Focus on 3 big SEO factors

It can be difficult to know what the hell to do with SEO.

Every week brings dozens of new ideas, tasks, and things that were "disrupted" last week. They all get tossed on that pile of 1,000s of other strategies for you to look at someday. Someday soon, right?

Instead of chasing the idea-of-week, focus on the big things that matter and have always mattered.

Content. Internal links. Backlinks.

All sites that are consistently ranking high work on those constantly. If you get those working for your Shopify store, you'll be ahead of 80% of everyone else.

Content

The vast majority of Shopify stores are weak on content.

What I mean by content are words, images, and videos on all of your pages. Not just your homepage or a product page or two. Every. Single. Page.

Search engines and SEO are built around the idea of connecting searchers to content they are searching for. If you have no content or weak content, is it any surprise you have no one showing up?

At a minimum every page should have around 500 words of unique content and a unique image or video or two. Bare minimum.

Content that you've used elsewhere doesn't count. For example, a shipping and returns section on every product page doesn't count towards the 500 words of unique content goal.

Any page missing content shouldn't be expected to rank anywhere above spot 100 in the search results in the long-term. Sure it might jump up here and there, but it won't stay there.

Once you get to that minimum bar, you need to make all that content useful, informative, or entertaining. This will be a high bar that few stores will be able to do to every page but it's possible to do to your important pages. Remember, search engines only bring you the searchers. It's the searchers who actually engage with the content and ultimately buy. Boring or filler content will cause them to bounce, no matter how well you ranked for it.

Content is such a big deal if you do nothing else from this article except content, you'll be light-years ahead. Just make sure you're creating content for the right people.

Internal links

Internal links means adding an link (or URL) from a page in your website to another page in your website. They are called internal because the don't leave your domain.

Links tell search engines and visitors which page they should look at next. The more prominent the link (by its visual size, placement, and color) the more weight you're giving to it. (This mostly applies to your customers, not to search engines.)

A huge image on your homepage linking to your Fall Collection is giving more weight than a small text link in your footer going to your Returns Policy.

Your menu is a rich source of internal links, which is why whatever you link to in there tends to get the most traffic.

On every page except your homepage, try linking to at least three different pages. Ensure that it makes sense, don't just add links because I told you to have three.

For example:

1. the page you wish people would go to (e.g. this can be adding to cart)
2. a consolation page that is similar to this page
3. a page that is useful, teaches, or entertains

You can have other links but don't over do it (e.g. keep it under 10). Ignore and don't count any links in your menu or footer.

For your homepage, link to the top pages you want someone going to. Say ten links or so. Here you can get away with a lot because everyone is used to homepages being a menagerie of links especially when imagery is used.

Backlinks

The third big thing to focus on is backlinks.

Backlinks are when another website links to your store. They are the digital form of word of mouth.

Backlinks are a huge topic so I'll only briefly cover them here.

You should be connecting with other website owners to earn these over time. That can be getting news articles quoting you, writing press releases, starting partnerships or co-marketing, etc.

You're basically wanting people to talk about you (in a good way) and linking back to you (hence the term "backlink").

This area is also filled with spammers and shady operators who will fake this to trick search engines. Each backlink will take a lot of effort to earn. Paying $5 to get 100 backlinks is just a scam.

An easy way to get started earning these links is to offer your products to relevant reviewers to honestly review your product.

And when we talk about how to get sited in LLMs, this is one of the best ways. That's because they are trained on content from all over the internet. If they constantly see other websites recommending your product, the LLM will likely recommend you as well.

These three things will take up the vast majority of your time in SEO. Once you have them starting to work, then you can look at all the various other ideas that float around. You'll notice most of them are variations or supplements to these big three. e.g. structured data is just a form of content.