How to Optimize your Shopify Blog for SEO

As one of the most highly acclaimed e-commerce platforms, Shopify is home to more than four million websites where you can create and customize a store to your liking, with many SEO features available and over 8,000 apps. One of the tried-and-true SEO features of optimizing your store is creating a Shopify blog. 

By creating a blog for your store, you’ll be able to engage users, keep them interested, and make the shopping experience enjoyable for them. Shopify has made the process of creating a blog fairly simple and accessible, thus allowing you to get started as soon as possible. 

In this article, we’ll give an overview of how you can create a Shopify blog and how you can optimize these features to increase your profits.

Why Should You Be Blogging on Shopify?

There are many benefits to blogging on Shopify. These are some of the advantages:

• Sharing your brand story: writing blogs allows you to show what makes your store unique and give a behind-the-scenes look. You can use the blog to answer the most frequently asked questions about your store.
• Connecting with your customers: when customers read blog posts, they’ll feel more connected to your store and more likely to become lifelong customers.
• Building trust and credibility: blogging gives you the opportunity to showcase your expertise and authority on the subject, thus building trust and credibility, which is likely to result in more business.
• Generating traffic to your store: by publishing new content, people have new ways to find your site and learn more about your store, especially if you optimize your store by using SEO practices.
• Ranking for more niche keywords: blogging allows you to include relevant keywords that are less searched and improve your ranking while not over-stuffing your product page with keywords.

How To Start a Blog on Shopify

Firstly, you should activate the blog on Shopify by clicking the Online Store on the menu bar, then go to Blog Posts >> Manage Blogs >> Add Blog. At this point, you can name your blog and add it to the site’s navigation menu. 

At a strategic level, before you create content for your blog, you should consider a few elements, such as:

1. Analyzing the different ways you can make a profit, monetization being the main one.
2. Identifying your target audience and creating content in line with their interests.
3. Distributing by laying the groundwork.
4. Planning the details surrounding the publishing of a blog.

Shopify Blog Infrastructure

One of the most significant advantages of Shopify is its user-friendly infrastructure containing many features, such as:

• Adding and editing content/media,
• managing/disabling content,
• creating blog categories,
• assigning posts,
• adding tags,
• creating and managing posts,
• managing SEO fields for posts, and
• setting a publishing date/time.

You can also take advantage of the many plugins and apps to make your store unique and personalized. 

SEO Fields and Setup for Blog Posts

While Shopify delivers the basics for SEO for your site, to ensure maximum optimization, you should utilize the following:

• Post Title: As an important component of SEO, you can use this field by including the main keyword and keeping it up to max. 70 characters.
• Feature Image: You should add the feature image at the very top of your content and edit it to 16:9 dimension, but also do a 1:1 square image for social media. To optimize your images for SEO, make sure to include alt text, as it helps you drive traffic.
• Post Visibility: This element allows you to hide or display a post or set a publication date.
• Tags: They allow you to avoid the limitation of categories and organize your blog posts as you wish.
• Post Excerpt: This feature allows you to show an excerpt of a post on the blog’s page. You can do so by clicking “Add Excerpt” on one of your blog posts.
• Link Building: if you get other websites to link to your sites or products, you ensure that customers spend more time on your site and increase your chances of sales. Link building also proves your reliability and authority, thus driving organic traffic.
• Meta Description: It’s a great feature that allows you to tease what your post is about on the search engine’s page results. Remember that Google shows 160 characters max., so you should keep the descriptions short and to the point.
• URL & Handle: Through this field, you can set the URL for your blog post, which we suggest to be short and relevant.

Shopify Blog Taxonomies

While Shopify’s infrastructure is great for SEO essentials, one drawback is the limitation in the taxonomy components, such as tagging, categorizing, and organizing your posts.  

Organizing content by Shopify blog

Because it is limited to creating categories, Shopify can create different “Blogs” and add posts to them; they work just as categories do, and based on your post categories, the system will create a blog feed that includes an indexable URL. This method is a great way to solve the problem of not having a category feature at the individual post level. By going to Online Store > Blog Posts > Manage Blogs, you’ll be able to create, delete and manage the SEO data for each category.

Organizing blogs by Shopify tag

Another way to organize your blog is by creating tags for each post. Creating a well-organized tagging system will allow you to display posts. 

However, keep in mind that while you may want to include all the tags that you think might help with traffic, this can make your site look spammy. 

To avoid this, you should stick to one or two overarching tags that can be used as you need them, and make sure your tags have one or two words. 

Shopify will create a feed page of all posts containing that tag, with each tag having a unique URL on each blog. Due to this, things can get messy, which in turn can hurt your authority in your niche.

Organizing blogs by publication date

Due to the limits of setting an archival taxonomy for blogs, you’ll have to use tags to work around this issue. However, use tags by creating an archival dating, such as “MONTH YYYY”. This will be handy when you need to access archival posts.

Additional Shopify Blog Functionality

You can extend the functionality of the Shopify blog features by:

• Adding content to blog category pages,
• monetizing blog posts,
• adding categories, tags, and archives in the sidebar.

Another way to optimize your Shopify blog is to use SEO apps and tools, such as:

• SEO Optimizer,
• SEO Booster – SEO Marketing by Secomapp,
• SEO King by Engage Apps, etc. 

Shopify Blog vs. WordPress Blog SEO

Both Shopify and WordPress offer a wide range of features that make them reliable platforms for building a top-notch site. 

WordPress is primarily used as a blogging platform; therefore, its content-driven architecture will make it easier for blog posting. It also offers WooCommerce, an e-commerce platform.

While Shopify doesn’t offer all the blogging features as WordPress, it provides the essential features to help people without prior experience build a strong blog. 

If you find it hard to choose between them, you can explore the three options below:

1. Use Shopify for blogging and selling.
2. Use Shopify for selling and WordPress for blogging.
3. Use WordPress for blogging and WooCommerce for selling. 

Keep in mind that by choosing the second option, you’ll have to add a WordPress subdomain, which can negatively affect traffic as Google sees subdomains as different websites.

Conclusion

As we’ve established so far, blogging can be very beneficial for your Shopify Store. If you invest enough time and resources, you’ll be able to reap many rewards, which can be a higher ranking, more sales, or more organic traffic. Do not linger on the idea; if you haven’t started blogging, this is the time. We leave you here with some tips as you begin creating content: 

• Be consistent: make sure that you follow a blog posting schedule, be that once a week or a month, to remain consistent.
• Prioritize quality over quantity: through blogging, you’ll want to introduce your store and build a connection with customers; keep your blog concise and establish your expertise. 
• Write simple sentences: you’ll want to avoid “keyword stuffing” as it can make your posts difficult to read. Ensure writing according to your target audience. 
• Don’t hard sell: while you should promote your products, you can use your blog to educate, entertain, and provide high-quality content that enriches your customers and your store. 

And most importantly, set a clear goal so you can develop a strong strategy on how you want your blog to function. After this, all is left to say is to be patient. To see results takes time sometimes, but they always come.