How to Blog on Shopify & Optimize for SEO

Blogging on Shopify is a great way to get traffic to your online store, and optimizing your blog posts for SEO can help you attract even more readers. Doing both can be a bit daunting at first, but with some knowledge and practice, you can become a blogging and SEO powerhouse.

In this article, we will dive into the world of Shopify blogging and SEO and explore some tips and tricks to help you get the most out of your blog posts. By the end of this article, you will have a solid understanding of how you can take your store from zero to hero with the power of blogging and SEO.

There are many reasons why you should blog on Shopify. They include:

A blog is a great platform to share your brand story and connect with your customers on a deeper level. When you write blog posts, you have the opportunity to show your personality and give your customers a behind-the-scenes look at your business. 

This helps them feel more connected to your brand, and they are more likely to become loyal, lifelong customers, as well as answer any frequently asked questions they might have about your brand or the products you sell.

One of the main reasons to start a blog and make use of the best blog apps for Shopify is to generate traffic to your Shopify store. Every time you publish a new blog post, you create a new opportunity for people to find your site and learn about your products or services. And if you optimize your blog posts for SEO, you can attract even more readers.

When you blog, you can build trust and credibility with your audience. You can share your expertise on a certain topic, and show that you are an authority in your industry. This helps build trust with your readers, and they are more likely to do business with you in the future.

Now that we’ve gone over some of the reasons why you should blog on Shopify let’s look at how you can start blogging. We’ll go over our process step-by-step so that you can hit the ground running with your first blog post.

You cannot just wake up and start writing content on a certain topic and expect it to rank on the first page of Google. That’s because there is a science to SEO, and you need to do your keyword research before you start writing if you want your post to rank.

Our SEO services start with thorough keyword research. We want to ensure we are targeting the right keywords for your blog post so that it can rank on the first page of Google.

We use a number of different tools for keyword research. However, Ahrefs tops our list as the best keyword research tool on the market. It gives us insights into the search volume and difficulty of a certain keyword, as well as the number of clicks you can expect if you rank on the first page.

This is valuable information because it allows us to target keywords that are not only popular but also have a lower difficulty score. This increases our chances of ranking on the first page, and ultimately getting more traffic to your Shopify store.

The process of finding keywords with Ahrefs is simple. We type a seed keyword into the Ahrefs Keywords Explorer and get a list of related keywords.

Once we have the right keywords, we export them into a Google Sheet. This helps us keep track of all the keywords we want to target and makes the next step easier.

Keyword filtering is the process of going through all the keywords we’ve found and determining which ones we want to target.

One of the most important SEO steps is organizing your keywords into clusters. This is the process of grouping together similar keywords so that you can target them in one blog post.

For example, let’s say you want to write a blog post about the best drugstore foundations. Some of the keywords you might want to target are:

• Best drugstore foundation for dry skin
• Best drugstore foundation for acne-prone skin
• Best drugstore foundation for oily skin
• Best drugstore foundation for mature skin

As you can see, these keywords are all related to the same topic. Therefore, they should be grouped into a cluster.

Organizing your keywords into clusters has a few benefits:

• Helps you stay on topic: When you have a list of keywords related to the same topic, it’s easier to stay on topic when writing your blog post.
• Avoid keyword cannibalization: Keyword cannibalization is when you rank for the same keyword multiple times on your website. This confuses Google and can hurt your rankings. By organizing your keywords into clusters, you enhance your chances of ranking for each keyword.
• Allows you to target long-tail keywords: Long-tail keywords are longer, more specific, less competitive ones. By grouping together similar keywords, you can target a variety of long-tail keywords with one blog post.

Categories: A category is a broad topic that contains a group of related keywords. For example, let's say we have a Shopify store that sells kitchen supplies. Some of our categories might be:

• Cookware
• Bakeware
• Kitchen Gadgets
• Small Appliances

Subcategories: A subcategory is a more specific topic that falls under a broader category. Continuing with our kitchen example, some of our subcategories might be:

• Pots and Pans (Cookware)
• Cake Pans (Bakeware)
• Can Openers (Kitchen Gadgets)
• Toasters (Small Appliances)

When structuring our silos, we ensure:

• Each piece of content should only be in one place.
• There should be a clear hierarchy between categories and subcategories.
• All the pages in the same silo should be inter-linked together.

Writing valuable content is one of the most important aspects of SEO. Content should be well-written, informative, and engaging.

Before we create an outline, we first type in the target keyword into Google. This gives us an idea of what content is already out there and how we can make our articles better.

We check the top 10 articles that come up and take note of the following:

• What topics are they covering?
• What format are they using? (e.g., listicle, how-to guide, etc.)
• What tone are they using? (e.g., formal, casual, etc.)

We seek to understand what people are looking for when they type in our target keyword. This helps us create an article that is both informative and engaging.

Once we understand the existing content well, we create an outline for our article. This helps us organize our thoughts and ensure that we cover all the relevant topics.

Shopify makes it easy to upload and publish content. All you need to do is create a new page or blog post and enter your content into the text editor.

Before we hit publish, we:

• Add a meta title and description: A meta title is a text that appears in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The meta description is the short blurb of text that appears under the meta title in the SERPs. For both the meta title and description, we include our target keyword. However, we make sure to write them for humans and not for search engines. This means making them both accurate and click-worthy.
• Use Htags: Htags are HTML tags used to structure a page's content. They range from H1 (the largest) to H6 (the smallest). We use Htags to break our content up into smaller, more digestible pieces. This makes our content easier to read and also helps search engines understand the hierarchy of our content.
• Use visible font sizes: We make sure to use font sizes that are easy to read. This helps users scan our content and also makes it more accessible for those with poor vision.

One of the most important aspects of our on-page Shopify SEO services is adding images to blog posts. We don't just add a featured image and two or three other images throughout the article. Instead, we try to add an image every 300 words.

This might seem like a lot, but it's important to remember that people are visual creatures. Adding images helps break up the text and also makes our content more engaging.

When adding images, we:

• Compress the images: Large image files can slow down a page's loading time. We compress our images using lossless compression to ensure that they load quickly.
• Add title tags: Title tags are the text that appears when you hover over an image. We make sure to add descriptive title tags to our images. This helps search engines understand what the image is about.
• Use descriptive filenames: We give our images descriptive filenames (e.g., "best-kitchenware.jpg"). This helps search engines understand what the image is about.

At GoldenWeb, blogging on Shopify and optimizing pages for SEO are just a few of the many services we offer to help take your business to the next level.

Our team of experienced professionals will work with you to develop a custom strategy that meets your unique needs. We'll also provide ongoing support and maintenance to ensure that your website is always performing at its best.

We offer a full SEO audit that identifies over 285 SEO and CRO potential growth opportunities. This includes a technical site audit, on-page optimization, content analysis, and link building.

To help you understand our process, we offer a free mini-audit, a scaled-down version of our full audit. This mini-audit will identify some of the potential growth opportunities for your website. Book yours now!