Making the right choices for your online store
Today I’m going to hand the mic over to our very own resident Shopify SEO expert on the big course, and also in the digital marketing collective, my VIP marketing membership.
Her name is Kerri Bennett, her business is Yellow Door Digital. She is a legend.
Today she’ll be sharing her tips and advice to help you on your Shopify SEO journey and avoid making all the wrong moves.
Tune in to learn:
- Why you should never buy a third-party theme
- Why Shopify is actually easier for SEO beginners
- Why you should always duplicate your main theme before making edits
- Why you should never let a website developer be the owner of your store
- Why it’s unwise to buy your domain name from Shopify
- Kerri’s tips for creating SEO-friendly content on your product pages
- Why you should steer clear of editing your robots.txt file
- What to do when you want to remove a product
- How to keep your discount codes safe
- Why you should never put your store on password-only access
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About Kerri Bennett
Kerri is the owner of an intentionally small, Shopify and eCommerce SEO agency, Yellow Door Digital.
With over 20 years in the digital space and a degree in Internet Communications, Kerri’s experience spans website design & development, Search engine optimisation, email marketing and social media. However in the past 10 years, the focus has been exclusively on supporting business to leverage the Shopify platform and best practice eCommerce SEO to grow and manage their online stores.
Transcript
Kate Toon: Hello and welcome to another episode. My name is Kate Toon, and I am the head chef at the recipe for SEO Success, an online teaching hub for all things related to search engine optimization and digital marketing. Today I’m gonna hand the mic over to our very own resident Shopify SEO expert on the big course, and also in the digital marketing collective, my VIP marketing membership.
Her name is Kerri Bennett. Her business is Yellow Door Digital. She is a legend. And today she’ll be sharing her tips and advice to help you on your Shopify SEO journey and avoid making all the wrong moves.
Kerri Bennett: Hey, I’m Kerri Bennett from Yellow Door Digital, a small Shopify and SEO agency based in Geelong, Victoria, Australia as a veteran user of Shopify as a developer, designer, and store owner, today I’m sharing with you 10 things I would never, ever do if I was an e-commerce owner using Shopify. At Yellow Door Digital, we help small businesses build e-commerce stores, optimize them for conversion and search engines, and assist with general store management, updates and improvements.
If you have a Shopify store and need an expert in your corner, I’d be happy to chat. You can connect with me via my website, www.yellowdoordigital.com au, or via Instagram at Yellow Door Digital. After many years working on the Shopify platform, I can tell you I’ve had big wins, but also made and seen some big mistakes.
Today I’m sharing these with you in the hope that you can avoid any pitfalls. So let’s begin. Firstly, I would never, ever buy a third-party theme. When you buy a theme from the Shopify theme store, you get a theme that has been vetted by Shopify developers to meet some pretty tight standards. The theme code is not only clean and efficient for the platform, but it’s not bloated with unnecessary elements.
Shopify mandates that themes within its store are maintained, regularly, updated and supported. When buying from theme marketplaces, you run the risk of getting a theme with bloated code, a theme that doesn’t leverage all functions of Shopify, potentially a lack of regular theme updates and possibly lack of ongoing support.
Shopify has 900 themes in its theme store, plenty of functionality and design options for large and smaller stores. Number two. I would never, ever say Shopify is rubbish for SEO. Shopify has the facility for the owner to craft relevant page titles, meta descriptions, headings, image, alt text, and influence the navigational structure of the site.
You can also easily incorporate specialist SEO apps to assist your on-page optimization if required. Elements that you cannot control on Shopify, such as access to log files and hosting are only a small part of SEO. So I would never, ever say that Shopify is rubbish for SEO. In fact, for most novice users, Shopify removes much of the geeky end of things, making it easier for users to optimize on page SEO element.
Number three, I would never, ever make significant edits to my website without first duplicating my main theme. Shopify makes it super easy to duplicate your live theme and make edits to a draft version, no matter if you’re a skilled user or novice. If you’re making significant edits to the design elements of your store, I would never, ever make those changes without first duplicating the live store. Having a clean duplicate store means you can roll back if anything was to go wrong, and you can always delete that duplicate if you need to down the track. So tip number three, I would never, ever make significant edits to my website without duplicating the live theme first.
Number four: I would never ever let a website developer be the owner of my store. Believe it or not, I’ve seen this more times than I would like to. Here’s how it goes. You hire support or a developer to help build your website after the site is complete. They might make you a staff account and you feel everything might be fine. No, not fine. The website needs to be transferred to you so that you are the owner of the store.
The owner is the only person that has control over the bank account information and has the ability to invite or remove other people’s access to the account. You can use collaborator and staff accounts to give others access with limitations relevant to their involvement. I would never, ever not be the owner of my Shopify store.
Five. I would never, ever buy my domain name from Shopify. Yes, you can buy a domain from Shopify, just like you can buy a domain name from Squarespace or Wix. Feels like a good match after all. Perhaps it’s easier to have it all under the one roof, but unfortunately if something goes wrong with your Shopify store and you get locked out for some reason, you could also potentially lose your domain name.
The URL, you’ve built a following on, maybe even have achieved some pretty great SEO on, it’s just not worth the risk. Buy your domain from a dedicated domain provider. I tend to recommend VentraIP, but there are lots of others out there.
Number six, I would never, ever use generic content on my product pages. Good SEO is about having great content on your website, including on your product page. If you have cut and paste, mass generated copy that you’ve had supplied from your wholesale provider. Chances are lots of other people who stock the same product are also using that same untargeted generic copy, use well-crafted prompts in AI tools to help you write engaging, clever, brand aware content.
Not only will it be more engaging and relevant to your audience, but the search engine gods will look favourably on your unique content. To repeat, I would never, ever use generic information as the main content on my product pages.
Seven. I would never ever edit my robots.txt unless it was completely necessary and I knew exactly what I was doing. The robots.txt file helped search engines understand what pages on your site to look at and what not to. Years ago, Shopify didn’t even allow anyone to edit their robots.txt file. They figured too much damage could be done by allowing access to the important file to potentially untrained users. Today you can edit the robots.txt file.
However, in all my work with hundreds of Shopify stores, I’ve only ever needed to edit it on two occasions. So unless you have the title of web developer on your resume, steer clear of the robots.txt file.
Eight. I would never, ever delete products, pages, or collections without redirecting them. I get it. You decide to stop stocking a particular product. Maybe the manufacturer has stopped producing it. Maybe it doesn’t align with your brand anymore, whatever it might be. Deleting it without first checking if that product was [00:07:00] responsible for bringing your search engine. Traffic is risky to your acquisition traffic.
The product might be highly ranked in search engines for various keyword phrases that are important to your brand, even if that product has been a slow mover. It’s possible the product appeared highly in some search results and was responsible for bringing traffic to your website that ended up converting with an alternative product.
Over the years, I’ve had a number of store owners contact me to determine why their traffic has significantly dropped. We trace it back to deleting products without consideration to what traffic they might be bringing to the website. If you must delete the product, and I’m sure you will need to do this at some point, make sure you add a redirect from that product page to a collection page that is representative or aligns to that product type.
So for example, if you remove a pair of black leather, high heels. Redirect that product URL to a High Heels collection. This makes the link still relevant for the user and ensures the user doesn’t land on a 404 not found page. So I would never, ever delete prominent products from the website without adding a relevant redirect. Same applies for collections, blog posts and static content pages.
What number are we up to? Number nine. I would never ever use standard discount code strings. People can guess that welcome and 10 off might be discount codes to get unqualified discounts on your products. Browser extensions like honey and retail may not test and publish codes.
They discover using scrapers and bots Instead, keep type control on your discount codes. Use less generic terms as your codes and turn off any that are no longer in use. You can also limit the number of uses and set expiry dates. You can even restrict usage to certain customers. I would never, ever use standard discount codes without limits on a Shopify store.
Finally, number 10, I would never, ever put my store on password only access if I wanted to take a small break. Yes, store owners need holidays, and if you’re running a lean ship with you in every possible role from marketer, buyer picker, and packer, you might be inclined to think that putting your store into password only access might be the best way to ensure you don’t get orders that you cannot fulfill whilst you take that much needed break.
Putting your store behind a password means that your website visitors can’t see any of your products, but neither can search engines. By putting password access only over your store for even a short period of time might mean that search engine bots crawl the site and get the idea that you are shut for good.
They too cannot access or see any of your content. The better option is to either remove the ad to cart button from all your products or replace it with a pre-order button with a note to indicate when delivery will be scheduled. This can all be done on most Shopify themes quite easily within the customizer for the product page template.
A wrap of the 10 things I would never ever do on the Shopify platform. I hope you found it helpful. If you would like to chat to me about your Shopify store and get a free mini audit. Email me at hello@yellowdoordigital.com.au.
Kate Toon: So that’s the end of this week’s show. If you have questions about Shopify SEO, you can head to the I Love SEO group on Facebook. I also wanted to let you know about my free Ultimate SEO checklist, which will help you manage your site and grab all the Go Grapple the Google Beast. If you haven’t got that already, you can download it completely free.
From the website, and thanks for listening. If you do like the show and enjoyed this episode, please don’t forget to leave a five star rating review on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, or have you heard the podcast? Your review will help others find the show and learn more about the wonderful world of search engine optimization.
And until next time, happy SEOing.
