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In This Episode
I’m being joined today by special guest Kevin Indig, who is Director of SEO at Shopify.
Shopify, if you don’t already know, is a commerce platform that allows anyone to easily sell online, at a retail location, and everywhere in between.
I am excited to be picking his brain about the future of eCommerce SEO from someone who has a real shot at helping shape that future!
About Kevin Indig: SEO Director of Shopify
With more than a decade of experience in SEO, Kevin Indig has become one of the leaders in SEO for tech companies. Before joining Shopify, Kevin held positions at G2 Crowd, Atlassian, and Dailymotion and he has a strong technical SEO background.
Kevin’s top tips when it comes to your eCommerce site’s SEO strategy are as follows:
- Do the basics right.
- Build an audience outside of your website that you can then direct back to your site.
- Don’t just create content for the bottom of your sales funnel. Focus on your customers at the top too.
- Invest in video. The impact of video when it comes to eCommerce sales is set to grow exponentially in the next few years.
What are the Challenges of eCommerce SEO?
eCommerce SEO is the process of making your online store more visible in the search engine results pages (SERPs). When people search for products that you sell, you want to rank as highly as possible so you get more traffic. You can get traffic from paid search, but SEO costs much less. As a result, eCommerce SEO is hugely important when it comes to getting increased leads and traffic to a business’ website.
As many eCommerce businesses know, SEO brings its own set of unique challenges. Websites often battle with:
- Ranking low on SERPs for content and category pages
- Competing to rank with identical products to other stores
- Integrating ‘content’ and ‘shop’ sections of their sites so that they can often feel very separate
According to Kevin, some of the most common opportunities that eCommerce store owners have to boost their visibility in search can be found by going back to basics. This involves ensuring your business has a clear goal when it comes to its SEO strategy and then setting targets to be able to meet it.
All eCommerce businesses should check aspects of their website pages such as title optimisation, content keyword optimisation and the overall user-experience and design of their site. This is in order to find areas you can improve upon, as well as the areas you can do differently to see better-ranking results.
The Future of Search
In order for eCommerce businesses to be able to future-proof their SEO strategy, we looked at the big trends and what opportunities they provide:
1.Voice Search
In Kevin’s opinion, whilst the potential for voice search is huge, the impact on SEO and for eCommerce businesses remains low for now. This is because consumer behaviour is still quite a few years away from using their voice to make purchases, for example through their Google Nest or Amazon Alexa devices. As a result, eCommerce businesses are better to prioritise other growing traffic channels, when it comes to trying to improve their visibility.
2. Social Media Channels
The biggest opportunities for eCommerce brands to improve their SEO long-term are still with social media channels. Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook etc, are all still engaging a huge audience and encouraging them to make purchases. It is imperative that eCommerce businesses integrate their shops with these platforms so that they can directly sell to customers without their customers leaving the social media app. Shopify has recently integrated with TikTok to provide this exact service.
3. Diversification of Channels
“Coronavirus has catapulted eCommerce ten years into the future”
– Kevin Indig
Traditional eCommerce SEO channels are now diversifying, with search getting more complex.
As a result, eCommerce businesses need to find different ways to get people’s attention by integrating their store with more platforms and focussing on getting their brand name out there.
Shopify and SEO: What Does The Future Hold?
At Thinkplus, as an agency, we have always viewed Shopify as a great eCommerce platform.
It’s extremely user-friendly, with great functionality, however, there are some well-known limitations around some areas of SEO.
According to Kevin, there is always a balance between making Shopify easy to use for eCommerce businesses and retaining some of the technical control, which can negatively impact SEO.
To address these issues, Shopify are working to implement a roadmap of users’ most requested changes in order to expand their functionality, for example introducing customisable URLs.
Find Out More
Watch or listen to the video or podcast to gain further insight into what the future of eCommerce SEO will look like. If you want more SEO suggestions and advice, then request a free review of your website via this link: https://exposureninja.com/review/
Timestamps
00:00 — Introduction
00:42 — Introducing Kevin Indig
07:03 — ECommerce SEO
12:16 — The Future of Search
28:01 — Shopify and SEO
