Valentine’s Day is an interesting shopping event for ecommerce stores. Customers are looking for gifts that help express their love for one another, with flowers, jewelry, and other interesting options. It’s a great opportunity to attract and convert online shoppers. Here are some SEO tips to help make the most of your Valentine’s Day sale!
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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.
It doesn’t have to be just jewelry or flowers; there are plenty of interesting gift options, like tea
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.
Lego published a great gift guide on its site, including great images and content
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.
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.
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.
For a jewelry store, this is always a busy time, so it needs to come prepared
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.
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.
You won’t be the only one looking for last-minute Valentine’s gifts!
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.
Edwin is an experienced strategic content specialist. Before joining Yoast, he worked for a top-tier web design magazine, where he developed a keen understanding of how to create great content.
You can sell your products online in many marketplaces, and all these platforms benefit from SEO. From improving your photos to writing better product descriptions, on-page SEO is key if you want your product listings to rank in search.
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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 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.
An Airbnb listing appearing in a Google search for a key term
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 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.
Great photography and branding make your products stand out
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 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.
An example of a good product description for an Etsy item
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 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.
Properly set up products with structured data will get rich results in Google
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 marketplace’s performance.
Edwin is an experienced strategic content specialist. Before joining Yoast, he worked for a top-tier web design magazine, where he developed a keen understanding of how to create great content.
Every business owner with a website is looking for ways to get noticed in the search results. There are loads of tactics to rank well as a local business, but unfortunately, there is no silver bullet. As with most things SEO, this is a combined effort. One of the ways to get noticed is by offering customers up-to-date information like opening hours and contact information. You can do this using Google Business Profile, formerly Google My Business. But what is it exactly, and why is it so important for local SEO?
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What is Google My Business?
Before we start, it’s good to know that Google recently changed its name from Google My Business to Google Business Profile. But even with its new name, Google Business Profile is still your one-stop shop for managing your business information and how it will be presented in the search results. It is an essential tool to adjust how your business is shown in Google Maps, the Knowledge Graph, and organic search results. According to the most recent edition of Whitespark’s Local Search Ranking Factors Survey, Google My Business remains the biggest driver of local SEO success, with reviews coming in second place.
You can manage your business listing by adding NAP details, opening hours, photos, etcetera. There are even unique options to show multiple ways to shop (delivery or curbside pickup). In addition, you get many other options, like managing the reviews your customers leave behind. As you might already know, reviews should be a critical part of your local SEO efforts.
Want to learn more about local SEO and how to get higher rankings in the local search results? Our Local SEO training helps you improve your online presence and attract more online and offline visitors.
How does it work?
Getting started with Google Business Profile is easy; you make an account and claim your business. After filling in your details, you need to verify your business. You can choose between receiving an automated call or text with a verification code, or receiving a real-life postcard from Google at your specified address with the verification code. Some businesses may need to verify with a video. You may have to verify with more than one method. So, why does Google want you to verify your account? They want to ensure that you’re telling the truth and that you’re the business owner listed at the address. Google has a special page that helps you check your verification status.
Once verified, you can fill in all the necessary details and check how your listing is doing. You can get regular insights to see how many impressions, clicks, and subscribers your listing got over time. It’s a great way of getting a feel for how Google and customers perceive your business.
Keep in mind that Google My Business (or Google Business Profile) is not the catch-all tool for your local SEO. It has to work in tandem with your other off-page and on-page SEO efforts. You probably won’t climb the charts if your profile is inaccurate, but you won’t reach the top without a well-optimized site and localized content. These things go hand in hand.
Ranking factors
Google Business Profile uses many factors to determine rankings for businesses. We’ll highlight the three most important ones:
Relevance
Distance
Prominence
Relevance
Relevance determines how well your business fits the search intent of the customer. Is your focus identical to what the customer needs, or are you a bit opaque about what your company does? Vagueness doesn’t rank or sell. Be as clear as you can be, and keep your focus. That way, Google knows what people can expect from you and will be more inclined to show your business in the search results.
Tip: When setting up your profile, Google offers you common services that you can add to your category of business. It’s smart to include these, because they will help your business get found. We’ll talk about these in more detail later on.
Proximity
Proximity is a well-known factor for ranking local businesses. And quite logical when you think about it. You can’t rank in a local search for dentist in Philadelphia when you have located your company in Manhattan. However, the exact way Google determines which businesses to show in a local search is unknown, and it can be pretty hard to rank in a given area. Other factors play a significant role as well. It helps to say you are located in a particular area and show it by having local-oriented content around your business on your site. Google uses what’s known about the searcher’s location to present the most relevant local businesses.
Prominence
Prominence is all about the activity around your listing; this could be the number of reviews, events, local content, et cetera. It also helps to have loads of quality links to your site. It is somewhat hard to determine what prominence means exactly, but one thing is for sure: no one likes inactive profiles. You have to keep it updated with new photos and manage your reviews. As said before, this goes hand in hand with your site, so make sure both listings align and publish content focusing on your local area(s).
It is vital that you keep your business listing accurate and up to date
Optimize your Google Business Profile listing
Any business with a bona fide brick-and-mortar location or an online outlet is eligible for a Google Business listing. But what if you operate your business out of your house and don’t want people to know your address?
If you don’t operate a walk-up brick-and-mortar location but visit your customers in a particular geographic area, you’re called a “Service Business.” Service businesses include plumbers, carpet cleaners, and courier services. In this case, you’re still eligible for a listing. However, you’ll want to choose “Service business” when Google asks what kind of business you have.
Google asks what kind of business you are operating
Verifying your location
Google tries to make sure that only legitimate businesses are represented in GMB. It requires anyone claiming a Listing to verify their association with the company. The easiest way to start the process is to perform a desktop search on Google for your business name (for example, “Kido Chicago”). You’ll see a link in the panel on the right-hand side of the page that asks, “Own this business?”
Before you click that link to begin the verification process, make sure you are either not signed in to Google (you can create an account in the next step) or are signed into a Google account for your business instead of your personal Gmail. It’s not a requirement; however, sharing access to your listing with employees or other company agents from a business account will be much easier.
Click on Claim this business to claim the profile of this business; if you are the owner
Once you fill out the most basic information (see below for what these details are), if it can corroborate your address and phone number, Google will call and ask you to enter a PIN on the screen. If it hasn’t previously seen a business with the phone number and address you submitted, you’ll be mailed a postcard within a week with instructions on how to PIN verify.
Verify with video
Some businesses may need to verify with a video. If you own a physical store, you will need to record your location by showing street signs, your business exterior and interior, and you need to show that you’re authorized to represent this business. You will need to show all these requirements in one continuous recording, so no editing.
If you own a service business, like a plumbing or landscaping business, you don’t have a physical store. That’s why you’ll need to show street signs or the surrounding area where your business is located, your business card or a branded vehicle or business tools, and finally a proof of address. Again, this needs to be done in one continuous recording.
Primary business information
Name, Address, and Phone
This sounds simple, but it’s surprising how many business owners overthink these core attributes or try to “optimize” them. Your Name, Address, and Phone (NAP) are your thumbprint online. If they don’t reflect your business accurately in your Google Business Profile, Google—and your customers—lose trust that you are who you say you are. They will stop sending business your way.
Do NOT stuff keywords in your business name. Represent yourself as you would answer the phone or welcome a customer into your store. You probably see spammers doing this and succeeding all the time, but it’ll come back to bite them at some point. Google is monitoring for these kinds of abuses all the time, and they’re getting better at blocking the abusers.
Submit the same address you use on your website. If you’re a Yoast user, this should be the address you enter in the Yoast Local SEO plugin. Even if you’re a service-area business, you’ll have to submit a physical address, not a PO box or other mailing-only address.
You’ll see a map displayed just alongside your address. Zoom in and double-check that the pin is in the correct place on your business. Google’s pin precision for U.S. addresses is typically pretty good, but it can be spotty in other countries.
Don’t use a tracking phone number to segment customers coming from Google vs. other sources. There are ways to do this, but they’re pretty advanced. Implementing tracking numbers incorrectly can do tremendous damage to your local search rankings.
Choose a category for your business
From a rankings standpoint, the business category is the most important attribute you can optimize in your Google Business Profile. In our experience, it’s best to keep an eye on Google’s advice on categories. Remember that advice has changed frequently over the years and might change again.
Start typing, and the categories magically appear. You can add more later on
Google maintains a taxonomy of several thousand categories to describe local businesses. You’ll probably find a match pretty closely by typing in a few characters of a keyword that describes your business.
Google suggests “using as few categories as possible,” as well as categories that are “as specific as possible.” And while it’s true that Google can and does “detect category information from your website and mentions about your business throughout the web,” our advice is to specify as many relevant categories as possible on your Google Business Profile listing.
Google’s automated review system may remove one or two from your listing, but this is not spam—provided you select relevant categories. It helps you show up for as broad a range of searches as possible.
Services businesses can add the specific services you offer
Add your website
In the process, there’s a field to add your website URL, but it doesn’t have to be your “website” per se. In particular, if you operate in more than one location, you may want to enter the page on your website corresponding to the location you’re submitting to Google—rather than your homepage. Opinions are mixed on whether listing your homepage, or a location page will help you rank better, so do what’s best for prospective customers. If you think your homepage will give them the best initial sense of your business, submit it as your “website”. If a location page—or even some other page—will give your audience a better sense, submit that instead.
Add a business description
Later on, you can add a business description to your profile. It’s essential to take a moment and find an excellent way to describe your business on Google. The business description field gives you a maximum of 750 characters to convince people to visit your business. This might be the first thing people read about your business, so make it unique and exciting. Describe what your business offers precisely and how you set yourself apart from your competitors. You can also talk about your history and anything else that’s helpful for customers.
Keep the description short and sweet, and don’t try to push promotions or deals you have running. You also shouldn’t include URLs or HTML code. Give it a think, write a few descriptions and pick the best one!
A unique business description can make you stand out from the rest
More business information
After entering the attributes above, you’re asked to verify your listing. But don’t stop there. There are a few other attributes that are well worth your time to add.
Photos and images
Photos may be the most neglected attribute in all local SEO. The success of Instagram, Pinterest, and any lesser-known apps indicates how visual our internet culture has become. Consumers often select—or reject!—a business because of its photos. Not only on the content of the photos, but consumers also judge the quality and professionalism of the photos.
Photos are essential in the mobile ecosystem that Google Business Profile powers (including Google Maps), where they dominate a business’s representation in Google’s user interfaces. Try to add authentic photos instead of stock photos, and make sure the pictures reflect your business.
As with all local media or social media sites, Google Business Profile has its image format requirements. Take some time to review them and make sure you have high-quality assets for each format. You can find more on improving your images in our image SEO guide.
Business hours
Selecting your opening hours is pretty straightforward. Google has dramatically improved its interface for telling customers when you’re open over the past several years. Hours will be front-and-center wherever customers interact with your business on Google, so they should be accurate. You can even daypart multiple times during the day and add specific hours for holidays and special events.
While you can’t control it, you may be interested to know that Google now displays the busyness of your business in real time. This is based on aggregate location-tracking visitors with Android phones and iOS Google Maps users with location services enabled.
See when a business opens and when the most popular times are
Specific categories of businesses will have the option to add their menu. Suppose you’re lucky enough to be in one of these categories. In that case, we highly recommend adding this, as it gives Google an additional set of keywords that your business should consider relevant.
Accept messages for more leads
By default, this feature is turned on. It will add a messaging feature to your Business Profile, and it can be a great way to generate more leads. Of course, you need to keep this chat feature in mind and check regularly for any messages. If you respond quickly and helpfully, you’ll probably turn visitors into customers.
The chat function
If you’re slow to respond to customers, however, Google might disable this feature for you. So, if you’re not sure you’ll be able to keep track of this feature, it might be better to turn it off.
Share posts on your Business Profile
The Posts feature is a very useful way to communicate with your customers from your profile. With posts, you can connect with existing and potential customers through your Business Profile on Google Search and Maps. You can create and share announcements, offers, new or popular items in stock, or event details directly with your customers. Use this to promote your sales, specials, events, news, and offers. You can even add videos and photos to posts to make them more interesting!
Example of the post feature
Many options
Since Google Business Profile has grown quite a bit over the years, there are many more options to explore. You don’t need to use all of them, but some are valuable. For example, the Products feature to highlight your products in your listing is a great way to get people interested in what your offer.
Another great option is the possibility of getting potential customers to ask questions that you can respond to. Keep in mind that others can also answer these questions, so keep an eye on this. When it works, it can be a real help in turning visitors into customers.
And, as always, get reviews for your business! With a Business Profile, you can even respond to these reviews. It doesn’t have to be a message. Nowadays, you can also quickly respond with an emoji, like a heart or fire emoji.
Ranking factors beyond your control
There are two significant local search and local SEO ranking factors over which you have little control. They both have to do with the physical location of your business.
The location of your potential customer
The first is the proximity of your business to the location where your prospective customer is performing their search. All other things being equal, Google will display a company closer to the searcher than one farther away from them.
In the early years of Google, its algorithm favored businesses close to the center of a given city or its “centroid.” This was partly because Google wasn’t as good at detecting the location of the searcher as they are now. It defaulted to showing businesses in the areas with the highest population density.
Nowadays, this factor has declined in importance. Especially for mobile searches where Google has a precise idea of where you are. Google has also partially improved at detecting desktop searchers’ location information through surreptitious collection means.
A physical store in the city of your customer’s search question
The second factor is having an address in the city in which your customer is searching. If your customer is searching in Seattle, your Tacoma or Bellevue-based coffee shop won’t appear. This is simply because it’s irrelevant to the customer’s search.
Short of opening additional locations to target areas where high concentrations of your customers are searching, there’s not much you can do to optimize for these ranking factors. Still, you should be aware of their importance.
Google Business Profile Insights
Google provides a free, lightweight analytics package as part of GBP. This gives you a basic sense of how customers and potential customers view and interact with your listing.
Insights show how often your listing appears in plain old search vs. Google Maps. It also shows the number of clicks to your website, requests for driving directions, phone calls, and more.
There’s also a breakdown of how many customers see your listing for direct searches (for your business specifically) vs. discovery searches (for businesses in your category). While no one outside of Google is entirely sure how they calculate the discovery number, it’s probably as good a barometer for the overall strength of your local SEO as any, mainly if you track it over time.
Troubleshooting listing issues
The most typical GMB troubleshooting issue continues to be duplicate listings for the same business. While it’s gotten harder to detect duplicate listings, it’s much easier to close them.
The first step to identifying duplicates is to search for your business name on Google. If it looks like multiple listings refer to your business, select the one you’d like to report as a duplicate and click “Suggest an Edit.” Follow the suggestions to have the listing marked as duplicate.
Google support staff are generally responsive to these reports within a reasonable time. If you continue to have trouble, ask multiple people—co-workers, friends, family members, or relatives—to report the same problem, and it’s more likely Google will look at it. If your issue seems particularly thorny, you’re most likely to get a response by tweeting @googlemybiz, the official Twitter support channel for Google Business Profile.
Some time ago, Google added a new feature to the Google My Business dashboard. A feature that allows you to manage your reviews and report reviews for removal. You can also check the status of reviews you’ve already reported here. Keep in mind that Google will only remove reviews that violate their policies, such as irrelevant or offensive content.
Structured data and Yoast Local SEO
Google increasingly depends on structured data to determine what your site is about and which elements represent what. This is true for your business information, including the information that Google Business Profile uses. Make sure you add the correct structured data to your site. Enhance your NAP details, opening hours, reviews, product information, et cetera, with Schema.org data. This will make it much easier for Google to determine the validity of your listing. Several tools can help you with this, including our Yoast Local SEO plugin.
Local SEO is critical, even with Google Business Profile
So, you should activate and maintain your Google My Business account and make it awesome. But to get the most out of your listings and to get good rankings, you must have your site in order as well. Optimize every part of it. Create local content for your chosen keyword and business location and get quality local backlinks to build a solid link profile. Ask customers to review your business onsite or on My Business. Make sure your listing is active and attractive; as we said, inaccurate profiles are no good.
Edwin is an experienced strategic content specialist. Before joining Yoast, he worked for a top-tier web design magazine, where he developed a keen understanding of how to create great content.
Ecommerce businesses always look for ways to improve their online presence to drive sales. Google Merchant Center (GMC) is an essential tool for achieving this, as it helps businesses showcase their products across Google’s ecosystem. This guide aims to provide retailers with an understanding of GMC. It offers useful insights on optimizing product listings and enhancing visibility on Google Shopping.
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What is Google Merchant Center?
Google Merchant Center (GMC) is a free-to-use platform for ecommerce businesses that want to use Google’s extensive reach. It is a centralized hub where retailers can upload and manage product data. With this, business owners can make their products visible across various services such as Search, Maps, YouTube, and Google Shopping. Merchant Center is an important part of the ecommerce SEO puzzle.
The homepage of Google Merchant Center
Google Merchant Center Next is now live
With the recent upgrade to Merchant Center Next, the platform offers a more streamlined and intuitive experience. Now, it’s much easier to manage products and improve their performance.
After signing up and logging in, retailers get access to features like Product Studio, an AI-powered tool for creating product images and videos. This tool generates tailored product assets, improves image quality, and removes backgrounds. Plus, the unified product list also allows omnichannel merchants to manage online and local inventory seamlessly.
The new analytics tab provides comprehensive insights into market trends and pricing strategies. For instance, the Pricing tab in Merchant Center Analytics provides retailers with valuable insights into how their product prices compare to those seen by customers on Google.
The Google Merchant Center Next is much easier to use and comes with great new features
This tool allows merchants to evaluate their pricing strategies by seeing if their products are more expensive, cheaper, or comparable to those competitors offer. The tab offers a breakdown across various brands and products, identifying those with significant price differences. In addition, it also provides sale price suggestions designed to make you more competitive.
Merchant Center Next also has a much better design, with intuitive navigation and easy website verification options. Finally, merchants have an easy-to-understand interface to manage their product information and optimize their presence on Google. The platform’s advanced analytics tools offer a better view of business performance.
The benefits of using Merchant Center
Google Merchant Center offers significant advantages for ecommerce businesses that focus on sales growth. It increases visibility by allowing products to appear in Google Shopping results and ads, reaching millions of potential customers. This broader audience increases conversion chances.
The platform enhances the shopping experience by providing detailed product listings with high-quality images and descriptions. This helps customers make quick, informed decisions, boosting conversion rates.
GMC also provides data-driven insights through its analytics tools. These tools help businesses optimize product listings by analyzing metrics like pricing, clicks, and conversions, improving their ecommerce strategy.
Additionally, GMC supports both free and paid listings. Free listings enhance visibility for smaller businesses without extra costs, while paid ads more effectively target specific customer segments.
Integration with Google’s ecosystem is seamless. It connects with Google Analytics and Google Ads, offering a comprehensive view of marketing efforts and improving ROI measurement.
Lastly, GMC gives businesses flexibility and control over product presentation and placement. This ensures marketing efforts align with business goals. An AI-powered tool like the Product Studio also helps build robust product data, enhancing efficiency.
Setting up Google Merchant Center
You’ll need to set up a GMC account to use Google’s network to improve your ecommerce business. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you through the process:
Enter your business name, address, and contact details. This information will be used across the various features and tools in GMC. Specify your business model, whether you sell products online, in a physical store, or both. This flexibility allows GMC to tailor its features to suit your business needs.
Verify and claim your website:
Follow the instructions for the method you choose to complete the verification process. You can use an HTML file upload, an HTML tag, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, a code via a business email address, or an ecommerce platform (like Shopify, WooCommerce, or Wix).
Configure shipping and tax settings:
Set up shipping options and tax information. These settings are important as they affect how your products appear in listings and ads. Highlight any special offers like free shipping to attract more customers. Comply with Google’s shipping and tax information requirements to avoid disapprovals.
Add product information:
Once your account is set up, add your product information. This involves creating a product feed, which we will cover later.
Integrating with third-party platforms
Managing product data manually can be time-consuming and prone to errors. You can automate this process by integrating Google Merchant Center with third-party ecommerce platforms. Using this process helps your product listings be consistently updated and accurate.
It’s easy to connect your ecommerce platform. In your Merchant Center account, navigate to the “Settings” menu and select “Data sources” and “Add product source” to link it. Follow the on-screen instructions to connect your platform (e.g., Shopify). This typically involves authorizing the connection and selecting the data you wish to sync.
Adding product data sources or feeds is also easier in Google Merchant Center
After integration, you can manage your products directly within Merchant Center. Make any necessary updates or modifications to ensure your listings remain competitive and compliant with Google’s policies.
Benefits of integrating your ecommerce platform
There are many benefits to integrating your ecommerce platform with Google Merchant Center. For one, you get automatic updates. So product information, including images, prices, and descriptions, is automatically synced from your ecommerce platform to GMC. This eliminates the need for manual data entry and reduces the risk of discrepancies.
Integrating also leads to streamlined management, as you can manage product data directly from your ecommerce platform. As a result, you’ll free up time and resources to focus on other aspects of your business. It should also lead to fewer errors in your product data. Automated syncing minimizes human errors, so the product information displayed on Google is always accurate and up-to-date.
Merchant Center product data feeds
Product data feeds (or data sources as they are now called) are the backbone of your Google Merchant Center account. These serve as the primary source of information that Google uses to display your products across its platforms. You should optimize these feeds to represent your products accurately and reach the right audience.
What is a product data feed/data source?
A product data feed or data source is a structured file containing detailed information about your products. This file includes attributes such as product titles, descriptions, prices, and images. Google uses this data to create Shopping ads and listings, so keeping it accurate and complete is critical.
Methods of adding products
Google Merchant Center offers multiple methods for uploading product data, providing flexibility to fit your business’s unique needs.
Automatic addition from your online store
Google can automatically add products from your online store using the structured data markup (schema.org) on your product pages. This method ensures that any changes made on your website, such as price updates or product availability, are reflected in Merchant Center. Simply provide your store URL and implement structured data markup on all product pages to enable automatic updates.
Connecting ecommerce platforms
We’ve already mentioned this option before. Connect platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce to Google Merchant Center to sync product data automatically. This integration ensures product information is consistently updated without manual intervention, reducing errors and saving time.
File uploads
Upload product data using a file (e.g., TSV, TXT, XML). This versatile method allows you to compile data from multiple sources into a single file. Make sure to use proper formatting to avoid errors. You can also host the file at a URL for daily syncing with Merchant Center.
Google Sheets template
You can also use a Google Sheets template to manage product data. Any changes made in the spreadsheet automatically sync with Merchant Center. This provides a user-friendly interface for managing data, with automatic updates ensuring consistency.
Manual product entry
You can manually enter product details one by one in Google Merchant Center. This is ideal for small inventories or specific product updates. It allows you to add, edit, or delete products as needed easily.
Content API for Shopping
The Content API for Shopping is a powerful tool that allows developers to programmatically manage their Google Merchant Center accounts. It offers a more dynamic and efficient way to handle large or complex product inventories. This interface lets you automate updates and maintain accurate product data across Google’s platforms.
The elements of a product data feed
Optimizing your product data source involves attention to several key elements:
Product titles: To improve search visibility, use clear, descriptive titles with relevant keywords. Avoid using promotional text or excessive punctuation.
Product descriptions: Provide detailed and accurate descriptions, highlighting unique features and specifications. Include relevant keywords naturally.
Images: Use high-quality images with a plain background. Make sure images are clear, professional, and accurately represent the product.
Prices: Keep pricing current and competitive. Keep consistency between the price on your website and in the data feed.
Availability: Update product availability regularly to reflect current stock levels. Use attributes such as “in stock,” “out of stock,” or “available for pre-order.”
Unique product identifiers: Include GTINs, MPNs, and brand information to help Google accurately categorize and display your products.
Maintaining your Merchant Center account
Regularly checking your GMC account is essential for identifying opportunities and fixing issues. It has various account monitoring tools, such as the overview page. This page provides a snapshot of your account’s performance. It highlights key metrics such as product status and performance trends. Use this page to identify items needing attention and assess the impact of recent changes.
You can use Google Merchant Center’s Products tool to identify errors and issues within your product data feed. Regularly check the “Needs attention” section for warnings and errors. Here, you’ll find missing attributes or policy violations so you can fix them to avoid product disapprovals.
The new version of Merchant Center includes a much-improved analytics section. You’ll find detailed performance reports to analyze pricing, clicks, impressions, and conversion rates here. Use these insights to understand customer behavior and make informed decisions to optimize your product listings and campaigns.
Common issues and how to fix them
Addressing issues in your Google Merchant Center account is crucial for keeping products visible and compliant. Common problems include data errors, policy violations, disapprovals, and performance issues.
For data errors, update your product feed to meet Google’s specifications, correcting any missing attributes or pricing discrepancies. Comply with Google’s Shopping policies to prevent account suspension.
Review disapproved products to identify and fix issues, then request a re-review. Optimize product titles, descriptions, and images to boost relevance. Adjust bids and targeting in Google Ads to improve visibility and reach.
Strategies for performance improvement
Implement effective strategies to boost your Google Merchant Center performance. Update your product data feed with accurate pricing and availability. Enhance product listings with detailed descriptions and high-quality images, and consider adding ratings to build trust.
Use Merchant Promotions to highlight special offers and leverage Google Ads’ audience targeting to reach specific customer segments. Test and optimize campaigns with various ad formats and bidding strategies to refine your approach. You can sustain growth and maximize your ecommerce success by actively managing your GMC account.
To maximize Google Merchant Center’s potential, leverage advanced features like Local Inventory Ads to enhance product visibility and attract local shoppers. Try out Product Studio for AI-powered content creation, streamlining the production of high-quality product assets.
Enhance customer experience by providing clear return policies and ensuring secure data collection. Integrate with tools like Google Analytics and Google Ads for comprehensive insights and targeted marketing strategies.
Google Product Studio uses AI to help you improve your product listings
All about Google Merchant Center
Google Merchant Center is an indispensable tool for ecommerce businesses that aim to boost their online visibility and sales. By following this guide, SEO experts can harness the full potential of GMC, driving growth and achieving ecommerce success. Login to your GMC account today, start optimizing and watch your business thrive.
Edwin is an experienced strategic content specialist. Before joining Yoast, he worked for a top-tier web design magazine, where he developed a keen understanding of how to create great content.
Over the years, Shopify has become a leading platform for entrepreneurs looking to tap into the dropshipping model. This approach allows sellers to offer a wide range of products without the hassle of managing inventory or logistics. Understanding how to use SEO effectively is crucial if you want to fully take advantage of the opportunities dropshipping with Shopify provides.
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Understanding dropshipping on Shopify
Dropshipping is a distinct way for sellers to approach ecommerce. Dropshipping helps you start and scale an online retail business with minimal financial risk by eliminating the need for inventory management and upfront product investments.
What is dropshipping?
Dropshipping is a fulfillment method where a seller operates an online storefront without holding any physical inventory. Instead, the seller partners with third-party suppliers who manage inventory and logistics, shipping products directly to the end customer. This business model minimizes upfront costs and overhead, enabling you to offer a wide array of products and swiftly adapt to market trends. However, success in dropshipping hinges on strategic supplier relationships, effective digital marketing, and exceptional customer service to meet consumer expectations.
Key benefits of dropshipping
It’s very easy to build an online business based on dropshipping. It doesn’t cost that much to get started. Since there’s no need to purchase inventory upfront, you can start your businesses with less capital.
This business offers great flexibility and scalability. With no physical inventory, you can easily add or remove products and scale your business according to demand. The same goes for the choice of products. Access to huge numbers of products from suppliers worldwide allows you to diversify your offerings and cater to customer needs.
Last but not least, it doesn’t matter where you are located. You can manage your online business from anywhere worldwide with an internet connection.
The ethics of dropshipping
Dropshipping can sometimes raise questions about ethics, especially as more people care about sustainability and fair treatment. As a dropshipper, you can positively impact by choosing suppliers who treat their workers well and use environmentally friendly materials. This means offering products made under fair conditions and that don’t harm the environment. Being clear about your commitment to these values can help you earn the trust of customers who care about making responsible choices.
Sustainable packaging and efficient shipping methods can further show your dedication to protecting our planet. Focusing on ethical practices and following rules and regulations helps you build a business that thrives and supports the well-being of people and the environment.
You can build a successful dropshipping business, but it often requires more dedication and effort than many initially expected. Although dropshipping takes out the logistics part, the other challenges of launching and running an ecommerce business remain. As the owner, you’re tasked with handling returns, managing repair or warranty issues, responding to customer inquiries, and ensuring your products are both high quality and legally compliant. These are the kind of responsibilities many frequently underestimate.
Why choose Shopify for dropshipping?
Shopify is a flexible and user-friendly ecommerce platform that makes the dropshipping process easier. It offers seamless integration with various dropshipping apps, allowing sellers to easily add products to their stores. Shopify’s expansive ecosystem supports everything from payment processing to marketing, making it an ideal choice for dropshippers of all experience levels. With Shopify, you can start a dropshipping business with minimal investment.
Even some multi-million dollar companies have started as a dropshipping business, like Gymshark
How to start dropshipping on Shopify
Select a niche that aligns with your interests and market demand to start dropshipping with Shopify. Research potential products and reliable suppliers using Shopify’s app store to find tools for product selection and order fulfillment.
Once your store is set up, create an engaging user experience and optimize your product listings. Effective marketing strategies should also be implemented to attract and retain customers.
Choosing Shopify as your dropshipping platform gives you access to a powerful toolset. These tools help you simplify your operations and enhance your business’s growth potential. Whether starting from scratch or looking to scale an existing venture, Shopify gives you the flexibility and support you need to thrive in ecommerce.
A quick start guide on how to drop ship on Shopify
Starting a dropshipping business on Shopify is straightforward. Here’s a step-by-step guide to get you started:
Create a Shopify account. Go to Shopify’s website and sign up for a free trial. Once you’re ready to launch, choose a pricing plan that suits your business needs.
Select a niche and products. Research potential niche markets that interest you and have demand. Use tools like Google Trends and market research to select products that appeal to your target audience.
Find reliable suppliers: Use Shopify’s app store to find dropshipping apps like Zendrop or Spocket to source products. Choose suppliers known for quality products and reliable shipping.
Set up your Shopify store. Customize your store with a memorable name and logo. Use Shopify’s themes to design your storefront and create a seamless shopping experience.
Add products to your store. Import products from your dropshipping app to your Shopify store. Write detailed product descriptions and set competitive pricing.
Configure payment and shipping settings. Set up payment gateways like PayPal or Shopify Payments and determine shipping rates and options that suit your business model.
Launch your store. Review all settings and ensure everything functions smoothly. Publish your store and start marketing to attract customers.
Shopify supports a ton of dropshipping platforms
SEO is key for Shopify dropshipping success
If you are in the dropshipping business, you are probably not alone. Even if you have picked a good niche, there’s still competition. To get traffic and potential customers, you need SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Shopify SEO is crucial for the success of any dropshipping store.
With SEO, you optimize your online store to improve its visibility in search engine results. The goal is to attract organic traffic without relying heavily on paid advertising. If you implement these SEO strategies well, you can significantly enhance visibility, drive traffic, and increase sales for your store.
SEO strategies for Shopify dropshipping
SEO for drop shippers is not that different from other types of ecommerce SEO. The main goals are getting your site structured properly, well-optimized in terms of performance, and filled with excellent, well-researched, and targeted content. This will help Google find, index, and rank your products.
But remember that getting Google to index and rank brand-new websites is harder than ever. Getting Google to see your site positively takes a lot of work. It will take quite a while before every one of your products is indexed—if that even happens. Be sure to set up a Search Console account to see your store’s indexing status and use the feedback provided to improve your store.
Last but not least, you should always monitor what you are doing. Analyze your SEO performance using tools like Google Analytics and Shopify Analytics. Monitor key metrics such as organic traffic, engagement, and conversion rates — find issues, fix and improve.
Keyword research and strategy
Keyword research is key in all types of SEO. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, and Semrush to identify relevant keywords that potential customers are searching for. Focus on long-tail keywords that reflect specific search intents, such as “eco-friendly yoga mats” or “durable waterproof hiking boots for women.” After that, develop a keyword map that aligns with your product categories and pages, and make sure that each page targets specific keywords without overlap.
On-page SEO optimization
Optimizing individual pages and writing unique content is a major part of drop shipper SEO. Write unique and engaging product descriptions highlighting each product’s benefits and features. Avoid using generic manufacturer descriptions to ensure originality and relevance.
Next, structure your content with headers and subheaders. Use H1, H2, and H3 tags to structure your content. Each page should have a clear hierarchy, with primary keywords in the H1 tag and supporting keywords in subheaders.
Write compelling product titles and meta descriptions that include target keywords. Use tools like Yoast SEO for Shopify to optimize these elements, and make sure they are engaging and informative.
Technical SEO
For the technical part of the story, focus on site speed and mobile optimization. Make that your Shopify store loads quickly and is mobile-friendly. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to identify and fix performance issues. Also, make sure there are no security and trust issues on your website. Do make sure your site is accessible and complies with web accessibility standards.
Image optimization
Image SEO is a big part of SEO for dropshippers. Use unique images if possible. Make sure images are compressed and optimized for fast loading times without compromising quality. Shopify does a lot of this by default, but it doesn’t hurt to keep an eye on it. Also, use descriptive file names and alt attributes for all product images. This improves image search visibility and enhances accessibility for users with visual impairments.
Content marketing and blogging
You should invest in content marketing to help rank for more terms and show authority. Develop a content marketing strategy with a blog featuring informative and engaging content related to your niche. Topics could include “The Benefits of Sustainable Fashion” or “How to Choose the Right Yoga Mat.” Use internal links within blog posts to direct readers to related product pages, enhancing the user experience and SEO value.
Schema markup and rich snippets
Proper schema structured data implementation for your products is essential if you want them to stand out in the search results. Add product and related properties to your schema markup to provide search engines with easy-to-understand data about your products. This can enhance search result listings with rich snippets, such as product ratings, shipping policies, and prices.
Building quality backlinks
Focus on acquiring high-quality backlinks from authoritative and relevant websites. Engage in guest blogging, participate in industry forums, and collaborate with influencers to gain valuable links. Avoid blackhat tactics like buying links or using link farms, as these can lead to penalties from search engines.
Making the most of Yoast SEO for Shopify
Use the Yoast SEO app for Shopify to streamline your SEO efforts. This tool offers insights and recommendations for optimizing content, managing meta tags, and improving readability, making it easier to implement effective SEO strategies. It even has AI-powered tools to help you write titles and meta descriptions.
Yoast SEO for Shopify has a suite of tools that help you improve the visibility of your dropshipping store
More SEO tips
There’s always more to do with Shopify SEO, so keep working on your dropshipping store. For instance, if your dropshipping store has a local component, optimize for local SEO by setting up a Google My Business profile and ensuring consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) information across directories.
You can also create specialized landing pages for specific campaigns or product categories. These pages can target niche keywords and provide a focused experience for visitors, improving conversion rates.
AI and automation tools for dropshipping SEO
It’s 2024, so you can use AI tools to enhance your SEO strategy and speed up the work. Use AI to generate content ideas, optimize product descriptions, and analyze competitive keywords. Remember to give it the human touch, though!
You need SEO to succeed with Shopify dropshipping
SEO is an important component of a successful Shopify dropshipping business. While it requires patience and consistent effort, the rewards for increased visibility and sales potential are significant. Implementing these SEO strategies, including tools like Yoast SEO for Shopify, helps you position your Shopify store for long-term success in the dropshipping business.
Edwin is an experienced strategic content specialist. Before joining Yoast, he worked for a top-tier web design magazine, where he developed a keen understanding of how to create great content.
As webshop owners, we continuously refine our checkout process by monitoring shopping cart abandonment and running A/B tests. Why do some users fail to make purchases even after adding products to their carts? This article explores that question while considering diverse perspectives about abandoned shopping carts.
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Shopping cart abandonment occurs when online shoppers add items to their virtual cart but leave the site without completing the purchase. This often results from unexpected costs, complex checkout processes, or limited payment options. Addressing these issues is vital for ecommerce businesses to boost sales and improve customer satisfaction. Optimizing this is a huge part of ecommerce SEO and Shopify SEO.
Shopping cart abandonment continues to challenge ecommerce businesses, with statistics showing that nearly 70% of potential purchases are left incomplete. This is a huge annual loss. While this represents a significant economic issue, exploring it unveils a complex mix of cultural, technological, and behavioral factors.
Economic and behavioral insights
The many abandoned shopping carts may reflect broader consumer behavior trends, especially in a cautious post-pandemic environment. Consumers are increasingly deliberate about spending, influenced by economic factors like inflation and financial uncertainty. This trend aligns with the behavioral economic principle of loss aversion, where the fear of making a poor purchase decision outweighs the potential benefits.
Cultural variations in shopping behavior
Cultural influences profoundly affect shopping behaviors, with some cultures prioritizing the experience over the transaction. In regions where shopping is viewed as a social activity, higher abandoned shopping cart rates might occur as consumers enjoy browsing without the intent to purchase immediately. This cultural perspective invites businesses to consider localized strategies that respect and leverage these social shopping practices.
For some, shopping isn’t just a functional task; it’s an enjoyable activity akin to window shopping. These users may add items to carts for fun rather than purchase. Online window shopping could explain some cart abandonment, as users may use carts as temporary wish lists, planning to revisit them later.
Technological and psychological dimensions
Technological advancements, such as predictive AI, offer promising solutions to reduce abandoned shopping carts by addressing consumer hesitations. However, this raises privacy concerns, prompting the need for transparent data practices. Psychologically, shoppers may experience decision fatigue or become overwhelmed by choice, leading to abandonment. Simplifying choices and providing clear, concise information can alleviate these issues.
Ethical and environmental considerations
The rise of sustainability and ethical consumption reshapes consumer expectations. As environmental concerns become more prominent, consumers demand transparency and ethical practices from retailers. Businesses that fail to meet these expectations risk losing customers who prioritize these values, highlighting the need for authentic corporate responsibility.
Alternative shopping models
Community-based buying and cooperatives represent alternative shopping models emphasizing collective purchasing power and shared values. These models can reduce abandonment by fostering community and commitment among consumers. Additionally, they challenge traditional capitalist paradigms, offering a collaborative approach to consumption.
Nike has a nice and clean shopping cart with options to save favorite items quickly
Causes of cart abandonment
The reasons for cart abandonment can be surprisingly straightforward, often overlooked during checkout optimization. While many focus on preventing abandonment, it’s crucial to understand why users utilize shopping carts initially. As we discussed, could cultural practices or economic conditions influence shopping behavior, leading to varying patterns of cart usage across different regions?
Research by Close and Kukar-Kinney (2010) highlights that the primary focus shouldn’t solely be on abandonment but also the initial use of shopping carts. Many assume users add products to carts to buy them, but this isn’t always true. A significant portion of users treat shopping carts as wish lists or use them to calculate total costs, including potential hidden fees.
This raises the question: How do digital shopping habits compare to traditional in-store shopping, and what lessons can be drawn from other industries, such as hospitality or travel, where reservations and bookings often follow similar patterns?
Kaufman-Scarborough and Lindquist (2002) also note that shopping carts serve purposes beyond immediate purchases. This implies that “abandonment” might be an oversimplification. Some users explore and tally future purchases without intending to buy immediately.
Session time-out concerns
Session time-out refers to the automatic expiration of a user’s shopping session on an ecommerce website after a period of inactivity. When a session times out, the items in the user’s shopping cart may be lost or require re-addition, leading to frustration and potential abandonment. This technical limitation can significantly impact the shopping experience, particularly for users who take longer to make purchase decisions or are interrupted during the process.
To mitigate abandonment caused by session timeouts, you can extend session durations. You can also implement persistent shopping carts or reminders to encourage users to complete their purchases before the session expires.
Challenges in understanding cart usage
Determining why users abandon carts and how they use them is challenging but possible. Studies and enhanced ecommerce analytics in tools like Google Analytics can provide insights. Exit intent surveys, which appear when users attempt to leave, can offer valuable feedback on abandonment reasons.
The famous Baymard Institute statistics show an average cart abandonment rate of 70.19% (as of September 2024), highlighting the need for comprehensive analysis. Comparative studies across different retail sectors or geographic markets reveal unique patterns or universal truths about consumer behavior.
The Baymard Institute identified several causes of cart abandonment. Here are the main ones:
48% Extra costs too high (shipping, tax, fees)
26% The site wanted me to create an account
25% I didn’t trust the site with my credit card information
23% Delivery was too slow
22% Too long/complicated checkout process
21% I couldn’t see/calculate the total order cost up-front
18% Returns policy wasn’t satisfactory
17% Website had errors/crashed
13% There weren’t enough payment methods
9% The credit card was declined
There are many opportunities to apply insights from mobile app user experience research to improve mobile shopping cart processes. Technological advancements, such as AI and machine learning, can also personalize and streamline the shopping experience on mobile devices.
Suggestions for improvement
To effectively address cart abandonment and its alternative uses, we must consider a range of strategies that incorporate diverse perspectives and innovative thinking. Here are some suggestions that help improve the shopping cart experience.
1. Transparent pricing and costs
While clearly displaying prices and additional costs like shipping is fundamental, consider how cultural perceptions of pricing transparency might vary. In some regions, consumers expect negotiation, while others value fixed, upfront pricing. Brands can experiment with dynamic pricing models or offer region-specific promotions to align with local expectations.
2. Diverse and flexible payment options
Beyond merely outlining payment methods, consider integrating payment innovations such as digital wallets or microfinancing options. These can cater to tech-savvy consumers and those with limited access to traditional banking. Offering payment flexibility reduces barriers and aligns with the growing trend toward financial inclusivity.
3. Streamlined checkout process
Defining checkout steps is crucial, but personalizing the process is equally important. Use data analytics to tailor the checkout experience based on user behavior, such as pre-filling information for returning customers or offering fast-track options for those in a hurry. To minimize friction, consider implementing one-click checkouts, similar to Amazon’s model.
4. Wish lists and alternative engagements
Implementing wish lists is a practical way to differentiate between genuine abandonments and alternative cart uses. However, expanding beyond traditional wish lists to include social commerce features — like sharing wish lists with friends or integrating with social media platforms — can enhance the shopping experience. This builds community and taps into the influence of peer recommendations. Retargeting and cart recovery email campaigns are also valid options.
5. Social commerce and community-driven experiences
Social commerce and community-driven shopping are reshaping how consumers interact with brands. By creating platforms where users can collaborate, share reviews, or engage in group buying, businesses can foster a sense of community that reduces shopping cart abandonment. These experiences transform shopping from a solitary activity to a shared journey, increasing consumer commitment.
6. Ethical and sustainable practices
Aligning with consumer values on sustainability and ethics can mitigate cart abandonment. Clearly communicate how products meet ethical standards, whether through sustainable sourcing or fair trade certification. Transparency can reassure consumers and reduce shopping cart abandonment driven by ethical concerns.
7. Technological integration and innovation
Explore technologies like augmented reality to offer virtual try-ons or 3D product visualizations. These innovations can reduce uncertainty and enhance consumer confidence, particularly in fashion and home furnishings, where physical interaction with products is traditionally valued.
8. Feedback and iterative improvement
Encourage consumer feedback at various shopping journeys to identify pain points leading to abandonment. Based on this feedback, implement iterative improvements, ensuring the shopping experience evolves in line with consumer expectations and technological advancements.
These strategies give businesses insight into the issues and solutions that reduce shopping cart abandonment rates. As a business owner, you want to improve the overall shopping experience for your customers. This comprehensive approach addresses practical and emotional aspects of consumer behaviors. The goal should be to foster loyalty and encourage conversion in a difficult ecommerce environment.
Stumptown Coffee Roasters offers different ways to shop, including a subscription and an option to donate part of the purchase
How do you handle shopping cart abandonment on your site? Do you provide wish lists? Consider these insights to optimize your website’s shopping experience. Maybe you borrowed other innovative strategies from other industries or cultures for your approach to reducing cart abandonment? If not, take a look around and get inspired!
Edwin is an experienced strategic content specialist. Before joining Yoast, he worked for a top-tier web design magazine, where he developed a keen understanding of how to create great content.
The summer has just ended. Should you already start preparing for Black Friday and the holiday season? Yes! They’re the biggest sales of the year, and ranking in Google is something you take time to do. It’s never too early to start getting your deals ready. So, if you have an online shop or an ecommerce store, let’s start working on your holiday season and Black Friday SEO immediately!
Don’t forget that Black Friday (November 29, 2024) and Cyber Monday (December 2, 2024) are kicking off this year’s holiday shopping season. You can set up a lot of content for all occasions. In this post, we’ll review some things you can do to prepare!
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Today, people are used to shopping online. It’s easy and convenient. You don’t have to travel only to find something out of stock. Plus, online stores often offer payment plans. Shopping online is so popular that online sales in the USA during the holiday season hit a record of $221 billion last year! And the numbers will only continue to rise. That’s why it’s safe to assume that people will buy many (if not most) holiday gifts online this year.
Staying on top of trends to prepare for the holiday season is good. E-commerce is still growing, and consumers expect more every year. Here are some actionable tips for the upcoming Black Friday and holiday season to improve your SEO:
Discount deals and alternative payment options (Buy now, pay later) should be part of your ecommerce strategy
Brands should provide a consistent purchasing experience across digital/online and physical stores
To minimize returns, brands should make their product pages as comprehensive as possible
Holiday season marketing campaigns should be tailored to each platform to ensure maximum effectiveness
Online is where it’s at
Of course, in-store or curbside pick-up will still prove popular. However, most people research their ecommerce purchases online – sometimes weeks in advance! So don’t be surprised when the holiday shopping season starts well before Black Friday and continues for weeks.
Extending Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and other holiday season online deals for a few days or weeks can be a good idea. This is especially true if you want to prevent huge crowds from gathering at your store on a specific day. That won’t be a good shopping experience for anyone involved, so spreading these deals over an extended time is probably better.
Start preparing in time
Dive into the data you amassed during previous Black Friday and Cyber Monday events, and see if you can come up with improvements for your holiday season SEO. Bear in mind that it takes a while for content to rank. So, to keep up with the competition, try to get your content in gear at least 45 days ahead. That’s often recommended. Of course, you can always start preparing earlier if that works better for you. Your schedule could look something like this:
45 Days in advance: Post your promotion to your website calendar and post a save-the-date post on social media and in your email newsletter).
7 Days in advance: Post upcoming events/promotions on social media and via email. Try to encourage other (small) businesses to share it with their followers.
1 Day in advance: Post an event reminder post on social media.
It’s a good rule to remember these steps and time frames. However, you can do much more than set up new pages and renew old ones. Let’s look at a few practical tips.
1. Do holiday season keyword research
Keyword research is important all year, but especially during the season when your online store starts having big sales. You have probably worked on this research previously, but now is the time to dive in again. There are always things to learn, like developments in your industry, changes in consumer behavior, or new trends and topics to discuss.
Start early with your research to give yourself enough time to produce high-quality, helpful content that helps reach those new audiences. While using generative AI tools to generate Black Friday SEO content for your ecommerce is enticing, please refrain from doing so. Generative AI can help you do your job but can’t replace your valuable insights and opinions.
2. Set up holiday season gift pages
First, we must consider what category or particular landing pages make sense for the upcoming holidays. You can always set up pages like ‘Best gifts for parents/millennials/teens’, ‘Newest deals for your 6/10/12-year-old’, and ‘Best friend/grandparents/coworker discounts’. You could also think of ‘Top 10 gifts for outdoor/skiing/parasailing enthusiasts’ and ‘Top 3 deals for stay-at-home parents’, etcetera.
To increase the chances of your gift pages ranking, boost their internal linking structure. You can also link the previous all-year holiday season pages, such as specific Christmas landing pages (‘Top 7/10/25 gifts for under the Christmas tree’) to boost these when the time has come. That could be around the 45-day mark, but we would be okay with stretching that to 60 days. You’ll need to give Google and other search engines enough time to follow your links and find your specific holiday season SEO landing pages with deals.
Social media like X and Pinterest — though this is technically a visual search engine — can play a massive role in the success of your (online) holiday season sale. Take Pinterest, for instance. Raise your hand if you or your spouse has a Pinterest Christmas wish list. Many people do. If you get your products on people’s wish lists, that can positively impact your sales.
While you’re at it, don’t forget to share your holiday season gift pages on Facebook and Instagram. In the previous section, we’ve mentioned the top 10 lists. We all know these still work pretty well on social media. Yoast SEO can help you optimize your social media posts before you share them.
Email marketing
Last but not least, remember your email marketing! For many companies, newsletters provide a steady stream of income. Be sure to plan a good campaign for your newsletters.
For example, we recommend setting up holiday gift guides and sharing these. You can create an excellent overview of many gifts that many people will enjoy. ELLE and Target have pages like that, and so do more companies.
4. Introduce new products
The holiday season is an excellent time to pitch new products. If you know of potential bestsellers for the upcoming holiday season, start writing content about these products now. You can compare it to tech sites writing about concept iPhones, features that Apple might add, etc.
The more you write about new products upfront, the more likely the sales pages for these products will rank when it matters. You should link all pages you made in advance to that one main page you’ll set up when the product is released and available to buy. Treat that page like cornerstone content.
5. Add structured data to your product pages
When adding or changing your product pages to fit the holiday season, don’t forget to optimize them. Check, for instance, whether you’ve added structured data to your product pages. Rich results that show ratings and prices can give you an edge over your competitors. Our WooCommerce SEO plugin, Local SEO plugin, or Yoast SEO for Shopify app can help you do this to improve your holiday season!
Example of a product appearing in the search results if you use structured data.
Don’t forget to optimize your product feeds for Black Friday SEO. This maximizes visibility and sales during this high-traffic online shopping period. Start by ensuring all product information, such as titles, descriptions, prices, and availability, is accurate and up-to-date. Check if the products that need them have relevant Black Friday keywords to enhance discoverability. Use high-quality, clear images to showcase your product.
Use the promotions feature in Google Merchant Center to prominently display special deals and discounts for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This way, you’ll make your offers more attractive to potential buyers. Please update your feed regularly to reflect real-time inventory changes and fix errors to maintain product visibility.
7. Reuse content
There’s no shame in serving old wine in a new bottle. If you have a Black Friday or a Christmas gift guide for 2023, feel free to reuse it in 2024. Update the year and details like popular brands and products for that year. If the slug of your URL is /black-friday-guide-2023/, change it to /black-friday-guide-2024/ around August next year, and redirect the old URL to the new one. No need to create a new page. It would be a waste of nice inbound links not to reuse that old URL. Of course, this is even easier if you don’t include the year in the URL, so /black-friday-guide/ is also an excellent slug.
In the months before the holiday season, you could even simply repost popular posts from last year (a bit adjusted or updated if needed) on social media. Valentine’s Day might even become Secret Santa. Cyber Monday might match your child’s favorite gifts for Ramadan. These are probably small adjustments; perhaps just adding ‘this Ramadan’ to a meta description or title will do.
It’s a good idea to check and optimize your website for speed and mobile use. Trust us; you’ll get these recommendations from an SEO blog or consultant daily. And with good reason! Mobile, site speed, and user experience are essential to get people to spend money on your ecommerce business this Black Friday. When preparing your online store for the holiday sale season, this is as good a time as any to check your mobile website and site speed, and update or improve them if possible.
Investing in local SEO for Black Friday and Christmas shopping is essential for local businesses aiming to attract more customers. Begin by optimizing your Google Business Profile with accurate business information, including address, phone number, business hours, and any special Black Friday/Cyber Monday hours or promotions. Encourage satisfied customers to leave positive reviews. Use local keywords in your content, focusing on terms your community will likely search for, such as “Black Friday deals in [Your City].” Additionally, engage with your local community on social media by promoting special deals to drive more foot traffic to your store.
10. Create a measurement plan
All set? Remember to make a measurement plan to analyze your success. Write down all your plans, then think about how to track all your actions. This is key to knowing what to focus on next year. For detailed instructions on analyzing your Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Cinco de Mayo shopping, read our post with five tips to measure your holiday sales success.
What should you do when the holiday season is over?
How do you handle the product pages of holiday gift sets after the holidays? Even if the gift set or product was a great success, and you want to offer it again next year, it’ll take a while for the page to be relevant again. What is the best way to deal with these pages in the meantime?
Our advice: Keep the pages up. However, you don’t necessarily want them visible to people browsing your site. So, have the page up without linking, then link to it again during the holiday season. This is better than deleting it and starting again.
Conclusion on holiday season SEO
In short, now’s the time to buckle down and start writing holiday gift pages and content for new products. Remember to plan your social media promotion and analytics. After all, you can never start too early when your online business depends on the holiday season. Be prepared; begin now with your SEO. Good luck with your holiday season sale!
Edwin is an experienced strategic content specialist. Before joining Yoast, he worked for a top-tier web design magazine, where he developed a keen understanding of how to create great content.
Standing out in the crowded marketplace is crucial for any online store. For Shopify merchants, optimizing SEO titles and meta descriptions is an important step in gaining visibility and attracting potential customers. AI-driven tools like Yoast SEO for Shopify have made this process more efficient and impactful.
SEO titles and meta descriptions are HTML elements that communicate your web page’s content to search engines and users. While these do not directly impact rankings, these components significantly influence click-through rates (CTR) by acting as your virtual calling card in the search results. A well-crafted meta description can entice users to click on your link over others in search engine results pages (SERPs). While Google loves generating them automatically, you can still influence what they show.
How AI is transforming Shopify SEO
Integrating AI in SEO has changed how we all approach optimization tasks. A ton of innovation is happening right now, from AI tools automating keyword research to content creation and from on-page SEO to providing merchants with deeper insights into user intent and consumer behavior. AI can improve the user experience by predicting user needs and customizing content delivery. Ultimately, we are all looking to boost engagement and SEO performance.
AI-generated features for Yoast SEO
As a merchant, you can streamline your Shopify SEO work using AI in your SEO strategies. Our Yoast SEO for Shopify SEO app uses AI to automatically generate SEO titles and meta descriptions that are both keyword-rich and engaging.
One of the most time-consuming aspects of SEO is crafting unique and engaging titles and meta descriptions for each product and page. We’ve built generative AI technology to speed up this process. Thanks to Yoast AI Generate, we can generate optimized titles and descriptions that align with what search engines and users seek. This saves time and ensures consistency and relevance across your site.
Using Yoast SEO on your Shopify store makes improving your SEO much easier. The app handles technical SEO tasks automatically and gives clear feedback with simple color-coded signals. This makes it perfect for beginners just getting started with SEO while also being powerful enough for experts. Plus, Yoast SEO includes access to helpful courses to boost your knowledge.
It also creates structured data to help your store achieve rich results, making it stand out in search engines. With 24/7 support and straightforward tips for optimizing your content, Yoast SEO tackles common challenges. It helps you save time doing SEO tasks and getting noticed in search results. This way, you can focus more on running your business while ensuring your store is easy to find online.
Of course, you can’t simply do what you want here because there are best practices for crafting SEO titles and meta descriptions for Shopify merchants.
Best practices for SEO titles in Shopify
Incorporate primary keywords early: Place your primary keyword at the beginning of the title to ensure search engines and users immediately understand the page’s relevance.
Branding: Include your store name at the end of the title to increase brand recognition, such as “Buy Eco-Friendly Yoga Mats | YourStoreName.”
Character number: While Google has no hard limit, keep your title length in check to ensure they display fully in search results.
Unique titles for each page: Ensure each product and page has a unique title to avoid duplication and improve search engine understanding.
Use action-oriented language: Encourage clicks with verbs that suggest action, like “Shop,” “Discover,” or “Explore.”
Best practices for meta descriptions in Shopify
And what about meta descriptions? What should you remember while writing or optimizing meta descriptions in Shopify?
Focus on benefits and features: Highlight your products’ unique benefits and features to entice users to click.
Include a call to action: Use language encouraging users to act, such as “Browse our collection today” or “Order now for free shipping.”
Keep it concise and relevant: Ensure the entire description is visible in search results and accurately reflects the page content.
Avoid keyword stuffing: Use keywords naturally and sparingly to avoid making the description look spammy.
Highlight offers and promotions: If applicable, mention any promotions, discounts, or free shipping offers to attract clicks.
Reflect current content and updates: Regularly update meta descriptions to reflect product details, offers, or seasonal campaign changes.
Match user intent: Ensure the description aligns with what users are searching for and provides a clear answer or solution to their query.
Use these best practices to enhance the effectiveness of your SEO titles and meta descriptions. Ultimately, these should improve merchants’ visibility and increase click-through rates in search engine results.
Enhancing your Shopify store’s visibility with our AI-generated SEO features is straightforward. Doing so might boost your search engine performance. If you haven’t installed Yoast SEO for Shopify yet, please do so. It’s an amazing SEO app that helps merchants get results. In the latest release, we’ve added AI-generated features. Install the app from the Shopify App Store and integrate it with your store.
Yoast SEO for Shopify uses generative AI to help you do ecommerce SEO
Once you have optimized your products or pages, scroll down to the Yoast SEO interface’s Title and Meta Description section. Here, you’ll notice a purple button with a sparkle icon: Generate Shopify SEO title or Generate Shopify Meta Description, depending on which you are looking for. Clicking the button will open a modal that shows the Search Appearance preview. It will also show five suggestions for titles or meta descriptions it generated. The AI analyzes your product details, keywords, and user intent to create optimized content.
Carefully review the AI-generated titles and meta descriptions. Ensure they accurately reflect your product details and align with your brand voice. If you are not happy with the first five, hit the button again to have it generate more. Pick the one you are happy with. Make any necessary edits to tailor the content to your specific audience or to highlight unique selling points.
Once you are satisfied with the content, save the changes. Then, track the performance of the updated titles and descriptions using tools like Google Analytics or Shopify analytics tools to assess improvements in CTR and traffic.
It’s now easy for Shopify merchants to improve their SEO in just a few steps — all thanks to AI. These tools can help you aim for greater visibility and more effective engagement with your potential customers.
Conclusion
Titles and meta descriptions are often the first things consumers see from your Shopify store. Optimizing them properly increases visibility and engagement! Yoast SEO for Shopify now makes that process a lot easier. Adopt our AI tools to enhance your SEO strategies and improve your online store’s performance.
Edwin is an experienced strategic content specialist. Before joining Yoast, he worked for a top-tier web design magazine, where he developed a keen understanding of how to create great content.
Our mission at Yoast is ‘SEO for everyone,’ and we believe that Shopify merchants can benefit greatly from SEO. That’s why we built an app that helps you attract more people to your online store: Yoast SEO for Shopify. This app stands out from the crowd because we built it with a team with many, many years of experience in SEO. But how does it attract more people to your store? And what can you do with it? Here, we’ll explain why Yoast SEO for Shopify is the best solution for your online store!
Table of contents
First, a note about SEO
Making your online store a success takes a lot of work. No magic bullet will bring you loads of customers without you having to do anything — and you should not trust those claiming that. We sometimes call SEO “Seriously Effortful Optimization.” Holistic SEO takes time and effort; it’s as simple as that.
Tools like Yoast SEO for Shopify make turning your store into a success story significantly easier, but it still requires sweat and tears. You need to write and improve your product content and continually track whether what you are doing works. If it doesn’t, you should adjust course and try again.
Over time, Shopify merchants like you get to know the tools, the content, and your audience and understand what works and what doesn’t — experience will help you in your commercial journey.
No single app can guarantee instant top rankings and ecommerce success. Instead, it acts as a valuable resource to guide your efforts. Engaging thorough keyword research, optimizing product descriptions, improving site user experience, and building quality backlinks are all essential tasks that improve visibility.
That being said, we built Yoast SEO for Shopify as a helpful guide — a personal SEO assistant, if you will — to help you reach your goals.
Here’s what you can expect when you install Yoast SEO for Shopify.
We are SEO experts
For almost 15 years, Yoast has been building products that help people with WordPress websites with their SEO. With over 13 million active installs and websites ranging in size from the bakery around the corner to some of the most popular, hugest sites on the planet, we’re not afraid to call Yoast SEO the #1 SEO plugin for WordPress.
You might wonder what this has to do with you as a Shopify merchant. Well, we’ve built our Shopify app using all the learnings and SEO expertise we’ve acquired over the years — which is a lot!
This experience resulted in an app that handles much of the technical SEO stuff for you. For example, the latest best practice for meta robots directives, product structured data, correctly setting indexing controls on paginated states, and all of the nuances of how various open graph and SEO settings work together.
What does all of this mean? The takeaway is that these settings are important in how high you end up in the search results. We also have close contact with Google and collaborate with them regularly. This makes it easy for us to stay updated on the latest SEO developments. This helps us constantly improve our app to ensure you stay on top of the latest changes in SEO.
Yoast AI Generate is easy to use and greatly enhances your Shopify SEO work. By clicking the ‘Use AI’ button, the tool will generate five titles or meta descriptions based on the content you are working on. Pick the one you like and save your work. If you are not happy with the options, simply generate five more. Of course, you can always tweak them before applying them. Here’s a guide on how to use the Generate AI feature in Yoast SEO for Shopify.
This is just the start of using the power of generative AI to help you improve your Shopify store!
Get a little help from generate AI with Yoast SEO for Shopify
We make it easier to modify Shopify themes
When you install an SEO app, it needs to change your online store and theme. Don’t worry, this is normal. Depending on the other apps that you’re running, some other modifications will already have been made to your theme files.
Unfortunately, many of the new apps you install will apply their changes to what’s already there. That’s why ecommerce stores often end up with mismatched, malformed, and missing bits of (SEO) code, especially if you’ve historically used multiple apps.
The Yoast SEO for Shopify app is smart. It conditionally removes potentially conflicting code and cleanly outputs its own rather than forcing it on top of what’s already there. The app also helps you clean up your store when you delete it, should you choose to do that.
Our structured data is comprehensive
Structured data helps Google and other search engines better understand your pages, benefiting your rankings. Our structured data approach does a great job of connecting and describing products and pages. We don’t output ‘bits and pieces’ of structured data. We tie the structured data together and output it in a way that minimizes conflict and overlap. Of course, you can decide which pieces you want to turn on or off.
Our developer documentation has more technical insights into our Schema structured data implementation.
We support Shopify review apps
Structured data also allows your customers’ ratings to appear in the search results. This is essential when you have an online store. It shows other (potential) customers that you are trustworthy and will increase their chances of visiting your website. That’s why we support many review apps on Shopify.
We handle the structured data for your ratings and reviews to make those ratings appear in the search results. We currently support several review apps, including some of the most popular ones in the Shopify App Store, like Judge.me, Look, Ali Reviews, and Opinew.
Structured data helps your products to stand out in Google
Yoast SEO offers much control
With Yoast SEO for Shopify, you decide how your titles and meta descriptions are set up per content type. This allows you to consistently show your titles and meta descriptions in the search results. We integrate directly into Shopify to give you control per post, page, or product on an individual level. Our app gives you this page-level control, allowing you to make these changes per page or product you’re working on.
We help you create high-quality content
Content is a key element in SEO. Google uses any chance they get to remind the SEO world of the importance of high-quality content. To start and keep ranking, you need to keep producing great content. Content that’s easy to understand for site visitors and search engines. That’s why readability is important when creating content for your product pages and blog posts. Writing high-quality blog posts and creating great product descriptions should always be a priority.
It’s important to conduct keyword research for your online store and keep up that flow of fresh content. The right content helps search engines like Google understand what your website is about, which helps them direct the right audience to your pages. Perhaps even more important, it strengthens the relationship with your audience when you provide them with high-quality content. Yoast SEO for Shopify is the SEO solution that gives you direct feedback on the content you’re writing to help you improve it for site visitors and search engines.
To help you discover high-quality keywords to rank for, we’ve built an integration with the leading online marketing platform Semrush. Our content dashboard will show you which articles and product pages need optimization so you will always know what to do next.
Yoast SEO for Shopify makes it easy to optimize your product descriptions by following the traffic light feedback
We understand content in 20 languages
Yoast SEO is the best app for understanding content written in your language and giving you direct feedback. Currently, it can do this in 20 different languages: English, Dutch, German, French, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese, Polish, Arabic, Hebrew, Hungarian, Norwegian, Turkish, Czech, Japanese, Greek, Slovak and Indonesian. Remember that we can only provide an analysis of the language set for the theme.
There are a lot of SEO apps out there that are focused on the English language. Thanks to our team of linguists, we can offer feedback on your content in any of the languages above! With Yoast SEO, you have one SEO app that helps you write great content (in the language of your choice) and fixes a lot of the technical SEO for you.
See how content appears in search and social
Our search and social media appearance tools are essential to understanding how your products and content will appear on other platforms. They allow you to let your content shine and help it reach the audience you are looking for. The search appearance section previews how your content will look on Google, and the social media appearance section will do the same for platforms like Facebook or X.
Yoast SEO for Shopify has a bulk editor
The bulk editor feature in Yoast SEO for Shopify, currently in beta form, is useful for efficiently managing and optimizing the SEO of multiple pages. It lets you simultaneously update titles, meta descriptions, and more across multiple pages. This, of course, can save Shopify merchants time compared to manual, page-by-page edits.
Here are some of the items you can edit from the bulk editor using the provided CSV file:
SEO titles
Meta descriptions
Focus keyphrases
Related keyphrases
Canonical URLs
Robots meta tags
Social media titles and descriptions
Schema structured data page and article types
The bulk editor in Yoast SEO for Shopify makes it easier to manage data in bulk
To conclude
There are many SEO apps available for your Shopify store. And it’s up to you which is best for your specific needs. We hope this article gives you more insight into our Shopify SEO app’s features and how it can help you climb those rankings! To read more about our app, visit our Yoast SEO for Shopify page.
Edwin is an experienced strategic content specialist. Before joining Yoast, he worked for a top-tier web design magazine, where he developed a keen understanding of how to create great content.
Online retailers work hard to make their stores stand out from the competition. One of the main points they should focus on is offering the best user experience. Combined with a proper SEO strategy, this can lead to great results. Search engines like Google prioritize user satisfaction, so integrating UX and ecommerce SEO helps improve search rankings and build a long-term relationship with your customers.
UX is the underrated SEO powerhouse
Traditionally, SEO focused on keywords, backlinks, and technical factors. However, Google’s algorithms also focus on user engagement and satisfaction. A great UX is not simply an add-on but the foundation of your SEO efforts.
As Steve Jobs famously said, “Design isn’t just what it looks like and feels like — design is how it works.” High-quality UX/UI design can increase visitors’ time on a website and lead to better conversion rates. Such metrics indicate to search engines that the site effectively addresses user needs, which could warrant higher rankings.
Customers seek a seamless experience when buying something. A great UX can influence those purchasing decisions and set your brand apart from competitors in a market with similar products and services.
As another business leader, Dr. Ralf Speth, ex-CEO of Jaguar Land Rover, famously said: “If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design.”
Improving conversion rates through UX
A website’s design, performance, and functionality directly impact its conversion rates. A well-executed user interface can boost conversions. Such enhancements attract more visitors and convert them into loyal customers. There are many sections on your online store that could benefit from UX improvements.
For example, abandonment of shopping carts is a big issue in ecommerce. There are many reasons why users leave their carts without buying. Most of these are tied to the buyer journey, but many customers also leave their carts due to issues with the store or the buying process UX. In numbers: the Baymard Institute found “that 22% of US online shoppers have abandoned an order in the past quarter solely due to a “too long/complicated checkout process,” while 17% left because of technical issues on the site.”
Improving page speed is also one of the pillars of UX. Portent found “that the difference in ecommerce conversion rate between blazing-fast and modestly quick sites is sizable. A site that loads in 1 second has an ecommerce conversion rate 2.5x higher than a site that loads in 5 seconds.”
These are all things you can fix in your UX strategy. In a well-known study, Forester Research showed that businesses can expect up to $100 in return for every dollar spent on UX. For many retailers, investing in UX and ecommerce SEO can drive business growth.
The importance of mobile optimization
Since mobile has far eclipsed desktop traffic in market share, optimizing for mobile is more important than ever. At the start of 2024, Statista calculated that smartphones were responsible for 77 percent of retail site traffic globally and for generating two-thirds of online shopping orders.
First impressions matter
Creating a positive first impression is critical for ecommerce businesses. Research suggests that users form an opinion about a website in just 50 milliseconds. Key factors influencing these lightning-fast judgments include visual complexity, prototypicality, and exposure time. Prototypicality refers to how closely a website aligns with users’ expectations based on familiar design patterns. Exposure time is the brief period visitors initially see and evaluate a site.
Websites that are visually simple yet stick to common conventions are perceived as more appealing, even within this short exposure time. As visitors spend more time on a site, the familiar structure becomes as influential as its simplicity. Focus on these design elements to make visitors happy and improve engagement.
Google NavBoost and user trust
Recent insights into Google’s NavBoost highlight the role of user behavior in search rankings. NavBoost analyzes user interactions, particularly click patterns, to refine search results based on user satisfaction. Metrics such as “good clicks” (indicating user satisfaction) and “last longest click” (where users spend the most time) directly correlate with UX.
A positive user experience leads to higher rates of good clicks and lower bounce rates. This shows that UX is important in establishing trust and credibility through Google’s E-E-A-T framework (Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).
The symbiosis of UX and SEO
UX and SEO are one. You might even call it SXO: Search Experience Optimization. Search engines prioritize websites that offer good user experiences. That makes sense because it aligns with their goal of delivering valuable content to users. A focus on UX boosts user satisfaction and could enhance search engine rankings. Those rankings could help drive traffic and improve conversions.
Strategic initiatives for UX and SEO
There are many things to do if you want to enhance both UX and ecommerce SEO, here are just a couple of them:
Responsive design: Make your website mobile-friendly, as mobile devices account for over half of global web traffic. Responsive design improves user satisfaction by providing a seamless experience across devices. As a result, it might positively influence search engine rankings. For example, eCommerce giants like Amazon excel in responsive design. These stores make sure that users have a consistent and user-friendly experience whether they are browsing on a desktop, tablet, or smartphone. This adaptability helps capture and retain mobile users.
Clear navigation and structure: Develop intuitive site architecture that facilitates easy navigation. This not only enhances the user experience but also aids search engines in understanding and indexing content effectively. A well-designed navigation system with a robust site search option can improve user satisfaction. For instance, ASOS, a popular online fashion retailer, offers a well-organized navigation menu with clear categories, making it easy for users to quickly find what they’re looking for.
Improve performance:Optimize page speed to reduce bounce rates and improve user engagement. Google’s Core Web Vitals highlight the importance of fast, stable, and interactive pages. Practical steps include compressing images, leveraging browser caching, and using content delivery networks (CDNs). Research shows that a site that loads in one second can have a conversion rate 2.5 times higher than one that takes five seconds.
Engaging content: Create informative, relevant, and engaging content. High-quality content draws users in and sends positive signals to search engines. For example, incorporating detailed product descriptions, customer reviews, and engaging blog posts can enrich the user experience and encourage visitors to spend more time on your site.
Accessibility: Incorporate accessibility features to accommodate all users, including those with disabilities. This aligns with UX best practices and ecommerce SEO requirements. Following the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) ensures your site is usable for a diverse audience, enhancing user satisfaction and search visibility.
A/B testing: Implement A/B testing to refine your UX and conversion strategies. This involves comparing two versions of a webpage to see which performs better. For example, testing different CTAs, headlines, or images can provide insights into what resonates most with your audience. Businesses can continuously optimize their site for better engagement and conversion rates by iterating based on real user feedback.
A strategy for success with UX and SEO
Today, it would be foolish not to integrate UX into your SEO strategy. Focus on user experience design and combine it with proven SEO strategies. This helps ecommerce businesses improve search visibility, engage users, and support long-term growth. This approach helps customers find and appreciate online stores, which leads to loyal customers and increased revenue.
Edwin is an experienced strategic content specialist. Before joining Yoast, he worked for a top-tier web design magazine, where he developed a keen understanding of how to create great content.
