An Introduction To Shopify

Shopify is a subscription-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) sales platform, letting small-medium businesses build an online store and sell their products online, centralising all your product data, sales streams, & customers into one system and connecting through all your channels, i.e., social media, blogs, email, text, and marketplaces.  

Shopify is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms used globally, contributing $444 billion in global economic activity since its foundation. Being well established in the United Kingdom with 170,506 businesses operating on their program, making it the 2nd largest platform in the UK with a 21% market share, with WooCommerce in the lead with 22%.  

Benefits of Shopify  

A well-established eCommerce platform, built for the average user, aspiring entrepreneurs, & growing business owners, built for those not skilled in technical development. A web design that is simple to navigate, use, and establish your business on, implementing a drag-and-drop editing interface that can see a web shop built in 4 minutes.  

The largest benefit of Shopify is that the platform provides the technical infrastructure: software and domain hosting, technical support available 24/7 through email, phone, & live chat, its own payment gateway, secure financial transactions, & a shopping cart for mobile devices.  

Its market share is partly owed to its great usability but also to its low startup costs. The low monthly subscription fee and extra packages make this platform a long-term solution to businesses’ eCommerce. With a 14-day free trial period offered to new users, the most basic package starts at £5, then the more premium packages stem from £19 to £344 monthly. All of these packages come with SSL and web hosting, meaning your internet connection and transactions are secure & safeguarded, however, if you want your domain without the Shopify brand in your URL, this comes at an extra cost of £11 annually.  

Offering a plethora of marketing tools such as email marketing, social media integration, and the capacity for initial SEO optimisation, which can all help increase your business’s visibility & promote your store higher on Google.  

Crucial for any business’s growth, analytical tools and reports using this platform data are offered for free. Helping you track your store’s performance in sales, traffic, & many more metrics that can aid you in making professional decisions based on reliable data and insights.  

Is Shopify good for SEO? 

Advantages

Shopify is a beginner’s introduction to SEO; it is limited, yes, but the foundations are strong, with a great UX allowing anyone to maximise the available built-in SEO tools & performance. What makes Shopify good for SEO exactly?  

One of the foremost essentials for SEO is the title tag and meta-data on the top section of your site. A title tag is the first thing consumers & Google notice when searching for any keyword; it is the winning argument for gaining traffic onto your site by having the most relevant title specific to their search.  

The capacity to edit the product descriptions, category names, and any content on your site gives you the perfect capacity to take ownership of the basics of SEO.  

URL customisation is a more technical aspect of SEO but essential to ensuring your site is maintaining its ‘URL link juice’. ‘Link juice’ is the SEO strength circulating throughout your site, directing all traffic to the relevant pages and converting them into leads, for example, if a page was no longer relevant or for public view. Deleting it would hurt your SEO strength, so instead redirecting this page to the newer, more relevant page would circulate this traffic and strength back into your business.  

Limitations

The difficulties with Shopify lie in its limited web development. The program is meant to be beginner-friendly, focusing mainly on its aesthetics, so there is a clear limitation on its SEO capabilities.  

Shopify’s SEO services do offer limited customisation, specific to each chosen theme, structured for strong foundations. There is significant difficulty when getting serious about your SEO, often having to find workarounds and be blocked from implementing plug-ins as they require strong coding skills.  

Duplicating content is a persistent issue with the URLs. Making a product page and adding it to several categories will create several URLs for this, which will not redirect back to the main page, confusing Google and harming your chances of ranking for this.  

Not to say these are complete blockers, but there are certain workarounds for a plethora of other issues that can be added as a plug-in/program, such as structured data (Google reviews, addresses, stars), slow loading speeds, no blogging, and creating product subcategories. These can be avoided but will require hired professional help from an SEO agency.  

SEO Services for Shopify

Shopify, like WooCommerce and any other platform, is not without difficulties, but if these issues are worrying you and you would like to implement a more advanced SEO strategy to rank competitively and establish good practices, then you require an SEO agency, one established in Shopify.  

As a Shopify SEO consultancy, we can offer strong progress and consistent aid to maximise plug-ins, coding, and the more technical/content fine points to maximise this eCommerce platform, to ensure that your site reaches its potential.  

To have a look at the range of services we offer and client testimonials from diverse industries, please click here.

To begin the conversation of quoting for you, please click here.