First time?

You’ve grown tired of spending money on Zuck, and you want to escape the paid ad hamster wheel.

After having a serious conversation with yourself, you’ve finally decided to invest in SEO. 

Great choice! 

But you’ve never done SEO before… and you’re probably wondering how long it will take you to rank your store. 

Ranking a Shopify store on the first page of Google is not all that difficult, but it is time-consuming.

Here’s the framework:

Technical: 

Take care of these issues only: 

• Canonical product URL issue

• Pagination on blogs & collection pages

• Set up robots.txt 

• Connect your site to Search Console & submit your sitemap

• Get yourself an image compression app or do it for free before you upload the images to Shopify (.webp format is best)

On-Page:

We’re going to rank your collection pages, not product pages. Trust me, it’s what the cool kids are doing. 

Go find your target keyword. 

You’re a new store, you can’t go rank #1 for something like “weight loss products.” 

Be realistic, find a longer-tail keyword variant with less search volume and less competition. Center your strategy around that. 

Add that target keyword to all of the essential locations (URL, H1, meta title & description, collection description, image alt text, etc.)

Write 5-10 blogs per month that are closely-related to that collection only. Don’t write about things that are relevant to your entire brand, just that collection – this is important. 

It will take years to build topical authority for your whole brand. But around one keyword? Much more efficient. 

Build internal links between each of these blogs and from each blog to the collection page with relevant anchors. 

Off-Page:

Get all of the free web 2.0 backlinks that your competitors missed – follow Connor Showler on Twitter/X for tons of free backlinks.

Sign up for HARO, Qwoted, and SourceBottle and pitch relentlessly. 

Go get this eCommerce SEO bootcamp course from @FreddieChatt on Twitter/X. I’m not an affiliate whatsoever, but Freddie knows what he’s up to and I’m sure his course is just as good. The reviews speak for themselves.

And finally, watch this video:

Until next time,

Kai Cromwell