Hey guys, welcome to another video in this in the training for Shopify x SEO. You've been through all the initial videos, as you have now realized there's quite a lot of setup and quite a lot to to make to shoot and then make sure you've got the foundations correct before you can actually optimize your your Shopify store. But now in the these next few videos, we're going to go right into the core of the training in terms of optimizing the site. So the first thing we're going to look at is the optimization of your homepage. And that will sort of set the foundation for optimization of the rest of the site. Okay, so the first thing we're going to look at is the Shopify URL.

I'll just pull over my screen. Now this may not may not be relevant to a lot of you guys who already have a Shopify store. Running. But hopefully when you actually created your store, you did take some have a little bit put a little bit of thought into what your Shopify URL would be. So normally what happens is when you open your Shopify store, Shopify on the, when you first set it up, sets up the account on what's called a subdomain, which is this section here of the my Shopify store. Then when you go and connect your actual domain, your store domain that you've purchased to, to the Shopify, the direct redirection is then set up so that if anyone clicks on this link, so we put a link in in the browser, and then it redirects to your actual domain.

Now, that's because Shopify is actually hosted by sure all your Shopify stores hosted by Shopify, and that's how they're able to have hundreds of thousands of sites. On this service. Now, the great thing about this is, it can actually be used as part of the optimization process. So normally what a lot of people will do is add in their brand name. So if you're, you're setting up a store, you might put in your brand name.my shopify.com. But it's not a bad idea to also add possibly your brand name plus one of your major keywords.

So for a toy store, for example, you could have the toy store brand name, and then maybe a hyphen, plush toys or something like that. The brand name is completely fine. The way the reason it comes in handy is later on, we can actually when you'll link building to your store, or sending traffic to your store for other methods, you can actually send them via and link build to this URL or send the traffic through this URL. And then you pick up the domain authority trust, relevance and power of the Shopify domain itself, pushing through to your store. So let's actually just a little Little bit of a side, I suppose feature you can use when you're actually doing your off page later on something that probably not a lot of people are aware of. But you can still push traffic and links through this domain, pick up the power of the domain along the way.

And that'll flow through to your actual domain itself. Now, you can still change your domain after the fact if you've got a store up and running, and it's going quite well, you can actually change that domain, then you just need to connect your, your, your primary domain to the new subdomain of Shopify, but then you just need to make sure that if you have done any link building, or you've gained some sort of trust and authority over time, that you do a 301 redirect at your registry to actually direct the traffic, the existing traffic through to the new Shopify store. That's something a little more advanced and it's something we might do some training on. In some further videos, but just a little tip that can help you gain a little bit of power immediately once you've actually got your Shopify store set up and domain connected.

Okay, so just a little bit on structure of website pages and e commerce, e commerce Shopify store pages, just going to look at how we actually view the content on a page and what we believe is important. So first of all, obviously, you've got your content. So that's on a homepage of a Shopify store. I'll just bring store over. We've obviously got a menu, your logo at the top, got a little this one, this claim actually has a bit of an announcement bar. Then you've got a slider with a title here.

And then you work into your however you've set your homepage up with collection featured collections, that sort of thing. And images and images are part of content as well and so is video so So in terms of the setup that we like to look at on our econ store to be really important, and there's some other things we're going to look at later on in some further videos that are going to enhance this process, but number one is URL, the URL of the over domain, and then the pages and collections pages for an e commerce store that goes with that is very important. And there's still a lot of people out there that that don't take into account the importance of URL, but time and time again, it's it's evident that the optimization of your URL plays a large part in how your page will will perform over time.

Then there's the SEO title, and also SEO description, which we'll go through in detail in a second. And then H tags, H tags are just heading tags. And Google looks at those for really trying to understand what the the the overall page is about. So your h1 tag is your main tag. And in general, you only want one h1 tag on a website. On webpage, you'll see a lot of websites out there.

And I'll show you how to find the h1 tags in a second that have multiple h1 tags. So what happens then is Google comes to a store or comes to a site and sees multiple h1 tags. And essentially, the bot gets a little bit confused and doesn't understand which h1 tag is the priority, so it will devalue that page a little bit. Then the next one is the h2. So h2 is like a subcategory or subheading, a synonym type of effect of using your headings so it can be a variation of your h1 heading, but just adds that little bit further deeper relevance to what a particular page is about. And then the next heading tags, h3, h4, h5 and h6.

Now, the h3 to h6 tags generally have the lowest priority in terms of some of the importance on a page. So we start with h1, h2, and then height three to h6 tags. And then within that, that complements that is obviously your content, which is on the page. So one of the issues with Shopify is that many of the themes, and I'm not sure what they do, whether it's something to do with the code on the back end, but they and that's something we're looking at at the moment. They a lot of themes don't provide any h1 tags on the homepage. You can provide h1 tags, on collection pages and production product pages, but not h1 tags on the home page.

Generally, you'll say that the first heading tag is h2. Now, if there's not an h1 tag, and there are h2 is what Google will take as a first priority easy h2. So it's not a major problem. And as we work through the training, you'll see we're not really focusing on ranking the homepage anyway, the homepage is gonna rank as we optimize other parts of the site by default, so that we still want to set the homepage as best we can, and be able to set these heading tags, the best we can. So we'll just go and work through some of them. options now.

Okay, the URL of your homepage, or the URL of your site. So generally, as I mentioned before, if you created a store, and you've set it up as a brand, that's a really good start. So you don't have any particular keywords in there unless your brand is actually you built your brand, or named your brand around a particular product or category. But you just got to be a little bit careful that you don't when you have a brand, say let's say, your URL or your business name was popular toys USA, for example. That would be what we would call a partial match domain where you have if the core term you're trying to optimize for was popular toys you would have you've got popular toys in the URL. So then you've just got to be what happens is you've just got to be a little bit careful.

You don't over optimize the rest of the site, when you've got the core keyword in the URL and then it exact match domain would be something like popular toys calm. Now, obviously, I would assume that that URL has already been taken. But you get my point if you if your URL is an exact match domain of your actual, the actual term or product or category you're trying to optimize for, it's very easy to become over optimized. So in general, what we like to do is, especially with an icon stalks, it's pretty natural to do that is just provide a brand for the for the actual site itself. So this one up here would be a partial match domain because it has toys in the euro. But then it has, but it's actually the brand name as well.

And then it actually has the, the brand part in the second part of the URL, which becomes partial match. So if you've already have your store set up with your domain, it's nothing to really be concerned about. You just need to be aware that it's easier to become over optimized when you're using an executor Match denied or partial match denied than it is for a brand. But if you just use your brand, you need to be aware that you just need to make Google aware of what your particular product or category is about. I see a lot of Shopify stores that are that are branded really well. But they don't then optimize the rest of their site to actually tell Google what it's about, apart from maybe a product title or something.

So we're going to go through that as well. So and it also becomes a little bit tricky when Google changes its algorithms all the time. And what they tend to do is exact match domains that are over optimized might get a bit of a suppression over time, and then they they changed the way they look at things and they say, Well, okay, exact match domains, we're going to be a little more lenient on those now, for any particular reason. We never know what Google's doing until after the fact. So we need to be on top of their game and understand try and then understand and use evidence to find out why they've changed an algorithm or, or model or point how to actually react to that. Okay, tags the home page.

So as I mentioned before, h1 tags, rare on a Shopify store. Let's just bring over an example site, another example site. And the way you can actually that one of the ways you can see what page tags and a lot of other elements on a page really simply is in your browser, right click and then go to Page Source. And then you can just use your search function within the code and it looks a little bit lots of code and gobbledygook but it's pretty easy to to filter if you just go Ctrl F in your browser, and then we type h1. So we can see normally if there is an h1, so I'll just pull my screen across a little bit. In the the slider bar here, you'll see some lines or some indication of where your h1 would be.

So there's no there's no h ones on this homepage at all. And if we type page two, we can see then that hi Lights where the h2 is. So there are some h2 tags, masterpiece, masterpiece. So it's got multiple h2 tags. And then it's got some extra bits and pieces down here. But if we look, if, as I mentioned before, if there's no h1 tag, and then Google's looking at an h1, h2 as the next in line as priority, you're going to want to have some sort of indication of what the actual store is about.

So, whatever this particular apparel bowtique is trying to target, it would make sense to have in one of the h2, you know, some optimization of the particular keyword. So, let's, let's just have a look at what they're selling. So they're selling dresses. So it's women's apparel, essentially. So what you could do here, instead of having masterpieces, you could still call it masterpieces, but Women's women's dress masterpieces or something like that, that actually you add in part of the core term in your h2 title, probably not a very good example. But if you get my idea, we'll just bring another one over and have a look.

So here's another store, another Shopify store, we go to go to the source code. We do a filter h1, again, no h1 tags on the page, h2. And we can see that there are h2 tags, but shot by category. Featured Products, so there's no keyword optimization there. But then you work on down to actual categories that are h2, but there's multiple h2. So what I would suggest would be better to do here was make once you've got your head to tag because it's the only it's a priority on the page, you'd make the rest of these underneath it H three.

So just becomes pretty logical. So again, Google comes to this page, it sees there's all these h2 tags, which are the top level headings. And it doesn't know which one is actually the priority. Let's be clear this a lot of this has to do with themes or themes that lack these features. So it's not necessarily the store owners fault. They might not understand optimization or not have actually provided any optimization on this tool.

But the theme is actually limiting what can be done as well. So one of the things we're looking at at the moment for, he's actually building a theme with all these options and features built in. So you don't have to work around to have them user friendly, we're actually going to have a theme coming out that provides all the features and will be available to everyone in this course. So now, the other way you can actually check it out. you're heading tags with Screaming Frog. So obviously, the viewing the source code is your free version.

And then the the paid version if you've got more than 500 URLs would be using Screaming Frog. But you've got a free version up to 500 URLs. So once you've actually had your your site crawl, then you can come over to the tabs here and you can put in h1, and you'll see his homepage here. And there are no h1 tags, h2 and then it shows you what the h2 tags are. It'll only tell you what first two h2 tags are. So if you come down the bottom here, you'll see that page two number one is shop by category and h2.

Number two is Featured Products. But because we've done the the manual, just go back to it. Because we've done the Manual Test as well. We can see that there's many more. There's a lot more than just two h2 techs. And we'll just say there's no h threes on this page.

Yeah, so there's a h3 tag here. Looks like their particular collection pages. So This is not too bad but certainly could be optimized better. Let's just see if there's any h threes on this site now. So So this site here, I'm certainly the homepage is sort of under optimized in in for for its heading tags. But you know, if they're generating traffic by paid advertising on social media actually doesn't matter.

And they'll be targeting probably collection pages without doing any optimization at all. Okay, so using our example. So what are the hashtags on the page? So you can see here that we go to h2 in the homepage, it's all your favorite toys. So here's an opportunity to optimize your h2 tag on the homepage. So here it is here, too, on the actual the image here or if ever toys so if I was looking to target popular toys, I could change these to all You're popular toys.

Pretty common sense. Okay, so we have one h2, which is, if that's the top level heading tag, we only want one h2. And then we want to look at h threes. So if we go to the source code of the page and we put in hi Trina filter, we can see that the h3 tag is actually a mine action figures, baby clothes. So in this particular theme, it's the collection pages here that are actually h2 tags, sorry, h3 tags. So really good opportunity here to use your heading tags by setting up your particular theme with the h3 tags here.

And if we were going to optimize this a little bit further, we could be a little more granular in in what we're trying to target. But at the moment this is set up reasonably well for and also for usability. So people come to the actual store and know exactly what These links are pointing to in terms of collection pages. Okay, so now that you've sort of got an idea on how the URL and the H tags work together, actually, before we do that, what we're going to do is just have a look at the SEO title, because that'll play a part in how we actually structure all these together. Okay, so to set the homepage, SEO title and description. So the SEO title, along with the URL is probably the next most important or probably similar in terms of priority for the importance of the optimization of your store.

So to set up to set your homepage title and your description, you simply go to the back of the store and you go to online store, then Preferences, and then you'll see the section here for title and meta description. And this is just for your homepage. Now, you'd be amazed how many stores we see that actually don't have this set up. And if you don't have title and description set up what Google will do. We'll just crawl a site and it'll determine what what the SEO title and description is going to be. And, you know, if your homepage is not set up correctly, you're not going to have that overall optimization.

Even though we're not really worried about the ranking of the homepage, because it's gonna rank as we optimize the rest of the store, it still needs to be relevant. So Google needs to see every single pages site that's relevant to what you're trying to promote. So this is where you put your title in. And this is where you put your description in. So with your if, for example, you're using a get For example, this site so this site is a partial match domain Toys in the Attic, calm, but we're also selling plush toys and then with some of the actual toys that we want to target or in this title, so having I've got toys in the URL, if you've got, you've got your main keyword in URL, you I only want one not at all in the title. So because we've got it in the URL, I've only got once in the homepage title here, if I had put it in further than that, say I'll put in Peppa Pig toy, and then plants and zombies toy.

That would be really, really over optimized. So having it in the URL and then also, three times in the title was optimized to match. So Google Ad needs to see at once. So I would have have it just once. The main core or valve store is toys, so I would just have at once and then by adding in the actual type of toys, the main ones we're trying to target. Soon as Google comes to the store, it just starts to understand what this particular site is about, and those that these three so category plush toy.

And then these two types of toys are what we're trying to target. And most editors website it is and Shopify will give you the maximum character count. So you want to try and stay within that character count. Now, descriptions, a little bit more gray. And a lot of people think descriptions are really important for optimization. Some people think they don't matter at all.

Generally, what we like to do, what I like to do with product pages, and collection pages is leave this blank. And then let Google actually crawl store to find out what it's about. Because you'll pick up more keywords if you've got your content set up correctly in your store anyway, but for the homepage, it's probably not a good idea. Probably a good idea just to have your description in here explaining a little bit bit about what your store is, and it's more for conversion so for people to actually click through to your store, once they find it within the Google search results. So comply patent conversion for sure. Um, having said that, would probably, if you're going to use it, he's only have your main keyword in here once or even not at all.

So as we when we did a little bit of ratios before, on keyword research, we found the stuffed animals was actually quite a high volume keyword. So now we don't have toys in this description at all. So we just have a large range of plush and stuffed animals. And that just D optimizes because we've got toys in the URL, not this URL, by the way, that's just the URL of the of the store itself. And just ignore this. This was as I said, this door hasn't been optimized correctly anyway.

So if I was redoing the URL, I would change this to represent the type of stories that might be plush toy or best plush toys, mashup or something like that. And then we would optimize the rest of it accordingly. So it's actually the Toys in the Attic calm URL that I'm talking about when I'm talking about this URL up here. So that's how you set your homepage title and home page meta description. And just to be really careful not to over optimize your, your URL and your title together, you want to minimize your core keywords as much as you can, but you want to have to have at least in euro, and wants in the title. And we've always been really conservative.

If I had it in the URL, I wouldn't have it in in the homepage title either. But what you can do and we're going to go through a bit in a second is doing a bit of reverse competitor analysis to find out what's working for them in the market. Okay, so content. Another issue with a lot of stores is the lack of the ability to add as much content as you want on a particular page. Generally a lot of themes because it's set up that way. We'll just go and have a look at the store here.

You can have a lot of your collections and these are obviously classed as content But if you scroll down, there's not a lot of text content apart from these blog posts here. So depending on what theme you use, it's always a good idea on the homepage to provide more content if you can. So maybe 500 or 1000 words of content that you can add your add more titles in as well, is going to be beneficial. So again, depends on what the theme you use. But one of the free themes, I'm just gonna go find it actually the same that's on this store here, and this unbuilt store, you've got options on the homepage to put in custom content. So scroll on down, and here's some more content you can add here and you can add as much content as you want here.

And the only issue is, I'm pretty sure it only allows. The heading sections are actually set to default and you can't change them. Just standard bold text, not headings. So using this section of this particular theme, a good opportunity to add in sort of 500 to 1000 words of content or more, break it up with subheadings, even a loan and then H tags, and just start using your built building in your sort of your keyword research into the text explaining a little bit about the store, but without over optimizing and the particular terms. So, in lieu of that, what we can go and do is just have a look at some competitors of a particular of this particular market to see where their optimization lies in terms of the keyword on the homepage. Okay, let's say for example, Stuart were looking at ranking for plush toys.

And again, we're just looking at the homepage here. So I've gone to google.com and put in plush toys and we can scroll on down we see a lot of these massive sites amazon.com Toys R Us so we're not going to use these guys's as comparisons because they're so large So much parents strength and age that you can't compare apples with apples when you're looking at these massive stores, there are some times when you can do that, but not in this case, we're looking for a similar type of store and size and structure to ours to compare. So we can see this one, this one, we've been looking at Douglas cuddle toy calm, it's got the toy keyword in the URL URL wants just like our example. So we can use this as a bit of a bit of a comparison to see how they've optimized their homepage.

While they're ranking for this toy. Now, just by setting up the optimization identical or similar to these guys, doesn't mean we're going to rank on the home page. And there's a lot of other factors that will come into it, as you'll see later on. But it's a good place to start. So what you can use as a very quick free tool is a tool called SEO central com. It's free.

So you go to the homepage and then you scroll down And you click keyword density in there, just be aware you've got I think it's three crawls per day. So you don't want to go throwing in keywords just to check and then realize you get locked out for a day for doing a bit of research. Just just use it wisely. Put the URL in the density tool up here. There'll be a CAPTCHA phrase before you run it and you hit submit and then what it does, it pulls back the density of the keywords. So it gives you a top keywords and then the frequency and percentage of the total page of each keyword and then we'll just scroll on down.

Then it'll show you the percentage for two keyword phrases. And then three keyword phrases. So this is comes in handy is a good guide. So what we're looking for is plush. So we use our find tool again and we put it in here and here we have plush, so I'll just pull this across. This is using Chrome so you can see a yellow bars here show us where they they're in the Got it with that shot.

Okay, so ranked on the first page of google.com for plush toys. So you can see the term plush is only on that homepage twice, only two times, and 51% of the total optimization. Then if we scroll down we can see it's used once on this particular term here and this particular term here and then if we use a Phil to actually put the courtroom in plush toy, you can see it's not on the page at all. So the two keyword term plush toys not on the page. So it's using Google understands that it's about toys because of the way the site set up and in the URL and the optimal optimization of the site as a whole. So even though that the term plush toys Not on the page anywhere.

And there's enough relevance within the site to understand that what it's about. So if someone types in plush toys, it's a good chance it'll be relevant. So when we go to the homepage of the store, when we run a filter, we can, we can see that it only shows on that to the, the user. And he wants on the homepage, and it's actually a blog post here. So these blog posts are rotated. And this would actually disappear for homepage as more posts come in.

But Keyword Tool tells us it's on there more than that. And that is because the tool actually scrapes for titles and descriptions as well. So everything on the page, so we can see here, plush toys is in the in the description and also in the Twitter description as well. So it's certainly in the code more than you can actually see it on the page itself. So what it shows though is even though the rank really high for the term plush toys. It's not it's reasonably low keyword density, very low keyword density for the particular term on the page.

And yet, it's still ranking really highly. So less is more when your site is set up correctly. Okay, so then if we run our own example store and run it through the keyword density tool, and we can see immediately that the term plush toy is in quite a high frequency on the page. So 13 times, it's in the title as well, as we looked at before and in the frequency of the keyword is 35 times or 5% of the total content. So immediately this after doing the research on the competitor domain, we can see that a good guide for us would be to D optimize the term plush on our particular homepage. I would probably leave it in the title but you would start to D optimize it a little bit from The homepage itself.

And if we look at the account, have a look at the store. If we look at our store, we can see the majority of the terms on the homepage coming from our collection grids that we've added for the titles of these products. So the ways we could reduce this would be to add different toys in here, or different categories, so not the plush toy category. Or we can actually change the product titles, which we'll look at later on. In this case, probably would lessen the amount of times the this collection is actually shown. So maybe have it as only to two products in a in a two column grid or remove them all together and they'll reduce the amount of times plush obviously is on the page.

And same for all the other collections in the page. But keep in mind obviously when we're talking about previously we're talking about having more content and you can have a you know if you've got to think You can add more content here, just by adding more content will actually D optimize that particular term. So it brings down the percentage overall. So you don't necessarily need to remove them, you can actually add more content of different terms and different optimization to dilute the the other terms. So there's a number of different ways you can do it. It's all pretty, pretty self explanatory.

So yeah, that's what you'd be looking at in this particular example. And also, we'll just look at a second example, this time for the same term plush toys ranking on page one. But the store actually has the category page actually ranking. So we can just go and run that through the keyword density checker, which I've done here. And we can see interestingly, they do not have the term plush or toys in Europe at all. So but it is on the page.

So we can see here but still in relatively low densities, five times for the term plush on the total page. And the two two word keyword phrase plush toys is only on the page twice. So again, even further D optimized or low density, showing that and still ranking quite well, again, we can't use this as an ultimate guide because there's other factors that come into it, which we'll get to later on. But a good guide that we really need to do optimize for trying to rank for that keyword, the optimizer homepage here and it sets us for a good foundation. Okay, and the last thing I want to we actually skipped over the last thing I want to speak about on homepage optimization are your images. Now most of the images will be actually pulled from when you add collections to your homepage.

Sometimes you can in some themes you lead lucky slide images and other images that can be added manually on Page. But a lot of times, I'll pull images from your collection pages. So we'll go and have a look at those now, and just how that works in with our particular store. So what you want to be careful of is there's a video coming up on image optimization itself. So this will be a little clearer. But just we work on the homepage.

And you want to make sure that your image titles and your image alt tags are not over optimized either because they will have a they'll play a part in the title optimization of this page. So find out what what how they're optimized, you can just right click on a particular image, go to inspect if you're in Chrome. And then it'll show you the euro. The product name, which is not even has doesn't even have a keyword at all. It's just been uploaded from a database so it's not optimized at all for this particular image. And then the alt tag here you can see has been added in as elephant stuff to me.

So You know, we might, if we're going to reduce it to the toy was optimized on the entire page, we might change this to elephant stuffed animal, elephant stuffed animal, for example. And that would just be optimizer term toy, but the term plush is not there. So we're not so concerned about that for that particular term. So you've got to weave all these elements into your homepage and get quite granular to make sure you're not over optimized and optimized for whatever you're trying to, to rank for. Okay, so how do we if we needed to do optimize or, or add some more optimization with the images? How do we do it?

Well, firstly, as I mentioned, you do it by either changing the titles or the alt tags, but you can also add different products. So this, this particular grid section here is set for what have we got eight, eight products, so two columns, sorry, two rows with four columns. So the way Shopify works on mobile themes is the collection, it's actually selected to be here for this particular store is plush, soft toys. And it's the first eight sharp here in the collection. And so you can simply move these around and have the different different ones actually showing here. So this might be pretty simply, you might already know it, but it is handy to know from optimization point of view for the homepage.

So you just need to select manually here, and then you'll see these sections show up and you can just drag and drop, different positioning. So if we wanted to bring, let's say, this one here, we can scroll up, put it in the top position because it's not over optimize what we want. And then if we refresh our page We can say that it's actually been headed in place of Omo, the other ones down. So just something to be aware of when you're setting up grids for your homepage, it plays a large part. And yeah, you need to be granular if you're really going to go deep into optimizing your store. It's obviously a bit of work and a bit of thought, but it plays, pays dividends, once you actually get right set up correctly, okay, so that's that's essentially it for homepage optimization.

There is one extra section that we're going to be looking at, which is actually schema, which we'll explain in another video. So that will be added to the home page and other pages as well. And that plays a quite a significant role in optimization, but it's a whole section in itself, so we're not going to discuss it here. And that can be done Done later on anyway, so, okay, I hope that all makes sense. As I mentioned, homepage optimization needs to be done, but it's not going to be our main focus on the pages. We're trying to rank and pull in traffic.

So that'll be coming up in the next few videos. Thanks. We'll see you next video.