Site-wide ecommerce checklist

The first part of our ecommerce checklist is all about changes you can make site-wide to make sure your online shop is up to scratch. Some of these tips will help with your ecommerce SEO, but — more importantly — they will give users a better experience when they visit your site.

1. Use consistent branding

The first thing you should be aware of is that you should always use consistent branding. Ensure your brand or logo is visible on your homepage and page title. This will build trust and help promote and build your business, helping trigger recognition offline and in search engine result pages.

2. Add social buttons and newsletter sign-up

Newsletters and social media are the easiest ways to get return visits from your customers. Be sure to draw attention to your social profiles and newsletter signups throughout your website. Add your social profiles to your footer at least (use icons, links, and social widgets), but if you have space left in your header, that would also be a great spot for them. Promote your newsletter in your sidebar and use scroll-triggered boxes to draw attention to it. A nice giveaway always helps motivate people to subscribe.

3. Take care of site navigation essentials

Make sure users can navigate to your most important pages from your site menu. It should always be easy to reach shopping pages and the shopping cart, as well as customer service information and FAQs covering essential information like shipping costs and payment options. If users can’t find these pages, they’ll find it difficult to shop on your site.

4. Use SSL and security seals

Here’s one vital thing about creating trust: If your site has an SSL certificate, it will have that nice green padlock in your visitors’ browser address bar, and you’ll let them know they are shopping in a safe environment. These things will help customers confidently insert their home address, credit card details, or other personal information you ask them to provide. You could also add security seals. Find more tips like this in our trust article.

5. Make sure your site is mobile-friendly

Don’t forget mobile users! Making purchases via mobile is a popular option for many shoppers. So be ready for them and don’t miss out on those transactions. Read our ultimate guide to mobile SEO to get started.

6. Get things up to speed

When we say speed, we mean the performance of your site. People have short attention spans, and we’ve all got used to faster internet everywhere. However, many places worldwide have to make do with less-than-perfect mobile connections and a small data allowance. Don’t take your situation as gospel. Also, Google tends to rank websites faster, which is another reason to make sure your website is as fast as possible.

7. Add an ‘About us’ page if you don’t have one

People like to know about the company they’re buying from. Who is behind it? What’s their story? What motivates them? If we share the same values and beliefs, people are likelier to return to that shop and buy more products. Adding an about us page, and perhaps a team photo will help build a connection between your company and your customers. If you want some inspiration, Patagonia and Dopper are nice examples.

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Homepage

While you don’t necessarily need to optimize the homepage of your ecommerce site for SEO, you shouldn’t just ignore it completely, either. There are a couple of things you can do to make sure any visitors landing there will continue to shop and make a purchase:

8. Show featured products

You also need to reserve a prominent spot on your homepage for featured products or something similar, usually your core products or the items you currently have on sale. This will provide an immediate trigger for visitors and a good way to let them know whether or not they have come to the right online shop.

9. Include a compelling call to action

Your homepage needs a compelling call to action. This may change if you want to promote particular products or run seasonal promotions like a Black Friday sale. But whatever your CTA is, you need to make sure it’s always easily visible and meets your visitors’ needs and expectations.

Product search and categories

Having a great site is one thing, but if visitors can’t find the products they want to buy, it won’t be much of use to anyone. That’s why the following section of our ecommerce checklist is all about making your products easy for customers to find when searching on your site.

10. Add a search option

Every online store with more than 20 products should have a search option. Make sure you put the search option in a visible spot, as this will probably be the navigation of choice for your visitors. Besides optimizing your search option, be sure to give the search result pages some TLC. More on that later.

11. Use product categories

How you set up your categories and make these accessible to visitors matters – a lot. Categories help visitors get to different groups of products as quickly as possible, especially those who aren’t sure which specific products to buy. Amazon has a large list of categories (or departments), but makes the kind of products a category contains as clear as possible. That has much to do with naming these categories and logically using subcategories. Put yourself in the place of your visitors and go over your shop’s categories. Do they make sense? Are these the terms a visitor would use? If the answer is yes, you’re on the right track.

12. Add introductory content on category pages

Besides being clear about the name of your category, be sure to add a nice introduction to your category pages as well. This introduction is like the glue that holds the collection of products on that page together. This is really helpful in determining the subject of the page, especially for search engines. This also helps the category pages function in a similar way to cornerstone content.

13. Add thumbnail images for your products

In most cases, product images say more than a thousand words. This is especially true for those pages that simply don’t have space for a thousand words about a single product, such as your category or internal search result pages. Adding a stunning thumbnail image of that dress or painting will encourage more clicks to that page. Good thumbnail images make it easier for visitors to choose from a wide variety of products in category or search result pages.

14. Include calls to action in overviews

Besides having killer product thumbnails, your overview pages also need a call to action for each product, which means the visitor can add that product to their cart right from the category or search result page. Although it isn’t always possible for every product, you should do this wherever you can. There are online shops that allow you to choose the color and size of jeans, for example, without having to go to the product page. Choose the option you like, click add to cart, and proceed to checkout, all from the overview page.

Product pages

You’ve probably already put much effort into crafting your product pages. But are you sure nothing is missing, and nothing can be improved? This section of our ecommerce SEO checklist will help you ensure your product pages look the best they can.

15. Add great product images

Be sure to add great product images to your product pages. They should be zoomable and give multiple views of the product. Remember that even the filename and alt text of the product image matter for SEO. There’s a lot more on this in our detailed article on product images.

16. Write a fantastic product description

Optimizing your category pages is often much easier than optimizing all your product pages. If you’re selling bolts, screws and nails, adding an awesome and unique product description to each page is a lot of work. If you need your product page to rank as well, be sure to invest some time and effort in optimizing your product descriptions for the product name and/or SKU. Our Yoast SEO plugin will be useful if you have a WordPress site or a Shopify store.

17. Be clear about pricing

We can’t emphasize this enough: be clear about your prices. Adding surprise costs like shipping or taxes later in the checkout process will backfire, and shoppers may abandon their purchase. Be clear about these additional costs (if any) right from the start. You could even leverage this by offering free shipping on orders of more than a certain value, say $20 or $50. Surprise costs are a major turn-off, and they are illegal in the EU.

18. Show product reviews

Creating trust is a good thing for all online shops. Genuine product reviews help a great deal with this. One thing we would recommend for websites that include user reviews from third parties is to copy a couple of those reviews to your own website. Including third-party reviews in, for example, a widget, would be a great solution. Add these near your call to action for the best results.

19. Promote related products

When you’ve got their interest, leverage it. If someone buys an iPhone from your site, chances are they’ll need a cover and might even want a pair of those expensive wireless ear pods. But they might feel a bit less expensive when a customer has just paid full price for a new iPhone! Adding a related products section or an ‘other customers also bought’ section to your product page will trigger upsells, allow for bundles, and much more. We highly recommend adding these.

20. Add a call to action on your product page

Your visitor needs to click the Add to Cart button on your product page to start the purchase. Don’t hide that button! The number of shops that accidentally disguise the Add to Cart button is lower than it used to be, but we’d still like you to look at that button and make sure it stands out. This is especially true when you have a secondary call to action like ‘Add to wish list’. Making sure that the Add to Cart button stands out the most and is the largest and first major button on your product page is essential.

21. Show stock availability

These days, the availability of a product drives sales. With online shops everywhere, people want to buy things at a shop that will deliver the products they want tomorrow or even the same day. If you tell users a product is in stock, people are likelier to buy it. But this isn’t just about competition; it’s about managing expectations. If your website shows something isn’t in stock, people can still decide to buy at your shop and know they’ll have to wait a bit. If people buy at your shop and won’t get the product for three weeks because it’s out of stock, they’d likely have bought it elsewhere. Not making availability clear also badly affects your brand, by the way.

Shopping cart and checkout

It can be easy to overlook the details of your shopping cart and checkout process. However, these parts of your site are vital to the customer journey. In this section of our ecommerce checklist, we encourage you to take some time to ensure everything is working seamlessly.

22. Make the shopping cart easy to find

Regardless of how noble your intentions are, in most cases, your main goal is to make as much money as possible, and that money is made through your shopping cart. For this reason, your shopping cart should always be available and visible – don’t make people look for it. We recommend adding the number of products in the cart to the cart icon. It will help people remember if they have already added products to the cart.

23. Show the payment options early on

Like in number 16 of this ecommerce SEO checklist, this one is about preventing surprises. It’s frustrating to get to the end of the checkout process only to find that your preferred payment option isn’t available. And again, if your ecommerce shop is in the EU, it is now a legal requirement to display your accepted payment methods to customers before they get to the checkout.

24. No account needed

Always allow customers to buy without forcing them to create an account. We think that making customers create an account is bad practice. It’s only valid if creating an account gives customers perks like easy license renewal, managing recurring payments, etc. These are tasks customers probably would want to do in a secure environment, so they wouldn’t mind setting up an account, but when they’re shopping for clothes, having an account only makes sense for convenience reasons (not having to fill in address details next time and so on), and therefore it should be optional.

25. Set longer cookie expiration times

Perhaps ‘cookie expiration times’ are too narrow for what we’re trying to say. Our article on shopping cart abandonment will tell you a lot about how people use your shopping cart. Read that entire article, and you’ll discover why using longer cookie expiration times for your cart is better.

26. Use discount codes wisely

Discount codes and vouchers can be a great way to increase sales. But before you put a field to add a discount code on your checkout pages, consider whether you want to do this carefully. Once users see the option to add a code, they will want a discount code. And often, that means they’ll stop mid-transaction and search for one! So, if you want to offer discount codes, it’s a good idea to make it easy for users to find a discount (even if it’s to remove the delivery costs from their order). If you’re not planning to offer discount codes soon, leaving the discount code field off your checkout pages is probably better. Otherwise, it might increase your cart abandonment rates.

Search and social appearance

All right, by now, your online shop should be ready to go. One thing left to do for our ecommerce SEO checklist: make sure your site looks its best wherever it appears. That could be in the Google search results or social media, so be ready to make a good impression!

27. Optimize your SEO titles and Meta descriptions

With ecommerce sites, more so than all other websites, SEO titles and meta descriptions serve a very important purpose. Where Google is probably able to come up with a proper and keyword-related invitation to your website for information pages, the chances are your product page doesn’t have enough product information, or it contains details about your customer service or warranty that Google might use instead. Add a product-focused meta description to your product pages to encourage Google not to show the wrong text in search results! Use Yoast SEO Premium’s AI tools to speed up the creation process.

28. Add structured data to your pages

We recommend adding structured data to your product pages for technical SEO reasons. Schema markup will help search engines and Google Shopping understand your page’s contents better, and it might even help your page stand out in the search results!

Add at least schema.org/Product and schema.org/Offer, and see if you can extend this to even more detailed schemas. Adding structured data markup is more technical than optimizing your product description, so if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing, please ask your web developer for help. You can also use our WooCommerce SEO plugin or Shopify SEO app, making it much easier!

Read more: Schema.org is hard, Yoast SEO makes it easy for you »

29. Make sure you look great on social media

Besides structured data, be sure to add OpenGraph and X Cards. Again, Yoast SEO can help you add images to your page to be displayed on social media. With Yoast SEO Premium, you can even preview those! These ensure that when people share your content or products, they will be displayed as attractively as possible. This and more are explained in our article about product page SEO.

Keep reading: Positioning your shop in the online market »

One last thing…

30. Make ecommerce easier with Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO plugins and apps can help you to optimize loads of aspects of your site:

• Making sure your texts are readable? Check.
• Keyword research and optimization? Check.
• Managing your SEO titles, meta descriptions and social outputs? Check.
• Using AI to speed up the hard work? Check.
• Adding structured data to your pages with minimal effort? Check.
• Extra features for WooCommerce with our dedicated WooCommerce plugin? Check.
• And for your Shopify store? Check.

Try Yoast SEO for WordPress (available in free and Premium versions) on your site today. If you’re using WooCommerce, add on our WooCommerce plugin for the ultimate ecommerce optimization. Alternatively, if you’re working with Shopify, try our Yoast SEO for Shopify app instead.

Lastly, boost your ecommerce SEO expertise with our ecommerce training at Yoast SEO Academy! You can follow a trial lesson for free or unlock the full course when you buy Yoast SEO Premium, Yoast WooCommerce SEO, or Yoast SEO for Shopify. Still want more? Check out our ultimate guide to ecommerce usability.

The post Ecommerce SEO checklist: 30 tips for a better online store appeared first on Yoast.

Sharing your freshly written (or optimized) content on social media is important. It helps you stay in touch with your audience and update them on news about your business and related topics. But to get their attention, you need to optimize your social media posts before you share them.

In this article, we’ll explain how you can optimize your posts for Facebook and X, and how our plugin can help you with that! Lastly, we’ll briefly discuss Pinterest and the use of Rich Pins.

What is social media optimization?

Social media optimization is about improving how you use social media platforms to build your online presence. You do this not only by creating and sharing content for every platform you’d like to be active on but also by optimizing that content in such a way that you get traffic to your site. The goal is to build strong connections with your audience and to keep them engaged.

Social media optimization starts with well-optimized, highly relevant content that grabs attention. For most platforms, images and video are best suited for this. You can test various formats and ideas to see what your audience prefers. You can use any of the social media analytics tools to do this. Also, find the best times to publish your content to get the best engagement. Your posts should also have metadata for specific platforms like X Cards or OpenGraph for Facebook to help these platforms understand your content.

After posting, remember to engage with your audience. Respond to comments, participate in discussions, and listen to what people say about you and your content. Track your best-performing posts and use data to improve your content to stay relevant and engaging.

Promoting your content on various platforms makes sense in most cases. Remember to share your articles, videos, and other content on whatever social media network makes sense for you and your audience. Read this article if you don’t know where to begin with your social media strategy.

Facebook and other social media

Years ago, Facebook introduced OpenGraph to determine which elements of your page you want to show when someone shares that page. Several social networks and search engines use Facebook’s OpenGraph, but the main reason for adding it is for Facebook itself. Facebook’s OpenGraph support is continuously evolving, but the basics are simple. With a few pieces of metadata, you declare:

• What type of content is this?
• What’s the locale?
• What’s the canonical URL of the page?
• What’s the name of the site and the title of the page?
• What’s the page about?
• Which image/images should be shown when this post or page is shared on Facebook?

Social media preview in Yoast SEO

When you use Yoast SEO, most of the values above are filled out automatically based on your post’s data. It uses the locale of your site, the site’s name, SEO title, the canonical, the meta description value, etc, to fill out most of the required OpenGraph tags. You can see what your post will look like when you click on ‘Social media appearance’ in the Yoast SEO sidebar:

This preview tab allows you to edit how your Facebook post is shown when shared. Our plugin lets you change your social image, title, and description in your preview. This makes your social media optimization much quicker and easier, as you won’t have to leave your post to make these changes.

Make more impact on social media with Yoast SEO Premium!

Get Yoast SEO Premium today and make it quick and easy to manage how your social media snippets look.

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If you use the options for social media optimization in Yoast SEO, your Facebook post could look like this when you share the URL of a post or page:

So what do you need to do?

1. First, go to Yoast SEO → Settings → Site representation, and fill in your social media accounts.
2. Afterward, go to Yoast SEO → Settings → Social sharing, and make sure OpenGraph is enabled.
3. Then, set a good default image under the site basics settings. This image is used when you have a post or page that does not contain an image. It’s important to set this image to ensure that every post or page has an image when shared. Facebook is forgiving when uploading images, but 1200px by 630px should work well.
4. Lastly, follow the steps in this article to go to your personal WordPress profile and add a link to your Facebook profile, if you want to associate your Facebook profile with your content. If you do, be sure to also enable the ‘Follow’ functionality on Facebook.

You can complete all of these steps in a few minutes. After that, Yoast SEO takes all of the work out of your hands. However, it is important to remember that Facebook sometimes doesn’t immediately pick up changes. So, if you want to “debug” how Facebook perceives your page, enter your URL in the Facebook Sharing Debugger and click the Debug button. If the preview that you see there isn’t the latest version, you can try the Scrape again button. But remember that it can take a while for Facebook to see your changes.

OpenGraph for Video Content

If you have video content, you must do more work unless you use our Video SEO plugin. This plugin handles all the needed metadata and lets you share your videos on Facebook.

X

X’s functionality is quite similar to Facebook’s. The name of this functionality is X Cards. X “falls back” on Facebook OpenGraph for several of these values, so we don’t have to include everything. But it still is quite a bit. We’re talking about:

• the type of content/type of card
• an image
• a description
• the X account of the site/publisher
• the X account of the author
• the “name” for the domain to show in an X card

X preview in Yoast SEO

As you might have seen in Yoast SEO, optimizing your X listings is also an option. Simply click that tab to preview how your page appears when it gets shared to X. By default, the plugin uses the title, description and image you enter in the search appearance preview. Of course, this tab allows you to change these for your Twitter post.

Here’s an example of what your post could look like with all the required metadata our plugin helps you add:

So what do you need to do?

Ensure X card metadata is enabled by going to Yoast SEO → Settings → Site features → Social sharing and activating the X feature. This leaves a couple of values for you to fill out in the settings, which you can do using this guide on activating X Cards in Yoast SEO.

Use templates for social media snippets

Do you spend a lot of time tweaking the preview appearance of each page or post? You’ll be glad to know that Yoast SEO Premium also offers a very helpful feature: the ability to set default templates for your social snippets. With this powerful feature, you can design the ideal social appearance for all your content and feel certain that the output will always look great to whoever is sharing it.

What about Pinterest?

Pinterest’s Rich Pins allow for OpenGraph markup as well. Add variables like product name, availability, price, and currency to your page to create a rich pin. As this is mainly interesting for products, we decided to add functionalities to create rich pins to our Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin.

Read more: How to promote your products and earn money on Pinterest »

Conclusion on social media optimization

So, go ahead and use Yoast SEO to optimize your social media. It isn’t very hard; it just takes a few minutes of your time, and you will reap the rewards immediately. As these social networks add new features, we’ll keep our plugin and this article up-to-date. So, be sure to update the Yoast SEO plugin regularly.

Keep reading: Social Media Strategy: where to begin? »

The post Social media optimization with Yoast SEO appeared first on Yoast.

What is quality content?

That is the million-dollar question. Knowing how to write good content helps you get more visitors, higher conversions, and lower bounce rates. But who determines the quality of your content? The easy answer: your users. However, this also makes creating the right content more difficult. Because every user is different and has a different search intent. They have, however, one thing in common: every user knows what they want.

Although your users eventually determine the quality of your content, you can take a few steps to ensure you end up with well-thought-out, readable, and attractive content. In other words, content that’s eligible to be considered high-quality by your users and search engines. Luckily, a lot of the aspects that users will appreciate about your content are the same as the aspects search engines look for in quality content.

How search engines determine quality content

Search engines want to present their users with the exact content they seek. Content that is helpful, reliable and people-first and aligns with their current search intent. To help you create good content, Google has an acronym that you can consult: E-E-A-T. 

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Search engines decide on what is content quality by assessing a number of things – relevance, clarity and helpfulness, credibility and uniqueness. This all ties into the importance of E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) in any strategy around brand or topical authority.

Alex Moss – Principal SEO at Yoast

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The acronym E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. In their ongoing search for the best content, Google has added this acronym to their search quality raters guidelines. They use this to assess and judge the quality of online content. Although it’s especially important for so-called YMYL websites (“Your Money Your Life” – sites that are related to well-being, health, finances or safety), these guidelines apply to all content out there.

Why is quality content important?

 Quality content is the foundation of a strong brand, helping you establish authority and expertise in your industry. Well-crafted content speaks directly to the needs of your audience, providing valuable insights that position your brand as a reliable source. Whether it’s through blog posts, social media, or in-depth guides, delivering high-quality content builds long-term relationships with customers, fosters engagement, and strengthens brand credibility.

Beyond its impact on branding, quality content plays a crucial role in SEO. As mentioned above, search engines prioritize helpful, well-structured, and informative content that truly benefits users. By focusing on producing valuable content that answers queries effectively, you can achieve higher rankings in the search results. This leads to increased visibility, organic traffic, and better engagement, which will help you grow your website sustainably. To scale content creation effectively, check out this guide on scaling content. Additionally, if you mainly write content for your clients’ website, make sure to check out our article on writing valuable content that your clients will love.

7 steps to start creating high-quality content

To ensure the quality of your content, there are 7 steps that you can follow. Let’s go into them in more detail.

1. Write for your readers, not yourself

If you have an ecommerce site, you want readers to know about the products or services you offer. If you’re a blogger, you want readers to get to know you and the topics that interest you. However, it’s also important to consider what your users want to read about. What interests do they have? What events or news do they follow that you can relate to your business?  And what ‘problems’ are they trying to fix that have led them to your site?

The first step in creating high-quality content is ensuring it contains the information your audience is looking for. To find out what your users are looking for, you have to conduct proper keyword research. This will help you determine what subjects to write about and what words your audience uses. Keyword research also helps your rankings, as more visitors and lower bounce rates tell Google that your page is a good result to show in their search results.

2. Think about search intent and your goal

Search intent is the reason why someone conducts a specific search. It’s the term used to describe their purpose. For example, do they have a question they need answered? Or do they want to buy something online? Someone’s search intent makes a difference in how they consider the quality of your content. If it fits their need at that moment, then they will stay on your page longer. But if they need an answer to a question and the page they land on only tries to sell them products, they’ll be gone before you know it.

Match goals to different search intents

It’s important to consider search intent while creating content for a specific page. That’s why we advise you to match your goals to users’ different search intents. Is one of your goals to increase newsletter subscriptions? Then, you should add that subscription button to pages where users with an informational intent land. Does a visitor have a transactional intent (meaning: they want to buy something)? Make sure they land on a product or category page dedicated to the product they are looking for. 

Of course, experience tells us it’s not always that black and white. Still, it’s good to consider your users’ search intent. It helps you determine the focus of your content and what call-to-actions you want to add. A great way to get started is by adopting a content design mindset. This mindset helps you produce user-centered content based on real needs. Also, we recommend looking at the search results for some input to create great content.

3. Make your content readable and engaging

Do you want to get your message across? And do you want people to read your entire blog post or page? Then, make your content easy to read. This means that you should:

• Think about the structure of your text and the words you use. Too much text without any headings or paragraphs, also known as a wall of text,  tends to scare people off. Use headings and whitespace to give your readers some air while reading.
• Try to limit the use of difficult words and be cautious of the length of your sentences. Both can make your content harder to understand, which will slow down and frustrate your reader.
• Variation in your text will make it engaging. Use synonyms and alternate longer sentences with shorter ones to mix it up.

Another important thing to focus on: Have fun! And be conversational in your writing. This helps you write high-quality content that is different from your competitors’ and helps users get to know you and your brand.

Read more: 5 tips for writing readable blog posts »

4. Write with E-E-A-T in mind

Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness can all be used to improve your content. So how can you make sure to include these in your writing? We’ll go through them one by one and give you some pointers.

Share your experience

Although the acronym started as E-A-T, they added another E shortly after. This newly added E stands for experience. They prefer content that showcases knowledge or skills gained through first-hand experience. This can be gained through personal involvement or observations related to the topic at hand. To give an example, someone who has worked as an optician for many years will be experienced in the topic of eyesight. Or someone who has a prescription themselves will also have experience on the topic.

Keep reading: The new E in E-E-A-T, or the importance of Experience »

Be the expert in your field

The second E in E-E-A-T stands for expertise. Although it makes sense that this would be an important factor in determining the quality of content, it is trickier to evaluate. So what Google does is find out what it can about the author itself. What is their reputation when it comes to the topic at hand? What is their background? And what other (reliable) sources are they referring to? When it comes to this criterion, it will pay off to be clear about your expertise and where it comes from online.

Read on: The E in E-A-T: What is expertise? And how to show it? »

Show your authority

Related to expertise, the next letter stands for authoritativeness. An authority can be defined as a person or organization having power or control in a particular area. When you’re an authority on a topic, you often have the proper knowledge on it. That’s why official websites often have a higher chance of being perceived as the authority on a topic. But also aspects like qualifications and being associated with well-known organizations count towards this. If this one is tricky for you, don’t worry. It’s just one of the aspects Google looks for when determining quality. If this one doesn’t fit your blog or business, just focus more on the other letters in the acronym.

Keep on reading: The A in E-A-T: What is authoritativeness? »

Be trustworthy

The last one probably doesn’t come as a surprise, as this is something we all look for when browsing online. The trustworthiness of the content before you. Whether it’s for a product you want to buy or information that you’re looking for, trust plays a big role in how serious you take online content. If it doesn’t feel right, a user will hesitate in the best case and leave your website in the worst. Google’s guidelines are quite clear on how they determine the trustworthiness of a website: “An unsatisfying amount of any of the following is a reason to give a page a low-quality rating: customer service information, contact information, information about who is responsible for the website or information about who created the content.” So make sure to be clear on these and look for other opportunities to show your trustworthiness.

Read more: The T in E-E-A-T: What is Trustworthiness? How can you achieve it? »

5. Keep your content up to date

Another key element of writing high-quality content is ensuring it’s up-to-date and relevant. This means you have to update your content occasionally to ensure people can find the right information. But why is this so important? It shows your users that you’re on top of recent developments and can always provide them with accurate information. In other words, it builds trust and keeps your audience returning to your site.

Keeping your website and blog posts updated is also important for SEO, as this shows Google that your site is ‘alive’ and relevant. So, make sure you schedule a time to update your content regularly.

Keep reading: 10 tips to improve the quality of your page »

6. Invest time in site structure

The five steps we’ve discussed so far will help you write content that is easy to read and user-centered. Now, we’d like to highlight an equally important step: working on your site structure. It’s important because it will help users and search engines find your content.

Site structure refers to the way you organize your site’s content. When you structure your site well, search engines can index your URLs better. It helps Google determine the importance of your pages and which ones are related to each other. A good site structure allows users to find their way around your site more easily. It will help them find quality content in the search results and on your website. That’s why there’s much to gain from perfecting your site structure.

7. Use Yoast SEO to perfect your content

The last tip I want to share is the content analysis in our very own Yoast SEO plugin. This feature gives you real-time feedback on your content while you’re editing your page in the backend. It monitors whether you use your chosen keyword often enough and in the right places, it looks at text length and gives you feedback on readability. For example, it tells you when you use the passive voice too much, whether you’re using enough subheadings, gives you feedback on word complexity and the use of transition words. All of this and more is available in the free version to help you improve the readability and quality of your content. 

The content analysis in Yoast SEO Premium goes a bit further and also does the following:

• Allows you to optimize your text for related keyphrases and synonyms
• Recognizes different forms of your keyphrase, so you can focus on writing naturally
• Recognizes singular and plural, and also tenses of verbs
• Gives access to our AI features, like Yoast AI Optimize, suggesting changes in your content
• Gives you access to all the Yoast SEO academy courses, including our SEO copywriting training!

Buy Yoast SEO Premium now!

Unlock powerful features and much more for your WordPress site with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin!

Get Yoast SEO Premium »Only $99 / year (ex VAT)

A quick recap on high-quality content

Good, high-quality content will positively affect your SEO in the long run. So, before publishing post after post (or page after page), make sure to keep the following in mind. Make sure to write for your readers, make your content readable, match search intent with your goals, be trustworthy, keep your content up to date, and work on your site structure. 

The result? Good content that your readers will appreciate. This will positively affect your number of visitors, conversions and eventual revenue. If you want to learn more tips and tricks, make sure to read our guide to SEO copywriting!

Read on: SEO copywriting: the ultimate guide »

The post 7 tips to write good, high-quality content appeared first on Yoast.

What is Shopify SEO?

While Shopify helps you set up everything correctly from the start, there are some things to consider when considering SEO. As with all content management systems, you must optimize your store to ensure it performs well for customers and search engines.

With Shopify SEO, you’re building a technically sound store that is tuned to what potential customers are looking for. You will use SEO in such a way that you build a much better solution than what your competitors are doing. You use research to find out what customers need, and you use the power of high-quality content to draw people in.

The Shopify SEO tips also have to do with what you do to market your store in other places — both online and offline. At Yoast, we practice holistic SEO and advise you to do the same — it’s the only way to get sustainable results.

Yoast SEO for Shopify

Want to outclass your competitors and boost your Shopify store’s organic traffic? Yoast SEO for Shopify has everything you need, from creating top-notch content to making your products eligible for rich results in Google. Our 24/7 support team and valuable SEO courses will ensure you stay ahead of the curve.

Get it now! »

Does Shopify have good SEO?

Shopify ensures you set up your store quickly and that customers and search engines can reach it. It already has some basic SEO features, and you can use SEO apps such as Yoast SEO for Shopify for many of the other tasks. Of course, this being a closed platform, your control over SEO is limited to what the developers allow.

For instance, you have to use the built-in URL structure and a system to manage your products in so-called collections, but these can be suboptimal and might cause duplicate content issues. In the rest of this guide, we will go through the SEO basics you need to cover and how Shopify and Yoast SEO can help you.

Read on: How to become a Shopify expert »

12 SEO basics for Shopify to get you started

It’s an excellent platform to host your online shop, but there’s a lot you can do to make it perform even better. SEO can help you get your store noticed on Google and other platforms while making it more attractive to potential customers. In this guide to Shopify SEO, we’ll give you loads of tips — and a checklist — to make your ecommerce site successful.

1. Define who you are and what you stand for

To kick things off, we need you to think about who you are. Why does your business exist, and why do you need people to visit your store and buy your products? What makes you stand out from the competition? If everyone sells the same products, what would be your number one reason for people to come to you?

Define a mission for your store. A mission is an effective way of explaining what you have in your head. It provides a line that you can connect to your values and principles. You can use your mission as input for your online store’s SEO and marketing strategy. We have a post explaining exactly what you need to do to define a good mission and what to do with it.

2. Conduct keyword research for your store

SEO for your Shopify store must start with keyword research. Keyword research for online stores produces a list of terms you want your products, services, or store to be found. It will also give you insights into your audience, which words they use, which solutions they prefer, and how they behave. If you do it well, you can instantly fill in your SEO strategy for your site.

Various tools out there can help you get those insights quickly. You could use Google Trends, Answer the Public, or more professional tools like Ahrefs and Semrush — Yoast SEO for Shopify even integrates with Semrush. You can even use generative AI tools like OpenAI ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, or Google Gemini to inspire you.

Do thorough research and find out which terms are used most often. Find out what people usually search for and which phrases have search volume that you might aim for. Remember that trying to aim for the most popular head terms only might not make the most sense — try to aim for more long-tail keywords that still attract traffic.

It would help if you also looked at the different search intents around your products or services. No one goes from not needing something to buying it in the next second. The buyer journey has a number of steps, and you need to provide content for those steps.

3. Look at what the competition is doing

When doing keyword research, you must also see what your competition is doing. There are a ton of competitors operating in every niche you can imagine. Whenever you are looking at entering a market — or growing your piece of the pie — you must look at the competition. Who are they? What do they stand for? What’s their offering? Their prices? Service? How do they talk about the product? Who are they targeting, and by which terms do they do that?

Looking at your competitors gives you an idea of who to beat. You might find a weakness in their store or a strategy you might use. Or, you can find something that inspires you to work from. Please look at their content; are they writing thoroughly and with expertise about the product? Is that something you can improve on?

Shopify SEO tips in a handy checklist

This is a pretty epic Shopify SEO article, and we can imagine it is hard to keep track of all the great tips. Luckily, we put all the main tips in a handy little Shopify SEO checklist. Download the pdf and get started on the SEO of your store!

4. Write unique and high-quality product descriptions

Together with product photography, product descriptions are the life and blood of your online store. With good product descriptions, customers can get a good feel for a product without having it in hand. The problem is many online shops count on the descriptions manufacturers supply to stores. You can probably guess what that means: the same descriptions litter the web, causing duplicate content issues.

Writing your product descriptions can help you establish trust with the consumer. Having your content in your own words makes you more unique and lets you stand out from the crowd. Do keyword research for the products to determine which terms your consumers use. Use those terms in your descriptions and craft a compelling piece of content from that. Incorporate the details from the manufacturer, like SKU and product titles, but don’t rely on their descriptions.

Helping you improve your product descriptions is one of the standout features of Yoast SEO for Shopify. The app gives you suggestions while writing your descriptions and tips to help you improve both readability and SEO.

Keep on reading: Product identifiers like SKU and GTIN are essential for ecommerce SEO »

5. Write great titles and meta descriptions

Just as your product descriptions should be excellent, your titles and meta descriptions should also be epic. Title and meta descriptions are essential aspects that you can focus on to improve Shopify’s SEO. Use your keywords tactically and write something enticing those consumers want to click.

Shopify automatically generates titles and meta descriptions based on a straightforward template. You can edit your products’ titles, meta descriptions, blog posts, pages, collections, and general site settings.

Go to a specific page and open the search engine listing preview. Add a title and meta description for the search results pages here. These differ from the regular titles and descriptions, as these are specifically meant for the search results. You might have a specific title visible on your store and choose something else to show on the search results pages.

You can edit these in Shopify, but Yoast SEO makes this process much more manageable. This SEO app comes with the incredible power of variables — and generative AI. Using variables, you can automatically generate part of the title and the meta description based on your settings. Of course, it’s always better to write both yourself, but this allows you to automate some parts, which can be helpful when you have many products. The same goes for AI in Yoast SEO!

6. Create SEO-friendly URLs in Shopify

SEO-friendly URLs are easy to read, relatively short, and consistent. Unfortunately, the CMS is inflexible, and there is little wiggle room to improve your URL structure. If you sell ugly Christmas sweaters, your Shopify collection URL looks like this:

https://example.com/collections/ugly-christmas-sweaters

The only thing you can change in this setup is the last part. Many people feel that there should be a way to have Shopify give more control over the rest.

7. Fix your site structure with internal linking and proper navigation

One of the most impactful tips to improve your Shopify SEO is fine-tuning your site structure and navigation. The more logical your site is, the better and easier customers and search engines like Google can navigate it and find what they need.

Your site structure should follow a logical path, and your collection system should make sense. Please keep it simple. You can see collections as categories, so use the collections to keep customers from having trouble understanding your site. It’s also nice if they don’t have to wade through a million products to find what they need. Make sure to give the collection overview pages the love they need. At the least, give these a proper description.

Internal links are essential

Internal linking helps you give the most critical pages proper weight. By linking to your product pages from various parts of your online shop, you signal to search engines that these are important. With proper anchor texts, you can identify the destination and tell search engines in words what to expect from that link. All of this helps search engines understand your site.

For your navigation, keep it as straightforward as possible. Use recognizable terms and destinations; your menu should describe where a click would lead. Contact us says a lot more than Touch base, right?

Your most important pages should appear in your navigation. While the age-old three-click rule for navigating to all the pages on your site was debunked quite a while ago, there’s still a lot to be said for keeping everything within reach. Your most important pages should be accessible without digging for them.

8. Make products findable with an XML sitemap

XML sitemaps are like maps detailing all the routes to the different parts of your website. Search engines use sitemaps to discover new and updated content. This also applies to your online shop. Shopify will automatically generate an XML sitemap based on your site structure. Your XML sitemap will include product pages, collections, blog posts, and pages.

You can find your sitemap at the following URL, with example.com being your domain, of course:

https://example.com/sitemap.xml

There’s a set limit for XML sitemaps of 50.000 URLs. As many sites have more than that, they will generate sub-sitemaps with fewer URLs. The Shopify sitemap, for instance, can contain up to 5.000 URLs, after which the platform breaks these up into smaller parts. This also has the added benefit of speeding up the loading times of these sitemaps.

To a certain extent, Yoast SEO for Shopify lets you control what appears in your XML sitemap. For instance, you can add a noindex to determine that a specific page or post won’t appear in the search results. You can also decide whether archive pages should or should not appear in the XML sitemaps. For the most part, though, your out-of-the-box settings will be good enough. But if you want to tailor your crawling, you can.

9. Streamline the number of Shopify apps you use

While trying out every Shopify app under the sun is exciting, keep yourself in check. Many apps are bulky and heavy on JavaScript. Adding many apps will add much extra code to your store, as everything must be constantly loaded. One of the most crucial performance improvements you can make is to keep the number of apps low. Think about what you need for your store, pick the best apps that do that job, and remove the rest.

10. Optimize images for SEO

Images are an essential asset for every online store. Customers can only get a good feel for the product with great photos. But you need to offer all those images in the best way. Optimizing your images is one of the best and quickest tips to improve your Shopify SEO.

The importance of good product images

Good product images make it clear what a product is all about. It helps consumers view products from all angles without having the product in their hands. Product images need to be good, as they are one of the main drivers of conversion. Good photos also can catch the eye of the shopper. Great photos stand out in visual search engines like Google Images, Instagram, or Pinterest.

Optimize the file sizes

One of the essential tips to improve the SEO of your Shopify store is optimizing your images. It’s also something everyone can do — whether you are a seasoned ecommerce SEO expert or just starting. Optimizing your images, compressing them, and giving them proper names helps!

Lazy loading images

Another effective way to improve the loading times of your images is by lazy loading them. With lazy loading, the images will only load once they appear on the screen. Of course, you should always load all your images, as you want the images at the top of your browser window to always be visible. For the rest, lazy loading is a good choice.

Preventing CLS

While at it, check if your theme enforces width and height attributes on img tags. This helps avoid cumulative layout shift (CLS), one of Google’s metrics to determine your Core Web Vitals scores. CLS happens when elements move around during loading because image boundaries haven’t been defined. This causes jerkiness, and that’s a sign that your user experience is lacking for Google. You can try this by running your online store through Google’s page quality checks at web.dev/measure. You can also learn why and how to optimize your site for CLS on that site.

<img alt="screenshot" src="screenshot.jpg" width="100" height="200">

<img
  alt="{{ image.alt }}"
  src="{{ image.src }}"
  width="{{ image.width }}"
  height="{{ image.height }}"
>

Add alt text and good file names

Alt text is crucial for both SEO and web accessibility, and there are essential tips to follow when writing them for your product images. Firstly, it’s vital to be descriptive in the alt tag and clearly and concisely describe the product’s features, manufacturer, and model number.

File names also help Google understand your image. Suppose your file name is DSC37612.jpg, which says nothing about what the image contains. Add something useful. For example, if you sell iPhones and the photo shows a close-up of the back camera of an iPhone 15, you can give the file a name like this: iphone_15_back_camera_closeup.jpg. You see this, and you know right away what the image contains. Try to add relevant keywords as well if it makes sense.

11. Add a blog to your Shopify store

You can create a blog on Shopify quite easily. Compared to WordPress, it has a basic blogging engine that functions appropriately, and you can get started without much effort. Blogging on your ecommerce store can be an excellent way to enhance your SEO strategy as you try to reach an audience via search engines. It’s a beautiful way to offer customers more insights into your products and company.

Starting a blog on Shopify is very easy. Open your online store and navigate to blog posts in the sidebar. You can add a blog post from here by clicking the green button. By default, the blog is called News, but you can change that to anything you want. You could also run several blogs side-by-side. If you need help setting up your blog, we have a more detailed post about adding a blog to your store. Check it out!

If you have Yoast SEO for Shopify installed, there’s another way to improve your blog posts. Click Apps > Yoast SEO, and you’ll see an overview of all your products, collections, pages, and blog posts ready for you to optimize. Open the post you choose to edit, and you’ll get the full Yoast SEO readability analysis and SEO analysis. You can manage everything, from crawling directives for search engines to defining the proper article structured data.

Is blogging good for my Shopify store?

Blogging can be a good asset for your Shopify SEO strategy. For many fledgling stores, growth mainly comes from paid ads. Focusing on content marketing through a blog allows you to expand your reach and form a connection with your customers. But, as with everything, it depends on how you use it. Don’t go at it randomly; you need to strategize.

First, you have to determine the goal of your blog. Do you want to reach new customers, build your brand, form a bond with your current customers, or do something else? What type of content would you want to share — or, instead, what content resonates with your customers? Think about how the user might find you — in other words, map out the user journey. And don’t forget about keyword research! Use those insights to build a content strategy for your Shopify store.

When you have a strategy, you can build the blog content on your store. Use cornerstone content as a basis and add articles supporting that main content, so you can fully describe your topic from all angles — and connect everything by proper internal linking. Be sure to write high-quality, unique content that comes across as trustworthy and authoritative.

Yoast SEO for Shopify

Get more organic traffic by creating the best product and blog content. Make your products eligible for rich results in Google. Plus, you’ll get access to our top-notch SEO courses and fantastic support team (24/7). Check out the Yoast SEO for Shopify product page, or get the app now!

Start your trial today! »

12. Finally, pick a good Shopify theme

Your theme is an essential part of your online shop. Your chosen theme influences many things — from branding to user experience to conversions. Everything depends on how awesome your Shopify theme is. Luckily, there’s ample choice in the Theme Store, and many of these should function perfectly fine for your store.

Let’s go over a couple of things you should look out for when choosing a theme:

• Determine what you want and need: Will you run a store with a single product or a theme that can handle thousands or more? The theme store has a handy selection of themes for stores with large and small catalogs. What type of design do you need? What options do you need?
• Figure out your budget: Themes in the Shopify theme store run from free to a one-time payment of a couple hundred dollars. Check what you are willing to spend. Free works for some, but then you hardly get support from the developer. Paid themes often come with more options and tend to be better built.
• Check the themes in the marketplace: Quite a few themes are available. Shopify has even structured these into several collections, such as catalog size or the type of industry, such as clothing or electronics. You can filter on different properties, like features you need for the product pages or what’s available on a shop’s homepage. Now, almost 200 themes are available in the Theme Store.
• Read the reviews: You are probably not the first to pick a theme, so it’s a good idea to read the reviews of people who worked with it.
• Check the support the developer offers: Every theme comes with documentation and support, but the level and quality of support differ from developer to developer. Read the documentation and check around. Don’t be afraid to ask your questions.
• Ensure the Shopify theme is lean and mean: Many themes want everything and appeal to every store owner. But that means that there’s bound to be stuff built in that you don’t need. Keep in mind that all those features come at a price. Try to find a theme that has low overhead and loads lightning fast.
• You can try the demos and check out other stores that run the theme: The theme store offers demos for all the themes, and you’ll need to check these out. Also, Shopify provides examples of stores that run the specific theme you are looking at. It’s a good idea to closely examine those online stores and run them through their paces. For instance, run a performance test on web.dev/Measure and see how they do. You’d be surprised at the results.
• Check mobile-friendliness: As consumers increasingly use their mobile devices to shop, your online shop must function correctly. Again, the theme store allows you to see a mobile view of the theme.
• Test the user experience: The theme store also gives you a good idea of how users might experience the store. Click around, see the various layouts, and check how images load, how the animations work, the structure of the menu, and how it all feels. You can also try out the theme on your store to get an even better sense of how the theme feels and performs.
• Pay extra attention to the shopping cart: Does it feel like it wants customers to move through the process as quickly as possible? Or are there elements that take away focus? Are there other distractions? Is there room to expand the basic cart with upsells/cross-sells, promotions, and the like? Test your cart to see if you can reduce shopping cart abandonment rates.

For total control, build your own Shopify theme

Having your own theme built might not be something you start with, but it offers many opportunities to take your store to the next level. With a self-built theme, you are in control, and you get to define what it looks like, what it needs, and how it functions. You can make it as lean or as complex as possible.

Building your theme is a good idea if you reach the limits of what’s possible with a pre-built theme. Only so much customization is possible in an existing theme — both in a technical and design sense. You have much more control over the conversion optimization options if you do it yourself.

Building your theme is quite complex, and you must consider what you want and need. It would help if you planned to ensure you avoid issues later. Of course, it’s possible to go into the nitty-gritty yourself, but there are also agencies out there that can help you get this done. The developer section of Shopify has ample documentation to help you learn more about building and adapting store themes.

8 technical SEO optimizations for Shopify

Much of what you should focus on for Shopify SEO in your day-to-day activities is content-focused. You are working on your product descriptions and content marketing, and you won’t be rebuilding your theme every day. Still, there are several things you can do to improve your Shopify store in a technical SEO sense. Let’s go over a couple of highlights.

1. Optimize for speed

As a managed platform, Shopify works hard to provide users with a speedy experience. Shopify focuses heavily on speed to help customers quickly improve those all-important loading times. Fast converts!

If your store loads slowly, customers will leave it and try a competitor. Luckily, the CMS prioritizes performance. For instance, it has an automatic content delivery network (CDN) for hosting your content on servers near your customers. In addition, it has a performance report that gives you insights into how well your store is performing regarding loading speed. For this, Shopify uses Lighthouse to get real-world results on your store’s performance.

While it provides a good platform by default, there are other things you can do to speed up your online store. For one, you should pick a highly optimized, lightweight theme — or get one built based on your specifications. Ensure that you properly optimize images on your site and take care not to use too many photos. Discard those sliders — nobody uses these anyway — and don’t install tens of apps you hardly use.

2. Prevent duplicate content

We’re talking about duplicate content when a product or content appears on multiple URLs. This is not ideal, as Google might need clarification about the main one. Therefore, duplicate content can hinder your search performance.

Thanks to Shopify’s preference for collections, a specific product you add to a collection will be visible on two different URLs:

https://example.com/products/alien-ugly-christmas-sweater

and:

https://example.com/collections/ugly-christmas-sweaters/alien-ugly-christmas-sweater

Not ideal! Luckily, the second one is canonicalized to the first one, but this causes a headache. Recent themes, like the Dawn Shopify theme, have improved and now automatically output the correct URL.

3. Working with product variants

Shopify works well with product variants like sizes or colors. You have plenty of options to make different combinations of whatever you like. The thing with variants is that it’s hard to get them to show in Google properly. You might not need that depending on your needs, but if you want the different variants of products to be indexed, you might be better off turning your variants into individual products.

Of course, you must provide sufficiently different product descriptions for each to appear individually in Google.

4. Faceted navigation or product filters

Shopify has only a handful of filtering options for your online store—no Amazon-style mega menu for you! Luckily, there are ways to add more filters to your navigation. There are two options: add your custom filters if you use an Online Store 2.0 compatible theme or add an app to manage them.

The first option is relatively straightforward but might be limited, while the second option opens up a world of possibilities. Product filter apps give you more control over how you want to categorize and visualize the faceted navigation. They also come with intelligent options that make it easier to load filters based on loads of variables dynamically.

Whatever you pick, ensure that the parameters generated by the faceted navigation don’t end up in the search results pages — block them in the robots.txt liquid file with a disallow rule.

Here’s an example of a faceted URL :

https://www.allbirds.com/collections/mens?bestFor=everyday&hue=red&material=wool

5. Editing robots.txt to determine what ends up in search engines

The e-commerce platform hired top-notch SEO people to help expand and improve its capabilities. One of the things that came out of that team pretty quickly was the new ability to edit the robots.txt file. Having complete control over robots.txt gives you more ways to control what Google can and can’t do in your store. This takes away one of the most significant issues SEOs have with Shopify.

The robot.txt file is one of the crucial tools that you can use to optimize your online store or your website. It gives a way to tell Google how you want them to crawl the site. Ideally, you use this to prevent search engines from crawling less critical pages or sections of your site. For huge ecommerce sites, this is very important.

You can find your robots.txt file at https://example.com/robots.txt. Here’s what a standard robots.txt of Shopify looks like:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /cart
Disallow: /orders
Disallow: /checkout
Disallow: /54914154724/checkouts
Disallow: /54914154724/orders
Disallow: /carts
Disallow: /account
Disallow: /collections/*sort_by*
Disallow: /*/collections/*sort_by*
Disallow: /collections/*+*
Disallow: /collections/*%2B*
Disallow: /collections/*%2b*
Disallow: /*/collections/*+*
Disallow: /*/collections/*%2B*
Disallow: /*/collections/*%2b*
Disallow: /blogs/*+*
Disallow: /blogs/*%2B*
Disallow: /blogs/*%2b*
Disallow: /*/blogs/*+*
Disallow: /*/blogs/*%2B*
Disallow: /*/blogs/*%2b*
Disallow: /*?*oseid=*
Disallow: /*preview_theme_id*
Disallow: /*preview_script_id*
Disallow: /policies/
Disallow: /*/*?*ls=*&ls=*
Disallow: /*/*?*ls%3D*%3Fls%3D*
Disallow: /*/*?*ls%3d*%3fls%3d*
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /apple-app-site-association

Shopify automatically disallows crawling for several parts of the store. It does this well; most users don’t have to touch this file. However, adding rules to ensure that more advanced features don’t generate duplicate content in the search results for more complex or expansive sites might make sense.

You can edit the robots.txt liquid file by visiting your Online Store admin page. Go to the theme section and select Actions > Edit code. Find the template section and click Add new template. Click the dropdown and select robots.txt from the bottom. Click Create Template, and you can start editing.

6. Structured data for your products

Structured data is essential in this day and age. This data is coded in a specific vocabulary — Schema.org — that search engines read to better understand your website. Structured data describes every part of your website to Google, so it knows all about your authors, articles, types of pages, businesses, and how they connect. Of course, there’s also Schema structured data for products.

With product structured data, you can describe your product to search engines. You’ll tell them about the product’s name, description, images, SKUs, prices, reviews, etc. Search engines like Google might give your product listings rich results in return for this valuable information. A rich result is a highlighted search with price information, availability, and even star reviews. Getting this is essential for online shops.

Luckily, most themes and Shopify itself output some product structured data. If you need a more complex setup without coding, you can use one of the structured data apps in the App Store. But there’s also another possibility: Yoast SEO for Shopify.

Yoast SEO for Shopify outputs structured data automatically

On WordPress, Yoast SEO has one of the best implementations of structured data out there. We built a complete graph that describes and connects every nook and cranny of your site. Google loves this! We bring that to Shopify in our Yoast SEO app so we can help you tell Google all about your products and their details.

You must follow some steps to get Yoast SEO to output Schema. A lot of structured data is added automatically, like Product information on product pages, but we need your input on other details. First, go to Apps and open the Yoast SEO for Shopify app. Go to the settings and click the Schema tab in the sidebar. Click Site Representation and fill in your store name, upload a logo, and fill in the social profiles. Now, your site is ready to rock.

Schema structured data for your articles and pages

Yoast SEO does a lot more with Schema structured data. For instance, we tell Google about your business — the name, logo, and social handles. The SEO app is flexible, so you can determine which parts of the Schema structured data you want to turn on or off should you ever want to integrate with another service.

Yoast SEO for Shopify has an additional structured data option to set yourself up for posts and pages. You can now describe the pages in detail. For instance, you can tell Google that your contact page is exactly that using a simple selection in the app. After that, Yoast SEO will add ContactPage Schema structured data to your contact page — ready for Google to enjoy.

This also goes for articles. Yoast SEO adds Article structured data to every article by default, but you can easily change this. There are news articles, reports, scholarly articles, and more options. By defining this, you give search engines more details on what they can find on the page, and they have to guess less.

7. Manage your redirects

Redirects are incredibly important and helpful when working on your site structure. With a proper redirect, you can send a customer from one URL to another URL without them noticing it. This is useful when you remove pages or products and don’t want people to stumble on dead links.

Shopify has a redirect feature built in. For one, it automatically adds a redirect when you change the slug of an existing post. If you need to do large-scale work on your site, you can upload CSV files with your redirects. You can also use the URL redirect feature in the admin settings navigation section. It’s a straightforward redirect feature with just two fields: one for the old URL you want to redirect and one for the new URL you want the old one to point to.

8. Add your store to Google Search Console

With Analytics, Google Search Console is an essential tool for insights into your store’s performance in search. It gives you an idea of how your site does in a technical sense — crawlable, fast, and with valid structured data — and in a visibility sense. How do people see your pages and products, and how do they interact with them? Adding your store to Search Console is a must.

A quick rundown

Adding your Shopify store isn’t complicated:

• Open Search Console and log in,
• Add a new property
• Choose either way if you’ve bought your URL from a third party
• Choose the URL way for your examplestore.myshopify.com or examplestore.com URLs you got from Shopify (this is the only way that works)
• Temporarily turn off the password protection (if needed)
• Enter your domain name (including https://)
• Copy the HTML file
• Open your site theme settings
• Click Actions > Edit code
• Find the theme.liquid file and paste in the HTML tag below the head tag
• Save and wait for Google to verify your site

Yoast SEO for Shopify makes adding the verification code to your ecommerce store easy. You no longer have to touch any code to do that! Open the Yoast SEO app, go to the settings, and click on Webmaster tools in the sidebar. Find the webmaster tool you want to verify — Google, Baidu, Bing, or something else — and paste the verification code you received into it. Click Save, and you are good to go. Check the head of your site to see if the code is correctly added

What are the biggest SEO issues with Shopify?

Shopify is one of the best ecommerce platforms out there. It does most things reasonably well, and with some finetuning and care, it’s a solid platform to build your online store.

Most SEO issues arise from its handling of different products and their variants. Products on the ecommerce platform can live in multiple places/URLs in your online store, and that can confuse search engines. Luckily, the CMS adds canonical URLs to signal to search engines that the one in the /products/ section is canonical. Unfortunately, you cannot do much about this, but be aware of the limitations.

Another area people could improve is Shopify’s rigid URL structure. It uses a system based on subfolders, making for unnecessary long URLs. For instance, you can find the contact page on a regular site on example.com/contact/, but on a store, that’s always example.com/pages/contact. Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do about this.

Shopify is listening to its community and has begun to roll out several improvements that make it even more attractive as an ecommerce platform. Let’s hope they keep their focus and help you get the best results with your store. In the meantime, SEO apps like Yoast SEO for Shopify and the tips and checklists in ultimate guides like the one you are reading now help alleviate the various issues.

What is the best SEO app for Shopify?

Shopify is extendable, and you can choose from a broad selection of apps that help you improve your store. Some apps help ship your products, design your store, and offer customer services. Too many to choose from! Of course, there are also some SEO apps to take note of.

Some apps help you optimize images, others help with Schema structured data, and there are all-in-one SEO suites. The best one? We’re biased, but we think Yoast SEO stands out from the competition.

Yoast SEO for Shopify: Your SEO expert

WordPress fans have enjoyed using Yoast SEO for more than a decade — it’s the most popular SEO plugin for a reason! Yoast SEO is for SEO experts by SEO experts. But we didn’t make it for experts only. We’ve made SEO accessible so everyone working with WordPress can use Yoast SEO and get a fair chance in the search results. Over 13 million websites trust Yoast SEO, and our WordPress SEO app has over 25,000 five-star reviews on wordpress.org. Now, Yoast SEO is also available for Shopify. We’re ready to help shop owners get more out of their stores.

Yoast SEO for Shopify helps store owners improve their site technically and comes with an advanced SEO and readability analysis. The app will suggest improvements to your product page descriptions, helping you create the best ones.

These analyses also work on your Shopify blog. Content marketing plays a massive role in getting your store noticed on Google. The Yoast SEO app helps you write high-quality, readable content that resonates with potential customers.

The best structured data for your Shopify store

To enhance your Shopify store’s organic traffic, it’s crucial to capitalize on the benefits of rich results, which increase search visibility and edge out competitors. Yoast SEO provides rich structured data/Schema.org output in JSON-LD format, supporting various types such as Product, Organization, WebSite, WebPage, BreadcrumbList, Article, and Offer. Yoast SEO also ties all its structured data together in a single graph, which helps search engines understand your store.

Additionally, Yoast SEO has integrated with the popular review apps Judge.me, Loox, Ali review, and Opinew, to generate the necessary AggregateRating schema to show your reviews in Google. Furthermore, the Yoast SEO breadcrumb block can conveniently be added to Shopify themes v2.0 to increase your store’s structured data and help boost its organic traffic.

Product variant schema

Product variant schema allows you to organize items like size, color, or material under one parent product to improve how Google displays them in search. Using properties like brand for the manufacturer, color, material size, and unique identifiers like sku, you can define each variant clearly. Adding this structured data helps search engines understand and showcase your product variations more effectively. Our Shopify SEO app makes it easy to implement this schema, ensuring your variants are optimized and compliant with Google’s guidelines.

Of course, that’s only part of what the SEO app does. Be sure to check out the product page for Yoast SEO for Shopify or the Shopify SEO app store listing to find out more. In addition to the app, our SEO content gives you all the knowledge, tips, and tricks you need to make the most out of your SEO.

The Yoast SEO for Shopify training improves your skills!

In this guide, we gave an overview of what you can do to improve the SEO of your store. Of course, there’s more to the CMS — and to ecommerce itself. Luckily, we can help you on both fronts. Our SEO solutions come with training courses, and Shopify is no different. You’ll find an ecommerce SEO online course and training explicitly showing how to properly set up Yoast SEO for Shopify. Be sure to check out Yoast SEO Academy. Please try the ecommerce and Shopify training and bring your online store to the next level.

Conclusion on Shopify SEO

Shopify is a popular platform for hosting your online store. Rightly so, because it is easy to use and performs well out of the box. Of course, there are many things you can do to improve your store’s performance by focusing on Shopify SEO. This ultimate guide to Shopify SEO gives you an excellent place to start.

Don’t forget to download the Shopify SEO checklist and sign up for Yoast SEO for Shopify!

Read more: How the right Shopify SEO tools can boost your traffic »

The post Shopify SEO: the ultimate guide appeared first on Yoast.

Why you and your customers will love it

• Attract more shoppers
  • Make it easier for Google to show exactly what customers are searching for.
• Stand apart
  • Richer product details and search snippets help you outshine competitors.
• Confidence and clarity
  • Easily check your structured data in the Schema tab—no more confusion.
• No extra cost
  • Available immediately for all Yoast SEO for Shopify users.

Here’s how to try it:

To access the Yoast SEO for Shopify product variant schema, you just need to:

1. Open your Yoast SEO app and select a product.
2. Click on the Schema tab in your editor.
3. Confirm your variants and enhance your listings.

About Yoast for Shopify

Yoast SEO for Shopify makes SEO for your online store easy for everyone. It gives you the tools and guidance to do SEO yourself. Let us worry about your technical SEO so that you can focus on other aspects of your business. With multiple integrations with Semrush, Judge.me, Ali Reviews, Fera, Areviews, Loox, Opinew, Weglot and Langify to help you get more out of the online store.

The post Stand out in Google search results with product variant schema appeared first on Yoast.

What are transition words?

Transition words like ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘so’, and ‘because’ are words that show readers the relationship between phrases. Or sentences or even paragraphs. In a way, transition words act like the glue that holds your text together. Without them, your text is a collection of sentences. But with them, the individual parts come together to form one whole.

Let’s look at an example: I pushed the domino. As a result, it fell over.

When you start a sentence with ‘as a result’, your reader will immediately know two things: First, what happened in the first sentence caused something. Second, the sentence after that will describe the effect. By using the phrase ‘as a result’, you show that the two separate sentences are related to each other and should be read together.

Read more: Examples of transition words in your language »

Transition words to start a paragraph

Transition words can be used to connect short phrases, sentences and paragraphs. When you use them to start a new paragraph, this allows you to showcase the relationship to the former paragraph. This helps keep your text flowing and readers understand what direction the next paragraph is going into. Examples of transition words for starting paragraphs are ‘for example’, ‘firstly’, ‘likewise’, ‘however’ and ‘to sum it up’.

Transition word at the end of a sentence

You don’t always have to place transition words at the beginning of a sentence. You can also add a transition word at the end to change it up or when it feels more fitting. For example:

He’s a very nice guy. He took us out to dinner yesterday, for instance.

Even though ‘for instance’ is placed at the end of the sentence, it still provides the reader with information on how the two sentences relate.

Why you should use transition words

You might be wondering: are transition words really that important? Let’s look at a text (Text A) where we don’t use them and the same where we do (Text B).

Text A
I’m going to discuss a few reasons why practice is important to learning skills. The only way to truly master a skill is by actually doing what you’ll have to do in the real world. I think practice can be a fun way of putting in the necessary hours. There are people who disagree. It is said that people tend to remember only 10-20% of what they’ve heard or read. That number rises to as much as 90% when you put theory into practice. Following up explanation with practice is key to mastering a skill.

Text B
In this paragraph, I’m going to discuss a few reasons why practice is important to mastering skills. Firstly, the only way to truly learn a skill is by actually doing what you’ll have to do in the real world. Secondly, I think practice can be a fun way of putting in the necessary hours. There are, however, people who disagree. Thirdly, and most importantly, it is said that people tend to remember only 10-20% of what they read or hear. Moreover, that number rises to as much as 90% when you put theory to practice. In conclusion, following up explanation with practice is key to mastering a skill.

Text A is not a terrible paragraph. But it’s not the easiest to read, is it? Plus, text B does a better job of showing there are three separate arguments to support the statement with a definite conclusion. The reader never has to wonder whether a sentence still belongs to the previous argument or a new one. It even shows the relationship between sentences within one argument. In conclusion, most people will find text B easier to read, so they’ll stay on your page longer.

Types of transition words

Transition words can be divided into several categories, based on the type of connection you want to make. There are often several transition words available for the most common kinds of relationships between texts, or transitions as we call them in the table below. Sometimes, they mean the same; sometimes, there are slight differences. If you’re not a native speaker or are not familiar with these words, you’ll probably have to study and practice their use.

Why are they important for SEO?

As we’ve just seen, transition words make it easier to read and understand a text. They’re one of the key factors to readability. And readability is very important for SEO. Nobody likes to read a text that’s difficult to follow or boring. Your focus might be on creating a text that’s easy to understand for search engines, but that’s not how SEO works anymore. You need to write for people first and one of the ways to do that is to guide them through the text with easy language and well-placed transition words. 

This fits in nicely with the idea of holistic SEO. If you write a text that’s hard to understand, people won’t find what they need. What’s more, you’ll end up with unsatisfied visitors who bounce back to Google right when they hit your site. Google sees this as a sign of bad user experience, resulting in lower rankings. So make sure to write for your audience and search engines will follow.

Moreover, these helpful words play a crucial role in structuring your text. Well-structured text is easier to understand, making your blog easier to read. This helps to retain readers and, therefore, contributes to SEO.

What does the transition word check in Yoast SEO do?

The transition words check in Yoast SEO assesses whether or not you use enough of these linking words. If at least 30% of the sentences in your text contain a transition word, the traffic light will be green. You get an orange light if you use them in more than 20% or less than 30% of your sentences. The light will be red if less than 20% of the sentences of your text contain a transition word. That would be less than 1 in 5 sentences.

Want to read more on how we came to the exact measurements of the transition words check and the other readability checks? Then you should read our article about the methodological choices of the readability analysis.

How to improve your usage

While most of us use transition words here and there, not everyone uses them frequently enough. That’s why it’s important to know when you can use them, and that you’re aware of the relationship between your sentences or paragraphs.

Know the words (and when to use them)

This sounds obvious, but it’s good to know all (or most of) the different transition words you can use. Even if you’re familiar with a language, it pays off to refresh your memory occasionally. Especially if you also write in other languages than your own. We have a few examples per language (that we offer in Yoast SEO right now) to help you get started. Or look online for examples and their meaning to get some inspiration, examples from literature and fiction can be a fun way to learn the words and when you can use them.

Understand the relationship between sentences

One of the tips we often give when writing a text is to just start writing a first draft and put everything in there that you want to say. After that, you can look at the structure of the text and what needs to be elaborated on or removed. This phase of ‘cleaning up’ is also where the addition of transition words comes in. When you’re happy with the order of your paragraphs and sentences, you can reread your text and spot opportunities to tie them together with the right transition words. This will probably come quite naturally to you when rereading, as that often helps you figure out which parts end too abruptly or could use a good transition.

If it doesn’t come that naturally to you, or if you just want to make sure that you use them enough, our transition words check in Yoast SEO (free or Premium) will help out with that. This checks if you use enough transition words, depending on how long your content is. It will give you a green, orange or red traffic light to indicate your use of transition words and improvements that can be made in that regard.

Want to know more?

If you want to learn more about transition words and how to write great content in general, then our SEO Copywriting course can help you. You can preview this course for free, but if you choose to use Yoast SEO Premium, you get access to the full course (along with 15 other courses). If you use Shopify and want to work on the readability of your site, you can check out our Yoast SEO for Shopify app.

Conclusion

Transition words are important for the readability of your text. They explain, give examples, and help your readers understand your texts. They guide them through it. If you still need to get it into your system to use them more often, remember to add the step to your writing process! In addition, pay attention to the structure of your text. If you understand the point and goal of your paragraphs, it will be easier to pick the best transition words available.

Keep reading: How to use the readability analysis in Yoast SEO »

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What is SEO?

The acronym SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Let’s first get a definition from one of our principal SEO experts at Yoast, Alex Moss:

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SEO is both the art and science of improving a website, and pages within, to be as visible as possible for when people search for a relevant topic within any search platform. SEO covers many areas from technical aspects including optimizing a site’s performance and structure, to enhancing brand authority by providing great content and matching it with that person’s search intent.

Alex Moss – Principal SEO at Yoast

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So how does Google work? With search engines like Google, the process consists of crawling, indexing, and ranking. The crawler is an online bot that scours the web to collect all the pages out there and save them in a gigantic database called the index. This index is constantly updated with new pages or updated versions of existing ones. When someone searches online, the search engine calls on the index and uses complex algorithms to determine which pages are relevant to show. This determines the ranking of results shown to the online searcher.

For example, when I search for the term ‘sustainable phone case’, these results are shown by Google. Based on my search term and the intent behind it, Google deems these results the best ones found in its index.

Organic vs paid search

SEO is focused on attracting more organic traffic to your website, traffic that comes to your site via unpaid search results. But as you can see in the image above, the search results also show ads and sponsored results. Often at the top of the page. To make a clear distinction, there are a few acronyms in use that are valuable to know:

• SEM: Search engine marketing entails all marketing efforts to show up in the search results, both through ads and organic results.
• SEO: SEO is the practice of improving a website to show up when people search for a relevant topic within any search platform. 
• SEA: Search engine advertising is the practice of paying for ads that show up in the search results of relevant keywords.
• PPC: Pay-per-click. The advertising model used in SEA, where the advertiser pays a fee each time one of their ads is clicked.

These paid results can allow you to show up as the top result for a search term, but it will cost you money every time a user clicks through to your website. When comparing SEO vs PPC, they both have their benefits and drawbacks. But more often than not, they complement each other well.

Why SEO is important for site owners

Huge volume of searches

The reason that so many (big) companies heavily invest in SEO is the high impact that it can have when done right. To give you an idea, Google, the most-used search engine got around 8.3 billion searches per day in 2024. A number that has only gone up (and significantly) since 1998. So if you have a website, you want to make sure to show up in Google and other search platforms.

SEO is intent-driven

Online search is very intent-driven. Unlike other marketing channels, such as social media, where people happen to scroll upon your brand and content. This means you’re interrupting a user’s experience to capture their attention, which makes it more difficult to get them interested. Showing up in their search results aligns with an existing demand—your customers are actively seeking information, products, or solutions. This makes SEO a powerful inbound marketing strategy, where users come to you rather than the other way around. Because searchers already have intent, they are more likely to convert, making SEO an essential tool for attracting high-quality leads.

Competitive advantage

Creating a website and leaving it at that isn’t going to cut it. With new websites popping up left and right, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get noticed and maintain customer loyalty. SEO can provide you with higher online visibility, a stronger brand, more authority in your field, more contact moments with your audience and higher quality traffic to your website (and/or offline location). All of this, leading to higher brand loyalty and more revenue.

Types of SEO

Although the basic principles remain the same, there are a few different types of SEO worth mentioning. They may not all apply to your situation, but it is beneficial to dive into the ones that do:

• Ecommerce SEO: SEO specifically focused on gaining more visibility and organic traffic for online stores. With the goal of acquiring more sales.
• Local SEO: Local SEO is the practice of optimizing your website for a specific local area. This is to ensure you are easily found (both online and offline) by a local audience. 
• Video SEO: The process of optimizing videos and video pages to make them appear in the search results for relevant keyphrases. Whether that is Google’s search results or search results on other platforms like YouTube and social media.
• News SEO: Mainly relevant for news publishers, news SEO focuses on getting content to show up as the top result in Google News and other news-specific areas of the search results.

The 3 pillars of SEO

SEO is all about optimizing your website to increase your online visibility. But what do we mean by that? What exactly should you be optimizing? Well, there’s a lot you can do and it can be divided up into three main areas.

Technical SEO

First of all, it’s important to focus on the technical part of SEO. Technical SEO is all about improving a website’s technical aspects to improve user experience and make search engines understand your pages. Aspects that fall under technical SEO are:

• Loading time of your pages
• Making the right parts of your site crawlable for search engines
• The amount of dead links on your site
• Security 
• Use of structured data

Search engines value these aspects because they want to present their users with websites that provide a proper user experience. A page that takes forever to load, doesn’t exist anymore, or isn’t secure, provides a terrible user experience and will not make users happy. Also, aspects such as crawlability and structured data help search engines understand what your pages are about. This helps search engines understand your relevance and allows them to rank your pages higher.

On-page SEO

Although technical SEO is also part of on-page SEO, this can be seen as ‘under-the-hood’ optimization to improve your pages. The other efforts that can be categorized as on-page SEO are targeted at optimizing the content on a page. Think of:

• The quality of your content
• Use of the proper keywords
• Showing E-E-A-T in your content
• Site structure
• Internal linking
• Well-thought-out URLs, titles, and alt tags 

On-page SEO mainly revolves around content SEO and using the elements around that content to improve your findability for relevant terms. 

Off-page SEO

In contrast to on-page SEO, off-page SEO entails everything you do for SEO outside of page optimization. Such as external link building, social media and local SEO (off-site). This is focused on growing your reach and building your brand to attract more traffic. An important part is link building, getting other relevant websites to link to your content. This can really help boost your visibility and improve your reputation as an authority – see links as like votes of confidence from other websites 

But there’s a lot more you can do. For example, speaking at events, doing interviews, and blogging for other websites. These activities give you the opportunity to showcase your expertise and reach new people. When you own a local shop, these might not be as relevant. In that case, it’s important that you focus on the experience that people have with your shop. Make sure that customers leave happy and that this experience is positive, offline and online. This also extends to social media. Although your activity there does not directly impact rankings, it pays off to be in contact with your audience there as well. And provide a similar (positive) experience through these platforms as well. 

One final aspect that you shouldn’t forget about is your business listings. Make sure these are accurate on your Google Business Profile and other websites that are relevant to your business.

SEO Ranking factors

To determine what results to show, and in what order, search engines use ranking factors. Ranking factors, or ranking signals, are characteristics of a page that search engines look at to determine how relevant that page is for a specific search query. Although the exact list of ranking factors and their importance is a bit of a mystery and changes from time to time, we do have a pretty good idea of the most important ones:

• The quality, relevance and usability of your content
• External and internal links
• The technical aspects of your site (f.e. security)
• User experience on your site (site speed, easy navigation, mobile parity)
• The overall online presence of your brand

In addition to these top-ranking factors, there are plenty of others (both known and unknown). But to get a head start with SEO, it makes sense to focus on these aspects first.

SEO now vs early days: a brief history

SEO in the 90’s

Although websites have been around for a little while longer, people started optimizing their sites for search engines in the mid-1990s. As you can imagine, SEO was a lot simpler back then. The algorithms that search engines used were way less advanced and relied on ranking factors like keyword density to determine the relevance of a page. The ‘trick’ back then was making sure the keyword was being used enough times throughout your page and in your meta tags. 

Search engines evolving

Naturally, the companies behind search engines quickly realized the issue with this approach. Displaying the results that use the keyword most isn’t always the best experience for their users. So they had to find a way to better handle how potential results were being ranked. Search engines like Google started working on ways to get smarter and rely less on ‘tricks’ and static ranking factors. This resulted in a number of algorithm updates, each resulting in a smarter Google that was more capable of understanding the relevance of a page. 

With a team working non-stop on improving Google’s search engine, the focus moved from factors like keyword density to user experience and high-quality content. These algorithm updates are still very much a part of the SEO field, with Google releasing a new one (or multiple) every year. You can expect this to be a continuous process where search engines adapt to current search behaviour and adjust their algorithms to keep showing users the best results for their search query. 

SEO in 2025

So, where does that leave us in 2025? As mentioned, search engines continue working on their algorithms to improve their users’ experience. The focus points of SEO in 2025 are still high-quality content and technical factors like site speed, security and mobile parity. But there are more aspects that Google and other search engines deem important.

Search engines are working hard to get a better understanding of a user’s search intent, to show that user the results that fit their need best. Related to that, they continue to improve how information is presented in the search results, which can differ quite a bit per search intent. 

One result of that is zero-click searches, where search engines show the complete answer to a search query in the search results. This can lead to fewer clicks to your website, but it still pays off to be the website that provides that answer. In fact, this is a good example of the direction in which SEO is going. Shift your focus from ‘just clicks’ and maintaining a specific spot in the search results to building a strong brand and being visible on different platforms.   

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In 2025, SEO will focus less on raw keywords and more so around search intent across diverse platforms like social media and LLMs. As well as this, it’ll be important to produce more video content as discovery platforms integrate these more into their SERPs.

Alex Moss – Principal SEO at Yoast

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The other aspect we can’t ignore is AI. More people are using AI tools for their online searches and search engines are also investing in providing AI-driven search experiences. An example of that is Google AI overviews, where Google uses AI to pull together and combine information on a search query from different resources. This is then shown in one overview, with the hope that this directly answers the specific question asked. 

Setting SEO Goals

SEO experts used to closely monitor ranking positions, clicks, website traffic and stats like bounce rates. Naturally, all of this data is still relevant, but there has been a shift in what goals to focus on. Search behavior has changed, and search engines are showing your content in many different ways. So it’s not just a number game anymore. You need to focus on the overall perception of your brand and being present in the right places. 

Set SEO goals related to engagement, brand awareness, user experience on your website, user satisfaction, and how all of this can be related to sales or other actions you want your audience to perform. This can be trickier than just looking at your daily rankings but will give you a better idea of the success of your SEO strategy and how you’re perceived.  

How to learn SEO and get started

Although it consists of a lot of different aspects, it is possible to tackle (a lot of) SEO yourself. Let’s look at how you can do that and what resources can help you get started. 

Start with the basics

Before you get to content creation, it’s important to get your technical SEO in order. If you know your way around redirects, optimizing page speed, crawlability, security and structured data, make those your first priority. If not, let your site builder help you out or hire someone with a background in technical SEO. When that’s done, you can start looking at site structure and the content on your pages.

By doing keyword research, you will be able to create content that aligns with your business and gets people to your website. It will also give you loads of input on topics to write about. This will enable you to set up an SEO strategy and plan to continue working on this throughout the year. Because SEO is never done. That’s why it’s important to create a realistic plan and keep yourself (or your team) to it. This might feel like a lot of effort, but remember that SEO not only brings more traffic to your site, it also helps build your brand and increase user loyalty in the long run. 

How we can help you

At Yoast, we want to make SEO accessible for everyone. And we want to help you do it yourself. That’s why we offer a free and Premium version of our WordPress plugin, allowing you to get started with SEO without too much trouble. Our free plugin comes with features like the SEO and readability analyses, which give you feedback on your content right away. It also handles parts of the technical SEO for you. Our Premium plugin gives you access to some more features like AI-powered features, a redirect tool, and the possibility to add multiple keywords per page. Making SEO even easier to work on. 

We also offer a variety of SEO courses in our Yoast SEO academy, where you can find 5 free courses to get started. For example, the SEO for beginners course, the WordPress for beginners course and a course on structured data. If you’re a Yoast SEO Premium user, you get access to all 16 courses on there. Which will really help you dive into the different aspects of SEO and how to tackle them. 

Finally, we have an SEO blog with numerous blog posts on SEO basics, more advanced SEO, new developments and related topics. All of this to make sure that you have all the tools you need to successfully work on SEO yourself!

Read more: The ultimate guide to WordPress SEO »

The post What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)? appeared first on Yoast.

What is ecommerce SEO?

Ecommerce SEO concerns all the tactics you can use to gain more visibility and organic traffic for your online store in search engines, like Google. These tactics focus on the technical and content sides of SEO. By optimizing your store you can get a dependable stream of targeted traffic to your site. This, in turn, should lead to more sales.

Branding is key

You are one of the millions of companies trying to sell something online. Of course, you might think you’re unique, but, in most cases, that’s not true. In most niches, you compete with dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands of others. What you need to do is stand out. But how?

First of all, you need to write down your mission. Your mission will clarify what you – and your customers – want your business to be. This will help you identify your USPs (unique selling points) and create a strong brand that resonates with your audience.

Building a recognizable brand is not just about visuals like a logo or the colors you use, but also your tone of voice or your handling of customer requests. Being present on the right platforms and showing your audience that you are trustworthy and there to help them. How you present yourself to the outside world makes all the difference. Branding helps you get inside people’s minds and stay there. But stay genuine and fit your branding to your audience.

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SEO helps online stores get found by the right customers at the right time. Unlike ads, which stop when you stop paying, strong SEO keeps bringing in shoppers over time. A well-optimized store makes products easier to discover, builds trust, and reduces reliance on paid traffic.

Carolyn Shelby – Principal SEO at Yoast

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Technical ecommerce SEO

To get properly started we need to look at the technical aspects first. Here, we’ll go over some important considerations for your online store.

The importance of good hosting

One of the simplest but most impactful things you can do is choose the right hosting for your site and upgrade your hosting plan when needed. Starting out, it might not make sense to drop hundreds of dollars for an extensive hosting plan. But once you reach a certain level, it makes all the sense in the world. Good hosting makes your site faster, pages load properly, and you’ll be able to handle more traffic than ever before. It can also better handle the crawling efforts of Google and other search engines, making it easier for them to index your URLs.

Most hosting providers offer several packages with uptime guarantees, scalability options, dedicated support, et cetera. Find a hosting provider specialized in ecommerce, and don’t try to take the cheap route.

SSL is essential for ecommerce SEO

Long gone are the days when having an SSL certificate for your site was optional. When you are selling something and/or collecting customer data in any way, you need to do so in a secure environment. No one will leave their credit card details on a website that is not adequately secured.

There are other benefits to having a properly secured website. Google, for instance, has said many times that having an SSL connection can give your site a ranking boost. In addition, many of the newer internet technologies like HTTP/2 only work on websites that use HTTPS connections.

Make your site visible through crawling and indexing

You probably want to have all your pages shown in Google, but not being mindful of this can backfire. For example, indexable results from your internal search engine, URLs with parameters from your faceted navigation or product filters, outdated content, temporary pages, and test content can be considered useless URLs. If you have a ton of them, Google will spend a valuable part of your crawl budget indexing those instead of crawling and indexing the pages that you do want to show up in the search results.

Use your robots.txt file to control what search engines can and can’t do on your website and adequately use meta robots tags to block stuff that doesn’t make sense to show in the search results. Also, to get Google to crawl your store correctly, you need optimized XML sitemaps that list your most essential pages. 

Improve the URLs of your online store

Getting your URLs right is a crucial aspect of ecommerce SEO. Unreadable URLs make it harder for search engines and site visitors to understand your products. And online stores tend to have a ton of URLs. Usually, every single product has its own URL and every product variation also comes with its own URL. On top of that, things like faceted navigation can generate an endless stream of URL variants. If Google finds the same products on multiple URLs, how will it know which one to show in the search results?

Help search engines by minimizing the number of URLs on your online store to prevent confusion and unnecessary crawling. Check your paginated search results and see if all of these have a unique URL. Give your URLs descriptive names to help search engines identify the contents, so change URLs like /sweaters/323551 to /sweaters/ugly-christmas-sweater. Follow Google’s advice on how to design a URL structure for ecommerce websites.

Be aware of duplicate content

This endless number of URLs showing the same content can cause another SEO issue you want to prevent. If they find duplicate content on multiple pages, search engines won’t know which URL to show which can lead to lower rankings for all pages involved. So make sure to check how your ecommerce CMS handles product variations and faceted navigation. You can use a canonical URL to signal to Google what the original version of a page or product is.

Duplicate content is also a risk when you use product descriptions provided by manufacturers, which are used on other websites. Although you’ll be competing with content on other websites, it will make your product page stand out less. Leading to search engines favoring other websites that do write their own product descriptions. 

Add structured data to your products

Structured data lets you describe your products and business information to Google. This makes it easier for the search engine to understand your business and products. In return, you can get rich results like highlighted product information. You can use structured data to provide details like titles and descriptions, stock and shipping details, SKUs, prices, reviews, ratings, and product images for products. Using these details, Google can highlight your products in diverse ways and various locations, like Google Images and Shopping.

You can also use structured data to provide business information. Google uses this data to verify whether you say who you say you are. It cross-references the information it finds on your site with what it finds on Google Business Profile. So make sure to keep this information (f.e. location, phone number, opening hours) up to date and consistent. If you want to add structured data to your products (or other pages), the structured data feature in our WordPress plugin and Shopify app might be worth checking out.

Improve your mobile shopping experience

Many people do their online shopping on a mobile phone, and that number is only growing. That’s why your mobile site has to offer a great shopping experience, similar to your website shown on a computer. We call this mobile parity. Your mobile pages should load quickly, work properly, and have no unnecessary distractions. People should not have to wait for your page to load, only to be confronted with things jumping around and buttons that aren’t clickable.

Keep the design of your mobile site simple while still offering the branding experience that people are familiar with. Especially on your product pages, you should offer a minimal amount of distraction to get people to convert as quickly as possible. Make sure that your theme is responsive and scales appropriately to all screen sizes without having multiple designs. Give extra attention to the readability of your pages, especially those with more than a bit of text, like product pages or blog posts.

Optimize the page speed of your online store

Site speed is an ongoing challenge for most websites, especially since Google has declared it a ranking factor. For ecommerce sites, that’s even more important because a slow store can cost you customers. It is proven repeatedly that people will more likely buy from an online store with proper page speed. It’s also a vital part of another ranking factor, page experience.

How you improve the loading times of your store depends on the type of store you’re running. Hosted platforms like Shopify and Wix have built-in performance enhancements, like a CDN and image optimization options. For these SaaS platforms, you’re somewhat limited to the choices they make. If you run a WooCommerce store on WordPress, you have more control over your performance. You can choose your hosting plans, your CDN, your cache management, et cetera. Of course, there is no wrong solution. Pick whatever fits your goals and budget.

Improve your code

Many of the performance improvements you can make are found in your code. Make sure that the code of your theme is lean and mean. Fix scripts that block the rendering of your content in the DOM. Minify your code and try to add lazy loading to images where it makes sense. Don’t rely on JavaScript for loading critical functionality and content.

All the evergreen site speed tactics should also be applied to your online store. Think optimizing your images, uninstalling unnecessary apps and plugins, updating your CMS and plugins, optimizing your caching, minimizing the number of HTTP requests, asynchronously loading scripts, et cetera. To get an idea of where you should start, make sure to look at the Core Web Vitals.

User experience improves conversion rates

Related to technical SEO and branding, it’s important to be aware of the overall experience your online store offers its users. You need to help customers feel safe and welcome before they are ready to buy from your store. A well-optimized online store is a joy to use, offers a safe and secure buying experience, and loads in no time — both on mobile and desktop. Photography, typography, and content also contribute to user experience.

User experience is also about taking away frustrations and barriers for users to reach their goals quickly. It’s about optimizing product pages, CTAs, and payment flows to get people moving through the process without issue. Focusing on user experience can help you improve your store’s conversion rates. In addition, it builds a relationship with the customer and helps them come back for more. Build brand loyalty through a pleasant user experience. So add an option for guest checkout, make your site search work, improve the text on your CTAs, and offer proper faceted navigation. To give a few examples.

Don’t underestimate the importance of content

Content is, and will remain, still a very important part of SEO. Ecommerce SEO is no exception to this rule. Having great content on your website, and a proper content SEO strategy can help Google and your customers choose your shop above your competitors.

Keyword research for your online store

An important aspect is figuring out which keywords you can target — and which keywords your potential customers are searching for. It gives you a better sense of the competition and the landscape you are operating in. While doing keyword research for your online store, you’ll also uncover different search intents. Often enough, the customer doesn’t follow a straight line in their buying journey.

However, you can guide potential customers during their buyer journey with helpful content in the right place at the right time. For this, you can use proven marketing strategies like the AIDA model (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) to guide a customer from discovering their need to guiding them to a purchase. At any touchpoint during their journey, you need to be there to stay part of their buyer journey. Keyword research will help you uncover the terms searchers use during the different sections — helping you write content that is valuable and on point.

Improve category pages for ecommerce SEO

Often, category pages can be easier to rank than individual product pages. You can set them up to target a broader set of terms instead of one specific product. Your keyword research can help you use keywords that your audience searches for. Give your category pages a good title and meta description featuring the keywords you want the page to rank for. In addition, pick a proper URL structure for your category pages. Keep them short and focused.

Add a piece of text to the category page to give Google and customers more insight into what this page holds. Don’t overdo it, though; it doesn’t have to be a wall of text. Just ensure that it is written for humans and isn’t stuffed with your keywords. Add great product images to your category pages and link to them from other relevant pages on your website.

Again, consider search intent here; category pages should target and offer solutions for ‘browsing’ behavior. This differs from what you do with individual product pages. For category pages, you want to rank for “Black Dresses” while your product page might want to rank for “Black Dress”.

Add a blog to your online store

One of the most important ways of promoting your online store is via content marketing. Adding a blog to your site gives you a range of options to rank in the search engines and attract a new wave of customers.

While your product descriptions and landing pages allow you to talk about specific products, a blog can be much more flexible. Here, you can dive deeper into your product, your business, and topics related to what you sell. Just make sure it’s relevant to the people you’re trying to target.

With high-quality content, you show that you are passionate about your product and that you are an expert on the topic. Trust and expertise are crucial factors for Google and visitors to find the business they want to buy their products from.

Relevant content has a great chance of ranking if you target the right keywords. You can write all-encompassing, authoritative cornerstone content that you can use as a base for your content strategy. Supporting those articles, you can go into more detail about specific aspects. For instance, the guide you are reading now is supported by numerous articles on ecommerce SEO topics which are all interlinked.

Improve your product pages for SEO and conversion

Your product page is where the magic happens. Here, you want your customers to hit that buy button without hesitation. But what are the aspects of an excellent product page? What can you do to improve your product page SEO? 

Write great titles and meta descriptions

The words you use to describe your articles are essential. Of course, this also goes for the words you provide for your product to be used in the SERPs — the titles and the meta descriptions. In 2021, Google was actively rewriting more page titles than ever. According to them, too many sites were using non-descript or spammy titles. Therefore, it is even more important to improve your titles and keep an eye on what Google is showing for your products.

Using WordPress/WooCommerce SEO plugins and Shopify SEO apps like Yoast SEO for Shopify, you can set up templates for both titles and meta descriptions, so they follow a similar pattern. This saves you time, and you won’t have to do everything by hand. Of course, you should write everything by hand for your most important articles and pages. Make them stand out!

Write your own product descriptions

We already touched on this topic briefly while discussing the risk of duplicate content. To prevent your product descriptions from being the same as 100+ online stores out there, you need to write them yourself.  If you have a ton of products, start with the ones most important or most valuable.

Be sure to write in the language your audience uses to find and describe these products. Don’t use jargon or made-up words that only a few people will understand. Good product descriptions are easy to grasp and easy to read. Also, stay away from walls of text — use a good header hierarchy and break up the text with paragraphs and lists for readability.

Add unique, high-quality product photos

Excellent product images are another great way to set yourself apart from your competitors. Your customer wants to see your products in detail. Even if you have an offline store as well, photos show what your products look like and give you that edge over competitors who just use the images provided by the manufacturer. Try to take authentic photos and do it yourself. Make sure they are high-quality and show your product in use to show what it looks like in real-life situations.

If you’ve shot good photos of your products, optimize them for the right size, compress them and give them a proper SEO-proof name. Use the product name in the image file name and the alt text when you upload it to your store.

Add reviews of your product or service

Reviews are incredibly important for your business. Collect them, display them and add review and ratings structured data. It can nudge customers to buy your product or service. It also helps Google turn those reviews into highlighted listings in the search results — with stars and all.

Most shoppers look up reviews before buying a product or deciding on a service. While the availability of reviews on your product pages helps build trust, they need to be genuine. Don’t publish fake reviews or only publish the ones that paint your product or service in a positive light. Even negative reviews have a place! What’s more, how you respond to negative reviews says a lot about you and your business.

Add related products for cross-selling and internal linking

To increase the conversion rate and the total amount spent per cart, you can use a variety of tactics. One of those tactics is adding related products on your product pages and even on your checkout screen, although you need to test that second option so that it doesn’t harm the checkout process.

The same goes for a list of alternative products for the one a customer is looking for. An ‘Other customers also look at’ feature helps uncover more products for your customers, plus it helps them reach their goal more quickly. In addition, this helps your internal linking as well. By doing this, you make it easier for customers and search engines to reach different parts of your site.

Improve the shopping experience with filters

For online stores, faceted navigation is a must-have on category pages. Faceted navigation — also known as product filters —, lets users filter their search to a more manageable level. We all know filters like size, price, color, brand, et cetera. Offering ample filter options genuinely improves a shopper’s experience on your site. Filters give them the possibility of finding a product with much less friction.

When set up correctly, they should work without issue. The problems with faceted navigation start whenever this system spits out a massive amount of indexable URLs, thanks to the filtered parameters. This could lead to duplicate content, index bloat, and crawling issues. These URLs mustn’t get indexed by Google.

Handle out-of-stock products

Every online store will eventually reach a point where products run out of stock. How you deal with that is more important. Manage expectations by showing when this product will be back in stock. Or offer ways to keep them in the loop by offering to send an email when it’s available again. There’s more you can do to handle products that are out of stock, but it is important to act upon it to show potential customers and Google that you’re active and trustworthy.

Site structure, navigation, and internal linking

Site structure is essential for every site — and the larger your site is, the more important it gets to keep it under control. Setting everything up transparently helps customers and search engines find their way on your ecommerce site easily. As Google uses the structure to understand your site, you need to think about how you link everything together. With proper internal linking, you can signal to Google which pages are the most important ones. It will prioritize these over other, less-linked pages.

Think about your navigation

The same goes for your navigation. Well-thought-out navigation doesn’t just please Google, but users as well. Search engines like Google use the navigation of your online store to uncover your content. They also use your navigation and your site structure to connect the various parts of your site.

Google, for instance, advises shop owners to add links from menus to category pages, from category pages to sub-category pages, and finally from sub-category pages to all product pages. It’s vital to link to all the products you want to have indexed. Don’t forget to add your most important pages and categories to the footer, as that is important real estate!

Don’t forget about internal linking

Other than having a proper navigation and site structure in place, you also need to link related content to each other. This shows search engines what pages and topics are related to each other and which pages are most important. It also helps site visitors find other related content or pages to the page their currently on, keeping them on your site and helping them find what they are looking for. When you have a blog, internal links also give you a great opportunity to link directly to specific products or categories that are related to that topic. Use internal linking to show the importance of pages and help users navigate through your site.

Link building for online stores

You shouldn’t underestimate the power of link building. These are links from other websites leading to your products and/or content. This is, to this day, an important ranking factor for search engines. Not just having as many links to your website as possible, they need to come from relevant websites and make sense. 

You need to publish content that people will link to for this to happen. That doesn’t strictly have to be a blog post, but that could also be a buying guide, an infographic, a tool that helps people make decisions, original research, et cetera. Excellent, unique content has a bigger chance of getting links from relevant sites and people.

Another link building strategy is to reach out to your local community to get them to talk about you. Or you could invest in influencer marketing and digital PR to boost your online store.

Marketing and ecommerce SEO

You can sit and wait for people to show up in your online store, or you can act. While not technically SEO, marketing is still at your disposal — and there’s a lot you can do. We’ve already talked about content marketing, but we’ll also discuss social media, ads, and video marketing.

Social media

Everybody knows social media can do a lot of good when used right. So, use it to your advantage. It won’t help your store rank better, but it can help you get and build an audience. It can function as an extension of ecommerce SEO, and it is a wonderful way of contacting your customers. Social media marketing is essential for your branding — it’s where people can see you and what you do. Make the most of it!

Video marketing

Video is huge, and its growth is nowhere near stopping. Invest in video SEO if you have the budget. Just make sure it looks good and represents your business. With video, it’s important to know what you want to achieve. Do you want to get recognized on YouTube and have your videos rank well there? Then that’s where you should focus your attention as simply adding a few videos to your store won’t help in this situation.

Do you want to produce the best videos on your ecommerce site? Then you need to think about where you want to host these and how to make them click with your audience. Want videos to do well in the organic search results? That’s something else entirely. Figure out if you want to focus on videos for YouTube or your own site.

Running paid ads

Running ads in the search results is another way to stand out from the crowd. It gives you the option to bid for specific keywords and — depending on your niche — can get you a relatively cheap way to the top of the search results.

Fledgling stores often rely on paid ads to get noticed in the search results. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. But, with paid ads, you must keep paying, or else your stream of customers will dry up. It’s not a sensible strategy to just focus on running paid ads. Combine it with SEO, social media, and content marketing.

Google Shopping feed/Merchant Center

While it is good to focus on getting your products found in Google’s organic search results, most online stores also put effort into Google Shopping. Google helps customers find the best products for the best prices in the Shopping section. In 2020, Google made it free for merchants to add their products to the Shopping section. Simply sign up for Google Merchant Center, correctly fill in all the required data about your business and follow the guidelines.

Local SEO for ecommerce

If you combine your online store with a brick-and-mortar one, you must also focus on local SEO. Discover how your online and offline stores can support each other to strengthen each other. Write content optimized for your locale and build good landing pages that help you get noticed for searches in your area. We also offer a local SEO plugin that can help you optimize your website for a local audience. For instance, it adds proper business location schema structured data for your shop and helps you get your details in Google Maps.

Is your online store on Shopify or WordPress? 

Shopify is one of the biggest ecommerce platforms out there. And WordPress powers around 43% of all websites worldwide. Both WooCommerce and Shopify are excellent choices for your online store. 

For WordPress sites, many of the ecommerce stores are powered by WooCommerce. It’s a solid platform that does a lot out of the box. Put the ecommerce tips from this guide into practice, and you are well on your way to an optimized store.

If your online store is on Shopify, you’ve chosen a platform focused on ecommerce. It comes with pretty much everything you need straight out of the box. If there is something you’re missing, there are tons of apps that can help you out. Although most SEO advice is platform agnostic and this guide will already give you lots of input, we also have a guide on Shopify SEO to help you get your Shopify store ranking high.

WooCommerce SEO plugin by Yoast SEO

To help you quickly set up WooCommerce for optimal SEO, we built the WooCommerce SEO add-on for Yoast SEO. Our WooCommerce SEO plugin adds several extra features while also improving the code WooCommerce puts out to make it more understandable for search engines. It’s an essential tool if you want to get the most out of our WooCommerce store. You can use this add-on with both the free and Premium version of Yoast SEO.

Yoast SEO for Shopify app

One of the most remarkable aspects of Shopify is that you can improve your store by running apps. There are apps for everything, from review management to email marketing and image optimization to cross-selling products. One of the most popular categories is ecommerce SEO, and we’re proud to offer a Yoast SEO for Shopify app as well.

Our app improves the technical SEO of your Shopify store while also offering features that help you produce the best possible product-related content. It comes with SEO and readability analyses, various controls for handling how Google crawls your site, and an impressive Schema structured data implementation that instantly helps search engines understand your products.

All about ecommerce SEO

That’s it! You’ve just learned a lot. But although this is billed as a thorough guide, a complex topic like ecommerce SEO cannot be contained in one single guide. Where possible, we’ve linked to related articles that go deeper into a specific detail — read these to expand your knowledge!

The post Ecommerce SEO: how to rank higher & sell more online appeared first on Yoast.

What is Shopify and what does it do?

Shopify is an ecommerce platform that has everything under one roof. It’s a cloud-based solution that lets merchants create, customize, and manage online stores without issues. Shopify focuses heavily on ease of use and functionality, and with the thought of having businesses run an online business without technical expertise. 

The CMS has quickly become one of the most popular ecommerce platforms. For instance, it dominates the US market, with a market share of around 30%. It helps by easily serving businesses of all shapes and sizes, from small startups to large enterprises. 

Choosing the right ecommerce platform is critical to your online success. There are many good reasons to choose Shopify, as it’s versatile, user-friendly, and scalable. It’s a good solution for most businesses and even has an app store with tools like Yoast SEO for Shopify that help you with your content marketing and SEO efforts.

Primary features and services of Shopify

One of Shopify’s main features is hosting and scalability. As a managed hosting solution, the platform offers fast and reliable performance for your pages. Its infrastructure can handle traffic spikes and high-demand sales peaks like those during Black Friday sales. 

Next, it is well-known for its template and customization options. The theme store has over 240 themes, all of which are mobile-friendly. You even get a selection of industry-specific themes to help businesses get online quickly. 

Another strong aspect of the platform is its tools section and how it integrates with nearly everything. The app store has almost any app you need, from Shopify SEO tools like Yoast SEO to inventory management options. This breadth of options is very impressive. 

Lastly, the CMS makes it easy to manage payments and financial transactions. It runs its own payment gateway, Shopify Payments, but it also supports various third-party payment processors. 

These options together form a fully formed product that helps merchants with everything from server management to brand building and marketing. No wonder so many merchants choose Shopify as their ecommerce platform. 

How does Shopify work?

Shopify’s intuitive platform makes starting and running an ecommerce store very easy. It doesn’t matter if you sell just one product or thousands — the software makes it accessible for every type of merchant. 

Simple setup process

One of Shopify’s most impressive aspects is the setup. Entrepreneurs can literally launch an online store within a few hours — without prior technical know-how. The platform offers easy-to-use tools that work by simply dragging and dropping elements. In addition, it offers user-friendly walkthroughs to guide merchants through the process. There are pre-built themes to get started with quickly, and buying premium themes from the Theme Store is also possible.

Effortless management

Shopify has a clearly organized admin dashboard. Store owners can track orders, manage inventory, and check customer data in a single place. Merchants also enjoy the automation features. For instance, it automatically calculates taxes, handles shipping integrations, and manages checkout processes — a huge time saver!

Of course, as we live in the mobile age, the platform offers mobile app access. Merchants can manage their stores on the go, so they don’t have to miss anything when they are out and about. We’ve already mentioned that the store themes all scale with and perform properly on mobile devices. 

All of these possibilities make Shopify a very good solution for most stores. Even a solo entrepreneur can build and manage a professional store without issues. This makes it a far more accessible option than platforms like WooCommerce or Adobe Commerce.

7 Key benefits of choosing Shopify

The ecommerce platforms’ impressive features, scalability, and customer-centric design stand out. Here are some key reasons merchants choose Shopify as their preferred ecommerce platform. 

1. The user-friendly interface

Time and time again, merchants mention that the clean, intuitive interface is the most important reason for choosing this ecommerce platform. It’s one of the most user-friendly e-commerce builders out there, and it’s intuitive for beginners and powerful for experienced users. 

Shopify has an innovative drag-and-drop builder that lets merchants customize the store layout and product pages without coding. The admin interface is clearly organized and simple, even for non-developers. Thanks to the guided setup and well-designed templates, business owners can quickly move from concept to live store. In addition, the admin panel gives an easy-to-understand overview of the store’s performance so merchants can manage orders and inventory without issues.

2. Shopify AI Magic

One of the newest benefits is Shopify Magic, an AI-powered solution that makes work easier and more fun. For instance, it has an image editor that automatically cleans up and optimizes product images, and a content generation tool that uses generative AI to write FAQs, product descriptions, and blogs. Email improvements also help dynamically tailor email campaigns for higher engagement rates.

It also has Sidekick, an AI assistant that can help you get more done in your store. This chatbot answers all your questions and advises you on your specific situation, as it knows everything about your store. As a result, you have more time to focus on important things like strategy.

3. Flexible and scalable

Another big benefit of choosing Shopify as an ecommerce platform is its flexibility and scalability. The CMS can grow with a merchant and offers options for large and small businesses. 

It has an affordable pricing structure. The $29/month plan helps small businesses get online quickly without investing too much. For large businesses, there’s Shopify Plus, which supports global enterprise brands like Heinz and Gymshark. This plan offers advanced features like a multi-store setup, custom checkout-out options, and very high API limits. The platform is also very proud of its 99.98% uptime guarantee, which keeps stores online even in the busiest seasons. 

4. Integrated payment solutions

Another big advantage is the streamlined payment process for clients worldwide. Shopify Payments, a built-in payment system, eliminates the need for third-party gateways at no extra cost and no set-up fees. Additionally, it supports over a hundred payment integrations, including Stripe and PayPal.

5. Robust app ecosystem

Shopify is a very extendable ecommerce platform. It has an excellent app store, where developers offer a wide range of good apps that improve and expand what the CMS can do. Currently, over 10,000 apps are available in the app store, and new ones are arriving daily. 

Many of these apps integrate deeply with the CMS, allowing marketing automation and personalization that can increase sales. Merchants can install apps to recover abandoned carts, upsell related products, or integrate with CRM and advertising platforms.

Merchants can find apps for nearly everything. Some of the most popular ones are Oberlo for dropshipping, Klaviya and Mailchimp for email marketing, Judge.me and Loox for product and store reviews, and PageFly for building custom landing pages.

This extendability helps merchants scale their work whenever they need it most. 

6. Comprehensive support

Running an online store is difficult enough without having to worry about technical issues. Luckily, the platform helps remove that worry with 24/7 technical and customer support. Merchants can access professional assistance via live chat, email, or phone. In addition, it offers loads of learning material in the form of Shopify Academy, community forums, and tutorials. Business owners can quickly learn to make the most of their online stores. 

7. Yoast SEO for Shopify

The ecommerce CMS comes with all merchants need to run their stores, including tools to improve search engine visibility. While SEO is always in its mind, it is good to think beyond the basics that the e-commerce platform offers. Getting traffic is too important to leave it to chance. 

Yoast SEO for Shopify is the perfect tool for merchants looking to get that traffic. This app is built by a team of SEO experts with decades of experience. Yoast SEO has innovative features like real-time SEO suggestions, helping you optimize your pages and products with actionable insights. Or enhanced structured data for your products to make these stand out in Google. 

Yoast SEO also helps you write better product content. Enter your focus keyword and use the feedback to make your product descriptions stand out. A readability analysis also helps you make the content as readable for your customers as possible. There’s a Semrush integration to get keyword data from the editor and AI-powered features to automate some parts of the optimization process. 

Combining Shopify’s framework with Yoast SEO makes your store accessible to search engines and customers.

Unique selling points

Shopify has a lot going for it as an ecommerce platform, and there are more things it does to stay ahead of the competition. 

Multi-channel selling

One reason Shopify could be chosen over the competition is its ability to sell across multiple channels. Multi-channel options allow merchants to sell their products on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, with all the management and insights happening on the main dashboard. It also has point-of-sale options that help merchants offer in-store sales and integrate online and offline. 

The CMS can sync listings to third-party platforms like Amazon, eBay, or Google Shopping, increasing merchants’ visibility. The platform also has many more options for going omnichannel with your store, which makes it a great fit for managing everything all at once. 

Strong security and reliability

Trust is an important aspect of ecommerce. Merchants need to trust ecommerce platforms with their data and trust that they keep it safe and sound. Luckily, Shopify is working hard to provide store owners with a secure shopping environment. It is certified Level 1 PCI-DSS compliant, the highest level of payment security standard, which helps protect customer data. It also has built-in fraud detection features that minimize the risk of chargeback. 

Compared to hosted platforms like WooCommerce, Shopify automatically handles almost every security aspect. This gives merchants peace of mind that their customer’s data is safe.

Considerations before choosing

Shopify is an all-around great ecommerce platform, but there are some things to remember when merchants choose between the many other options. Its pricing is decent, with basic monthly plans starting at $29. Still, the cost can add up when you want to add apps, third-party integrations or want to have a custom theme developed. However, the CMS is often easier to set up and cheaper to run than platforms like Adobe Commerce.

Another consideration is the platform’s limitations. Shopify is closed software, so store owners have limited code access. WordPress solutions like WooCommerce might be better if openness is an issue.

These are the main reasons to choose Shopify

Shopify provides a great combination of ease of use, scalability, and features that help merchants thrive. Whether you run a simple store with a small budget or juggle millions of dollars, the commerce platform has the necessary solutions. It grows with your needs and offers you many options and possibilities to make the most of your business. Moreover, if you add Yoast SEO for Shopify to your store, you can boost visibility on Google, hopefully translating to more traffic and business growth.

So, why wait? Sign up for a free trial, add Yoast SEO to your store, and get your business on the road!

The post What is Shopify and why choose it as your ecommerce platform? appeared first on Yoast.

Understanding what makes content valuable

Good content always has a goal — it could answer questions, solve problems, or offer critical information. If readers find your clients’ content valuable, they will likely feel listened to. They will understand that the advice and ideas are meant for them, which helps you build a bond with them. Writing valuable, high-quality content isn’t just for filling your client’s websites but a way to help and inspire them to improve their business. 

There are many options to get results from the content you produce for your clients. So, what are some of the more popular goals you can target with your client’s content?

• Building brand recognition: Share brand stories and values so people understand who your clients are.
• Teaching the audience: Create articles and videos showing how products and services work.
• Getting leads: Write content to get people to subscribe, download items, or contact your client. 
• Driving traffic: If your client’s content is valuable, readers will likely click on their site.
• Increasing engagement: Make content to spark conversations and get feedback. 

Keep writing focused and clear, with your eyes on the ball. You should focus intently on your clients’ current issues, challenges, and opportunities. Take the time to write well-researched pieces, as these can empower your readers. Once you do this, they will likely see your clients as subject matter experts they can trust. Straightforward, high-quality content can inspire readers and bring much value to you as an agency. 

Strategic planning is the foundation

Much of the writing process is about planning. Before you write for your clients, clearly define the goals for that content piece. Find out what questions your clients’ customers are struggling with and how your answers can help them. Research their target audience to understand their daily struggles. This way, you can make your content much more relevant to readers. 

It’s advisable to spend plenty of time doing keyword research. This process is very helpful, giving you many insights into your client’s audience and the words they use to find things. Ultimately, these findings will help you build content strategies for your clients.

The next step is to create a content plan. First, make a simple calendar or a list of topics your client wants to cover. Your plan will guide them and help them keep track of their audience’s themes and recurring concerns. 

Don’t forget to use tools that integrate directly into their content. For instance, the Yoast SEO plugin has integrated keyword research features — among many other great features. It can highlight keywords and trends related to current topics, which will help your clients plan the current piece of content but could also inform the next. 

Ideation and content planning

After researching, it’s time to start generating ideas for your client’s content. Don’t tie yourself up too much; brainstorm freely. Write down every topic that pops up and then organize these ideas to match the client’s needs. Mind mapping is a fantastic way to sort and visualize these ideas. Of course, you can always use a simple list or whatever works for you. Seeing these ideas together helps your client see the connection between them. 

Before starting to write, it’s a good idea to think about the structure of the content. Break down the article into introductions, main sections, and conclusions. This way, it’s easier to structure the content and keep the writing focused and readable. From there, write and edit the first draft — editing helps the content shine.

Optimize your writing for readability

Good writing is all about clarity. Use direct language and try to avoid passive voice. Vary your sentence length to keep the client’s articles engaging. Start with a bold statement or an inverted pyramid-style intro. In the rest of the article, use detailed explanations to build on and prove the main point. 

Read more: SEO copywriting: the ultimate guide 

Format your client’s text to improve readability. Always use headers to introduce new sections and short paragraphs to make it easier for readers to follow the ideas. The same goes for using lists and bullet points to break up walls of text. Make sure that every element of your client’s layout allows the reader to understand your writing quickly.

During this phase, you also need to consider on-page SEO optimizations. Watch how you use your focus keywords and logically structure your client’s content. As you might know, Yoast SEO is a fantastic tool for this. It gives you feedback on sentences, passive voice use, and keyword use and distribution. As a result, this feedback helps publish high-quality content, especially under a tight deadline.  

Read more: What is high-quality content and how do you create it? 

Using Yoast SEO in your content process

Yoast SEO is an SEO plugin/add-on for WordPress, Shopify, and WooCommerce. It’s designed with simplicity in mind while also offering a solid set of SEO features. It also lives within your post editor to give you feedback on your writing. For instance, it offers real-time suggestions on how you use keywords and the structure of your article. Thanks to this, you can focus on the writing part without sacrificing the SEO and technical aspects of making content your clients will love.

Yoast SEO is an industry standard for agencies. It’s a helpful tool that guides users in writing engaging, valuable content for all clients. As it’s aimed at ease of use, the feedback is practical and insightful. Also, Yoast SEO Premium comes with AI-powered suggestions that make this process even easier. Using this SEO plugin in your agency helps you build a consistent content process to write, review, and optimize high-quality content. 

Inspiring through actionable content

Help your readers out and show how little things can make a big difference. Don’t forget to give your clients the tools and processes needed to succeed. For instance, share your best practices and guidelines for writing content and creating the valuable material everyone seeks. Share stories of how your agency helped clients reach their content goals, as these insights help potential new clients choose you over the competition.

Inspiration can come from many places, but it’s not always a given. When you get inspired, your client’s content can reach a whole new level. Content can also reach new heights when writing with a clear purpose and using tools that support your writing process. This way, you can turn a simple set of ideas into content your clients will love. 

Wrapping up

Creating content your client loves depends on many things, especially having good plans, writing clearly, and regular improvements. As always, everything starts with research to build a solid plan. After that, start creating relevant content for your clients with clear writing and text structure. Finally, optimize your work with helpful tools like the Yoast SEO plugin, which gives relevant feedback and improvements. 

You should also treat it as a learning process and improve as you go. This way, your clients eventually have a solid foundation that gets more engagement and deeper connections with their audience. Try it out and see how it can change your client’s next project. Every article will strengthen your client relationship while showing your expertise and experience.

The post How to write valuable content that your clients will love appeared first on Yoast.

Get started with the Yoast SEO Free installation:

1. Go to our new Yoast SEO Free page
2. Click the install button and follow the on-screen prompts
3. Complete the setup, and you are all set

Because everything is more user-friendly, you will save time and avoid the usual guesswork. This improved flow is perfect for new users and anyone who does not feel comfortable around zip files or manual uploads.

Installation should be the easiest part of your SEO journey. Try it today by heading to the Yoast SEO Free page and trying the plugin. You will be optimizing your site in no time.

Get Yoast SEO today and join the 13+million websites using Yoast.

The post A smoother way to get started with Yoast SEO Free appeared first on Yoast.

What is content scaling?

Content scaling is about making your content process more efficient. The goal should be to make more content without lowering the quality. First, you must examine every step of your content creation process — from brainstorming to research, editing, publishing, and reporting. Once you have the process detailed, you can find ways to do those tasks faster and predictably. 

A well-scaled process helps you create a lot of content. This approach helps you build a solid system rather than adding more articles. For instance, your content team could develop a checklist to help review articles, introduce a content calendar to improve planning and set up clear tone-of-voice guidelines. These steps help you stay consistent and true to your brand — whether you produce one weekly article or dozens. 

Why scaling content matters

Scaling content production can directly help your business. If you actively publish high-quality content on your site, search engines will understand that your site is active and reliable. By targeting the right audience with the right search intent and message, you could improve your search visibility and generate more traffic for your content. Search engines are likelier to see you as trustworthy when you publish high-quality content.

In addition, producing content more consistently and following a plan can help you reach a bigger audience. More articles mean more opportunities to write about topics that interest your different audience groups. In the end, this will broaden your brand’s presence. You’ll have a bigger chance of people seeing you as a trusted source if you offer helpful insights and solutions to their problems.

All your content can help potential customers make decisions. This content is another way to address their concerns and answer questions. By doing this strategically, you can continue to engage your audience and nudge them closer to making that final decision. Of course, whether that decision is a sale, information request, or newsletter signup doesn’t matter.

Scaling your content production also supports your branding. When you create well-organized content over a longer period, you can support your brand voice and recognition. That reliability helps build trust and strengthens your reputation. 

The biggest challenges in scaling content

If you want to scale your content production, you must overcome several hurdles, which, if you don’t consider, will impact the quality and consistency of your content. 

Quality control and consistency

When you produce more content, you need to make sure that every piece represents your brand well. However, catching errors or maintaining the proper tone becomes harder because you have more content to review. If you don’t do this well, there’s a risk that your articles will vary in tone or style. Without proper guidelines or a good editorial process, your content quality may suffer when you publish more and more.

For example, you can miss issues like tone, formatting, or factual errors without a standard editing checklist. If you do this for a while and people start to notice, they can form a different view of your brand. It would almost look like you don’t care about these issues. You need to set clear quality benchmarks and a solid review process. Consistent editing with fixed content rules helps everything you publish meet the same standards.

Handling different audience needs

In an ideal world, you write for different groups. You cannot target one group only. Every segment has its own interests, problems, and ideas. But if you scale your output, you risk writing mainly generic articles. No one will like that content.

If you haven’t yet sorted your audience, do so and focus your content on these specific groups. As a result, your content will be more useful for the people in those groups.

Process difficulty and extra management work

More content means more parts to manage. Each article needs research, writing, review, checking, and then publishing. This is fine if you publish a few posts a month because you can handle these steps by hand. But growing your output complicates things when you face many deadlines, writers, or quality checks.

Complexity leads to bottlenecks. If you struggle with one thing, that might eventually slow down everything. Think of it like this: when you don’t scale your editorial process, you will eventually have a pile of articles that need approval. This grinds your publication flow to a halt. Develop a system that divides tasks into repeatable steps. Use content calendars and checklists to track progress and make managing projects easier. 

Balancing speed and thoughtfulness

Scaling content production can lead to pressure to cut corners to meet deadlines. When the speed of publication comes into play, there’s a high chance that content will become less developed. This shouldn’t happen. Every piece of content should be carefully planned and produced. Rushing only leads to content that lacks depth, accuracy, or clarity. 

Of course, this is easier said than done. You have to find ways to increase efficiency without sacrificing the quality of your content. Start by streamlining your process, breaking it up into smaller tasks. Set up a system that monitors quality while giving you enough room to be flexible.  

Building a repeatable content creation process

Scaling your content production reliably requires setting up a solid content process. That process should be easily repeatable and have clear tasks, which will help keep your team on track. 

Map the entire content workflow

Describe each content task and work your way through the list of what has to be done. Write down a list of all phases, ranging from conception through publication. This will help you understand where delays or errors creep in. Consider drawing a flow diagram or another visual. This list will act as your directive.  

Create a content calendar

Use a content calendar to plan your publishing schedule. Proper planning helps you keep track of deadlines, even if they are for different outlets. Thanks to your content plan, your team can write content in advance and, hopefully, without stressing out about deadlines too much.

Develop detailed briefs and outlines

Content briefs are a great way to align writers — see below for an example. A brief like this should, at least,  include the subject, target audience, key messages, and keywords that the writer should target. Once approved, create an outline for the content and fill in the structure. A good content brief speeds up the writing process while ensuring that content is targeted well. 

Implement a style guide

A style guide can help you ground every piece of content in a consistent tone of voice and formatting. This guide should include rules for tone, punctuation, formatting, and whatever else makes sense to share. You can easily share this guide with anyone on your team; even freelancers enjoy using it. 

Use checklists for each stage

You’ll find it easier to manage once you break the process down into small tasks. Make a checklist for tasks such as researching, writing, and editing. Having a proper checklist helps you make sure that you don’t forget anything. This could be checking facts, improving readability, or using proper SEO tactics. Your lists will help you scale your content production while maintaining quality output.

Standardize tools and platforms

Use well-known tools to manage tasks in your team. Think of project management tools like Jira or Asana, shared calendars in CoSchedule, Canva for visual designs, and document templates in Microsoft Office. Many companies use Google Docs to collaborate on documents. In those cases, you can use one of the standardized Google Docs extensions, which are easier to scale.

Write a good manual or checklist for these tools so that anyone — from in-house writers to external freelancers — follows the same steps. Standardization makes this work and helps apply important SEO best practices properly.

All of these things help your team routinely produce quality content. Making the process repeatable reduces the chance of errors and wasted time, so you can scale without losing what makes your content awesome. 

Strategies to scale without losing quality

Careful planning is one of the best ways to scale your content without lowering its quality. Another great option is to use clear methods to make your work more effective. 

Develop a strong content strategy and workflow 

As always, start with a solid plan that includes your goals, topics, and the audience you want to reach. Creating content for your audience is much easier when everyone truly understands who those people are. A good workflow avoids delays and helps people move from one task to another.

Use a detailed content calendar

We’ve discussed the importance of content calendars, and you really have to see these as your roadmap. A calendar shows all upcoming publications, deadlines, and the status of various projects. A good calendar keeps everyone up to date at all times and makes sure the work is nicely spread out. Good planning prevents missed deadlines.

Use template structures

Templates help you standardize your work, as they offer a reusable structure for common types of content. Each type of content can have its own structure to fill in. These templates help writers speed up their work while maintaining consistency across articles. 

Repurpose content thoughtfully

Look at what you already have and see how it can be adapted into a different form. For example, you can split a long-form article into several videos or a series of shorter posts. This strategy saves time while also delivering fresh material in new formats. Make sure to adapt the new content to the correct audience. 

Assign clear roles within your team 

Find out your team members’ strengths and have them do what they do best. A  writer should handle the initial draft while an editor reviews the work. Your trusted subject matter expert should check the content for accuracy. Clear roles help people do what they do best, which helps preserve content quality.

Maintaining high-quality content at scale

It isn’t easy to maintain content quality when scaling content production. To make the process more manageable, you should establish habits and use tools that help you make sure that every piece of content meets your standards. 

Follow your style guide

Setting up a good style guide keeps your writing consistent. Your style guide should include information on your content’s tone of voice, the terminology you can and can’t use, and how you structure and format it. Share this guide with your team.

Schedule periodic audits

Similarly, regularly review your existing content to see if it’s outdated or needs to adapt to changes in your brand messaging. This helps keep your older content relevant and accurate. 

Use tools when appropriate

Tools can help scale your content production. Even a tool like our Yoast SEO plugin can help your content work. Good content tools can help with formatting, improving readability, checking for keyword placement, and some even help with on-page SEO.

Using Generative AI for scaling content output

Using AI to scale content production might seem like a good idea, but please be careful. Generative AI can definitely be a valuable tool for content processes. However, AI is not without issues and needs interaction from real people.

Human oversight makes sure that the output aligns with your brand’s voice and content standards. You can use generative AI as a starting point or a helpful assistant, but not as a complete replacement for your real writers. Your use of AI should have a clear process to bring the content up to your desired quality level.

Conclusion to scaling content production

Scaling up content production shouldn’t mean lower quality. Mostly, it’s about knowing the content process inside out. Once you have that, you can lay out the steps for everyone to follow. With a good process, you can meet your goals and still maintain the quality of the content. Be sure to set up content templates, calendars, and clear roles for your team. Make the adjustments and see how this can lead to better results. 

Bonus: Content brief template for SEO

Are you looking for a basic content brief template that helps scale your content production? Check out the one below:

The post Scaling content creation without compromising quality (with template) appeared first on Yoast.

What is an SEO audit?

An SEO audit looks at how well a website performs in search results to find areas that need work. It helps find technical SEO problems, analyze on-page elements, evaluate Core Web Vitals and site speed, and analyze user experience and content quality. An SEO audit also looks at outside variables like backlinks and rival tactics to identify areas for improvement. Making sure your website is optimized for users and search engines can help it rank better and attract more organic traffic.

Step 1: Preparing an SEO audit

To make your site audit a success, you must prepare well. You need to collect the right information about your website using SEO audit tools, understand how to diagnose issues and prioritize fixes.

Crawl your website with Screaming Frog (or something similar)

The first step is crawling your website with crawler software. This helps find technical SEO issues that otherwise wouldn’t be so visible. Screaming Frog is one of the most trusted names in this, but Sitebulb is another highly recommended one. The free version of Screaming Frog crawls 500 URLs, but you can upgrade if needed. 

Crawling your site is easy; simply download and install Screaming Frog. Open the tool and enter your site’s homepage URL. Then, hit Start, and the crawl will run. Once the scan is complete, export the data into a CSV file for further sorting and prioritization.

What to look for?

Screaming Frog generates a ton of data, so it’s good to prioritize the outcome. Scan for missing, duplicate, or overly long titles and descriptions. Each page should have unique, targeted metadata. Find pages or links that return (404) errors as broken links frustrate users and hurt SEO. Then, identify oversized assets that slow your page load time, such as images, JavaScript, and CSS files. Last but not least, make sure that canonical URLs are properly implemented to avoid duplicate content issues.

Use an all-in-one SEO audit tool (Semrush or Ahrefs)

In addition to a technical crawl, Semrush or Ahrefs provides other insights such as keyword rankings, backlink health, and competitor performance. The SEO site audit of these tools gives you a technical health score from which to work.

In its recommendations, you’ll find many things to fix, like pages blocked by robots.txt or issues with internal linking. The tools also review the quality and relevance of your backlinks and give you ideas on how to get high-quality new links. You’ll also get keyword rankings to track how individual pages perform for target keywords. Identify opportunities to refine content or target new search terms.

Pull data from Google Analytics and Search Console

Combining all these insights with your site’s user behavior and engagement data will make your SEO audit come alive. It helps you understand how people use your site and how they experience it to pinpoint pages to improve. Export your findings from Google Analytics and Search Console to include in your website audit comparisons.

Check the top-performing landing pages in Google Analytics and their engagement rates. Pages with low engagement rates may have poor content or a disconnect between user expectations and page design. Also, look at session duration and exit rates to find pages where people quickly leave your site.

You can use the Performance Report in Search Console to see which pages and queries drive the most clicks and impressions. This will also highlight low CTR pages — ranking well but failing to attract searchers. Then, check the Page Indexing Report for crawl errors, warnings, or blocked pages and review the Core Web Vitals Report to find pages failing on speed or usability metrics. Remember that you don’t have to fix everything, but prioritize the most important issues you feel will have the most impact.

Create a centralized spreadsheet

Once you have all the data, please combine everything in a big spreadsheet. How you set this up is up to you, as everyone uses something different. But you could use something like this:

• Page URL
• Technical issues (e.g., broken links, slow load speed)
• Engagement metrics (e.g., engagement rates, time on page)
• Keyword rankings
• Optimization notes (e.g., missing metadata, duplicate content)
• Priority (High, Medium, Low)

Remember that one URL can have multiple broken links and rank for hundreds of keywords. To make the sheet manageable, use various tabs for each main issue and list all URLs with that issue. This spreadsheet will guide your fixes after the initial website audit process.

Minimal SEO audit (optional)

Not every audit needs to be a deep dive into your site. Sometimes, you don’t have the time but still feel the need to work on your site. In this case, you could do a simpler, quicker health check and evaluate specific regions of your site to see if these perform well. Such a minimal SEO audit is a streamlined version of a full website audit to find and fix critical performance issues.

Here’s a basic framework for a quick website audit:

1. Check that your site is indexed by searching site:yourdomain.com in Google.
2. Run a Google PageSpeed Insights test for slow-loading pages.
3. Examine the titles and meta descriptions of your most important pages (e.g., homepage, service pages, and key sales pages).
4. Check for broken links using Screaming Frog or manually check in your navigation.

This lightweight SEO audit still finds high-priority issues without the time commitment of a full review.

Step 2: User experience & content SEO

The next step is to see how people perceive and interact with your site. Look at the user experience and see if you can find things to improve. You can get people to your site by using high-quality content aimed at the right search intent and audience.

Improving the user experience

Can your users find what they need easily? If not, they might leave your site quickly. Giving them a good experience will do wonders in the long run. In your SEO site audit, start by diagnosing common UX factors.

Make sure the colors match your branding and are easy to read. Look at contrast, as this is especially important for buttons and links. Make CTAs (like “Buy now” or “Learn more”) stand out visually.

Check if the most important design elements are above the fold. Key messages and CTAs should be visible without scrolling. Think of this as the headline act—it must grab attention immediately. After your site audit is done and you move to fix things, add customer testimonials, third-party endorsements, and security badges (e.g., SSL or payment protection signs) to build credibility.

Give special attention to your menus, test drop-downs, and search functions. Remember to look for any issues with breadcrumbs.   

Audit website content

A large part of SEO consists of improving written content, so review its quality and improve where necessary. The Semrush/Ahrefs site audit should have given you many pointers. With this list, start working on the following.

Check the keyword targeting of your content. Make sure that each page represents a primary keyword. Ahrefs and Semrush show which keywords your pages rank for and identify gaps.

Check for duplicate or thin content. Avoid weak, duplicate, or low-value content. Where necessary, merge similar pages into one in-depth article. Provide actionable, valuable content.

Remember Google’s Helpful Content standards. Create content that delivers real value and focuses on user intent. Your content should answer questions with actionable, audience-focused solutions. Last, you demonstrate Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). In the audit, check if you use good author bios, cite reliable sources, and link references where necessary to develop expertise and trustworthiness.

Internal linking and related content

SEO is not just about getting users and search engines to your site —it’s also about keeping and showing them around. One of the most powerful ways to do this is through internal linking, so be sure to include this in your SEO audit. 

Check how you link your most important pages, like cornerstone articles or product categories. Your content should have a couple of links based on relevance and importance, but not too many. In addition, you should include a related content section on your pages to encourage further reading.  

Look for anchor text with generic phrases like “click here” and add these to a list of issues to fix after the audit. Anchor text should include relevant keywords or describe the linked page.

An internal search feature is another important aspect of showing people around your site. Make sure that your search bar provides relevant results, especially on large websites. Watch out that you don’t index these pages. Otherwise, you end up with all these search pages with random typos in the search results. Don’t forget to monitor what people search for to inform your content strategy.

Step 3: General on-page SEO audit

On-page SEO involves reviewing elements on individual pages to ensure they’re easy for search engines to understand and provide a good user experience. During an audit, the focus isn’t on making fixes but on assessing page-specific issues that need attention. The findings from this step are compiled into a roadmap or task tracker for later action.

Evaluate page titles and meta descriptions

Review your site for missing, duplicated, or improperly formatted page titles and meta descriptions. Use SEO tools to crawl the site and identify:

• Pages missing titles or descriptions.
• Titles or descriptions that are too long, too short, or cut off in search results.
• Duplicate titles or descriptions across multiple pages.

Assess heading structures (H1 to H6)

Headings are key in structuring content and signaling its importance to search engines. During the audit, verify:

• H1 tags: Check if each page has a single H1 tag and if the tag reflects the page’s topic and primary keyword.
• Heading hierarchy: Ensure proper structure (e.g., H2s for main sections, H3s for subsections) and no skipped heading levels (e.g., jumping from H1 to H4).
• Duplicates or missing tags: Identify pages with multiple H1s or missing headings.

These issues can impact search engine rankings and user engagement. Document all findings in a spreadsheet, noting pages that need updates and prioritizing them based on their importance, such as high-traffic or core pages. If you need a detailed plan for optimizing these elements, see our SEO roadmap article for actionable next steps.

Checking canonical tags and addressing issues

Canonical tags tell search engines which version of a page should be prioritized when dealing with duplicate or near-duplicate content. This is particularly important for websites like online stores that often generate multiple URLs for the same product due to filters or session variables.

Assess your site for missing canonical tags, non-indexable canonicals, or conflicting tags. Tools like Screaming Frog or Semrush can help identify issues efficiently. Look for pages that lack canonical tags, pages where the canonical URL points to a non-indexable version, and instances where multiple conflicting canonicals are assigned to the same content.

Test schema markup

Schema markup helps make your site more understandable for search engines. The code you add to your site helps structure and identify your content in a way that search engines can easily consume. In some cases, this can even lead to highlighted search results, for instance, for products or ratings and reviews.

Don’t forget to test your structured data. Use Google’s Rich Results Test Tool to check if your structured data is correct and valid. Also, check Search Console for errors under the “Enhancements” tab.

If you are missing Schema altogether, we have good news! Yoast SEO drastically simplifies adding schema for WordPress, WooCommerce and Shopify users. The SEO plugin outputs JSON-LD (the format preferred by Google) to add schema markup directly to your page’s HTML — no coding required.

Audit and improve your backlinks

Backlinks are as important as ever. Every link from a relevant, high-quality source counts towards your authority. These links prove to search engines that your content is valuable and meaningful. Of course, there’s a ton of spamming happening with links.

SEO audit tools like Moz, Ahrefs, or Semrush can audit your backlink profile. The results show a list of spammy backlinks and links from irrelevant websites with low authority. If spammy websites link to you, there’s an option in Google Search Console to disavow these links. This is a last resort, though. You should only use the disavow tool if you have received a manual penalty from Google for unnatural links.

It’s more important to focus on earning high-quality backlinks. Create shareable, high-value content like guides, research, or infographics while building relationships with related websites, bloggers, or journalists for natural backlink opportunities. If your audit shows low authority scores, add a task to your roadmap for a detailed investigation and devise a plan to get high-quality backlinks.

Step 4: Site speed and engagement

Check your site performance, as site speed and user engagement greatly impact success. Pages that load slowly are annoying for users and can give you a poor score in the eyes of search engines. Low engagement rates can hurt your results, as users might stop visiting your site.

Understanding and improving Core Web Vitals

To underscore the importance of performance, Google launched the Core Web Vitals. These metrics help site owners gain insights into how their sites perform in real life and get tips on improving those scores. The metrics focus on loading times, interactivity and stability. Together, these determine how enjoyable users find your site. It’s easy to run a test, and you’ll get quality feedback about your site.

You’ll see suggested improvements, such as minimizing JavaScript execution, using browser caching, or deferring non-critical JavaScript. You can do a lot to improve your site speed, so once you have collected all the data, add it to your sheet with the rest of the tasks to tackle.

Checking site speed beyond Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are a priority when analyzing page performance, but there are other areas to check to ensure your site delivers a fast and responsive experience. Faster websites lead to better user satisfaction, lower bounce rates, and a higher likelihood of visitors returning.

Check the number of HTTP requests your site makes, as too many can slow it down. Determine if CSS and JavaScript files can be combined or if modern HTTP/3 protocols are in use to allow multiple requests to process simultaneously. Review your files for unused CSS or JavaScript that could inflate load times and unnecessarily increase file sizes. Investigate whether file compression, such as Gzip or Brotli, is enabled to compress assets served to users. Tools like Google Lighthouse can detect if compression is missing and identify files contributing to slow load times.

Examine whether lazy loading is being used for images and videos, so only visible content loads immediately, with other assets loading as they are needed. Verify that lazy loading plugins like Smush or Lazy Load by WP Rocket are installed for WordPress sites. Alternatively, check if JavaScript libraries like lazysizes are used on other platforms. Make sure your site’s static assets are served through a Content Delivery Network (CDN), which delivers content from servers closest to users to reduce loading times. Providers like Cloudflare, Akamai, and Amazon CloudFront are commonly used. Lastly, you should run performance tests using tools such as Google Lighthouse, WebPageTest, or Pingdom to identify bottlenecks, ensure optimizations are in place, and track overall site performance.

Testing mobile performance and responsiveness

Mobile users drive traffic for most websites, so your site should perform well on phones and tablets is essential. To evaluate mobile performance, run tests using tools like PageSpeed Insights. These tools can help uncover layout issues, poor interactivity, and slow-loading assets on mobile devices. Pay close attention to whether responsive web design works correctly, meaning your site adapts to various screen sizes. Review CTAs and forms to confirm they are accessible and functional on mobile devices, especially ensuring buttons are easy to tap and forms are simple to fill out. Document any issues you find so they can be addressed during your site updates.

Testing engagement on your website

To understand how well your site engages users, use tools like Hotjar to analyze behavior, such as where visitors click, how they scroll, and which sections they interact with the most. Test your site’s navigation to ensure intuitive menus and internal search bars produce accurate results. Evaluate whether CTAs are placed effectively, particularly above the fold or after key content. Actionable CTAs should use language that encourages clicks, such as “Start Now” or “Learn More.” Run usability tests on internal links and related content suggestions to check if they guide users toward other relevant pages. Avoid heavy-handed popups—test exit-intent tools to ensure prompts or discounts aren’t disruptive. Collect insights from these tests to refine your site for better usability and interaction.

Step 5: Monitoring and tracking results

SEO is a colossal effort; the process does not end there once that initial effort is made. After the audit, you make a plan to tackle these issues, prioritize them, and then slowly do them or get other teams to do them (if you have people). Then, monitor your actions to determine whether those changes work as intended. Regular monitoring is also a great opportunity to find improvements and better calibrate your SEO strategy.

Regular monitoring helps you improve your site, adjust to the latest algorithm updates, and stay on course. For instance, you can set up automatic crawls to track the number of issues as you progress. If you work on the issues later, fewer and fewer issues should pop up, which should be reflected in the next crawl. However, new issues can surface if you add pages and products or do other work on your site.

Why monitor results?

By tracking results, you can measure the impact of your audit (e.g., increased rankings, traffic, and engagement). It’ll also help spot new issues like broken links, slow pages, or dropped rankings. This will ultimately help you improve your strategy by identifying what’s driving results and where to focus next.

SEO is not something you do in a month or so. It takes time, and you might see the results in many months. Consistently track and analyze.

Metrics to track in a site audit

Start by looking at traffic metrics. Organic traffic shows how many users find your site through search engines, which you can monitor in Google Analytics under Acquisition > Organic Search. Check referral traffic to see if other backlinks send visitors to your site. This data shows how effective your SEO and link-building work is.

Next, evaluate engagement and search performance. Metrics like engagement rates and time on page help you understand how users interact with your content. On the search side, track keyword rankings with SEO audit tools like Wincher, Ahrefs, or Semrush to see how well your pages are doing in the SERPs.

Use Google Search Console to monitor your CTR and check for indexing issues in the Coverage Report. Make sure that your most important pages are indexed. Monitor loading speed, interactivity, and layout stability in tools like PageSpeed Insights.

This is the same data we used when we started the audit, but now, you should look at the results of the improvements. Once improvements are made, you should monitor their performance for quite a while, as some can take a long time to take effect.

Schedule regular check-ins

You need to monitor results regularly. Review rankings, CTR, and new crawl errors weekly. Each month, check traffic trends, user behavior, and fixes made after the audit. Every quarter, you should run a fresh crawl with Screaming Frog, but keep in mind that running full scrawls is time-intensive. At least check your most important pages often. Also, check competitor performance and update old pages based on new opportunities.

Conclusion on doing SEO audits

Conducting an SEO audit might seem overwhelming, but it becomes much easier with a structured approach and the right tools. Audits help you uncover issues and areas of improvement so you can tackle them effectively. Stay consistent with your audits, and you’ll be on your way to a stronger online presence!

The post How to perform an SEO audit (with checklist) appeared first on Yoast.

Define your website’s purpose

Before proceeding, begin by describing your website’s goal. What does your website need to do? Do you need an online store, a simple way to present your company, a blog, or a portfolio? Your main goal should influence the rest of your choices and help you find a platform with the features you need.

If you run an ecommerce site, you’ll need great shopping cart functionality, secure payment options, and features to manage your inventory. If you focus on blogging or need a portfolio site, you’ll probably want good content management options, a flexible design, and ease of use. Once you understand your needs, you can narrow down the list of platforms.

Thinking deeply about the purpose of your website can also help you plan for the future. If you think you’ll expand the site with more products or a wider range of services, choosing a platform that can scale and evolve with your business might be a good idea. 

Do you have technical expertise and resources?

One of the most important questions to answer when deciding on a platform for your business website is whether you have technical knowledge. Some of the website builders available right now have an easy-to-use interface that requires little to no coding skills. Some even use AI to help you build a website from scratch by simply describing it. Other platforms and CMSs give you direct influence on the appearance and workings of your website, which needs technical expertise. 

If you’re not technical or don’t have a technical team backing you, looking at online platforms with drag-and-drop editors and pre-designed templates might make sense. With these, you can have a professional-looking website without writing code or understanding backend systems. Brands like Wix, Duda, Web.com, and Squarespace are some options that function like this.

However, if you have the technical resources or plan to hire a developer, a content management system like WordPress gives you more flexibility and customization options. WordPress is a popular option — it powers over 40% of websites. It’s known for its extensive plugin ecosystem — with powerful tools such as Yoast SEO — and a vibrant community. 

Remember, though, that choosing a CMS that requires more technical input also requires maintenance and occasional troubleshooting, which could increase costs in the future. 

There are a couple of things you need to consider when building a website for a business. First, you must understand your skill level. Second, you’ll have to find out if you have resources and support. This helps you decide whether a simple site builder or something more open-ended is the better investment for you.

Types of website platforms

Building a proper website for a business means exploring various options. Experiment and find out which online platform matches your requirements and needs. Just remember that there is not a single “best” platform that works well for all businesses. Every tool has its strengths and weaknesses. 

Consider the  popular options

There are many tools to help you build company websites, but you do not need to try every one. You can probably make do with the most popular options, as these have proven their worth.

WordPress

WordPress is the most popular CMS and offers an amazing selection of themes and plugins. You can customize it in any way you think, giving you great control over the platform. WordPress is a great option if you want to create a website for a business that can adapt over time. The CMS performs well in the search results and can grow with your content needs. WordPress is great for:

• Best for bloggers and content creators: Ideal for content-rich sites with robust publishing features.
• Best for customization: Offers extensive themes and plugin support to tailor every aspect of your site.
• Best for SEO and flexibility: It is highly adaptable for businesses and developers aiming to optimize and expand their online presence.
• Best for ecommerce: Seamlessly integrate WooCommerce for powerful online store features and e-commerce capabilities.

Read more: 10 reasons why you should use WordPress

Shopify

Shopify is a great all-in-one ecommerce option for companies selling products online. It handles everything from hosting to security and from payments to integration. Shopify makes it easy to build an online store. It has lots of features to help you scale your business. Shopify is good if you want a solid option to get started quickly.

• Best for online retailers: Ecommerce-friendly, easily set up to manage and grow an online store.
• Best for secure transactions: Integrated payment gateways and reliable security features ensure peace of mind.
• Easiest to scale: Intuitive interface helps startups and growing businesses manage stores efficiently.

Read more: Picking an ecommerce platform: WooCommerce or Shopify? 

Wix and Squarespace

These platforms are for users who want simplicity. They come with built-in templates and handy editors. Wix and Squarespace are good options for small businesses, creatives, and professionals who want to build a nice-looking portfolio or simple business website. These are the best options for users who want ease of use over extensive flexibility and customization options. 

Other options

Of the other platforms, Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento), Drupal, or Webflow may also be worth looking at if you have specific needs. Adobe Commerce is useful if you need a large-scale ecommerce environment. Drupal is great for handling larger sites with complex data needs (although the project recently launched a simplified option called Drupal CMS). Webflow is a middle ground with design flexibility and editing capabilities.

While we list several of the best platform options available, you should base your choice on your needs, requirements, security levels, and desired functionality. 

Scalability, customization, and security

Choosing the right platform to build your business site isn’t just about here and now. You should also think about scaling your sites once your business grows. 

Scalability

When selecting a platform, consider whether it can handle increased traffic and additional content you might need. Can you expand your capabilities as your business grows? For example, if you plan to add more products or expand your feature set, you need a website solution that scales without much work. Look for features, services, and plans that support growth.

Customization

Your business is unique, and so should your site reflect your unique brand. The platform you pick should give you plenty of options to customize your business site. It shouldn’t just let you pick from a selection of templates but also offer the options to change design elements, add custom code, and integrate tools you need to build your business. Platforms that offer much flexibility allow you to do what you want. This helps your site feel fresh and aligned with your brand. 

Security

Security is essential for a business website. As we hear more stories about data breaches and online threats, you should choose a platform that values security. You should consider SSL certificates, server security, software updates, and secure payment options for ecommerce sites. A reliable site builder should have proper security protocols to protect customer data. 

Managed hosting services or SaaS platforms like Shopify often handle WordPress security automatically for you, but you should double-check it. If you go the self-hosted route, you should make sure that you have the resources available to manage the security of your business site. 

Budget and cost considerations

For many, cost is the most important factor when choosing a website platform for a business. However, it’s important to consider both the short-term and long-term investments. Make sure that your budget evolves as your site does. 

Upfront and ongoing fees

Site builder platforms all work with subscriptions, but sometimes, one-time costs are involved for themes, plugins, or other features. For example:

• Subscription fees: Site builders such as Squarespace and Wix charge a monthly fee for hosting the site, accessing features, and support.
• Hosting and domain costs: If you choose a CMS like WordPress or Drupal, you must budget for web hosting, domain registration, and premium themes and plugins. Investing in a more premium hosting plan often leads to better performance. Of course, you can also have a custom theme built by an agency or solo developer, which would also cost money.
• Transaction fees: Online stores need payment systems, and some platforms charge money for handling transactions. These costs can add up if you move a lot of volume. 

Value over time

Picking the cheapest option might sound sensible, but you should consider the costs over a longer time. A highly scalable platform with a long list of features and a good support team might cost more initially but could save time and money in the long run. Look at the full package and see which platform offers the best mix of price and functionality. 

Testing and trials

Be sure to try out the different options. Many website builders offer free trials or demo versions. Use these to explore the capabilities before you sign up for a specific plan. Testing the interface and features gives you a better understanding of whether this product meets your wishes. This is a good way to avoid making the wrong decision, which could lead to extra costs or limited growth.

Additional considerations and support

After you’ve crossed off the technical and monetary questions from your list, a few questions still need to be answered. 

Customer support

Your website is central to your business, so keeping it up and running is essential. For this, you need a platform with good support. Access to good customer service is a huge help if you run into issues or you’re trying to implement new things. Look for platforms with various ways of contacting support (email, phone, chat) and ample documentation available. Platforms with proper support can reduce downtime and help you on your way quickly.

Integrations and marketing tools

Websites are the centerpiece of a business strategy, and they should not live alone. Find out if your preferred platform integrates with business tools like CRM systems, email marketing services, and social media platforms. Many site builders now include built-in SEO tools to rank your site in search engines. And if they don’t, Yoast SEO has plugins for WordPress, WooCommerce, and Shopify. Choose something that matches your existing digital strategy.

Analytics and reporting

What would you do without knowing how your site is performing? Data is essential to make informed decisions. Analytic tools show how visitors behave on the site and which pages perform well. Some platforms come with built-in analytics tools, which help see how your site is doing.

Deciding on the business site platform

To recap, you can choose how to build your business website by answering these questions: 

1. What is the goal of your website?
2. What technical expertise and resources do you have?
3. Which site builders have the features and scalability you need?
4. Do the cost structure and support options fit into your budget?
5. Can the platform integrate with your marketing and analytics tools?

Take the time to answer these questions. Then, read honest reviews of users of the various platforms and try out the demos — very important. It’s all about getting your hands dirty in this process. You need to determine which platform best fits your business while giving enough flexibility to scale when your business grows. 

We’re saying it again: there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. You should pick the platform that works today and will still work when your business has grown. It doesn’t matter if you pick an easy-to-use website builder or a highly customizable CMS, as long as it makes sense for you and your business — now and in the future. 

Now, choose a platform for your business website

It costs a lot of time and money to build a website for a business. You need to define your goals, evaluate the various platforms, and determine how you want your business to grow. Every decision you make affects how you support your business objectives. When you look at your technical know-how, budget, scalability needs, and support options, you should be able to decide which site builder to choose if you want to succeed.

The most important thing is to sign up for the free trials and demos. Don’t hesitate to contact experts or customer service for tailored advice. You should build a site that is ready for today and prepared for tomorrow. Choosing the right platform for your business helps you set up for success.

The post Choosing the right platform for your business website appeared first on Yoast.

Understanding SEO and PPC

As we all know, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It consists of everything you do to get your site higher rankings in the original search results. Those tactics are thoroughly researching which keywords to target, writing high-quality content, and making sure that your site is structurally and technically sound. The goal is to get the organic traffic you want by making your site relevant and authoritative.

Pay-per-click (PPC), on the other hand, is all about paying for ads — the sponsored listings — that appear at the top of search results. So, every time someone clicks your ad, it costs you money. As it lets you target advertising based on user demographics, this model can lead to immediate results.

What’s the difference between SEO and PPC?

SEO and pay-per-click advertising are both popular options to get traffic to your site. However, both options have their advantages to help you reach those goals.

Cost structure

For SEO, the costs mostly lie in the initial work and ongoing maintenance. You have to invest in creating high-quality content, optimizing your site, and reaching out to build good links and relationships. With SEO, there are no direct costs per click, but it does require consistent effort and resources to get results.

With PPC, you pay every time someone clicks your sponsored listing. To make it manageable, you set a budget; when this budget runs out, your ads will no longer be visible. PPC gives you control over budget, but costs can quickly ramp up — especially in high-demand markets or for competitive keywords. 

Time to results

We always say that SEO is a marathon and not a sprint. Building authority takes time, so it can take months to see rankings go up. But the wait is worth it, as it leads to better and more stable results in the long run.

PPC is more direct and to the point. Launch a campaign, and the visitors should come in straight away. As such, this is a great tool for time-sensitive stuff like promotions and launches or when you need instant visibility and reach. 

Sustainability and impact

SEO is the more sustainable option. With your initial work done, you can reap the rewards for a long time. Of course, there’s always more to do with your SEO tasks, but that’s normal. Building a brand is something that will pay off big time. With PPC, you get an incredible boost for a short period — the time you pay for the sponsored listings.

Targeting capabilities

SEO targets users based on content and keywords. You can target your content on different search intents, but the options are not as direct as with PPC. This offers more precise options, allowing you to publish ads to specific demographics, locations, times, and user behavior. 

Flexibility and control

With SEO, you do put yourself in the hands of search engine algorithms. Algorithm updates could harm your rankings. As a result, you should reevaluate your strategy. You have control over everything on your site, but not search engines. PPC, though, does give full control over your ads. It makes it easier to adapt to changes and needs.

Measurement and analytics

It’s important to measure your success. For SEO, you are looking at a longer period and need to keep track of traffic and keyword rankings. It can be difficult to get usable insights from data. With PPC, you get detailed insights that show you how your campaigns are doing. You’ll also get the tools to adjust instantly. 

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SEO and PPC, while different channels that require different skills and have different goals, can really complement each other in the long term. To me, PPC is considered more of a science than the art of SEO. The great thing about PPC for SEOs is that it not only attracts quicker returns (that can also be calculated with more precision) but also provides the same accurate and actionable data for SEOs. I have always found data from PPC extremely useful in directing an SEO strategy.

Alex Moss – Principal SEO expert at Yoast

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Pros and cons of SEO

Both SEO and PPC have their pros and cons. Let’s go over these.

Pros of SEO

SEO is cost-effective in the long run. Once you have a strategy and an optimized site, it can continue attracting traffic without additional costs, leading to a sustainable traffic source. 

Ranking well gives your site a sense of trust and credibility, as people trust sponsored listings less than organic search results. High rankings can boost your brand. Of course, higher rankings lead to a high CTR, and many users simply skip ads because they don’t like them. 

As SEO improves the general user experience of the website, it will become a better investment for your money overall. Investing in SEO can lead to higher engagement and conversion rates.

Cons of SEO

Of course, SEO isn’t the end-all solution to everything. For one, building up authority and higher rankings takes a lot of time. It’s not the solution if you want quick results. You must also work on your strategy, content, and site quality. The more work you put in, the better your results can be. And as search engines keep evolving, you must evolve as well. 

SEO operates in a highly competitive landscape. For some markets, it’s almost impossible to break into the top ten of the results. Plus, it might take a ton of money to do that. And that’s another con for SEO: the results are uncertain due to algorithm changes, competition, and market conditions.  

Pros and cons of PPC

Pay-per-click advertising also has its own good points and bad points, as you’ll read below:

Pros of PPC

The biggest benefit of PPC is getting immediate results for your money. You can set up campaigns quickly and get results going without much hassle. You also have full control over the budget, so you only pay for what you want to pay for. 

PPC is also flexible and precise. You have much control over who you target and when, leading to more precise results. And if your strategy needs adjustments, you can update your sponsored listings quickly. Pay-per-click ad systems give you all the data you need to make the proper decisions. 

Cons of PPC

One of the main drawbacks of pay-per-click is that costs could rise quickly. Another main drawback is that you’ll only get results as long as you pay — no money, no results. This makes PPC a viable option only for specific campaigns.

How well ads perform also depends on how users perceive them — ad fatigue is a thing. You must experiment with placements and forms to see what works best. For this, you should adhere to the rules of the platforms on which you’re running your ads.

Conclusion SEO vs Pay-per-click

Whether you choose between SEO and PPC depends on your needs, strategy, and timeline. SEO is amazing for long-term results, while PPC can quickly produce results. Most businesses will probably use a combination of both. You can use the strength of both strategic tools in your toolset to get the results your business is looking for.

The post SEO vs. Pay-per-click advertising: Which one should you choose? appeared first on Yoast.

What is SEO automation?

By automating SEO, you use tools and software to do the repetitive optimization tasks for you. These tools don’t eliminate the need for a person to be involved, but they can do the heavy lifting. These tasks often contain data-heavy and time-consuming work. 

Think of all the manual work you must do to run an SEO campaign. You have to crawl your website for technical errors, do keyword research, track how your ranking develops, and generate insightful reports — important work but tedious. SEO automation tools take these tasks and do them for you. These tools work faster and more accurately than you do. As a result, you can focus on the fun stuff — the creative and strategic work. 

For example, you could manually try to find broken links on your site, but that would take forever. An automated tool can do that in minutes and provide a nice report. For your content, keyword research tools can generate a list of terms to target in just a few minutes. You’ll even get search volume data and information about the level of competition. 

The benefits of SEO automation

Automating your SEO has many advantages. Handing over repetitive tasks can save you a lot of time, leaving you with more time to work on your strategy and content. Automation is also more accurate in handling data, which leads to fewer errors and, thus, more dependable data. SEO automation streamlines your work and allows you to scale quickly once your site grows.

Tasks you can automate right now

Today, most SEO automation tools are designed to handle specific tasks. We’ll list the most common tasks you can automate.

Keyword research

Keyword research is the foundation of SEO. It is also very time-consuming to do manually. You’re looking at search volumes, competition, relevancy, and more, and you’ll have to make deductions from that. It’s not weird that almost everyone uses keyword research tools such as Semrush and Wincher to do the hard work.

Keyword research tools can automatically:

• Generate lists with relevant keywords for your topic or niche.
• Give essential supporting data such as search volume and difficulty.
• Suggest related keywords that you can use to build up your.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you run a gardening blog. Keyword research tools like Semrush can identify not only popular keywords like “best gardening tools” but also related terms such as “gardening tool maintenance” or “best hoes for gardening in specific conditions.” These insights allow you to build content clusters that improve your site’s authority.   

Content optimization

Content optimization is another field in which SEO automation comes in. For instance, Yoast SEO can analyze your content to make sure it is properly optimized for search engines. An SEO tool like this gives feedback on:

• How you use keywords in your content and suggest improvements to make.
• How readable is your content, and are your sentences too complex?
• Where and how you can add relevant links to other content on your site. 
• Improvements to make to your meta descriptions and titles (with AI in Yoast SEO’s case)

Yoast SEO is a very popular plugin for WordPress and Shopify. It helps you optimize each post or page on your site to make it user-friendly, search-engine-friendly, and, of course, make that process as easy as possible.  

Website audits

Automatically auditing your website regularly is also a popular form of SEO automation. Such an SEO audit can help you catch issues that might influence your site’s performance. These can include:

• Broken links.
• Slow loading speeds.
• Missing meta tags.
• Duplicate content.  

Tools like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb can perform these audits automatically. These tools even let you schedule recurring audits, so you’re always updated on your site’s health. In addition, the tools provide actionable reports that highlight what needs fixing.  

Rank tracking

There are many ways to gauge your site’s performance; one of the most important is to check its rankings. However, tracking your rankings manually is a lot of work. Luckily, rank-tracking tools such as Wincher, Semrush, and Ahrefs make this incredibly easy. These tools automate this process and provide you with regular updates on your keyword positions.  

Among the things these tools can track are:

• Changes in your rankings over time.
• The performance of specific target keywords.
• Competitor rankings for similar keywords.  

You get all kinds of reporting for your rankings. Plus, with the built-in alerting systems, you are always on top of things without constantly monitoring them.

SEO reporting

Another part of your SEO work that can be automated is reporting. Building custom reports is grueling work that can take hours of precious time. Luckily, tools like Looker Studio can combine data from different sources, such as Google Analytics, Search Console, Semrush, and others, to build custom dashboards that update automatically.  

With proper SEO automation tools, you can create reusable templates for your reports, so you have something predefined to start from. These can also be generated automatically at scheduled times to save you even more time.   

How to get started with SEO automation

At one point, you will be ready to start automating your SEO workflow. But where do you start?

Find the tasks you need to automate

Think about your work and find the tasks that take the most time or recur most often. Such tasks are often the best options to automate. For example, if you spend much of your time on reporting, that would be a good option.  

Choose the right tools

Not all tools are created equal, so choose one that does what you want them to do. Here are some options, but there are many others.

• Yoast SEO: Optimizes on-page SEO and provides content suggestions.  
• Semrush: Offers keyword research, content outlines, and optimization
• Google Search Console: Tracks performance and identifies site issues.  
• Screaming Frog: Conducts in-depth site audits.  
• Looker Studio: Automates reporting by integrating with Google Analytics and other data sources.  

Start small

Diving head-first into SEO automation might be exciting, but it will probably not end well. Please start small. Pick a couple of time-consuming tasks and see how you can make them more manageable and insightful. Once you see what works and what doesn’t, build from there.

Final thoughts on automating your SEO

SEO automation is a handy way to save time, improve data accuracy, and scale your work. We’re not looking to replace people but rather support them in their jobs. Tools can do many tasks, from keyword research to audits and data analysis. This leaves you more time for your high-impact work! 

Start small and experiment with a range of tools. You’ll find what works and what doesn’t, which will help you fine-tune your process. Ultimately, you want SEO automation to help you work smarter, not harder. 

The post SEO automation: Tools and tips for SEO success appeared first on Yoast.

Start preparing early

As with most sales, you need to plan ahead. Begin planning your Valentine’s Day SEO strategy as early as possible. Ideally, you’d start several months in advance. Research keywords related to Valentine’s Day and your industry to see what comes up. When the sale comes, you’ll be inspired and have new ways to promote your products. If you set up gift guide pages, do so in advance so search engines have enough time to index your pages. This increases your chance to rank when the shopping rush begins.

Create a landing page specifically for your Valentine’s Day sale. Use it to highlight your best deals and popular items that make great gifts. Keep the URL simple and undated so that you can update and reuse it yearly. This approach helps you build SEO value over time while keeping backlinks intact. It also makes your seasonal campaigns easier to manage in the future.

Optimize your product pages

Your product pages will probably see the most traffic and conversions, so be sure to optimize them. Use proper related keywords in the places where they make sense, but don’t overdo it. For example, instead of “Rose bouquet,” try “Classic rose bouquet for Valentine’s Day.” Yoast SEO for Shopify or WooCommerce SEO can help you do this.

Consider conveying that your products are made with a good heart without relying on traditional red heart symbolism. This could involve creative descriptions, imagery, or design elements that convey a sense of warmth, kindness, and generosity without being overtly literal.

As always, add high-quality images to your sales pages with descriptive alt-text, such as “red roses for Valentine’s Day delivery.” This will make your product pages more accessible and understandable for search engines. If you sell jewelry, create specific pages with phrases like “Valentine’s Day jewelry sale.”

When you have options to deliver your product, include the final delivery date in your communication to build trust and ensure customers receive their items on time.

Create gift guides and seasonal content

Content marketing drives traffic to your site. Good content can help shoppers find the perfect gift. For SEO purposes, Valentine’s Day gift guides can serve well. Make guides like “Top 10 gifts for her” or “Romantic ideas for Valentine’s Day.” In these guides, link to the proper product pages to make it easy for shoppers to buy the listed products.

Keywords like “Unique Valentine’s Day gift” or “Valentine’s Day flower delivery” work well in blog content. There are plenty of relevant content ideas. For instance, you could create themed infographics or videos to share on social media.

Focus on local SEO for delivery or pick-up

Is your business locally oriented, and do you offer local delivery or in-store pick-up? Optimize your sales for local searches! Edit your Google Business Profile and add details about your Valentine’s Day sales, opening hours, and local delivery options. Don’t forget to use location-specific keywords in your content.

Build a bond with your customers and encourage them to leave reviews. Positive reviews are an important part of building your local business. Use local SEO properly to attract customers needing last-minute Valentine’s Day gifts or same-day delivery. 

Use social media and influencers

Social media is a great tool for promoting your Valentine’s Day deals. Remember to post appealing images of your products, such as flower arrangements, gift boxes, or jewelry. Depending on your business, Instagram and Facebook are especially good for showcasing your Valentine’s gifts. You might even try TikTok if you’re good at video content. TikTok even published a guide to help you with your Valentine’s Day sale. 

Remember to think about influencers who like your brand. Influencers can create authentic content to drive traffic to your site. Be sure to include special offers to make them actionable.

Use user-generated content

Social media is also a great place to encourage customers to share their Valentine’s Day experiences with your products. Ask them to post photos of the gifts they purchased, the stories of how they were received, or even a review of the experience of buying from your store. You could even create a branded hashtag and promote it in your social media and email campaigns.

As your website is the focal point, remember to add these posts to it. User-generated content helps build trust and acts as social proof. It’s great for potential customers to see that other customers have had an excellent experience with your business. Seeing happy customers share photos of their Valentine’s Day flower arrangements or jewelry gifts can help others do the same. In addition, you are creating a human connection with your customers.

Run exclusive Valentine’s Day promotions

It’s not just about inspiring customers to want to buy but also about getting them to buy it. Special offers help shoppers complete that last step. Create urgency with limited-time deals, such as “20% off Valentine’s Day gifts for 48 hours.” You can also offer free shipping or discounts on bundles for couples.

Don’t forget to use your email newsletters to announce these promotions. Write subject lines like “Valentine’s Day sale — Shop the perfect gift now” to grab attention and get clicks to your site.

Add festive details to your website

A subtle way to get shoppers in the mood for Valentine’s Day is to add small festive design elements to your store. For example, you can update banners, landing pages, and CTA buttons with a subtle Valentine’s theme, such as hearts or pink and red color schemes. But be sure to keep it subtle. 

You can directly link your Valentine’s Day landing page or related content from your website’s header navigation during the sale to improve your SEO. Many ecommerce stores use dynamic navigation to feature seasonal categories like “New In,” “Back to School,” or “Holiday Deals.” Adding a Valentine’s section makes it easy for shoppers to find your offers quickly.

Offer last-minute shopping options

Some people like to shop at the last moment, so please also cater to them. You can always offer digital gift cards and same-day delivery services. Highlight these offers prominently on your website with phrases like “Still looking? Get it today!” or “Instant Valentine’s Day gifts.” 

PPC ads like “last-minute Valentine’s Day gifts”  in search or on social media help target people needing an urgent solution. It’s a quick and easy solution to get sales from customers running out of time. 

Track and adjust your strategy

Last but not least, monitor the campaign’s performance. Use analytics and internet marketing tools to track keyword rankings, traffic, and conversions. Find out which products or pages perform well and adjust your strategy where needed. For example, if certain keywords like “Valentine’s Day exclusive jewelry sale” drive traffic, create more content around those topics.

Keep an eye on your competitors, too. If they offer something unique, consider how you might adapt your approach.

That’s it for Valentine’s Day SEO

Planning and great content are the most important things to make your Valentine’s Day sale successful. A targeted campaign can attract more shoppers to your store. Optimize your product pages, create engaging content, and promote your offers via social media and email campaigns. Now, you’ll be ready to turn the season of love into a successful sales season.

The post 10 SEO tips for your Valentine’s Day sale appeared first on Yoast.

What is an SEO roadmap?

An SEO roadmap is a strategic outline for enhancing a website’s visibility in search engines. It consists of all the SEO tasks you wish to perform in a given period of time. These tasks encompass keyword research, content strategy, and technical SEO.

We need a plan showing how people find our product or business. Once we know that, we’ll need to write content strategically targeting these people. At the same time, we’ll find a way to improve our website’s technical aspects to ensure it performs flawlessly.

The goal is to connect your SEO plan to the broader business goals. This will help you focus on the right things for the desired results. Of course, this isn’t just about performing better and properly managing your resources. It helps allocate time and budget effectively to areas with the most impact.

Setting up and managing an SEO strategy has many benefits. It provides a solid framework for tracking performance and fine-tuning it where necessary, helping you target the right people and stay ahead of the competition.

Why do you need an SEO roadmap for that?

While it’s easy to jump right into the SEO work you need to do, it’s better to have a roadmap. An SEO roadmap helps your decision-making process. It helps you prioritize the activities that drive the most value. And it gives you a sense of direction.

Setting up such an SEO roadmap will help you increase your website’s visibility in search. It will also help you target the right audiences and reduce costs by focusing on high-impact areas.

Your new strategy should support the overarching business goals. Often, that’s increasing sales. By increasing organic traffic, you can boost sales and revenue. It could also support brand awareness. Enhancing your brand’s presence in search engines makes it more recognizable. Plus, you’ll want to engage customers.

Building a solid, holistic SEO strategy also keeps you agile. You’re much more on top of things and able to respond to changes in search history trends or market conditions. This is another thing that gives you a leg up over a slightly less well-prepared competitor.

How to create an SEO roadmap

Before creating an SEO plan, you need to collect some insights. Clearly define what you want to achieve, and audit your site to get a feel for the issues you must fix. Then, the budget and availability of resources must be figured out to get the updates done. When you have everything, you can build out your SEO roadmap.

Define your goals and priorities

Creating a successful SEO roadmap begins with setting clear goals and establishing priorities. This step helps focus all efforts and align them with broader business objectives.

Set SMART goals

The most important thing is to work in a structured manner. You need a framework to verify if the work you’re planning is feasible and measurable. Here’s how to effectively define your goals and priorities using SMART criteria.

• Set SMART goals: Goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. This framework ensures clarity and direction.
• Specific: Clearly describe what you want to achieve. For instance, instead of saying “increase traffic,” specify “increase organic traffic by 20%.”
• Measurable: Use metrics to track progress and evaluate success. Example: “Reach 50,000 monthly page views by the end of Q2.”
• Achievable: Make sure the goals are realistic. Think about your resources and constraints. Consider current performance as a baseline.
• Relevant: Align goals with business objectives. If brand awareness is your number one goal, focus on increasing visibility in search engine results.
• Time-bound: Set a deadline to create urgency. Example: “Achieve a top 3 ranking for targeted keywords within six months.”

Of course, there are many other options. Consider frameworks like the Eisenhower Matrix to prioritize tasks by urgency and importance. This method helps you prioritize tasks by urgency and importance, sorting them into four categories: do first, schedule, delegate, and don’t do. Use this matrix to categorize SEO tasks, focusing first on urgent and important ones, like fixing critical site errors.

Align with business objectives

Your SEO goals should fall in line with your overall business strategy. This way, SEO efforts will help your company achieve its goals. For example, if your company wants to grow its market share in a particular area, you should focus on local SEO. This means targeting local keywords and directories.

Not all tasks are created equal, so determine which ones will have the biggest impact and put them on your SEO roadmap first. Look for tasks that are easy to do and give you quick results, like fixing high-traffic pages. Also, focus on projects that match your main business goals, even if they take more time and resources.

Remember to meet with all the important people to ensure that your SEO goals are what they want and that they fit with the whole company’s goals. Talk to the marketing, sales, and product teams to understand what they want and how SEO can help them achieve it.

Audit your website

Conducting a thorough website SEO audit is critical in creating an effective SEO roadmap. This process helps identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement. You can add the audit findings as improvement tasks to your roadmap.

Do a content audit

Most of the time, people find your website through your content. As such, it’s an essential part of your SEO strategy. But your content might have become a tangled mess if you’ve been at it for a while. A content audit can help inform your SEO roadmap and help you untangle that mess.

Review your existing content and see if it (still) meets user needs and aligns with your goals. Then, look for content gaps to determine whether your audience is interested in a topic you haven’t discussed on your site yet. If you find these or other opportunities, add them as tasks on your roadmap. Don’t forget to check the on-page SEO of your key pages.

You can do a proper content audit by hand, but tools like Semrush and Ahrefs make this process much more manageable.

Do a technical SEO audit

A technical audit will help uncover performance issues with the site. These issues might prevent search engines or users from properly accessing your site.

First, crawl your website using tools like Screaming Frog to see if it can be accessed properly. Uncover crawl errors and find out what’s happening on pages that are not available — accidental or not. Check for broken links or 404 errors and add these to your task list.

Evaluate and improve page load times, as speed affects user experience and rankings. Don’t forget Google’s core web vitals. Also, check that your site is responsive and functions well on mobile devices.

You should add those tasks to the roadmap if you find technical issues on your site that you want or need to fix.

Check the user experience

Every year, user experience is getting more important if you want to perform well in search engines. Make sure that your site is easy to navigate. It should have a logical structure that helps users find information quickly. Analyze site bounce rates and time to identify pages needing improvement. Again, if you find improvements to be made, add them to your SEO roadmap as tasks so you can work on them in a structured way.

Analyze the backlink profile

The web is built around links, and while links have become slightly less important over the years, they’re still an important topic for search engines. In your audit, please look at your backlinks and see if you can acquire high-quality, relevant backlinks. Unless you have a manual action for spam from Google, it probably isn’t worth your time to disavow all the toxic links pointing to your site.

Estimate time and resources

Before you fill out your SEO roadmap, you need to estimate accurately the time and resources you have available to you. Doing so helps set realistic timelines to achieve your SEO goals.

Evaluate team strengths and capabilities

When working with a team, assess the skills available to determine who can handle specific SEO tasks. Also, understand the workload your team can handle alongside other responsibilities.

Budget planning

While you need enough people for your project, you also need a budget. Find the tools and technologies you need for SEO and budget accordingly. Also, decide if you need additional expertise, such as hiring freelancers or an SEO agency.

Set realistic timelines

It’s important to set realistic goals and timelines for the project. Give each task in your SEO roadmap a deadline. If you’ve looked at your tasks in detail, you know how long it would take. Do consider delays, as things will likely have a different duration than you thought before — even if you thought it through. Don’t forget to plan work for different teams in advance so they know when to come in.

Prioritize tasks based on resources

Look ahead and see if you can mix quick wins with long-term projects. It’s good to have successful moments during the project, not only at the end. Focus on optimizing existing high-traffic pages first while planning a longer-term content strategy. Make sure that the most critical tasks receive proper attention and resources.

Review and adjust

Your SEO roadmap is never set and done — there are always things to adjust for whatever reason. It’s important to review and adjust your strategy regularly. This helps you refine your plans and jump on new opportunities. Or, you can finally fix that pesky new thing that keeps popping up.

Schedule regular reviews

Don’t just wait for reviews to happen — plan them in advance. Conduct in-depth reviews every quarter to evaluate the overall effectiveness of your SEO strategy. In addition, you should hold monthly meetings to discuss ongoing tasks, recent results, and anything that needs priority.

Analyze performance data

Analyze all data thoroughly before making decisions. Examine all relevant data, including traffic, keyword rankings, and conversion rates, to get a complete picture of performance. From that data, identify your successes and failures. Determine which strategies are working well and which need reevaluation.

Get feedback from stakeholders

Ask your teammates for their views on what’s working and what’s not. If possible, hold feedback sessions to develop new solutions for issues. When necessary, ask customers or executives for insights on how you can make sure that the SEO plan supports overarching goals.

Refine goals and strategy

For all your research, refine your goals to reflect the necessary changes. If you performed better than you thought, why not take those goals up a notch? If not, see what you can do to improve. Also, don’t forget to place manhours in areas that need the most help.

Implement changes and track impact

When you’ve collected all your insights and know what you need to do, you should develop a plan to implement them. For example, you could update your content strategy or invest in different platforms to compete. Of course, you need to monitor the effect of the changes you made to your SEO strategy — and adjust if necessary!

A roadmap is the groundwork for SEO success

This guide provides the steps needed to develop an effective SEO plan. It helps you find long-term success for your roadmap while aligning it with broader business objectives. Be sure to work diligently on the tasks in your strategy and analyze and adjust if needed.

Do you need help keeping up with SEO? Be sure to sign up for one of our SEO webinars!

The post How to create an effective SEO roadmap appeared first on Yoast.

What is marketplace SEO?

Marketplace SEO is about making a platform with many sellers — like Airbnb, Etsy, or Amazon — easy to find on search engines. It means improving product details, organizing the site well, and using customer reviews and content. Optimizing the listings on these ecommerce platforms helps more people find the products and increases sales for everyone involved.

For instance, Etsy gives store owners plenty of options to improve their product listings by writing detailed product descriptions or adding great images. As a result, every well-optimized, handcrafted item ranks in the search results. Similarly, Airbnb allows property owners to update their listings with local keywords so that they appear when users search for accommodations in specific areas.

Effective marketplace SEO means that when someone searches for “vintage leather bags,” Etsy listings are among the top results. Or when a traveler looks for “secluded cabin in Vermont,” Airbnb’s optimized listings pop up. The result, of course, is to quickly connect marketplace buyers and sellers.

On-page SEO for marketplaces

You can use on-page SEO as a tool for marketplace SEO. Doing so directly impacts how easily potential customers find your listings. Take the time to optimize elements like titles, descriptions, and images. Ultimately, you’ll find that your marketplace listings will be more visible in search results. This visibility, of course, should hopefully lead to more clicks and more sales.

When each ecommerce page is optimized correctly, search engines better understand your content, which improves your rankings. This means your marketplace appears in front of the right audience at the right time.

Optimizing images

For marketplace SEO, you need good images to capture attention and show the quality of your products. If possible, make sure that your images are high-resolution and professionally shot. All your images should be relevant and showcase the product from more than one angle to give buyers a good feel for it.

Add clear alt text like “handmade ceramic mug” to make your images more accessible and to help search engines recognize what the image shows. This improves the SEO of your marketplace listings and makes them more appealing to users who use speech-based browsers.

Don’t forget to optimize the image itself. Compress files to maintain quality while reducing load times, as slow-loading images can drive users away. Tools like Squoosh can help with compression without losing quality. Ensure file names are descriptive and include keywords where appropriate, such as “organic-cotton-shirt.jpg,” to boost search visibility further.

Create great titles and meta descriptions

Titles and meta descriptions can draw users from search engine results. Crafting an engaging title means more than just adding keywords; it should capture what the page is about. Keep it short but descriptive, like “Elegant Summer Dresses – Affordable Fashion Online.” This approach catches users’ attention and clearly tells them what to expect. Ensure the titles aren’t too long so they appear fully in search results without getting cut off.

Descriptions provide more details about your listing. A good meta description should highlight features and benefits. It should also mention why people should click on your listing instead of your competitors. Here’s a good example: “Discover our range of elegant summer dresses crafted from breathable fabrics for comfort and style. Perfect for any occasion, at prices you’ll love.” This has all the keywords, and it speaks to the customer. Keep it short, accurate and engaging.

Writing great product descriptions

Product descriptions sell your products. If you want to sell your products, you must invest plenty of time in writing great product descriptions. Start by understanding your target audience and use those insights to address their needs and concerns. Write naturally and incorporate all the keywords you want the product to rank for.

Many ecommerce sellers simply list features, but explaining these in context is better. Here’s an example: “This eco-friendly bamboo toothbrush is designed for comfort and sustainability, reducing your carbon footprint while providing a gentle clean.” By writing this way, you set your products apart from your competitors.

Another way to make your products stand out is through storytelling or vivid language that paints a picture. Here’s one: “Imagine sipping your morning coffee from this handcrafted ceramic mug, its unique glaze reflecting the artisan’s touch.” Instead of simply listing details, you appeal to the buyer’s emotions. This also offers a way to make the shopping experience more personal.

Whatever you do, try to avoid using the text provided by the manufacturer, as these will be used on thousands of sites. Try to make it unique for you and your customers.

Using product specifications properly

You must list specifications to help customers decide if they want to buy this specific product. It’s important to list these product specifications with care. Make sure to present details such as product identifiers, dimensions, materials, weight, and compatibility in a way that’s easy to scan.

This makes it easy for customers to find the information they need quickly. It also helps search engines index your content more effectively. Including specifications can give customers more confidence in buying the product, as they know exactly what they are purchasing.

Additionally, think about the unique features that specifications can highlight. For instance, computer shoppers would love to know what kind of processor a laptop has. Shoppers use these details to compare products based on specific technical attributes. Where applicable, use bullet points in your ecommerce content to present data clearly and concisely.

Implementing Schema markup

You can’t live without a schema markup if you want to improve your marketplace SEO. Schema markup adds structured data to your products, which helps search engines understand and interpret your products. If you do it well, your products might get rich results, like added star ratings, pricing, and availability.

For instance, an item with a product and reviews markup might show a 4.8-star rating and price directly in Google. These listings appeal to customers and could lead to a better CTR.

If you want to add schema to your products, you need to use specific types of markup relevant to your marketplace, such as Product, Review, and Offer schemas. Tools like Yoast SEO can implement schema code for you automatically. Whatever you do, don’t forget to test your structured data to make sure it’s correctly implemented and up-to-date.

Use Yoast SEO for Shopify

Working on your online store can be tiresome, but luckily, there are tools to help you. Yoast SEO for Shopify is a great app that makes managing it much easier. It has content optimization features, AI tools for creating awesome titles and meta descriptions, and many schema enhancements. Together, these features help your store’s visibility in search

Conclusion to marketplace SEO

For your marketplace to succeed, you need on-page SEO. Work on product visibility and engagement by improving images, creating clear meta tags, and refining product details. Tools like Yoast SEO for Shopify simplify this process. These methods can attract more visitors and improve your ecommerce marketplace’s performance.

The post Marketplace SEO tips to improve product listing visibility appeared first on Yoast.

2011 – Panda

The Panda update marked a shift in SEO by targeting low-quality content and spammy practices. It penalized sites with thin content or those created solely to manipulate rankings, such as affiliate-heavy pages. Over time, Panda became part of Google’s core algorithm, reinforcing the need for meaningful, high-quality content that provides real value to users.

2012 – Venice

Google’s algorithm update Venice was a noteworthy update, as it showed that Google understood that searchers are sometimes looking for results that are local to them. After Venice, Google’s search results included pages based on the location you set, or your IP address.

2012 – Penguin

The Google Penguin update focused on eliminating manipulative link-building practices. It penalized sites with spammy or paid backlinks, shifting the focus to earning genuine, high-quality links. By 2016, Penguin became part of the core algorithm, emphasizing the importance of ethical and relevant link-building strategies.

2012 – Pirate

The Pirate update addressed copyright infringement by penalizing sites with repeated DMCA takedown requests. It aimed to reduce the visibility of websites sharing unauthorized content, ensuring legitimate sources were prioritized in search results. This update highlighted the importance of respecting intellectual property online.

2013 – Hummingbird

The Hummingbird update improved Google’s ability to understand the meaning behind search queries. Rather than focusing on individual keywords, it considered the entire phrase to deliver more accurate results. This shift encouraged natural, conversational content and reduced the need for over-optimized keyword stuffing. It also laid the foundation for advancements in voice search and semantic search technology.

2014 – Pigeon

Another bird-related Google update followed in 2014 with Google Pigeon, which focused on local SEO. The Pigeon update affected both the results pages and Google Maps. It led to more accurate localization, giving preference to results near the user’s location. It also aimed to make local results more relevant and higher quality, taking organic ranking factors into account. 

2014 – HTTPS/SSL

Google introduced HTTPS as a ranking signal to encourage secure web connections. Sites using HTTPS gained a slight ranking advantage, promoting better data encryption and security for users. While initially a minor factor, it signaled Google’s growing focus on user safety and set the stage for security becoming a standard expectation online.

2015 – Mobile Update

Known as “Mobilegeddon,” this update prioritized mobile-friendly websites in mobile search results. As mobile usage surpassed desktop, Google aimed to ensure a better experience for users on smaller screens. While the immediate impact wasn’t drastic, it marked a clear shift toward mobile-first indexing, emphasizing the importance of mobile optimization for long-term SEO success.

2015 – RankBrain

RankBrain introduced machine learning to Google’s algorithm, helping the search engine interpret unfamiliar or complex queries. It analyzed past searches to predict the most relevant results, even for terms it hadn’t encountered before. While you can’t directly optimize for RankBrain, creating clear, helpful, and user-focused content ensures your site aligns with its goal of improving search relevance.

2016 – Possum 

In September 2016 it was time for another local update. Google’s algorithm update ​Possum update​ applied several changes to Google’s local ranking filter to further improve local search. After Possum, local results became more varied, depending more on the physical location of the searcher and the phrasing of the query. Some businesses, not doing well in organic search, found it easier to rank locally after this update. This indicated that this update made local search more independent of the organic results.

Read on: Near me searches: Is that a Possum near me? »

2018 – (Mobile) Speed Update

The Speed Update made page load time a ranking factor for mobile searches, building on its previous importance for desktop. Slow-loading sites were more likely to see a drop in rankings, especially on mobile devices. This update reinforced the need for fast, seamless user experiences, encouraging site owners to prioritize performance optimization.

2018 – Medic

The Medic Update was a broad core algorithm change that heavily impacted “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) websites, such as health, finance, and legal sites. It appeared to prioritize expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T) in content, especially for topics affecting users’ well-being. While it wasn’t exclusively aimed at medical sites, it underscored the importance of credible, accurate, and user-focused information.

Keep on reading: Google’s Medic update »

2019 – BERT

The BERT update (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) enhanced Google’s ability to understand the context of words in a search query. By analyzing words in relation to the ones around them, BERT improved how Google interpreted natural language and intent. This update particularly helped with more conversational or complex queries, making search results more accurate and relevant. For content creators, it emphasized the value of clear, natural writing that directly addresses user needs.

Read more: Google BERT: A better understanding of complex queries »

2021 – Page Experience Update

The Page Experience update introduced a new ranking signal combining existing factors like mobile-friendliness and HTTPS with Core Web Vitals. These metrics measured real-world user experience, focusing on loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability. While content quality remained the top priority, this update emphasized the importance of delivering a smooth and user-friendly browsing experience.

Keep reading: Page experience: a new Google ranking factor »

2021 – MUM (Multitask United Model)

Announced in 2021, MUM introduced a powerful AI system capable of processing information across multiple formats and languages. It can analyze text, images, and videos to deliver more comprehensive answers to complex queries. For example, MUM can combine insights from various sources to provide layered, context-rich results. This update signaled Google’s focus on deeper understanding and more diverse content delivery in search.

Read on: Google’s MUM understands what you need: 1000x more powerful than BERT »

2021 – Product Reviews Update

First run in April 2021, these updates prioritized detailed, insightful product reviews over thin or generic content. Google rewarded reviews that showed expertise, included real-world usage, and helped users make informed decisions. It’s a key update for affiliate and e-commerce sites focused on providing genuine value. The update ran multiple times over the years.

2022 – Helpful Content Update

The Helpful Content Update targeted low-quality, unoriginal content designed primarily to game search rankings. Instead, it rewarded “people-first” content—material that genuinely answers user questions and provides a satisfying experience. Sites with lots of unhelpful or shallow content saw declines, while those focused on creating valuable, user-centric content were prioritized. This update reinforced the importance of writing with the audience in mind, not just search engines.

Keep on reading: Google to launch Helpful Content Update to diversify search results »

2023 / 2024 – A mix of updates

Between 2023 and 2024, Google rolled out a mix of core and spam algorithm updates to enhance search quality and combat manipulative practices. Core updates focused on refining how content is evaluated, rewarding pages that provide high-quality, relevant, and trustworthy information. At the same time, spam updates targeted tactics like keyword stuffing, spammy backlinks, and low-quality AI-generated content. These changes reinforced Google’s priorities: surfacing helpful, user-focused content while penalizing manipulative SEO strategies.

2024 – Site Reputation Abuse

Google is cracking down on site reputation abuse, including parasite SEO. This tactic involves using trusted domains to host unrelated third-party content, like payday loans or casino reviews, to manipulate rankings. Sites caught violating this policy risk manual penalties, which require removing or noindexing the problematic content to recover. Legitimate uses of third-party content, such as syndicated news or user-generated material, are still allowed when properly managed.

Google algorithm updates: What’s next?

Google continues to refine its search algorithms with a growing focus on AI-driven search experiences. Recent advancements, such as Google AI Overviews, show a shift toward providing users with more intuitive and context-rich results. These tools combine AI to summarize complex topics, pull insights from multiple sources, and answer broader questions in a concise way.

Looking ahead, we can expect updates to further enhance understanding of search intent, prioritize high-quality content, and improve how information is presented. At the same time, technical factors like site speed, mobile usability, and security will remain essential. For website owners, the key is to stay adaptable by focusing on creating helpful, accurate, and user-centered content while keeping an eye on emerging AI trends in search.

Read more: Should I follow every change Google makes? »

The post A brief history of Google’s algorithm updates appeared first on Yoast.