Hey guys, welcome to another video in the series for Shopify x SEO. And in this video we're going to talk about blogging. Now, blogging obviously can be a bit of a boring subject, but it's still one of the most powerful options, you have to actually start driving traffic to your store reasonably easily. So we'll work through how the best way it is to set up your blog, and how we do it. And there's some nice little tweaks that I'm going to show you that will really power up the blog posts themselves and actually start ranking really, really well quite simply and easily, and that's going to drive traffic, especially if you do it properly. Okay, so what's the objective in this video?

Well, quite simply, it's to quickly set up your blog on your Shopify store. Firstly, we're going to work through how you find topics and hence stories to write about. And we'll use our common tools. And then also, we'll look at a site called answer the public. And we'll use a Google answer box also to give us some ideas on what to write about. Then we're going to work through.

In the second part, we'll work through the the structure of the blog, setting up the blog title, your URL, page title, and your age tags. And all these elements are really important and critical for the success of that particular blog page. Number three is something that you would have seen as you're browsing the internet that a lot of the big sites do, and there's a reason for it. But you won't see it on many standard blogs, and certainly don't say it many Shopify stores. But the same rules apply. And that's a table of contents at the top of your blog post.

So I'll show you how to do that. And that can be really, really powerful for a blog post. Then we'll work through how to set up your images. It's always a good idea to add a video. And there's also a nice little hack that you can use with Twitter. That'll just pair up your blog post as well.

Then we'll go through the standard SEO title and description. And then schema is important, but that'll be in the scheme of video on its own. But that's a really, really powerful way to pair up the blog post even further. So when we're talking to our clients, one of the common questions we get asked is what do we write about. And when you actually think about it, there's so many things you can write about so many topics, topics you can write about when you have store, every product has a history, whether it's the the type of product or where it was made, or the manufacturing process so you can break it down that way. There's always news and updates or technology updates in your particular industry or market.

There's always something happening in your business that you may want to update your customers about. So there's many Many different things you can you can write about. But generally the good the best place to start is actually going find what people are wanting to hear about. And and use those tools and write about those. Okay, he's the example of one of our blog posts that ranking really well. And I think I showed in one of the previous videos.

But the reason this blog post is ranking well is not because there's been any magic thrown in it or actually any off page SEO, it's simply because the structure of the blog post is set up correctly. The competition is sort of medium competition. So if it was a really high competitive term, you're probably not going to rank that well straightaway. But there is search volume for it. So certainly, it's a good option to have when you can write a blog post like this quickly, and then just let it rank over time and you're going to start to bring in traffic as you do that. So you can see the most popular action figures, it ranks position to for that particular time.

So here it is here in real time. And it's actually not like this entire site, it's actually not that well optimized apart from some of the core foundational stuff that was done. And we're going to add a little bit more to it now to show you how can be powered up even more. Okay, so you can use your your standard Iris keyword research to go to the keyword explorer section, put in a particular topic that you're going to you want to write about. So in this example, I'm wanting to know whether people are actually searching for action figure types. And, you know, obviously people are and you would just from understanding the market a little bit, you know, that would be but I wanted to know what particular action figures they've been searching for.

So this gives me a bit of an idea and you can work through generally I try and Target specially when I'm doing my initial blog posts in where there's search volume, sort of a little bit lower, you don't want to be targeting keywords that have 100,000 or 200,000 searches per month because they're just going to be dominated by much, much larger, more powerful domains. So you want to filter out down to some lesser search volume. You can also use eye refs as well. And you can see here similar type of search popular action figures in the US and it will just bring back some of the actual terms that people are searching for. And and even brand names for GI Joe. And as you move on down and you can see more and more.

So with that particular example blog post, it was rather broad in terms of not not targeting a specific type of action figure or brand but just the most popular action figures. But you can get really granular and a great tool for that free tools called answer the public Comm. And you come to this, this site and this, this guy here, likes to yell at us and tell us we've got our put our term in. So you put your term in here in your language and hit get questions. And this really is an underutilized tool that I like using a lot for alternative keyword research. And it's really good as a blogging tool to to find out what people are searching for.

So it comes back, it pulls back questions related to the topic, it pulls back prepositions, and it pulls back comparisons. So we could just look at some of these and these are, you know, data that's pulled back from Google, of what people are actually searching for. On the net. So for example, category action figure lamp who knew how to sell action figures how to bow action figures. action figures are made so special Give you some really good ideas of blog topics. And they go on and on.

And prepositions. Action Figures full stop motion action figures for toddlers, action figures for adults, action figures for RC cars. So, yeah, it's a really good tool. And you know, you can, you cannot cannot really exhaust the list that I provide for you. And then there's some comparisons here, action figures versus dollars, that would be a blog post title, action figures, alien versus predator IDs, action figures. So make sure you utilize this.

It's free. And if it's in here, it's the terms that people are searching for on Google and gives you some really good ideas of what you can write about when I'm stuck. always come to this tool. And then the last one is Google itself. Say you put in sort of a Old search term, click on the answer box. And the drop down here is, is highly relevant, because Google thinks so to that particular term, so you can gain ideas here.

So best action figures to collect that would be a really good blog topic to write about, related to popular action figures. And then also scroll down to the bottom and where it's got related searches. These are further searches that you can, you can utilize to accumulate ideas to write your blog post about. Okay, so once you've got your ideas on what you're going to write about, now it's time to actually start crafting the blog. So the way Shopify is set up, you can add a number of different blogs and a blog is essentially a group of blog posts on a certain topic. Generally, on a Shopify store, unless it's really, really large, you'd only want to create one blog.

And generally I just call it and use or update or something like that. So you can see here now this works. Sitting up as news users quite handy later on when we when we work through the schema section, if you add the correct schema to your blog posts, and it helps the charts of the blog post, if it's correctly crafted to be added to Google News, which is a whole, essentially a bolt on search engine to Google itself, and you can gain a lot of traffic through Google News once you get indexed in Google News. So if you create credit, another blog now we'd create a whole nother blog section of which those blogs would be in that particular category. Okay, where I always start with a blog post is using these, essentially this structure and these rules. So I want my URL to be one of the priorities in how I set up with my keyword optimization.

Then the SEO title, then our page title, which on a blog post in Shopify, is also your h1. So if we just look at the for the blog post here, and we do our control, if we find that the h1 is actually the page title, and we only want one h1 on the page then we use synonyms or LSI, which is sort of variations of the particular keywords. Next, and then you can have and we only want one h2 and then we have h3 so we can have more than one h3 so the remainder of the subheadings can be h3 and this is all obviously surrounded by quality, well written content relative to the topic. Okay, so the first one we're gonna look at is URL. So I want to target the most popular action because that's what I'm my main term I'm targeting. So I want that essentially to be my URL.

So What you need to do is, you can initially just put any old title in, and then click Save. So it actually saves the post as a draft, and then it'll automatically generate this URL. But what you can then do is you can come in, and you can edit this URL to what you want it to be. So I want it to be most popular toy action figures. And that's going to be my euro because that's the term I'm wanting to target as my core term. Then for the h1 I want to add some variation in so we've added in top 10 most popular action figures of all time.

And from doing our end to the public search prior, we could also add in top 10 most popular fiction action figures of all time to collect. So the term collect was used, people are searching for it. So we're still going to rank for most popular action figures. But now we can Also rank for longer terms with collecting them also all makes, you know, there's pretty common sense. But you just need to think outside the box a little when you do go through this process. Okay, now we just work down through the post.

So we'll come to our h two and H three in a second. But generally what I like to do with a blog post is have a paragraph, or even two small paragraphs at the top, explaining and summarizing what the post is about. And then as I mentioned earlier, Table of Contents is a really important way to actually optimize your blog pages or any web page for that matter. But Shopify doesn't have as yet it's something we're working on, doesn't have any option to add a table of contents as far as we know. And there's no apps on the market to do that yet. So table The content will just bring over Wikipedia.

It was one of the first to add table of contents into its platform. And you can see here Here are the Table of Contents within the page itself. Now, if you can see in the bottom right hand corner, you'll see that let's go to economics here. There's a Wikipedia page, each tenant has a hashtag after the URL, and then the term economics. Now Google actually identifies this as a unique URL on that page. So this, and we have the keyword in that URL.

So by having a keyword in that URL, and we further optimize a page for that particular term, as I mentioned before, the URL is one of most important areas to have your keywords in them. So this is this is a really good reason why you'd want to build table of contents into your blog posts. A lot of big sites big news sites are starting to have them now. And it's because they work. So you want to be ahead of the curve a little bit with your Shopify store and start building table of contents into your blog post. So, to do it, you do need to take a little bit of time to learn the process with the code, but it is actually simple to do once you know how, Okay, so here's the code to create a table of contents.

And essentially what this will do, it will link table of content to each heading tag on your page. And so it'll be a heading, the first one will be h2 tag, and the rest will be h three. And then when someone clicks on that table of contents link, it'll jump, which I'll show you in a second to that particular heading tag. So just before we build out the table of contents, we'll just work through setting up the H tags. So H tags they need to be used, with a bit of common sense and logically, so For example, the title his top 10 most popular action figures of all time to collect. So it would make sense to break up the article into sub headings that the name of those action figures would be each of the headings which which we have here.

So the first one is that h2. So this is the term that I wanted to prioritize over the rest, the rest of still rank, but this will give it a little more power by having this one as an h2, and then the rest of H three. So they're the particular page tags we're using in this case. Okay, so now to build a table of contents, want to generally do it under first or second paragraph. So we'll actually just write in Table of Contents. And we'll just bold that.

And now what we want to do is link the first link of the table of contents to the first Heading tag. So here's the code. So the h2 needs to have an ID tag to tell the Table of Contents code, which one it's relevant to. So what we want to do is this h2 tag, which is the same as this. What am I sure the tags in the I think I've already added it in this case, but we will just sort of do that you click on this show HTML code here, once your content in actually on the page. And we can scroll on down.

If you can't find it, you can just do your, your h2 search, because that's the tag we're looking at. And we can see here, so generally, you would just, actually, I'll just go back out and we'll just type it without the tag and then you'll understand how it works. g i j Ara McDarrah h2 tag doesn't want to do it for me now. So we have our h2 in a now. So if we now go to the source code, and here it is here. So the ID tag we're going to add in here, that will be the hashtag that append to the link to create the new URL.

So we want to make sure that it's relevant. But we don't generally I don't like to make it identical or they can. That's what Wikipedia does. don't like to make it identical as the actual h2 because then you're essentially duplicating the h2 in the URL. So for this example, just going to bring over the code here we've got and so what we're going to do, so this way, I've got it highlighted here. This is a bit of code, we need to split So, take away that and then we have a space and then ID equals and then quotation mark.

And because I don't want it identical to the h2, I'm going to call this era tour toy figure. We'll figure Raven, and then quotation mark and then we need to close brackets again. So now we've added this ID tag to this particular h2 title. So go back to the front end of and we can see that it still displays correctly. But we've got the h2 tag in there now. Okay.

So now, I'm going to add in the first table of contents, Heading. So GI Joe Ras, we might call it, we call it, so we could call it for example, and we're just gonna make a dot point era. The most popular Gee, Hi, Joe toy. Okay, and I just hand balled that. So that's gonna be our table of contents that first jump to link. So now what we need to do is actually add in the link here.

So the easiest way to do that without actually going and writing is a code here, without actually writing that code in, you need to make sure you have saved the page. So your blog post is actually going to have a live URL. So if you just wanted save, you click on View and you can see in the bottom left corner, that's a live URL. So you can copy that link and just do a standard link insertion here. Okay, so now we have the link. And if we didn't change it, that will just link back to the page itself.

But remember, we need to add in our hash tag. So it actually jumps through to the h2 title. So now we'll click on the HTML. So we remember the hash tag we added in is called era. Actually just need to make sure so Google likes underscores nsurl. So make sense a minute.

So that's the ID. So we need to make sure we grab copy the complete ID without quotation marks. Go back to our link up here. Then at the end of the actual URL link, which is here. I'm going to type hashtag. And then simply paste the Id go back to HTML, you can see the link still the same geojo h2 is still same, click Save.

And now we will go and view a live version of the post. And okay, here's a table of contents. So now if it's all been set up correctly, if we click on this, it will jump to this. There you go. So the HTML is working properly, and it's clicking to this. So now what we will do is adding the rest of these jump to tags as well.

So we can see up here in the URL at the top, we've had the keyword Id actually add on to the end URL. Now this is a unique URL for Google to actually crawl. And it's not overly optimized. Because the keywords in URL, you just have a much greater chance of picking up more terms what you do it this way. And this is how you can power up blog posts as you do this. So okay, I've just added a second one in there.

Now this one goes to the h3 so jumps down to h3. So if you think about it, logically, what starts to happen is when because we've got more keywords into our URLs on the page. And with you know, we've done our keyword research and we've set up our hashtags correctly and content etc, etc. As you start to pull in more. More traffic from the multiple different keywords and longtail keywords you're starting to rank for. Traffic becomes effect in your ranking.

So becomes self fulfilling traffic is actually a really powerful ranking signal on its own. And if it's the right sort of traffic and then you've got the engagement of people reading your blog post, so it just tends to snowball a little bit and you start to push up higher and higher without doing much else. So this is why it's worth putting in the time and effort to create these. These features like a table of contents in your blog post, takes a little bit of work, but once you get used to it pretty easy and I just have a template that I pull in and then just swap out keywords and phrases as I need when I'm building these out. Okay, images, video and Twitter. Our next section we're going to discuss so you can get your images from wherever you want.

You can use your the images of actually got in your store and your product images if you like, but just keep into the fame of trying to spread out and broaden particular keywords and uniqueness over entire store, I just like to go grab images from something like pixabay is a good free one. And they're all creative commons license. So these top ones here is Shutterstock add. So they're sponsored images, that is free images are free to use with a license so you can grab those. And the other one is that I like to use a lot is pixels, so similar to my prices, and you can just download these for free. And then you can just add the images as you would on your store as we went through in the image setup.

So I won't go through it again here, but you just need to add title and name your file names correctly and then also set up your alt tags. Now I always like to add a a video and particular YouTube video into my blog post. One of the main reasons is that YouTube is actually a Google property. So wherever you've got a Google property embedded in your blog post, it's always beneficial can add more relevance is just, it's unlikely you're not going to find a video that's on a particular topic for your blog posts. So I just, you know, use my keywords and try and find the most relevant video. Also a video that seems to have had good views, some good comments has been around for a while.

So you look at all those factors, and then you can just embed it in the store or in your blog post. If you don't know how to do that it's pretty simple. With Shopify, you literally just put your cursor to where you want the video to embed, and click on Insert video. And then you can add the embed code here, which you can find on YouTube. What I also like to do as a rule, and again, not many people are doing it for the right reasons. Or for for the reasons I do, which is to gain more power in your blog posts by using really high quality properties.

And Twitter is certainly one of those that Google loves. So generally what I'll do is I'll just come and do a search into it. To find a Twitter tweet that I like, This one, for example, would be pretty cool. And if you just click on the drop down menu here and select embed tweet and as your embed code, so copy that code, come back to your store, or the blog post that the HTML code, scroll to the bottom, we'll put this one in the bottom. paste it in, save, and the tweet should be now. The second two, it should be there, pattern double action figures.

We'll just save it. So not only, not only are you embedding a high quality property, it counts as an outbound link as well to Twitter and outbound links to a relative to a relevant tweet. A candidate is a very powerful outbound link, link and provides that relevance you need so just another A little little hack that really certainly boost your blog post without doing without much effort at all. Normally all I will also put one outbound link to a high quality, very relevant website. So generally what I'll do is just go and type in the keyword into a riffs. And then I also pull back the top 10 ranking pages for that particular keyword.

And I'll choose the ones that I think's most relevant and add that as a link to the actual page there so that just helps everything in optimizing the blog post really well. Okay, as I mentioned, we'll go through schema in the other video. internal linking is very important between blog posts and to other parts of your store, but that will be covered in the internal linking video, so I'm not going to go through it here. So the Last thing that we need to do is we go back to our post and we need to set up our SEO title and description. So by default, it'll pull back the SEO title or pull back from the title once you've saved it. So, again, you want to make your SEO title, use bit of a variation in your LS title in your SEO title compared to your page title.

So I've just changed the title up a little bit, edit in my top 10 action figure range instead of figures of all time, and how to buy collect. So when we did our keyword research, we saw that there was some how to buy type terms especially in to the public, and also collect so that's why I've changed up the title there and it'll probably continue to rank for most popular action figures. But we should pick up some more searches for some other long tails just by adding in or Changing the title up. Now it's up to you whether you add in a meta description, our evidence suggests a meta description doesn't help much with optimization, generally, what I like to do is just take it out and let the content or the first part of the content actually end up in the meta description. Hit Save.

And it'll just, Google will actually read that content. And it can help with just pulling in a few more searches for keywords, even though we don't think it's significant. It certainly can help. And then if you end up with a really crazy ranking on a blog post, and it's pulling in a load of traffic, then you can come in here and optimize it for conversion and actually try and improve your click through rate with your meta description here. generally don't add in tags because we have no index to tag pages anyway. So it's not gonna make any difference but if you want to add in taxi for people searching within your store, you can but generally, we don't do that and for the reasons, people We get a lot of a lot of blog posts.

The reasons I explained duplicate content video was you can end up with a duplicate content issue. Okay, one one last element of this is I forgot to mention is, and it's really important part is the length of your content. So in, in general, the greater the key word count, the better. I would certainly try and have your blog post around 1500 words or longer, but up around 3000 words is seems to be a bit of a sweet spot for blog posts at the moment. So that's a lot of work and effort. But if you can look at generating blog post content that long, certainly worth the effort.

Now, if you would like to have someone write the content for you, these are the two services that we're using recommend. Seo Butler is really good for high quality content and it's basically pricey but you pay for what you get And the riders are really, and they understand SEO, then they stand the best structure for content. And so you can see here the prices for particular articles. And that'll be based on word count. The other one that I would recommend, but certainly if you're going to have it as your blog post content is on aid articles, you can pay a little bit extra per kid per word for like a five star writer for them to do back in research. And, you know, I've had some pretty good articles that have come back to the US actually used on my on my blogs by using this but it's a lot cheaper than then SEO Butler.

So that might be certainly something you want to look at as well if you're not keen to write your own content. But when it comes down to it, if you can write your own content, you're certainly going to get the best context and best quality and it's really going to work a lot better, but it's just that time factor. So I'll put those links in the show notes. And then yeah, if you're interested in them, you can use them. So that's it for the blog post training. Don't underestimate the power of blog posts when you set them up correctly and what sort of traffic and conversions you can start pulling in.

So do the work, get the good quality content up and it'll pay dividends. Thanks, we'll see you next video.