This guide - The Keyword Research Master Guide - will help you with your keyword research. A must-read for any ecommerce site. 

Here is the link https://moz.com/keyword-research-guide

This link is pinned on our Pinterest boards at https://www.pinterest.com/thedrawingboard3/seo-tips-for-online-stores/

TRICK:

Once Google has begun to index your website, a little "trick" you can do is compare how many pages are indexed in Google Search Console versus in a Google search. This "trick" can give you insight as to how well your page SEO is performing. Let me explain...

Let's say Google Search Console shows you have 256 pages indexed.
If you go to Google search and type `site:https://www.yourstore.com` into the search bar, you might see you have 210 results.

Based on the Google search result, you can see that you have 46 pages (around 8%) that Google has not indexed, and are therefore not showing up in Google search.

Because Google requires pages to have a specific level of quality before they are indexed, some pages are not indexed. This quality is your on-page SEO factors. Things like:

• Is there enough text content on the page?
• Do images have alt tags?
• Does the HTML have a logical and structured organization?
• Are there spammy links pointing to or from the page?
• Is there another page from your website that is about the same thing, only better?

From this example, you can see about 8% of the pages are not high enough quality to be indexed. But, knowing your website, you can probably guess that these lower-quality pages might be small collection pages, or old pages with very little content on them. This is okay - since those pages aren't key traffic pages anyway.

But...

Let's say your Google Search Console showed about 13,000 pages indexed but Google Search only showed 7,600 results. That means almost half of your website was either not found by Google's crawler or the quality was too low to be listed in Google Search at all. This means you have a problem, and your traffic is going to be a lot lower than it could be.

This "trick" won't show you WHICH pages are not indexed, but if you look at your top landing pages in Google Analytics, you can rule out those pages as not being indexed.

If you have a high percentage of pages not showing up in Google Search, you'll need to go back through your pages, and improve their SEO. You can repeat this "trick" any time, and hopefully you will see more and more pages get indexed over time.

BONUS TIP:
If you want to see ONLY your products that Google has indexed, you can use this code:
`site:https://www.yourstore.com inurl:products` (no spaces EXCEPT before the "inurl" part).

NOTE: If your default website doesn't use the "www" as part of the URL, you can leave the "www" out.

(originally shared on 9/22/17)

Think like your customer. Really get in the mindset of a customer (not as a store owner).

If you were searching Google as a customer for something you sell in your store, what would you search for?

Do you search for that item often and look over the Google results to see where YOUR shop is listed? Is your shop on the first page? The second page? Or nowhere to be found?

How often do you search for your own items on Google? Daily? Weekly? Monthly? Never?

TIPS:

• I highly recommend you think like a customer and do weekly searches for items you sell.
• Use terms your customers would use, not necessarily terms YOU would use.
• Look over the Google results and see exactly which page your shop is on. Then work on improving your listings to move that search result to the previous page, until ultimately you end up on the first page of Google Search.
• In order to improve your listings, do keyword research. Include those keywords in your listings.

SEO is something that is never-ending. It is something that you need to continue to work on in order for your items (and your shop) to rank better on Google and other search engines.

If you want your shop to be found by shoppers, you need to think like a shopper and tweak your listings to make sure those listings are found.

Yes, it is a lot of work. But once you start ranking well (on the first page of Google search), you will start to see the benefits and your sales will increase.

Make this a practice you do on a regular basis.

See how much you can move your listings up to that coveted first page of Google search.
It takes time. It won't happen over-night, but if you continue to improve your listings and your placement in Google searches, you WILL see positive results.

You can do this!

(originally shared 11/20/17)

Since we have some new stores here in this group, I thought it was important to bring up the sitemap. This Shopify Help page shows you how to find your sitemap and how to submit it to Google Search Console.

I believe this is an important first-step to take when you first launch your website. Google WILL eventually find your shop on it's own, but by submitting a sitemap, you can speed that process up a little.

If you have an established store (one that's been open for even a short time), and you already submitted your sitemap, I recommend you visit your Google Search Console and check on the status of that sitemap. Make sure Google didn't find any errors with your website.

Link - https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/promoting-marketing/seo/find-site-map

TIP:

For what it's worth, I check my Google Analytics and my Google Search Console on a daily basis. Usually just once a day, but definitely EVERY day. By doing this, I can act quickly to make a change to my website if Google spots an error of some kind, which ultimately reduces any downtime the website might otherwise have had from Google ranking. Both Google Analytics and Google Search Console provide a HUGE wealth of information you can use on a daily basis to see what's working with your shop, and what's not. I think these are far too important of tools to not be using them.

This #seo channel has lots of information to help you - I highly recommend you read (or reread) through all the posts here.

Also, make sure to see the SEO section on the website, AND the SEO boards on TheDrawingBoard3 Pinterest pages - LOTS of hand-picked articles there that I feel are very useful.

If you have questions about your sitemap, or about the content of this post, please post a reply below. Let's keep the conversation going as a nested thread. Thanks!

(originally shared 8/1/18)

In an attempt to keep important information in Slack (without going over our saved message threshold), I've moved most of the SEO posts that were originally here in this channel over to the website or to our Pinterest boards.

SEO ARTICLES AND INFORMATION ON WEBSITE

Here is a link to the SEO category on TheDrawingBoard3 website - https://www.thedrawingboard3.com/category/seo/

The website will be updated frequently to include new articles as I write them.

To find SEO articles there:

• Click on the SEO category in the right sidebar on the website, or
• Use the Search box to find the topic you are looking for, or
• Click on the Article Index (there's a link to it at the bottom of the website in the footer) and go to the SEO category there

SEO ARTICLES AND INFORMATION ON PINTEREST

I am using the Pinterest boards as our "Resource Library". In addition to articles I have written regarding SEO, you will find helpful articles that I've found on the internet that I highly recommend.

Here is a link to the SEO board on TheDrawingBoard3 Pinterest page - https://www.pinterest.com/thedrawingboard3/seo-tips-for-online-stores/

(originally shared on 7/30/18)