster – SEO Marketing by Secomapp is particularly suitable for mobile versions of stores as it can help enhance and accelerate its pages.

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3. SEO King by Engage Apps

The SEO King app developed by the Engage Apps company can help your Shopify store grow by performing all essential functions, such as boosting SEO, improving page loading speeds, and optimizing images. The app has several features that enable you to enjoy better SEO results while creating a more search-friendly site for your business.

The SEO King app has a 4.6/5 rating based on 996 reviews in the Shopify app store.

Top features & capabilities

Pros

Cons

Suitable for:

The SEO King by Engage Apps is an excellent option for large Shopify stores with up to 10,000 products, as it can process unlimited volumes of images and content. Furthermore, it has incredible features that can help international stores with different pages dedicated to other languages for a better user experience.

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4. Smart SEO

The Smart SEO app was created by Sherpas Design with the aim of helping your Shopify store improve its SEO and overall ranking in SERPs. The app is relatively easy to work with. However, some of the more advanced features can raise questions. Luckily, the brand is ready to answer questions and help customers in any way possible.

The Smart SEO app has a 4.9/5 rating based on 1,128 reviews in the Shopify app store.

Top features & capabilities

Pros

Cons

Suitable for:

The Smart SEO app is suitable for general stores in Shopify, which offer products or services in various sections. Through the app, such shops can improve several aspects of their search engine optimization strategies and reach a broader audience.

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5. SEO Doctor

Next, the SEO Doctor app, developed by the Magical Apps team, offers an array of SEO tools for Shopify stores. The app is designed to help merchants with their sites by scanning the store for various SEO-related issues that could decrease its ranking and organic traffic. SEO Doctor offers several automated and manual options that determine how hands-on or -off you are in working for your store’s SEO.

The SEO Doctor app has a 4.6/5 rating based on 460 reviews in the Shopify app store.

Top features & capabilities

Pros

Cons

Suitable for:

The SEO Doctor app is suitable for various general and hybrid Shopify stores with many product pages that need constant auditing.

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6. SEO Manager

The SEO Manager app developed by venntov provides over twenty different features that help with your search engine rankings and visibility. The app offers a step-by-step tour of its features that allow you to understand and use the app for your Shopify store. In addition, it also provides comprehensive help documents that can aid you in further understanding SEO.

The SEO Manager app has a 4.7/5 rating based on 1,728 reviews in the Shopify app store.

Top features & capabilities

Pros

Cons

Suitable for:

The SEO Manager app is suitable for general Shopify stores and hybrid stores that can maximally benefit from the app’s features enabling you to edit the SEO title and description for each product on your store.

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7. SEO Expert Pro ‑ All in One

The SEO Expert Pro ‑ All in One was built by Expert Village Media Technologies. This company has been working on various SEO-oriented apps for years. The developers aim to help you monitor and optimize your Shopify store by maintaining your search ranking and managing any SEO issues you might face.

The SEO Expert Pro ‑ All in One app has a 4.6/5 rating based on 675 reviews in the Shopify app store.

Top features & capabilities

Pros

Cons

Suitable for:

The SEO Expert Pro app will significantly benefit merchants with stores with hundreds of products. Thanks to the broken link checker feature, it will be easier to keep track of broken or misleading links and fix them.

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8. SEO Suite: Image Optimizer by AVADA

The SEO Suite: Image Optimizer app was developed by AVADA. This app aims to eliminate or modify all items that cause your store and its products to load slowly—high-quality images that are too heavy to load, weak social connections to your site, broken links, and more.

The SEO Suite: Image Optimizer by AVADA app has a 4.9/5 rating based on 3,680 reviews in the Shopify app store.

Top features & capabilities

Pros

Cons

Suitable for:

The SEO Suite: Image Optimizer app is most suitable for large Shopify stores that include a large number of products presented through various images. In addition, it is also ideal for any Shopify store that links its products on other platforms since the app works well integrated with Facebook, Google, Judge.me, Loox, Rivo, and Alireviews.

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9. Plug in SEO

The Plug in SEO app, developed by Plug in Useful, aims to help Shopify users check all the pages in their online store for SEO problems. Furthermore, it focuses specifically on speed and the blog part of your Shopify store in order to improve your SEO and ranking.

The Plug in SEO app has a 4.7/5 rating based on 2,575 reviews in the Shopify app store.

Top features & capabilities

Pros

Cons

Suitable for:

The Plug In SEO is suitable for Shopify stores with thousands of pages to manage, whether filled with products, blog content, categorizations, or more. In addition, it is also an excellent choice for major international stores, as the app supports multiple languages.

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10. JSON‑LD for SEO

The last app on our list of the best Shopify SEO apps is JSON-LD for SEO. Ilana Davis LLC built this app to help your Shopify store get the desired results. The app’s primary goal is to assist Shopify merchants in qualifying for Rich Snippets or Google Rich Results for desktop and mobile search results.

The JSON-LD for SEO app has a 4.9/5 rating based on 508 reviews in the Shopify app store.

Top features & capabilities

Pros

Cons

Suitable for:

The JSON-LD for SEO is suitable for any Shopify store. It is an invaluable product for merchants interested in generating rich snippets and knowledge graph cards about their products and brand.

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Conclusion 

Shopify is an excellent platform that offers people the opportunity to advertise and sell their products or services in a much easier way. However, integrating various apps, tools, and plug-ins can further improve this platform and your store.

Thousands of excellent Shopify SEO apps provide free features and other more inclusive paid plans. We have listed ten of the best apps you must check out for 2023. Consider each app’s capabilities and features in relation to what you want for your store. Integrating any of the ten listed apps in this article will help take your Shopify store’s SEO campaign to a new level.

New to SEO or looking to improve your visibility in search results? Manaferra offers a free SEO gap analysis to estimate your website’s potential. Contact us now!

Top 7 eCommerce SEO Tips

The primary goal of any eCommerce business is to increase sales. In order to reach this goal, you must focus your marketing efforts on improving the quality and quantity of your traffic and turning visitors into customers. One of the best marketing strategies you can utilize in such a case is the implementation of search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO is a fundamental part of digital marketing and one of the strategies with the highest ROI of any eCommerce marketing campaign. Therefore, it can be the key to optimizing your website. However, many eCommerce websites still choose to rely on other methods, such as paid advertising, specifically product listing ads (PLAs). In fact, companies in the U.S. spend billions of dollars every year on ads. Although there certainly are benefits to such an approach, you’ll soon find that they require constant investment for linear results. On the other hand, with SEO for eCommerce, you can grow exponentially with time while also producing valuable content.

With this in mind, it is in your business’s best interest to implement SEO and unlock the website’s full potential. Whether this is your first attempt at benefiting from SEO or you’re looking to advance your strategy—there are several areas we can help you improve. Read on as we dive into some key eCommerce SEO tips you must know about.

Find Keywords That Are Useful to Your Audience

To rank at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) use relevant keywords that align with the searches and interests of your target audience. This optimizes your site’s content for your audience, drives traffic to your site, and potentially boosts conversions and sales for your eCommerce business.

Various tools for keyword research make it easier for you to find relevant keywords as well as provide the data needed to actually rank for them, such as keyword difficulty, traffic, and SERP analysis. Some excellent free tools include Moz Keyword Explorer and Google Keyword Planner. Whereas for others, like Semrush and Ahrefs, you’ll have to pay to access their services.

When researching keywords, you will encounter various types based on their intent. In order to optimize your products and the overall webpage, it is important to understand the concept of keyword intent, as it is undoubtedly the core of keyword research. The keyword intent will help you modify your content and landing pages to what visitors are most likely to do after visiting your site. The keyword intent can be:

  1. Commercial intent
  2. Transactional intent
  3. Navigational intent
  4. Informational intent

Once you have compiled a list of relevant keywords of a specific intent, it is time to incorporate them in various parts of your website, such as the descriptions, product titles, FAQs, category pages, and so on.

Make Sure Your Website Is Easy To Navigate

Acquiring visitors to your website is only the first step to increasing your sales. The experience visitors have when interacting with your site determines whether they believe your products or services are worth spending money on. It’s quite simple—a good user experience helps build trust, which leads to conversion, thus increasing your sales. So, although often overlooked, user experience is arguably the most important metric for any website.

Users’ perceptions of your business are often created based on how easy it is to navigate your site. After all, no person wants to go down a rabbit hole when they know exactly what product they are looking for. That is why you must ensure that all elements of your website, including the layout, text, brand, sound, visual design, and more, are concise, thus, creating a good navigation experience for all your visitors.

Create Product Descriptions That Are Optimized for SEO

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Another element that can help your site rank higher on the result pages of search engines is the product description. For these descriptions to be effective, you need to include keywords and phrases that people might use when searching for products online. Through such keywords, search engines can better understand your page and content, thus ranking it higher and helping internet searchers access your site easier.

In addition to the increased visibility, product descriptions optimized for SEO are valuable because they provide the necessary information to potential customers, helping improve the overall user experience. By providing a unique, accurate, and engaging description of each of your products or services, you can easily persuade potential customers to purchase what you’re offering.

Structured Data Markup Is Essential for Rich Snippets

Usually, search engine results include the title tag, meta description, and URL for different websites. However, if you want to kick it up a notch, consider incorporating structured data markups that help your site stand out amidst the other results. By adding more information next to the elements listed before, you create a so-called rich snippet or result. These snippets include additional information such as reviews, ratings, pricing, shipping time, pictures, text, and more in order to create a more eye-catching display.

Allowing the search engine to provide more detailed information right away helps your site stand out from the others, thus leading to an increase in the click-through rate (CTR).

Improve Your Website Speed

If your website takes a long time to load, it can drive away visitors. In fact, findings show that users become impatient if a page requires more than 2 seconds to load. Furthermore, 7 in 10 consumers claim that a website’s speed impacts their willingness to purchase from an online retailer. That is why it’s best to keep monitoring and measuring various components through a thorough eCommerce SEO audit to ensure that your site is performing well. 

Your website’s speed is tied to various components—optimize them, and you will improve your website’s speed. Begin by adding high-quality plugins. They can enhance your site’s functionality without slowing down your website. Remember the concept of quality over quantity.

Next, optimize your website’s content—compress images when possible, and minimize your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code to avoid lengthy load time. In addition, you should utilize caching as it helps temporarily store specific information that users can directly access when they request the same page again. Other tips to improve your website’s speed include reducing redirects, using content delivery networks, and more.

Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

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Currently, the number of smartphone users is estimated to be 6.8 billion, showcasing the high number of potential mobile commerce customers. Statistics show that almost one-third of all eCommerce sales is done through mobiles. In addition, more than 60% of organic search visits come from mobile devices. Therefore, you should not ignore the benefits of improving mobile responsiveness.

In order to make your website more mobile-friendly, you must ensure that the site’s content is the same regardless of what type of device you access it from. Next, work on the site’s design so your visitors can easily navigate the mobile version of your website. 

Some of the tools you can use to elevate the mobile user experience include AI and chatbots that can help guide your visitors and answer any questions they may have about the products you provide. 

Finally, keep in mind to frequently perform an audit and see whether improvements are needed on the website’s loading speed.

Improve the Structure of Your URLs

The last tip on our list of the best SEO eCommerce practices is the improvement of the structure of your URLs. Generally, your goal should be to ensure there are no indexing problems. Avoiding such issues is vital for improving your site, especially when it comes to search engines trying to locate and retrieve certain pages within your eCommerce site.

It is best to minimize the number of alternative URLs that lead to the same content, including cases when the search engine treats upper and lower-case texts the same way. Additionally, ensure that all pages in paginated results have a unique URL and include descriptive words in the URL path that make it easier for the engine to understand the site and content.

The purpose of all these modifications is to ensure that visitors can easily navigate through your site, including the general menu, categories, subcategories, and even when using filters. A helpful element for page locations is the so-called breadcrumbs. The name is a metaphor that relates to the fairytale of Hansel and Gretel, who used breadcrumbs to create a trail showing the path they have followed. Similarly, website breadcrumbs are navigation links that aim to help users navigate from product pages to higher-level pages and vice-versa.

Conclusion 

To sum up, you can improve your search engine rankings, click-through rate, and sales by implementing SEO for eCommerce sites. With the implementation of relevant keywords and product descriptions, you can increase your site’s visibility and attract more visitors. 

Furthermore, you can boost your site’s credibility by improving the quality of content and the way it is presented. Another crucial factor to keep in mind is the page loading speed, as it can determine whether visitors continue exploring your site or immediately leave it.

Do you want to level up your eCommerce website and learn more about its potential? We’ll help you optimize your website’s structure and improve its performance. So, contact us now for a free SEO gap analysis!

5 Shopify SEO Issues & How To Fix Them

Incorporating search engine optimization (SEO) into your marketing strategy is crucial if you want to rank high in search engine results pages (SERPs). Shopify, in particular, incorporates numerous SEO elements that are unique to this all-inclusive online selling platform.

Throughout this article, we’ll present some of the most impactful SEO issues you can encounter on Shopify and teach you how to manage them. From duplicate content and crawling errors to collection page issues—we will discuss some practical tips to help you deal with each problem you may encounter.

The Most Impactful Shopify SEO Issues

They say that the first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one. Although Shopify offers an abundance of benefits for online stores, there are also numerous technical flaws and imperfections that can lead to various Shopify SEO issues. Such issues can damage your organic traffic and prove disastrous for your business. That’s why you should pay attention to them.

Want to learn more about how to improve SEO on Shopify? Here are five of the most common Shopify SEO issues and how to address them:

Faceted navigation

One of the first Shopify SEO issues you might encounter is related to the faceted navigation system. This system, in most cases, is located on the sidebars of your Shopify store’s site and allows visitors to narrow down their product search results by applying filters. For example, if visitors want to search for pink area rugs only, they click multiple filters based on that faceted classification of items.

In addition to helping visitors throughout the searching process, facets, as indexed categories, act as an extension of your site’s main categories. So, all in all, they are extremely helpful and important for ensuring a great user experience. However, in some cases, especially when they are not checked and managed regularly, your Shopify site can end up having duplicate content and low-value URLs for millions of pages within your online store. 

Think of it this way, each time a visitor uses faceted navigation to guide them, the filters create new indexable URLs. At some point, the search engine’s crawl bots will begin to ignore your site and typically remove the duplicate pages from their search index. They do this to prevent users from using such content to gain an advantage in ranking. Thus, it will create a new problem for your store’s visibility and organic traffic regardless of the fact you did not intentionally create so many duplicate pages.

In order to help search engines differentiate between the canonical URL and the many non-canonical ones created each time a filter is used, you should modify the tags used with each page. Generally, Shopify automatically renders the product pages with either of these two tags:

So this means that all non-canonical tags include a canonical tag in them associated with the product page. Regularly perform SEO audits to ensure your non-canonical URLs have canonical tags in them. Through canonical tags, you can guide search engines to differentiate between duplicate and canonical content, thus, making it clear that a group of duplicate pages has a preferred version.

Access your Shopify’s “collection-template.liquid” file. Then, find all the lines with {{ product.url | within: collection }} and change any code that is written as: 

<a href=”{{ product.url | within: collection }}” class=”product-card”>

to:

<a href=”{{ product.url }}” class=”product-card”>

This way, you ensure that the canonical product URLs are visible from any collections page and show up in the internal links across your Shopify site, regardless of what collections they can be found in.

On-page SEO issues

shopify-seo-issues

Another SEO element that is crucial to ensure ease of navigation, as well as crawlability, is on-page optimization. Your Shopify’s on-page SEO aims to make your shop and content as easy to understand and navigate as possible. 

However, lacking or incomplete basic SEO elements like titles, meta descriptions, headings, and subheadings can negatively impact the search engine’s understanding of your page’s content hierarchy, leading to decreased relevancy, rankings, and traffic for keywords and overall content.

The first step to fix your on-page SEO is to identify the pages that are not correctly organized with headings and subheadings. There are several tools, such as SEO Minion or Ahrefs, that can help you with this process. Once you have identified which pages are missing titles, headings, subheadings, or have some other issue with on-page elements, the next step is fixing them.

For example, if one of the headers needs to be a subheader, you need to access the template for that specific page. Find the subheader tag it currently contains, and you will most likely find something resembling the tag:

<h1 class = “product-name”>

     <a href=”{{product.url}}” tabindex=”0”>{{product.title}}</a>

</h1>

Then, you would simply have to edit the h1 so that it is an h2, and you will end up with the correct tag:

<h2 class = “product-name”>

     <a href=”{{product.url}}” tabindex=”0”>{{product.title}}</a>

</h2>

Blog issues in Shopify

shopify-seo

Blogging is a crucial part of most eCommerce digital marketing strategies. However, if you are already using WordPress or some other platform for your blogs, chances are they cannot be incorporated into your Shopify site. Therefore, featuring products from your store on another blog or featuring the blog on your product pages is not a seamless process.

The good news is that you can fix such a problem by simply transporting your content to the blog section of your Shopify account. The platform has embedded features that aim to provide a quick and easy way to post your content, such as tools to insert images and videos, automatic SEO for titles and descriptions, the ability to schedule your posts, space for comments, tags, and much more. In short, Shopify offers all the functionality you need to continue blogging.

Another area of Shopify blogging that might lead to issues is the template and themes chosen. Generally, the platform has ready-made templates and themes that users can choose from. However, in some cases, errors can occur when you purchase and apply these elements to your blog. You might have to deal with URLs that redirect to links unrelated to your store or products or an overall decrease in loading speed.

In such instances, it is best to either reconsider the template, theme, and other extensions added or make changes to the code. For example, you can deactivate the redirected links by replacing the JavaScript code of your Shopify theme. To do so, replace the code “window.location.href =” with the line “window.parent.location.href =”, or, if possible, disable it through the theme editor.

URL structure

Another area Shopify users encounter issues with is the restricted URL structure of the platform. Some business owners might not even consider this a problem. However, if you like to optimize all areas of your website, then being unable to customize your URLs can be a problem.

Generally, every page created through your Shopify account will have a folder that cannot be changed. Furthermore, all default pages created through the platform are done via subdirectory, making all URLs lengthier. Instead of the typical hierarchy of structure that most eCommerce stores have where the links look like this: https://your-domain/category/sub-category/product, with Shopify’s hierarchical structure, you are usually stuck with longer URLs that look something like this: https://your-domain.com/collections/collection-name/products/product-name

Similarly, the URL structure of blog posts has a structure that follows the same rules:

https://your-domain.com/blogs/blog-tag/blog-post-title

So, unlike other websites where the issue could quickly be solved by creating categories and subcategories that allow you to organize URLs in a better way, Shopify does not offer such a feature. However, you can still organize your products using other methods.

To begin, you should ensure you get the best exposure through relevant keywords in the parts that you can customize, such as the URL slug. Next, you can use breadcrumbs with schema markup. This way, you help the search engines understand what categories and subcategories are included in your store. You could also create an interlink by using relevant keywords as anchor texts or add megamenus to the homepage to have more control over the way products are categorized in your Shopify store.

Product available under a different URL

If you have many items on your Shopify store, chances are that you will have to deal with some broken links from time to time. To avoid this problem, you will need to redirect the URL of the product in order to ensure availability for the visitors. Through these URL redirects, you guide your visitors from one URL to a different one under your domain where the product they are interested in is available. You can redirect a single URL or numerous pages at once from one domain to another.

To redirect your Shopify content, you need to follow these steps:

  1. Go to Shopify admin and access the Online Store
  2. Click on Navigation
  3. Click on URL Redirects
  4. Click on Create URL Redirect
  5. Enter the old URL in the redirect form under “Redirect from”
  6. Enter the new URL in the redirect form under “Redirect to”
  7. Save the redirect

However, even after following the above-mentioned steps, in some circumstances, errors can occur. The reason for such errors is because, typically, the system prioritizes existing pages over processing a redirect. Therefore, for a redirected URL to work, you will need to delete the page on the original URL. But, when dealing with faceted navigation and URLs that once existed but have since been removed, the requests are likely to result in errors. In short, you must ensure that the old path no longer exists for the redirect to be processed.

The Bottom Line 

To conclude, Shopify is one of the biggest eCommerce platforms worldwide. However, just like with any website, you’ll encounter some challenges and issues along the way that you must learn to manage, specifically ones related to Shopify SEO. These problems may be holding back your site from ranking in Google and other search engines.

While you and your users utilize some features of the store, you end up creating duplicate content that leads to various problems that can damage your visibility, CTR, and conversion. That is why it is best to regularly review your Shopify store and make updates when needed in order to ensure your store is competitive in the search results. 

Depending on what issue you are dealing with, there are various ways to manage them. You can follow the tips provided throughout this article and install extensions, use the method of canonicalization, make changes to the code, redirect the URL, and many more steps to ensure your Shopify store and blog are working properly. Or, you could work with an SEO expert agency that can address and solve any similar issues your store faces.

Take the next step to improving your Shopify store’s SEO performance, and contact us for a free SEO gap analysis through which we can estimate your store’s potential.

Best SEO Agency for Higher Education

SEO for higher education focuses on helping schools outrank their competitors by reaching a wider audience, producing more leads, and increasing conversion rates.

So, how does a higher placement on the search engine results pages (SERP) turn into an increase in enrollment? Well, it’s all about attracting your target audience and driving prospective students to your website. By ranking high, your school has better chances of students actually clicking on your site, learning more about the programs offered, and enrolling there. After all, the first website on a search engine results page gets an average click-through rate (CTR) of 27.6%. 

So, the higher you are on the SERP, the better visibility you have and the more traffic you will attract. Ultimately, this will lead to better chances of landing prospective students and increasing your enrollment numbers.

Various factors contribute to a successful SEO marketing strategy for higher education websites, starting from on-page elements and content to the reputation. However, as you work on optimizing such elements, you can encounter various challenges, including technical issues.

Working with an experienced SEO agency, such as ours, will make it easier for you to navigate through various difficulties. So, let’s look at what makes us a top-notch SEO agency and how we can help your SEO strategy.

Establishing a Strong SEO Foundation

The first step to establishing a strong SEO foundation is to be aware of your site’s current state, the competition, and areas needing improvement. Therefore, we’ll start by performing an in-depth analysis of your search performance. Once we have gathered enough data to make an informed decision, we’ll develop an actionable SEO strategy that clearly defines the roadmap needed to put your higher education website on top of the SERPs.

On average, this step takes around 30-45 days to complete, depending on the size of your website.

Improving high-impact pages

Based on our comprehensive research of your website, target audience, and current performance, we will implement our recommendations to optimize your online presence. Our approach includes a thorough examination of your site to identify and rectify technical issues, ensuring that your content is displayed optimally for a seamless user experience.

Moreover, we will audit and set up analytics, utilizing tools such as Google Analytics 4 to track the effectiveness of your marketing strategies and monitor your conversion rate. If you already have analytics in place, we will review and fine-tune them to gain more in-depth insights into your website’s performance.

At this stage, it is also crucial to improve your content. We’ll help you find new content opportunities as well as identify and work on improving the already-existing content that could be performing better. With these steps, you will start to see improvements in your site’s organic traffic in just a matter of weeks.

Producing content that drives value

top-seo-agencies-for-universities

Our objective is to enhance your higher education institution’s website and ensure it reaches the right audience—those interested in exploring your institution’s offerings and programs. By producing content that drives value, your site can bring relevant traffic from potential students who want to pursue a degree in the programs of study you offer and then funnel that traffic down to conversion.

To achieve this goal, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of what students are searching for at different stages of their college decision-making journey. With the insights gained from this data, we work with you to create content that aligns with their needs and matches their intent.

Driving traffic and brand recognition

In addition to improving conversion rates, increasing organic traffic is crucial to establishing your brand. Our link-building team will craft a link-building strategy by analyzing your existing links as well as those of your competitors and finding ways to not only catch up but surpass them. 

We will ensure that your higher education institution gets coverage on various authoritative and relevant sites where potential students can encounter your website and learn more about the programs provided. Throughout the link acquisition process, our team will help your site acquire valuable links that drive qualified traffic to your website and improve brand recognition.

Measuring performance

best-seo-agency-for-higher-education

After implementing some of the steps planned in our lead generation strategies for your website, we will use multiple data sources to identify the strengths and weaknesses of our search strategy. This way, we measure performance based on specific pre-defined key performance indicators (KPI), such as the click-through rate, domain authority, keyword ranking, page views, and more. Based on the results, we make the necessary adjustments to keep improving and adapting to the standard of the ever-changing market.

But just because your site sees significant improvement after the first few months of working with us doesn’t mean that our work is done. We will always be looking for ways to update and upgrade our strategies and goals in order to help your website reach and stay at the top.

Conclusion 

SEO has become a crucial part of college enrollment growth. To be the best, you must work with the best SEO agency for higher education. Our team has extensive experience working with higher education institutions to help them rank higher in search results and reach outstanding growth after only a few months. Want to be the next success story? Contact us for a free SEO gap analysis, where we estimate your site’s potential and share more growth opportunities.

The Ultimate Guide to Link Building for eCommerce Websites

Getting more shoppers on your website is a matter of building authority around your brand online. This is where link building comes into play. Simply put, link building is when other sites link your eCommerce website. It is the perfect way to bring new traffic to your website, as it helps with your online reputation by having others refer to it.

Think of it this way: The more high-quality, relevant websites link to content on your website, the more your site will benefit in a few different ways. Below are some of the benefits of link building:

Consequently, this improvement in your SEO translates to more sales.

When it comes to the SEO of an eCommerce website, link building seems to be one of the most challenging aspects of the process—but keep in mind that it is also one of the most rewarding.

The secret to successful link building is developing adequate content strategies and outreach techniques. Doing so will make it possible for you to build links of higher quality more efficiently and increase the visibility of your landing pages and your eCommerce website overall.

Below we have included some of the best and most effective link-building strategies and how to apply them for your eCommerce website to succeed. 

Link Building Strategies

link-building-strategies

When devising a link-building strategy, remember that it won’t be instantaneous. Developing a link-building strategy will take time and effort when done correctly.

Essential to focus on is the quality of your backlinks rather than the quantity. The quality and authority of the pages linking your website are vital in determining how high you’ll rank in search engine results.

There are numerous strategies and practices to build the best links and raise your ranking in the SERPs, and we will go through some of them in this article. Let’s dive in!

Broken link building

One of the best strategies to link building is quite simple. You start from a common problem many websites have, i.e., broken links, and work your way up from there. This is a strategy that nearly everyone can apply as, according to a Semrush study, over 42% of websites have broken links. 

The way broken link building works is you find pages on blogs that contain broken links, i.e., links that lead to nowhere, and propose they replace the broken link with a link to your website that provides similar content. This way, you benefit from link building, and the site that links your content eliminates broken links.

Skyscraper technique

This is the technique by Brian Dean of Backlinko.com to grow search traffic by 110% in two weeks. According to him, the Skyscraper technique has three steps:

  1. Find content worth linking
  2. Create something better
  3. Contact the right people

To elaborate: You find content online that has already generated many links, or the “Skyscraper,” and create something better. There are a few ways to do this, like making your content:

After creating the content, you reach out to website owners with a site in your niche interested in your topic, as they have already linked to an article on that topic. You do this by email, suggesting they replace the link with one to your website as your content is better for this and that reason.

Resource link building

The next step is using resource links from trusted sites. These resource links will be a guide that you create for your target audience.

When compiling your own, use resource pages from authority sites and blogs like Forbes, Entrepreneur, Huffington Post, Jeff Bullas, Social Media Examiner, and Copyblogger. The goal of using resource articles is to create a more extensive list to generate more backlinks. Below are some examples of what the headlines of your articles could look like:

After you have written the article, reach out via email to the pages you have linked. This could result in them liking your article or even linking your content.

Guest blogging

Guest blogging has been around for some time now, but you won’t reap the benefits of it just by writing any guest blog on just any page. Though it was common practice to get a backlink, it isn’t worth writing a mediocre blog and posting it on a page outside your niche. Instead, you must be more strategic and authentic to benefit from guest blogging. The blogs you write for another site should be unique and relevant to the website, as well as authoritative and attractive for the readers. When done right, guest blogging has several benefits:

Infographic link building

Though many doubt the effectiveness of infographics, studies have shown that they help increase website traffic by up to 12%. Infographics have a few advantages as a link-building strategy. Firstly, they help you generate organic traffic on your website and earn quality links without doing anything or reaching out to others. Secondly, you can use them in practically any article as they are great for visualizing any idea or concept, like data, statistics, research, and findings.

Link Building Best Practices 

In addition to the strategies mentioned above, there are also link-building practices that you shouldn’t ignore if you want to succeed. These practices show you what to focus your efforts and time on so that the strategies you implement effectively generate more organic traffic to your eCommerce site. Here are some of the best link-building practices:

Quality over quantity

We are all familiar with the saying “less is more,” and in the case of link building, it’s true if the “less” is of higher quality. While most people make the mistake of trying to gain more backlinks, whether relevant or not, it is better to focus on acquiring quality links, as those will bring more traffic and help you rank higher in search engine results.

Relevance

As we have briefly mentioned above, whatever link-building strategy you implement, be it guest blogging, resource link building, or something else, it is important for the links to be relevant to your niche. One good quality link that is relevant to your website is much more beneficial than a higher number of links with no relevance whatsoever. 

Authority

It’s simple: the quality of the backlinks depends on the authority of the website linking your content. So how do you determine the authority of a website? While many might think that the fact a site ranks first in the search results means it’s an authority on the topic, that’s not always the case. However, there are specific ways to determine the authority of a website, like metrics, rankings, content quality, and audience engagement. An easy way to do this is by using tools like the one from Semrush. 

Diversity

Using different ways of securing backlinks is crucial to creating a balanced backlink profile that will resist the tweaks and adjustments made by search engines. There are a significant number of link-building tactics you can use to pursue links, all of which fall under one of these three categories:

  1. Content: e.g., guest blogging, infographic promotion, etc.
  2. Research: e.g., resource pages and directories, broken link building, unlinked mentions, etc.
  3. Community: e.g., sponsorships, interviews, partnerships, etc.

Consistency

When implementing link-building strategies, consistency is vital. Gaining quality links and forming relationships with authority pages takes time and effort. Furthermore, consistently posting content is crucial to establishing yourself as an authority, as it will bring you more attention and have Google rank your page higher in the search results.

Link Building Tools

link-building-tools

Successful link building is devising strategies to find link opportunities and reach out to convince others to link your content. While link-building can be done without using any tools, you can use some practical tools to make the process easier. Here are some of the best link-building tools:

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an SEO tool with extensive features to help you optimize your website. In regards to link-building, Ahrefs allows you to:

Semrush

Semrush’s link-building tool helps you with launching and managing outreach campaigns. This tool will also provide a list of link-building opportunities to check out. Lastly, you can use Semrush’s link-building tool to keep track of the success of the strategies you implement.

Majestic

Majestic is another excellent SEO tool that focuses explicitly on backlinks analysis. Below are some of the Majestic features:

Buzzstream

Buzzstream is a link-building and outreach tool with features like:

Advanced Link Building Strategies

advanced-link-building-strategies

Influencer outreach

Influencer outreach is building relationships through influencers, i.e., people who are active on social media and have a big following. For the influencer outreach strategy to be effective, you need to: 

  1. Find the right influencers for your niche; 
  2. Reach out to them via email for backlinks;
  3. Follow up after a few days if you don’t get a response from them.

Link roundups

Link roundups are summaries of top links shared weekly or monthly by different websites. Link roundups are a great way to build relationships with other blogs and generate more backlinks. You can use Google or social media (e.g., Twitter) to find link roundups of your favorite niche blogs, create a list, and reach out to them to feature your content in one of their link roundups.

Broken backlink recovery

Broken backlink recovery helps you maintain the SEO value of the links you’ve generated over time. By recovering broken backlinks, you retain link equity or link juice. In addition, reclaiming links decreases the chances of your site visitors landing on a 404 error page, thus ensuring a better user experience.

Unlinked mentions

As this strategy refers to having people discuss your product or website in a positive or neutral tone, only those with a strong brand presence can employ this strategy for link building. There are a few steps to using unlinked mentions as a link-building strategy:

HARO

“Help a reporter out,” or HARO is another excellent link-building tool. The way HARO works is you answer a reporter’s questions that are relevant to your business or industry. When you respond, you attach the link to your website, so if they use your answer, they also link your site.

Conclusion 

Focusing on your website’s link profile is vital for ranking higher in search engine results. A good link-building strategy will include various methods and practices of gaining backlinks like guest blogging, the “Skyscraper” technique, broken link building, infographic link building, link roundups, influencer outreach, etc.

However, when implementing these strategies, it is essential to remember that your site needs high-quality links from authority sites. This is because when it comes to link building, the quality of the links is what matters, not quantity. 

By following these link-building strategies and practices, you will gain more traffic for your eCommerce website, guarantee a better user experience for your visitors, and rank higher in search engines. 

FAQs 

What is link building and how does it work for eCommerce websites?

Link building is an SEO practice that helps you increase your search engine ranking. Search engine algorithms use links to determine the relevance of a page. If a website has a significant number of high-quality links, it means it has valuable content. External and internal linking grant your eCommerce website more visibility and, therefore, more organic traffic.

How do I build backlinks for my eCommerce website?

Building backlinks for eCommerce or product websites is difficult. What works for eCommerce websites is building links to your homepage or content and then using internal links to direct link equity to the pages you want on your website.

What are the best link-building strategies for eCommerce websites?

There are various link-building strategies for eCommerce websites. The best link-building plan will include a mixture of the following:

Why is link building important for SEO on eCommerce websites?

Developing a good link profile for your eCommerce website is crucial to driving more traffic, establishing yourself as an authority, ranking higher in search engines, and having search engines crawl your website.

What are the best link-building tools for eCommerce websites?

Link building can be done without using any tools, but using them can make the process easier and more efficient. Some of the best link-building tools for eCommerce websites are:

How can I determine the authority of a website for link building on my eCommerce website?

There are specific ways to determine the authority of a website, like metrics, rankings, content quality, and audience engagement. An easy way to do this is by using tools like Semrush. 

What are some advanced link-building techniques for eCommerce websites?

Some of the advanced link-building techniques for eCommerce websites include:

The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing for eCommerce

Content marketing has proven beneficial in several aspects, especially for eCommerce businesses. With an ever-increasing number of online businesses competing for attention, creating high-quality, informative, and engaging content is essential to attracting and retaining customers. Effective content marketing can help eCommerce businesses establish themselves as industry leaders, increase online visibility, and generate more leads and sales.

In addition to improving brand reputation, content marketing can help eCommerce brands boost their SEO visibility. By incorporating relevant keywords and providing valuable information, eCommerce sites can attract more organic traffic to their website, increasing visibility and higher conversion rates. With effective content marketing, eCommerce businesses can create a comprehensive online presence that attracts new customers and retains existing ones.

Lastly, content marketing can help eCommerce businesses create a loyal customer base by providing value-packed services like tutorials, guides, and product reviews. E-commerce businesses can establish long-lasting relationships with their audience by providing high-quality content that adds value to their customers’ lives, resulting in repeat sales and positive word-of-mouth marketing.

In this comprehensive guide, you will find a five-step strategy for using content marketing for your eCommerce business. Let’s get started!

1. Know Your Audience

know-your-audience

In today’s digital age, identifying your target audience is critical for the success of any eCommerce business. This is because understanding the needs and preferences of your customers helps you tailor your product offerings, messaging, and marketing strategies to resonate with them better. 

One of the best ways to do this is by creating buyer personas, i.e., a fictional representation of your ideal customers based on research and data about existing and potential customers. This approach allows you to visualize and understand your audience on a deeper level, including their motivations, pain points, buying behavior, and interests. 

By clearly understanding your buyer personas, you can fashion more relevant and personalized marketing messages and product recommendations that are more likely to convert into sales.

You start the process of creating a buyer persona by conducting some research on your current and potential customers and analyzing your findings. Afterward, you create a profile based on your gathered data and try to determine their challenges and pain points. Lastly, you can create a profile of a fictional person, the ideal customer, with a name, age, gender, and other demographic information. 

An example of a buyer persona could be a 24-year-old female who is fashion-conscious, enjoys shopping online, and follows the latest trends. She appreciates affordability and fast shipping. 

2. Develop Your Content Marketing Strategy

Developing a content marketing strategy for eCommerce businesses includes several crucial steps that can help you create engaging, relevant, and valuable content that resonates with your audience. 

Firstly, it is essential to set clear and measurable content marketing goals that align with your business objectives, such as increasing brand awareness, driving traffic to your website, generating new leads, or boosting sales.

Secondly, content marketing requires resources. This is why determining your content marketing budget is crucial to ensure you have enough resources to produce high-quality content consistently.

Thirdly, defining your brand voice and message has several essential benefits. For example, a tone of voice specific to your brand helps you:

Choose a tone of voice that best represents your brand, be it formal, informal, humorous, optimistic, assertive, etc. 

Another crucial aspect of your content marketing strategy is choosing the right content types for your eCommerce business. Different types of content include blog posts, product videos, social media posts, infographics, email newsletters, etc. Choosing the correct content types is vital to ensure you provide the right content at the right stage of the customer journey.

Last but not least, make sure to stay organized during the whole process of implementing your content marketing strategy. You can do this by creating a content calendar to help you plan and organize your content creation and distribution—thus ensuring you deliver content throughout the year in a consistent manner.

3. Create Engaging and Valuable Content

create-engaging-and-valuable-content

The next step in implementing your content marketing strategy is actually creating content. Engaging and valuable content is a critical factor in the success of eCommerce businesses. When it comes to online shopping, customers rely heavily on the information and visuals provided to make informed purchase decisions. There are a few ways to ensure the content you create is engaging, attractive, and valuable, including:

4. Distribute and Promote Your Content

Nowadays, eCommerce is highly competitive, so it’s no longer enough just to create high-quality content for your online store; you must also distribute and promote that content effectively to reach your target audience. Content distribution and promotion are essential for eCommerce success, as they can help drive traffic to your site, increase brand awareness, and ultimately boost sales.

When choosing the proper content distribution channels for eCommerce, it’s essential to consider your target audience and their preferred channels. For example, social media channels like Instagram and TikTok may be more effective if you sell products targeted toward a younger audience. On the other hand, email marketing campaigns are preferable for an older demographic.

An effective way to distribute and promote eCommerce content is by creating an email marketing campaign, allowing you to reach customers directly in their inboxes. When creating an email campaign, it’s essential to consider your audience, personalize your messaging, and include a clear call-to-action that encourages customers to visit your site.

Leveraging social media for eCommerce content marketing is another powerful strategy. Social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn offer a range of tools and features that can help you reach your target audience, including paid advertising, influencer partnerships, and user-generated content. It’s important to tailor your content to each social media channel and engage with your audience to build a solid online community.

By choosing the proper content distribution channels, creating effective email marketing campaigns, and leveraging social media, you can drive traffic to your site and increase brand awareness which will, in turn, boost your sales.

5. Measure and Optimize Your Content Marketing Strategy

measure-and-optimize-your-content-marketing-strategy

Once you have completed all the previous steps to your content marketing strategy, it is time to keep an eye on it. Measuring and optimizing your eCommerce content marketing strategy is pivotal for the success of your online business. By setting eCommerce content marketing KPIs, you can track the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts and make decisions to improve your strategy based on the data you have collected. 

Without measurable goals, it’s difficult to know whether your content marketing strategy delivers the desired results. By analyzing your eCommerce content marketing performance, you can identify the areas where you need to improve and optimize your strategy accordingly. This can lead to better engagement with your target audience, increased traffic, higher conversions, and greater revenue. Furthermore, such an analysis can help you understand your customers better, their preferences, and their behavior on your website. With this information, you can create more relevant and targeted content for your audience, which drives better results.

Conclusion

In conclusion, content marketing is an essential part of any successful eCommerce business strategy. By developing a content marketing strategy, creating engaging and valuable content, distributing and promoting said content, and measuring and optimizing the results, businesses can effectively reach and engage their target audience, build brand awareness, establish themselves as thought leaders in their industry, and ultimately drive more traffic, leads, and sales.

By investing in content marketing, businesses can build long-term customer relationships and position themselves for sustained growth and success in a highly competitive online marketplace.

4 Higher Education Marketing Trends To Watch in 2023

In higher education and many other fields, staying on top of the industry news and trends is crucial to gaining a competitive advantage. You can benefit significantly from using a strong higher education marketing strategy that aids you in identifying opportunities for growth, generating leads, and retaining students.

Read on to learn more about the current higher education marketing trends, how to adapt to digital transformation within the industry, and how to use cutting-edge technologies to succeed.

4 Higher Education Marketing Trends for 2023

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on higher education can be noticed in the visible shift in marketing strategies toward digital reinforcement and virtual events. In comparison to before, the path to reaching prospective students has changed. The immense use of digital platforms has necessitated a similar approach to marketing strategies.

The key to higher education success is not only accepting these marketing trends but fully embracing them. So, read on and learn more about higher education marketing strategies you can use to stand out from the crowd in 2023.

1. Student-centered content has the potential to drive significant results in higher education marketing

higher-education-marketing-trends

Considering the rising cost of education and the heavy burden of student loans, today’s prospective students are facing new challenges in deciding what higher education they should enroll in or if they should do so. As a result, higher education marketing must shift towards a more student-centered approach to drive results. Before, higher education institutes’ marketing concentrated on “this is why we are great” messages. Now, it focuses more on “this is why we are great for you.”

There are many ways you can reach prospective students by developing your brand identity, including content marketing. Quality content naturally helps boost engagement and helps build credibility. You can reach audiences on various platforms ranging from written content to audio and image.

Firstly, a common communication channel between higher education institutions and their audiences is blogs—spaces where the school can share relevant content, introduce various topics and programs, and create a community. Blogging is a highly effective tool for content marketing associated with many benefits on top of educating and engaging students. According to a study conducted by HubSpot Marketing, on average, companies that blog have:

To attract even more prospective students, you can utilize guest blogging to share content on a third-party blog. This way, you can create hyperlinks that direct visitors to your site and thus improve your visibility and web traffic.

Another format you can utilize for content marketing is podcasts. The popularity of such a tool has been at an all-time high in recent years. Statistics show that in the U.S., around 41% of the population listens to podcasts every month, with 28% doing it weekly. Because podcasts are naturally conversational, often featuring guest speakers that introduce content in a more personal way, there is plenty of room to create student-centered content. 

Video content is also gaining popularity in higher education content marketing. Both long-form and short-form videos are helpful, depending on the content you are presenting. For example, in higher education, you can utilize long-form videos for personalized campus tours, explanations of the application process, financial aid explainers, tutor introductions, and much more.

Your strategy should be to create high-quality content and incorporate it within your social media posts to reach customers. Link your blogs, podcasts, videos, and more on social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more—provide your audience with a glimpse of the content they can access by visiting your site.

2. Use short-form videos to promote your higher ed institute

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Short-form videos provide viewers with a timely snapshot of important events and programs within your school. You can accompany them with a clickable link, sticker, message option, hashtag, and more to increase engagement and stay connected with your audience.

A popular destination for such videos is TikTok which has quickly grown in popularity, with over  80 million monthly active users in the United States. An interesting statistic to keep in mind is that 60% of TikTok users are Gen Zers—a prime demographic for higher education institutions. Therefore, TikTok is an excellent platform for your university or college to connect and engage with Gen Zers as prospective students in an entertaining and relatable way.

Though you can create videos that provide students with scholarly content that gives them an idea of what your university can provide academically, it is best to mix such videos with non-academic ones. Videos focused on student experience, athletics, your university’s student services, the campus, and much more are where the real engagement opportunities lie. We advise you to involve your student body in order to present the most authentic representation of what life would be like for students at your university.

3. Consider shifting your PR strategies online in order to improve your higher education marketing efforts

You can also improve your higher education marketing by shifting your PR strategies online and collaborating with other professionals. Consider shifting your focus from school-produced content to student-focused and student-made content in order to better connect with your target audience. Furthermore, place ads on content websites typically frequented by prospective students and increase the chances of them interacting with your site.

Another element you should add to your marketing efforts is establishing ties with professionals that can help you create content as well as have an established presence on social media platforms with a dedicated following, such as:

Leverage such tactics by embracing these influencers with the ability to reach your prospective students more effectively through their content.

4. The importance of local SEO for higher education marketing is expected to increase in the future

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It is no surprise that SEO has considerable control over today’s marketing strategies, and rightfully so. It is the marketing channel that helps your site rank higher on a search engine results page (SERP) and consequently receive more traffic. However, a more recent marketing trend you should consider using is local SEO to optimize local searches. According to statistics, about 46% of all searches have local intent. Therefore, implementing basic local SEO strategies will help your site’s ranking in the local market, reaching many prospective students for recruitment. 

You should work with SEO experts and devise a strong content strategy that focuses on producing content answering questions from searches near your area and containing relevant keywords so as to improve local visibility. All improvements made in your online presence within your region will help recruit local students.

Conclusion

It is clear that one must always stay updated with higher education marketing trends as the field is constantly evolving. To stay ahead of the curve, keep generating leads, attract students and retain them, you should keep up with the trends and implement the necessary practices in your strategy. Recently, for example, higher education marketing trends include the increased importance of digital marketing, especially through student-centered content, short-form videos on popular platforms, and local search engine optimization. 


A well-chosen digital marketing strategy is crucial to expanding your institute’s student base. Our digital agency can help you stay on top of the current trends and be one step ahead of all that is to come. We’ll devise and implement a successful digital marketing strategy that encompasses all the above trends and much more. So, schedule a free consultation, and let us help you grow your education institution!

How To Edit Shopify Robots.txt

When building an eCommerce site, the robots.txt file will be one of the most important elements of your site’s search engine optimization (SEO).

eCommerce sites are typically bigger than the majority of sites on the Web. What contributes to these sites’ size is also the fact that they contain features such as faceted navigation.

This is why eCommerce sites need to be able to better control how search engines like Google crawl their site. By doing this, sites like these can manage crawl budgets and prevent Googlebot from crawling low-quality pages from their site.

While the default robots.txt on Shopify is very solid for most cases, you might need to do some adjustments to this file for some sites. Shopify has been growing exponentially with more sites starting to use the platform. The sites using Shopify are getting larger and more powerful, which means they require more crawl budget management—i.e. optimizing the robots.txt more.

In this article, we will discuss:

What Is Shopify Robots.txt? 

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The Shopify robots.txt file’s function is to give directions to search engines e.g. Google, Bing, etc. on what URLs on your site they may crawl. The robots.txt file will usually block search engines from crawling low-quality pages that you don’t want to be crawled. We generate the Shopify robots.txt by using robots.txt.liquid file.

What Is NOT Indexed by Default in Shopify’s Robots.txt?  

If you look at your Shopify site you will see an already configured robots.txt file. To find the robots.txt file you need to go to: domain.com/robots.txt

When you access the robots.txt file, you’ll find a set of preconfigured rules. The default preconfigured rules are set to block search engines from crawling nonessential pages. Here are some of the most useful rules you will find in the default Shopify robots.txt file:

Most Shopify store owners won’t even need to make any adjustments to their robots.txt file as the default configuration will be enough to manage most cases. Because the bulk of Shopify sites is typically on the smaller side, crawl control isn’t a problem for many of them.

However, for the sites that do need it, it is possible for store owners to create additional rules to customize the robots.txt for their site. You can do this by creating and editing robots.txt. file.

Where Is the Shopify Robots.txt File Located?

In order to make adjustments to your Shopify robots.txt file you need to first locate this file. To find your Shopify robots.txt file you need to consider the root directory of the primary domain name of your Shopify store. So, essentially it is the domain name slash robots.txt. 

For example: examplestore.com/robots.txt

What Is the Process for Constructing a Shopify Robots.txt.liquid?

Below you will find a step-by-step guide to constructing the Shopify robots.txt.liquid file in your store:

  1. Go to the left section of your Shopify admin page, go to Online Store > Themes
  2. Select Actions > Edit code
  3. Under “Templates”, click on the “Add a new template” link
  4. Click the dropdown on the far left and choose “robots.txt”
  5. Select “Create template”

After this the Shopify robots.txt.liquid file will open in the editor and you can go on editing the file.

How Can I Modify the Shopify Robots.txt File?

There are a few ways to modify or edit the Shopify robots.txt file:

  1. You can add additional rules to the Shopify robots.txt by writing new blocks of code to the robots.txt liquid file like in the example below:

{%- if group.user_agent.value == ‘*’ -%}

{{ ‘Disallow: [URLPath]‘ }}

{%- endif -%}

  1. If your Shopify site uses /search-results/ for the internal search function and you want to block it by editing the robots.txt, you simply need to add this command:

{%- if group.user_agent.value == ‘*’ -%}

{{ ‘Disallow: /search-results/.*’ }}

{%- endif -%}

  1. For blocking the multiple directories (/search-results/ & /private/, you need to add these two blocks to the file:

{%- if group.user_agent.value == ‘*’ -%}

{{ ‘Disallow: /search-results/.*’ }}

{%- endif -%}

{%- if group.user_agent.value == ‘*’ -%}

{{ ‘Disallow: /private/.*’ }}

{%- endif -%}

When you complete this action these lines will appear in your Shopify robots.txt file:

Disallow: /search-results/.*

Disallow: /private/.*

Sitemap: ##########

Know the Limitations of a Robots.txt File

While you can edit your Shopify robots.txt file to direct search engines to keep away from the pages you don’t want to be crawled, there are still some limitations to this, such as:

Possible Use Cases of Modifying Robots.txt

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Editing a Shopify robots.txt file is difficult and it is not recommended to do if you don’t need to or if you don’t know what you are doing. So, how do you determine if your site would benefit from editing the robots.txt file? Here are some of the cases when you could seriously consider editing your Shopify robots.txt file:

Internal site search

One of the best things to do for your site’s SEO is to block your site’s internal search through the robots.txt file. The reason you need to do this is because users can enter an infinite number of queries in search engines. Allowing Google to crawl these pages on your site will lead to a plethora of low-quality search results in the index.

The good news is that you can use Shopify’s default robots.txt to block the standard internal search with this command:

Disallow: /search 

Having said that, many Shopify sites don’t utilize their default internal search. Instead, many Shopify sites opt for using apps or some other internal search technology. Doing this will frequently change the URL of the internal search. When this occurs, Shopify’s default rules can no longer protect your site.

In the example below the internal search results render at URLs with /pages/search in the path:

This means that Google is allowed to crawl these internal search URLs:

In such cases, the site owner should consider editing Shopify’s robots.txt rules, i.e. add custom commands to block Google from crawling the pages or search directory.

Faceted navigations

Another case where you should consider adjusting your Shopify robots.txt file is when your site has faceted navigation, i.e. a filtering option you can apply on your category pages. You can usually find these on the left-hand side of the page. 

Let’s take as an example a clothing Shopify site that lets users filter the products by color, size, product type, etc. If we were to select the “Black” and “White” color filters, we would see a URL with the “?color” parameter loaded. In this instance, Shopify’s default robots.txt will successfully block certain page paths that faceted navigation might create, but not all of them. When the facet, “color” is not blocked,  Google is allowed to crawl the page.

In such cases, you should consider blocking pages with robots.txt in Shopify. This is because there are a  large number of these faceted navigation URLs that could be crawled due to the number of combinations. To reduce or prevent the crawl of low-quality or similar pages you should block multiple facets e.g. size, color, etc., and add rules in the robots.txt to block their crawl. 

Conclusion

The default setting on Shopify’s robots.txt doesn’t allow search engines to index certain pages on stores, such as password-protected pages and pages related to the checkout process. However, users can modify the Robots.txt file which is located in the root directory of your store’s file system to allow or block specific pages as needed.

To construct a robots.txt file, you can use the default file provided by Shopify as a starting point and add or modify the instructions as needed.

It should be noted that there are limitations to Shopify’s robots.txt file. The file can be used to instruct search engines not to crawl pages you don’t want to be crawled but it does not guarantee it will block pages from being indexed. That’s why it is important to regularly review and update the file as needed to ensure that it is accurate and effective.

There are some cases where it is advisable to modify the Shopify robots.txt file, such as: blocking pages related to internal site search and faceted navigations, allowing or blocking specific pages as needed, etc. By understanding how to use the robots.txt file and taking advantage of its capabilities, you can improve the visibility and SEO of your Shopify website.

New to SEO or looking to improve your visibility in search results? Manaferra offers a free SEO gap analysis to estimate your website’s potential.

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