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

ecommerce-seo-best-practices

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.

Enterprise SEO Audit

An SEO audit is an assessment of a specific website with the purpose of identifying possible issues that prevent websites from ranking in search engine results. An enterprise SEO audit is the same, except on a much larger scale, i.e., with websites that contain hundreds, thousands, or even millions of pages.

Regular website audits are crucial in devising a successful SEO strategy. This is because finding your website’s strong and weak points will help you develop an SEO strategy tailored to your website’s needs. SEO audits will also contribute to efficiency as they will help you dedicate your time, resources, and budget to the optimizations that will have the most significant impact on your website. 

In this article, we will go over the process of performing an enterprise SEO audit, starting with how to prepare for the audit, technical SEO audit, on-page and off-page SEO audits, and analyzing the audit results.

Preparing for the Audit

preparing-for-the-audit

Enterprise SEO audits can be challenging due to the size of the website and the 200+ ranking factors in Google’s algorithm.

This is why it is always a good idea to set some goals and objectives regarding what you hope to achieve with the SEO audit. And we are not talking about “increasing organic traffic,” as this is very broad as a goal, but instead, get more specific with your goals; for example:

Next, find out which of the 200+ ranking factors in Google’s algorithm you need to focus on. You do this by establishing the most important metrics for your business and keeping track of them. Here are 12 of the most crucial SEO KPIs (Key Performance Indicators):

Lastly, establish a benchmark for comparison after you are done with the audit. These are the most important metrics you need to focus on:

Technical SEO Audit

One of the first steps into an enterprise SEO audit is doing a technical SEO audit. Start by analyzing your site’s architecture and find out what could be improved. If your website isn’t properly structured, visitors won’t be able to easily navigate through it, resulting in them looking for more user-friendly sites. Approximately one in two users leaves a website after visiting only one page. 

Secondly, you need to check if search engines like Google can properly index your pages, because pages that Google doesn’t index won’t appear in search results. To check if your pages are indexed, look for issues in Google Search Console. Along with unindexed pages, you will find a list of reasons why they weren’t indexed. It’s important to remember that not all pages have to be indexed, except for those you want to rank in reach results.

Another thing you should focus on is your site’s crawlability. When conducting an SEO audit, you should simulate how search engines like Google crawl your website to find out issues with your site’s crawlability.

Your website’s speed is another ranking factor for Google. Statistics show that the longer it takes for your website to load, the bigger the chances your visitors will leave your site. After that, you need to ensure you are implementing best On-page SEO practices on your site. The following are some of the most important On-page SEO elements for your website’s SEO:

Each of these tags serves a different purpose and can help your ranking.

Lastly, check your page for duplicate content, as it can prevent Google from picking the original page at the top of the search results. There are two ways to deal with duplicate content:

  1. Remove it;
  2. Use canonical tags to indicate which is the original version of the page.

The kind of content you publish and its quality is the foundation of your website and is, therefore, essential to ranking well in search engines. This is why you need to ensure the content on each page is unique and beneficial to your site’s visitors. Make sure you remove or update any content that doesn’t provide value for your visitors so your audience can benefit from it. 

Another integral part of your SEO strategy is the keywords you target. When conducting an SEO audit, you need to target keywords that bring qualified traffic to your website. You should use keywords that qualified leads usually use when searching for information about your industry, company, products, or services. Such keywords should also have enough search volume —i.e., many people searching for specific information.

Enterprise websites usually target short-tail keywords, which are more general and contain only a few words. Remember that it is harder to rank for these keywords, but they can bring in lots of qualified traffic and are great for branding.

Internal links have a few functions which make them essential for your website’s SEO, such as:

By using an SEO tool like Screaming Frog or Oncrawl, you can check for issues regarding internal linking and suggestions on how to fix them, for example:

  1. Finding essential pages that don’t get enough internal links and adding links to them;
  2. Finding pages with a good internal linking score and using them to distribute link equity to other pages.

Part of a technical SEO audit is also looking for broken links and redirects. Because websites are constantly updating their content or deleting old pages, links will sometimes break. It is, therefore, crucial to ensure that your external and internal links are leading to live pages. Having lots of broken pages on your site will cause Google to consider your website as not well-maintained and consequently not rank your pages in the SERPs.

Lastly, images and videos will make your website more aesthetically pleasing and understandable to visitors and help with your SEO (if they are optimized!). Add short and descriptive filenames containing keywords to ensure your images are optimized. These images also need to have Alt tags, as they help search engines understand the images.

Off-Page SEO Audit

off-page-seo-audit

Off-page SEO refers to improving your website’s rankings on search engines through activities outside your website. This is done mainly through backlinks. The number and quality of links you use help Google determine whether your website is credible and how high it should rank in search engines.

This is why it’s essential to regularly check for broken or toxic backlinks from spam sites, sites that Google does not index, those with viruses and malware, etc. 

Lastly, off-page SEO helps increase brand awareness through content marketing, social media, influencer marketing, guest posting, etc.

Analysis and Recommendations

The ultimate goal of an enterprise SEO audit is to achieve efficiency and better performance. Through an enterprise SEO audit, you can determine if your website is as healthy as it is pleasing to the eye and, more importantly, guide your team’s time, resources, and budget where they are most needed.

The results you get from an SEO audit will help you discover the strengths and weaknesses of your website so that you can address them accordingly. Remember that it is also essential to prioritize your action items to achieve maximum results, i.e., better rankings on search engines.

Conclusion

Search engine optimization is essential to growing your business through organic traffic. That’s why enterprise websites should practice SEO audits. Regularly conducting these audits will ensure your website ranks well in search engines and you establish yourself as an authority in a particular field.

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.

Shopify vs. BigCommerce SEO: A Comparison

Many companies need to adjust their strategy when it comes to investing in website growth. 70% of companies still choose to invest in social media marketing, while only 27.9% use social media to find inspiration for things to do or purchase. Despite the fact that search engines account for 93% of all online traffic, 47% of small businesses aren’t currently investing in SEO.

Companies must always consider search engines when choosing an eCommerce platform. Each platform has features that could either help you or negatively affect your business. 

This article will discuss Shopify and BigCommerce and some key differences regarding their features. This thorough comparison will help you decide which one would better suit your business!

Overview of Shopify and BigCommerce

When designing an eCommerce website, it is essential to consider the search engine optimization (SEO) capabilities of the platform. While many eCommerce platforms offer impressive features, without built-in SEO support, they may not be the best investment in the long run.

Nowadays, Shopify and BigCommerce are two of the most famous eCommerce website platforms online. Both of these platforms offer SEO features for their users. 

According to Shopify, users can add keywords, meta titles, and descriptions relevant to their products. Shopify users can also automatically generate robots.txt and sitemap.xml files, all while preventing duplicate content with canonical redirects.

BigCommerce users, on the other hand, can customize meta titles, descriptions, and the content on their pages. The BigCommerce guide also goes over proper canonical redirects, optimized website structure, and automatic microdata inclusion to give sites rich snippets in search results. 

Built-In Features vs. Apps

You can optimize your content using various built-in Shopify features. Here’s what these features do:

In addition to the built-in SEO features, you can install SEO apps on your Shopify store, such as:

BigCommerce has built-in SEO features for online stores, too, including:

Lastly, BigCommerce allows you to install additional SEO apps like:

How They Handle SEO Issues

shopify-vs-bigcommerce-seo-issues

When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), both Shopify and BigCommerce perform quite well. Below you will find some of the common SEO issues with eCommerce websites and how Shopify and Bigcommerce handle them:

Duplicate URLs

Duplicate content is content that is accessible on multiple URLs. Because the same content is shown across multiple URLs, search engines don’t know which one to rank higher in the search results. The problem that arises in this situation is that the search engine chooses to rank both URLs lower and rank other websites higher. 

Shopify duplicate URLs

The way to resolve the issue of duplicate URLs is by redirecting duplicate URLs to the canonical page. However, this is not permitted by Shopify. Users cannot reroute pages that exist in theory with the Shopify redirect tool.

Furthermore, with Shopify, a tagged URL can exist even if the tag itself doesn’t. The labeled pages still exist, even if all tags are erased. The Shopify platform deems URL structure as an instruction, therefore, when fed with an URL with a tag that doesn’t exist, it will return the parent page and not a 404 error. Consequently, there is an infinite number of possible URL duplications.

With Shopify, users cannot put up a redirect rule and address the problem because Shopify doesn’t allow users to edit .htaccess files. Thus, duplicates are indexed but cannot be redirected.

BigCommerce duplicate URLs

BigCommerce doesn’t have .htaccess files because the servers are NGINX i.e. users don’t have their own virtual servers. What’s different here is that BigCommerce is headless and allows you to set up any kind of wildcard redirect using your own register. Even though you cannot make up redirect rules within the BigCommerce platform, you can create some outside of it which can then be applied to your BigCommerce-powered shop.

The BigCommerce WordPress plugin allows users to accomplish anything they can do with WordPress with BigCommerce—making BigCommerce the more powerful SEO platform.

Robots.txt

A robots.txt file is a code that tells search engine crawlers which pages on your website they can and cannot crawl. These files are important because if they are not configured correctly, they can negatively affect your website’s SEO. When a web crawler attempts to crawl a blocked page in the robots.txt file, it will result in a soft error. The bigger the number of errors on your page, the slower the crawl rate and, ultimately, the lower the ranking. 

Shopify robots.txt

In general, Shopify’s default rules are capable of blocking search engine crawlers from crawling lower-quality web pages for most sites. In reality, most Shopify store owners don’t need to make any changes to their robots.txt file as the default configuration will be enough to handle most issues. This is because  the majority of Shopify sites tend to be smaller, making crawl control an easy task. Of course, as the Shopify platform gets more users, the websites will get larger. 

While Shopify’s default rules are more than enough for most cases, sometimes it is necessary for store owners to create additional rules to adjust the robots.txt to their site. They can do this by creating and editing a robots.txt.liquid file.

BigCommerce robots.txt

Similarly, BigCommerce also has a set of default rules and a list of disallowed files by default. If users wish to view or edit this list they can easily do so by going to “Settings” and then the “Search Engine Robots” section. After making the adjustments users may have to wait a few days up to a few weeks for crawlers to crawl their site again and reindex appropriately.

Category pages 

Category pages have a:

Shopify

Shopify allows users to manually add products to collections and create “smart” collections which are automatically filled with products based on conditions you set. Shopify refers to them as “automated collections.”

When setting up, users can employ various criteria to populate or fill a collection such as product titles, tags, prices, weight, etc.,—so, if you create an automated collection with a certain name, you can then tell Shopify to add to that collection any product that has the title of the collection in its name.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce allows users to manually add products to different categories or collections they create. Although Bigcommerce does not have automated collections it does have a “bulk edit” option. Bulk Product Editor allows users to access essential product values from the BigCommerce dashboard that are unchangeable by using the import default feature—thus speeding up category assignment.

Load Time & Page Speed: Which Is Faster?

The speed at which your online store loads is very important as it can affect conversions and your site’s search engine rankings. When we compare Shopify and BigCommerce load time and page speed analyzing mobile and desktop performance scores, BigCommerce is notably faster than Shopify (although Shopify is quite fast too). 

ShopifyBigCommerce
Mobile Performance Score41.5149.89
Mobile Ranking (1-12)106
Desktop Performance Score77.0378.67
Desktop Ranking (1-12)104

Shopify vs. BigCommerce Pricing

When it comes to different tools they can use, one of the first things customers are interested to know is their costs. 

Shopify provides 5 different pricing plans:

Shopify also offers a three-day free trial and the ability to pay upfront for a Shopify plan and take advantage of discounts.

On the other hand, BigCommerce provides 4 different pricing plans:

BigCommerce also offers a free trial and a 10% discount on the “Plus” and “Pro” plans by paying upfront for a year.

Conclusion

Both Shopify and BigCommerce are popular eCommerce platforms that offer a range of features and tools for SEO. However, their approaches to SEO differ—so one may be better suited for your business than the other.

Shopify offers a variety of built-in features for running an online store, including marketing and sales tools, as well as options for shipping and customer service management. One advantage of using Shopify is that it comes with many built-in features, giving users more freedom to pick and choose which apps they want.

BigCommerce, on the other hand, has fewer built-in features than Shopify, but its third-party app store offers more options for customizing your online store.

Ultimately, the better option for you depends on your business’s specific needs and goals. Both platforms have their strengths and weaknesses—which businesses should carefully consider before making a decision.

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 for a free consultation!

The Ultimate SaaS SEO Guide

Simply put, SaaS SEO is a marketing strategy used to attract visitors, i.e., potential users or customers, to a SaaS website. This is achieved by using SEO or Search Engine Optimization to get the site to rank higher in search engines like Google, Bing, etc. 

Looking at some of the most successful SaaS companies and their growth, it is easy to see that a large part of their success is due to their SEO strategy. Naturally, this means that you, too, need to focus on SEO if you want your SaaS company to succeed.

The first step in doing so is understanding how to create a good SaaS SEO strategy, i.e., pinpointing the aspects you need to focus on and discovering opportunities to put your company in front of your objective audience.

Use this guide to find some of the best tips and strategies to bring organic traffic to your SaaS website. Feel free to skip ahead to the ones that interest you the most.

What’s included in this guide? 

Perform an SEO Audit: Find Technical Issues

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Technical SEO refers to the practice of using different tactics in creating and optimizing the infrastructure of a website to facilitate crawling and indexing by search engines.

This SEO subcategory deals with the technical aspects of the website, such as:

Why is technical SEO important?

While the quality of the content on your website is essential to attract visitors, it is worth little if search engines cannot browse and index your website correctly. Optimizing the technical aspects of your website is crucial to attracting organic traffic from search engines because it makes it possible for users to access and navigate your website easily.

You can use tools like Google Search Console to pinpoint your SaaS website’s technical SEO issues:

  1. Log in to your Google Search Console account
  2. Go to “Overview” then “Security and Manual Actions” to check for serious issues, i.e., manual penalty, security issues, etc.
  3. Check “Crawl Stats”
  4. See the “Coverage” report to check the number of pages your website has indexed in Google
  5. See “Mobile Usability” to check if your website is mobile-friendly
  6. Check the “Details” section to see the errors Google has run into, etc.

If you want to conduct a more in-depth analysis of your website’s technical SEO issues, you can use the audit tool in Semrush.

Keyword Research

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Keyword research for SaaS companies refers to discovering the keywords customers use in search engines like Google to find SaaS products or services. 

If done correctly, keyword research can help you with the following:

The three steps of properly conducting keyword research are:

1. Finding keywords by using keyword research tools like:

2. Analyzing keywords using key metrics and criteria like:

3. Targeting keywords you want to rank for:

You can determine whether a keyword is primary or secondary using the Keyword Overview Tool and the Organic Research Tool.

Lastly, it is essential to determine the searcher’s intent when using a particular keyword before competing for any keyword. The searcher’s intent falls into one of these four categories:

By determining the searcher’s intent, you can use the right keyword for your content. You can use the “Intent” filter in any of the keyword-related tools in Semrush.

Define Your Content Strategy

After you’ve taken care of the technical aspects of your SaaS website, it is time to think about the site’s actual content. To get more organic traffic on your site, you need to define your content strategy, i.e., thinking about your target audience or customers you are trying to reach and their search intent, and the keywords they are using. 

In order to build a good content strategy, you need to:

Another essential aspect to consider when defining your content strategy is the longer-term production cycle of your content, i.e., longtail topics. This is a good, long-term strategy because you will have covered all bases regarding the keywords related to your industry, thus establishing your website as an authority on said industry and ranking better over time.

However, targeting longtail topics can be time-consuming; thus, most content writers will wind up producing content without an objective. To avoid this, try devising a content production strategy that takes into account data and trends in your target market to determine the ongoing content needs.

In-Depth Articles for Off-Page SEO

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Last but not least, the quality of the content you provide for the customers remains one of the most critical aspects of SaaS SEO. High-quality content is a must for attracting visitors to your website as well as attracting links. 

Some great link-building strategies for websites include:

Link building as a strategy can be time-consuming and requires a lot of effort, but it can help you build a good link profile which in turn will aid you in:

While some may be tempted to produce as much content as possible, quality content is much more critical when it comes to SaaS SEO. To grow traffic on your website, try writing high-quality, comprehensive pieces or pillar content that customers will simply not find on other websites.

Some examples of pillar content pages include:

  1. SEO: The Complete Guide for Beginners 
  2. A Ketogenic Diet for Beginners: The #1 Keto Guide 

Conclusion

SaaS SEO is crucial for bringing organic traffic to service pages and achieving higher rankings in search engines. 

To optimize a website for search engines, you need to:

  1. Perform an SEO audit to find out and fix technical issues
  2. Conduct keyword research to understand the searcher’s intent
  3. Produce optimized blog posts
  4. Develop a good content strategy
  5. Build a strong link profile through in-depth (pillar) articles

Following this guide can help you establish yourself as an authority in your industry and improve your website’s visibility in search results.

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. So, don’t wait! Schedule your free consultation now with our award-winning company and see the difference for yourself!

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