How to avoid a drop in rankings when launching a Shopify website

Building a website with Shopify is a popular option for many businesses – small and large – as they provide plenty of tools to bring creative ideas to life and help you rank on search engines.

Of course, the aim of publishing a new website is to appear high up on search engine results pages to attract organic traffic.

However, a new website can occasionally suffer a dip in performance on search engine rankings when launched. If you’re about to launch your new Shopify store, or you already have and want to avoid a drop in search results, read our useful guide.

What is Shopify SEO?

Shopify SEO is the process of optimising a Shopify store to improve its ranking on search engines, increasing its visibility, which drives organic traffic.

This process involves several different levels of expertise, including:

• Technical SEO – This involves improving the technical, behind-the-scenes elements of a Shopify website, including site speed, and improving visibility to search engine crawlers.
• On-page SEO – This involves different types of content creation that can be seen on the Shopify store. It’s created by finding relevant keywords with good search volume and using them within blogs, on-page copy, meta descriptions, and more, and using plenty of internal links to other pages of your website.
• Off-page SEO – This includes building backlinks from other websites to improve your website authority and prove to search engines that you’re a trustworthy source.

Using SEO tools like Google Search Console and tracking Google Analytics allows you to measure how well your search engine optimisation has worked. You can then tweak certain things based on your SEO performance. This could include more in-depth keyword research to improve your Shopify website’s visibility in organic search rankings.

Shopify SEO tools give you plenty of help when setting up your new website, but there is still a lot more you can do to prevent your rankings from dropping off on Google search.

Tips to follow to prevent poor rankings on search engines

Whether you’re about to publish a brand-new website or you’re completing a website migration and you don’t want to lose rankings performance, we can help.

We’ve compiled a list of key tips to know when publishing your new Shopify store. If you follow these steps, you will give yourself the best chance possible of performing well on search engines after publishing.

Coherent website hierarchy

A good website has a coherent website hierarchy as it shows Google how easy it is for users to navigate – helping with your chances to rank highly.

A common website structure is an inverted pyramid, starting with the homepage at the top and, as you move down the pyramid, it leads to more specific content.

• Homepage: The top of the pyramid, where most visitors start the journey through a website.
• Categories: Broad information pages, such as different types of products or services.
• Subcategories: Much more specific than categories, but not related to single items, i.e. ‘Men’s Trainers’ rather than just ‘Trainers’.
• Individual pages: The last level focuses on a single product or service.

Increase site speed

Visitors are more likely to back out of a website and try something else if the website speed is quite slow.

Because of this, your website speed must be quick, giving visitors the information they’re seeking within a couple of seconds. Anything longer and you’ll notice a huge drop-off in terms of performance and, as a result, your rankings will suffer.

Targeted keywords relevant to your niche

To improve the chances of organic traffic flowing into your website consistently, you must use target keywords that are relevant to your business niche.

For each page and every blog post on your website, you must find a primary keyword to base your content on. From there, try to incorporate that keyword and other relevant keywords throughout your content.

One of the best Shopify SEO tips is to try to avoid keyword stuffing. Overloading a page with the same keyword will be detrimental to your content’s performance.

Optimise your robots.txt file

Robots.txt is a file that shows search engines which pages they should not crawl. If you have duplicate content on your website, both of those pages will compete for rankings on search engines, so your Robots.txt file can tell the search engines which page to ignore.

Originally, Shopify users could not optimise their Robots.txt file, but now they can by accessing a theme called robots.txt.liquid. This now allows you to make changes to your sitemap and more, helping improve your chances of ranking highly.

Create more searchable pages with content marketing

Content marketing is a huge part of SEO, with many companies giving it plenty of time and energy.

By creating blogs for your website, you’re giving yourself more chance of Google finding you, and providing more organic traffic. Doing so also allows you to target keywords specific to your niche, and answer questions that you think your target audience is asking.

Blog posts can be created by focusing on specific keywords or terms that your product or service pages may not.

Build backlinks

The final entry to our top Shopify SEO performance tips for your online store is to build backlinks. Google wants to know that websites ranking highly on their search engine are reputable. It judges this by how many websites you have that link to yours.

You want as many high-quality websites linking to you as possible, showing Google that you’re a trustworthy website, and helping you improve your ranking.

Choose Paramount Digital as your Shopify SEO agency

If you need support to build your website or improve your Shopify store’s SEO performance, then Paramount Digital can help.

We boast a team of Shopify SEO experts who have years of experience working with a wide range of clients. Our SEO team have improved SEO rankings and prevented a traffic drop for all different types of websites in a variety of industries.

So, if that sounds good to you, why not contact us today so we can help you?

Simply call 01744 747474 or email marketing@paramountdigital.co.uk to speak to our team of experts.