Hi guys, welcome to the next section in Shopify x SEO training. In this video, just gonna take a little bit of time to go through some of the considerations when choosing a theme for your Shopify store. Now, obviously, if you've already got a store set up, and you might have spent a lot of time and effort getting that store set up on a particular theme, and that's fine. There's always ways you can optimize your current theme further. But if you've got the opportunity to to look at other themes, it's certainly worth considering just with some of the simple concepts that are going to help the same be optimized better. So there's only a number of different elements I look at.

When I'm looking at a theme from an optimization point of view. Obviously, the look at the theme is really important. That's going to increase your time on page your user engagement. And just the professionalism of your store. But this can be offset if there's some of the elements that are that are not set up correctly on the theme itself. So the three main things I look for in a theme number one is speed.

Number two is an option for lighted products. And I'll talk about that a little bit further. And number three is image optimization. In in terms of everything else, we require to optimize their site correctly, a lot of it's already built into the Shopify platform itself. And in so many of the themes, you're able to optimize them as you want, and that's what we'll be looking at going through further in the training. So we'll just work through the three elements, and I'll explain why they're important.

Okay, I'm just gonna pull over two different speed tests on the same domain, run by Shopify. These are tools pingdom comm is a good place to actually test the speed of your site. It's reasonably accurate. Another one is gt metrics comm gives you a little bit of more information but for for Shopify site tools.pingdom.com is certainly a really good option. So I've just added those URLs in so it's tools dot pingdom comm or Gt metrics.com. Now first of all, why is speed so important for any website, the faster the load speed of the site, the there's a number of different reasons that's going to be really important and it's pretty obvious.

Obviously, the faster loads the much more user friendly The site is for a user. So if your site and pages locally, the grantor charities that customer is going to stay on the store and then browse through the store and nothing worse than going to a store that loads really slowly on your phone or on your on your desktop or your iPad. And you got to move to the next page. And it takes, you know, more than a few seconds. And generally we like to click away and that most people are like that. So that's a user experience aspect of it.

And then, because of that, the search engines and a major search engine such as Google, they look at that as a very important core ranking signal within their algorithm. So any sites that load slow, are going to be devalued compared to a site that loads super fast, and it can become very granular. So once you get into the sites that are loading in milliseconds, that can have a huge impact on your rankings within Google, for your overall site, because they're just so much faster than the majority of sites on the net. So the way you can test the speed as I mentioned a little while ago, you can use this site here, tools dot pingdom pingdom.uk also tools.pingdom.com When you're putting a URL in here, just make sure that you choose the correct server. So wherever your main customer bases, that's what you choose, and you just hit start test.

Now, this is an interesting example. So a thing that I'm going to recommend, and I'll explain why I recommend it and go through in a second, it loads in 1.21 seconds just on the raw theme published on the site. So here's the the admin dashboard of Shopify, and you can see the raw theme here. Is, is published, there's nothing in the store at the moment. So it's just a roll test on speed. And we can see, as I mentioned, 1.21 seconds from New York, New York, it was faster than 85% of all sides tested in this tool around the world.

Then, if we look here, I've also have the Brooklyn theme installed. That's a free theme on Shopify, and I ran a test on On the same tool pulled over, we can see here, this is a Brooklyn theme here, and it loaded in 21 seconds. So a hell of a lot slower than the previous theme. Now, you might load up a site on a particular theme, and it looks like it loads reasonably fast for what you can see on the screen, but everything on the back end loads a little bit slower. And Google will take that into account. So this same theme is, is quite slow.

And if we bring over the demo of the theme, we can see that a theme like this is quite heavy on images, even though there's no image images on the on the speed test, or rancors. There's no products in there. But the why the theme is actually coded just makes it run a little bit slower. So certainly, you want to be looking at a theme that loads as fast as possible and you have to offset that obviously with the look of your store and the style of your store to make sure that it's You know, within the style and the market of your website, but theme is a really, really important part of gaining organic traffic to your store. I can't emphasize that enough. So let's say you do have already have your store set up and a theme and you've done all the work and you really liked the look of it don't want it want to change, we're going to go through some options to to help improve the speed later on in the training.

But you just need to be aware that there's only so much you can do on on certain themes. So, but there are options you have and some of those paid options where you can improve PageSpeed which with certain apps, and that's why I always like to find a theme that has most of a built in. So there's less work and less clutter in the code once a store is all set up and working properly. Okay, the next thing I like to look at is the same that provides by default related products. I will just put over an example. So he's a store here, you can see you've got the product page.

And then you have the more Products section down here. Now this is important from your internal linking point perspective within your store. Again, we're going to go through that later on in the course, with internal links. But being able to internally link to relevant products within your, your own site really helps Google understand what the site's about, or understand what particular pages about and improve that ranking. Not only that, it provides a nice usability perspective from the user to then go and look at related products that they might actually be, they might actually like to look at or purchase. So it becomes a bit of a conversion aspect, as well.

So, again, you can go and add on apps free and paid apps and within your store to do this if your theme doesn't do it. But again, I like to find a theme that has these built in by default. Okay, so one other thing I didn't mention on the slide was one other aspect that is quite important is with your collection pages. So this is where you have your and your category type pages within your site. You want the ability to add your add a description here on your collection pages. And again, that'll make a lot more sense when we go through it when we work on collection page optimization.

But by default, Shopify allows you to have the description up here above the product grid. But there are some themes that actually have this code out and don't allow you to do this. So that's one aspect it's, it's quite important to be able to provide that content on the category page or on the collection page. Now what I also like to do is add content below The collection grid. So let's say you have eight images, right products on your collection page. And then if you've got more than that, you'll go to a paginated page, page two, page three, page four, etc.

Or you can have as many products as you want. And then what I like to do is add content under the product grid here. So what that does, the more content you've got on a page and one of the issues with econ stores in a lot of different platforms. And not only does it make it look ordinary if you have a lot of content, because on a normal Shopify theme, you can add as much content as you want here. So you can have paragraphs and paragraphs and thousands of words, but it's not going to create a great user experience or conversion experience when they come to the collection page. And you've got all this massive content that most people won't read.

And they're going to click away from your site. What people want to see a product images like this on the collection page, and that's why Shopify has it set up that way because it converts well, but from a Organic perspective, it's it's not ideal that you don't have a lot of content on this particular page, because as you'll see, later on, we're going to look at ranking out category pages, which are a lot easy to rank, and then help the product pages rank through that method. So we'll be bringing you some information on how you can do this. I haven't found a theme yet that does this by default. But we've got a nice little bonus for you. That'll help you add this content in here without having to code or get a developer to do it for you.

Okay, the next element that's really important is your image optimization. The main reason for that is that images are heavy on resources, and that will slow down the site. So you want to look at a theme that actually compresses or optimizes images for speed by default. A lot of a lot of themes will not do that. And that's a big part of the reason why they run quite slow. Again, you can look at adding apps and paid and free apps to actually slow to actually compress your images to increase the speed of your image loading.

But again, it's it's much better to have a theme that actually does that for you. And you don't need to worry about cluttering up the site with extra apps and slowing slowing the site down from that perspective. So what I'm going to do is just show you my recommendation for a theme. It's a really clean theme. It's called econ turbo. It's been developed by a guy called Franklin, who is a bit of a Shopify expert does a lot of paid type advertising, and has a lot of training on paid advertising for Shopify stores.

But the theme itself, I've been using it for quite a while now. And it actually it's very fast. This is the first thing I showed were loads in 1.2 seconds. So it's built in at low fast, it's got all it's got a heap of different features that it helps with conversion, which I'll show you in a second. And I find it ranks very well. So the way it's been set up, it's got the related products built in by default, and all the the options that I've spoken about.

So it's the same that I would recommend. So to go and grab that theme, it is a paid thing. I'm just going to bring over the page. So if you just go Shopify x dot online slash eecom turbo, that will take you to the theme itself. Here, here's the sales page is the same, and you could scroll on down and it just explains all the features. As I mentioned, it is paid it's not super cheap, but it's not crazy expensive either.

So you've got a number of different options here. One side access or unlimited side access. If you're going to obviously use it on more than one site. That's a pretty good deal. So to me, even though it's a cost a little bit of money, it's It's a no brainer, because it's the thing that I've found is work the best. And you can develop really quite clean and simple site and build your store around this.

And it just helps with a lot of a lot of organic kind of optimization of your site on its own, plus all the extra features, which I'll just go in and show you. Now, the other thing about this thing that's fantastic, which you don't find with most themes, is because it's built with optimization and all the other aspects in mind. There's a heap of training once you get inside. So once you purchase a thing you actually then he can get into the member portal and you can download the theme itself and install it on your in your store. But then there's all this training on different options that the the actual same will provide. So if we just let one load up.

So he's got videos here that actually goes through the process of setting the store up correctly, for the best options and then explaining all different features as well. It's got features, great features such as your email autoresponder setup that connects and integrates with many different email autoresponders. It's got a heap of features like a product, timer bar, that just creates a little bit of scarcity when people are looking at you're looking at your product. So you can see here, this can be set as default. It's got a good just got a heap of great features that sort of working well once you've got your store ranking, and you're getting that organic traffic and the conversion start to flow also. So really, for me, this theme has now become a bit of a no brainer, because when I add up all the other, the cost or the monthly cost of subscriptions for other apps or need the one off cost on this thing.

It just makes it you know, a no brainer to go and get so if it interests you, I'll put the link in a text section in the training and you can just go and grab, grab that same And then also on your existing fame, go and do a speed test on it and see where you're sitting. And then you can consider whether you need to change your theme. Or if you don't, then we'll look at other ways that you can optimize your theme as we work through the training. So I hope that'll make sense. Thanks for watching this training session, and I'll see you in the next video.