How to Yoastify your shop
If you’re even vaguely into SEO and haven’t heard of Yoast, then I’m guessing you have been living under a rock.
But for those that don’t know, Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that helps your site perform better in search engines like Google.
It also gives you the tools to bring your content to the highest standards of SEO and overall readability.
It’s my favourite SEO tool which I use on all my sites and recommend in my course The Recipe for SEO success.
And yes I’ve tried all the other tools, but I find that Yoast works best with other plugins and its SEO copywriting features are just awesome.
But one big fat bummer was always that I couldn’t recommend Yoast to my Shopify students, who now make up nearly 50% of my course takers.
They had to struggle on, using dodgy apps or hand coding.
But all that has changed.
Yoast has just launched a Shopify version of their famous WordPress plugin and today I’m delighted to be chatting to Marieke van de Rakt all about its features, upcoming developments and how to get the best out of the app.
Tune in to learn
- What Yoast is
- Why Yoast launched an SEO app for Shopify
- Core features of the Yoast SEO app
- How it helps deal with duplicate content
- How to start off with Yoast SEO
- What kind of support is available
- Marieke’s top SEO tip
Listen to the podcast
Sponsor love
This podcast is brought to you by Yoast SEO for Shopify app. This app helps you improve the SEO of your online store, takes care of your technical SEO automatically and comes with lots of schema features right out of the box.
Find out more about Yoast SEO for Shopify here.
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And big thanks to wmmwindy from the United States for their lovely review:
“SEO. Great show.”
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About Marieke van de Rakt
Next to that, she is an investor in several tech startups. She was the former CEO of Yoast and the founder of Yoast Academy.
Her main expertise is in content SEO and marketing.
Connect with Marieke van de Rakt
Useful Resources
Transcript
Kate Toon:
If you’re even vaguely into SEO and you haven’t heard of Yoast that I’m guessing you’ve been living under a rock. But for those of you who don’t know, Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that helps your site perform better in search engines like Google. It also gives you the tools to bring your content as the highest standards of SEO and overall readability. It’s my favourite SEO tool, which I used on all my sites, and I recommend in my course at the Recipe of SEO Success. And yes, I’ve tried the other tools, but I find that Yoast works best with other plugins and its SEO, copywriting features are just awesome. But one big fat bummer was always that I couldn’t recommend Yoast to my Shopify students who now make up nearly 50% of my course takers. They had to struggle on using dodgy apps or hand coding.
But all that has changed. Yoast has just launched a Shopify version of their famous WordPress plugin. And today I’m delighted to be chatting with Marieke van de Rakt, all about its features, upcoming developments and how to get the best out of the app. Hello, my name is Kate Toon, and I’m the head chef with the Recipe for SEO Success. An online teaching hub for all things related to search engine optimization and digital marketing. And today I’m talking to Marieke. Hello Marieke.
Marieke van de Rakt:
Hello. Very nice to be here.
Kate Toon:
Well, I was just telling you before we started to record that you’re only the third person who’s been on the podcast twice.
Marieke van de Rakt:
And the first woman.
Kate Toon:
First feminine woman.
Marieke van de Rakt:
Yes, that’s me.
Kate Toon:
So we’ve had, we’ve had John Mueller and Rand Fishkin and then you.
Marieke van de Rakt:
And then Marieke.
Kate Toon:
I mean, if I’m honest, I would like you to be on the podcast every week, but maybe that’s going to be our future podcast that we’re going to make in the future when we’re free from this work stuff.
Marieke van de Rakt:
And you can use this as a sales argument to get Rand Fishkin and John Muller back again.
Kate Toon:
Because they want to be ahead of me.
I think it might put them off, to be honest. I’m only joking. I know. I thought I’d start the podcast by being mean to you. Marieke is currently the head of strategy at Yoast. Next to that, she’s an investor in several tech startups. She was the former CEO of Yoast and the founder of Yoast Academy. Her main expertise is content SEO, and marketing. Fun fact, Marieke enjoys ballet dancing. Now that is a fun fact because you’re quite a tall lady. Aren’t you?
Marieke van de Rakt:
I didn’t say. I wish I’m good at it. I just said I enjoyed it. Yeah. I actually took a course, but I quit again because I’m doing too much stuff. And one of the reasons I quit was because I’m too tall. So I was standing between all of the other ones. And I was like, who is that giant?
Kate Toon:
You could pick them up though. You could be the one that they jump into your arms, like in Swanlake.
Marieke van de Rakt:
Yes. As we’ve already established, I’m a feminine woman.
Kate Toon:
You are a feminine woman.
Marieke van de Rakt:
I want to be picked up.
Kate Toon:
Yes. Don’t we all want to be picked up. I think your ballet dancing skills are probably on a par with my role escaping skills. I tried them on today. I thought I’m going to have a go. And I managed to get from one side of the kitchen to the other.
Marieke van de Rakt:
Well, great.
Kate Toon:
I know.
Marieke van de Rakt:
As long as you have fun, then it’s okay.
Kate Toon:
It wasn’t really that much fun. It was kind of terrifying. I did make a reel of it, which is now on Instagram. If you’d like to entertain yourself by finding that later. Because, you’ve got nothing to do these days. Just running a giant company. I don’t know. Well, look, we’re going to start right at the beginning, right at basics. So anyone who is fresh to SEO and who hasn’t heard of Yoast, rhymes with toast. What is Yoast?
Marieke van de Rakt:
So Yoast is a piece of software. So most famous for WordPress now, also in Shopify, that helps you rank higher in the search engine. So it all started when my husband, who was the founder of Yoast, and his name is also Yoast, which is not confusing at all. He worked at those big companies, so we’re a Dutch. So he worked at KLM, our airline and at eBay, and he helped those sites rank high in Google. And then he thought everything I’m doing now, I could also build into plugin and then everybody can use it. So, that’s how it started. And he didn’t make any money for it for a long time, just because he was passionate about, well, opening the web. That’s the idea. Because you want to have a fair chance in search engines.
So, that’s how it all started. And we’ve done a lot of research. We have quite a good feel of what works in the search engines and what doesn’t work. And we always have to stay up to date. Because just this week, Google is rolling out a big new update. So we’ll figure out and tweak our plugin in such a way that it helps you to stand out in the search engines.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. I mean, I think the reason that WordPress is so amazing is because it is open source and anybody can develop plug plugins for it. And all the code for those plugins is open source as well. Everyone can see everything. Which is obviously a good thing and can be a bad thing as well. And as you mentioned, Yoast was free for a long time. It’s still free. There is a premium version now, and certain features are in there and certain… I must submit, don’t be crossed with me. I still have the free version for all my sites, because I’m nice and tight. But it works really well. There’s an awful lot of features and functionality in there.
Marieke van de Rakt:
We can set you up with premium one. We love you. You can have one. Maybe you can try it out. The premium version in WordPress is 89. And in Shopify it’s a bit more expensive though. [00:05:47] And we have a free version. We also have a free version in Shopify now so that people can play with it and check it out. It was part of our entire idea and values that we had to make something that would help the web get better. And WordPress is such a big chunk of the web. So we’re really making a difference there, I think. And you’re correct that the free version does everything, except when you want to, well, save a little bit of time, then we have some really awesome premium features.
Kate Toon:
Yeah you do, you do. [00:06:21] And if you want to go back in the back catalogue, you can listen to an episode with Yoast about the plugin and listen to his story about that. And I think now you’ve decided to launch in Shopify, which is a bit of a different platform. It’s a closed platform. So developing an app for Shopify is a very different affair. How did that happen? Why did you decide to do that? Because, it’s a big leap into a completely different CMS. Yeah.
Marieke van de Rakt:
So we had real value for a long time. So we didn’t want to do anything what wasn’t opensource. But Shopify actually reached out to us or the lead SEO people. They are friends with Yoast, he knows everybody. And Shopify, in what it does, really resonates with what we do. So I think the web would be better if people have their own website instead of selling their stuff on Amazon. And while Shopify was growing quite extensively, this was a big opportunity. But it takes a lot of time to build a plugin specifically for another platform. So that meant we had to make money of it as well. And we’re still not making enough money of it because it’s just an investment. It’ll become bigger, but that’s a big leap in what you have to do. And well, the workforce market is really big while, the Shopify market is smaller. That’s the case. Well, it was a big thing. I think we had a team working on it for a year and that meant we couldn’t develop other things.
Kate Toon:
And then I think Shopify has come along leaps and bounds in terms of its SEO capability. As I mentioned, half the people who are coming through my courses now are on Shopify. And a lot of people prefer Shopify rather than WordPress with WooCommerce, just because Shopify have obviously done a lot to make the aesthetic and the UX and the usability of the shopping experience really, really nice. I’m also finding Shopify sites run really quickly. They’re super fast. Some of them are really good and responsive, especially if you’re on Shopify 2.0 and you’ve got a premium theme, but a big thorn in its side has always been that there isn’t really a great SEO opportunity. They’ve got a few guidelines, can whack in a couple of title tags and meta descriptions, but it’s pretty limited. So now Yoast is in town. What features does the app have? Tell me, maybe five core features that Yoast for Shopify has that are going to really change things for people?
Marieke van de Rakt:
So what we have, and we do that all in the app. So all the other SEO apps kind of let you go somewhere else to do your things. You’ll stay in the Shopify backend. Is it called the Shopify backend?
Kate Toon:
It is called the backend, yes.
Marieke van de Rakt:
It’s called Shopify backend. I’m the WordPress girl.
Kate Toon:
I know.
Marieke van de Rakt:
So I often call the plugin and then I get like, no-
Kate Toon:
I know. I do the same. It’s okay.
Marieke van de Rakt:
Okay. Thank you. So I think most important, but that’s because I’m a content person, is our content optimization tool. So we have the entire thing. It’s exactly the same as it is in Yoast. Only it’s now designed and equipped for product pages. So, of course, in Shopify you have product pages more than perhaps you have blog. You should have a blog, but that’s another story. So there are complied with what a product page should look like. And the green bullets, orange bullets, red bullets help you to write good product descriptions, help you to write readable product descriptions.
So that thing is really important part of our plugin. I think people know Yoast SEO because of that. And then all of our schema and the technical SEO is taken care of for you. So we do a lot of things, making Shopify well, better platform, more SEO friendly, without you needing to do anything. Schema is something I think a lot of tools do in the wrong way, might be more important after this helpful content update. We’re going to see how that works. So that’s something that helps. Of course, we have the social previews and the Google previews you can look at and you’ll get access to our academy course. And, of course, you have a great course as well.
Kate Toon:
We both have good courses. Hey look, I’m going to come back to some of these things. So the content optimization tool, if you’ve not used WordPress, you won’t understand how cool that is.
Marieke van de Rakt:
That’s the coolest.
Kate Toon:
It is. So you kind of enter in the keyword phrases that you want to use. You can have primary phrases, secondary phrases, and it kind of looks for them in core spots on the page. Also, tells you if you’ve overused them, underused them, put them in the wrong place. But the readability tool I think is really good. I can’t remember, but I think it uses the Flesch–Kincaid methodology, but it basically says what readability level you’re at? What one do you use?
Marieke van de Rakt:
So I think Flesch, we do that. We still measure that, but that’s not very actionable. Because, what do you need to do when it’s not good? But we’ve made separate checks and your sentences are too long. Because, the hardest thing for people is to read long sentences. Especially if you read a long sentence after long sentence and then your head overflows. So we’ve built in those tools for many languages, of course, in Australia, you all speaking English,.but in Europe we all speak different languages.
Kate Toon:
Never. You don’t say.
Marieke van de Rakt:
Yes. So we built those for all different languages. And we just measure whether or not your text is easy to read, and especially for product descriptions. I think that could help a lot because people shouldn’t have a hard time reading your product description. I mean, that’s not easy to read.
Kate Toon:
And a lot of people, when they have a Shopify store reselling other people’s products, cut and pasting their copy, not really editing, not really thinking about it. So anything that helps with that is great. And you talked about Schema. I know we’ve done lots of episodes on the podcast for Schema. But for those who don’t know what Schema is, another term for structured data, it’s a way of flagging elements within your content. To make it really clear to Google what they are. So the classic ware store would be things like this is the price, Google. This is the availability, Google. Here are the colours, Google. Just really making it super clear. And often that gets pulled through into the search engine results pages, there’s little flagged elements. So again, some of that bakes into Shopify, but you are bringing extra elements in there as well.
Marieke van de Rakt:
And we’re tying it together. So what we do and other SEO tools don’t do this correctly because I often look at their own websites and it’s wrong. So what you want is that Google sees your site as one thing. So this is the homepage. This is an author. This is a product. And if you have multiple product Schema on one page and you could have that, for instance, if you have related products, if you don’t tie that neatly to each other, then Google won’t know if the schema on a page is of a related product, of the product that’s actually on that page. And that’s what Yoast says here will take care of for you. So it will tie all those things together in one big knot.
Kate Toon:
Yes, because to be honest, no store owners really don’t want to be digging into things like Schema. And I remember talking about this with Yoast at your conference very long ago, about how the goal of all these content management systems is actually to take away all this technical SEO stuff. So we don’t have to worry about it. And we can focus on the content and the beautiful images and being relatable and building trust, not worrying about whether we’ve got Schema on page seven and it’s category or it’s going to be pagination or… Anyway, the other great thing-
Marieke van de Rakt:
We’ll do that automatically for you. Because we do it automatically, it’s like four months ago, I finally understood why we do it better than other tools. Because I was like, you don’t have to worry about it, but we are really doing it better than that.
Kate Toon:
That’s good. And the other thing again, that was always a challenge is one of the first things I get my students to do is share their homepage or share a product page or a category page. And there was a real lack of control of the image that showed up on Facebook and the text that was associated. There was no real way, you could try and manipulate it, but it wasn’t a set thing. And that’s another great thing about Yoast for WordPress. Is that you can dictate say, I want to show… I know that these images on the page, but this is the image I want to show on Facebook and this is the copy snippet I want to show. So I think that’s going to give people a lot of control. Because, obviously social is everything for online stores. So having that level of control is fantastic.
Marieke van de Rakt:
Social and organic search. That’s what you want.
Kate Toon:
They are together. They live together. And then the Yoast Academy, which is packed full of courses on SEO, copywriting, and Schema. I’ve actually taken your Schema course. I thought it was really great. So having access to that as well. But the other thing is the support. So we didn’t mention that, but there’s a live support element as well. Isn’t there. Yeah.
Marieke van de Rakt:
Yeah. And we noticed that Shopify customers, because they’re higher payer customers than the usual WordPress customer. So they’re expecting better support. So Shopify, we have great small team, but they’re really into helping you set it up. So you’ll get access to our support team as well.
Kate Toon:
Well, I think it’s a different mentality. Because with WordPress, because it’s open source, because there’s a million forums and a million tutorials, I guess people on WordPress are very much used to going out and finding the information. Whereas on Shopify, it’s a closed platform with customer service. You can’t go in and take out the code and put new code in. So therefore you are relying on customer service. So it’s kind of a different beast. Isn’t it? Let’s talk about one of the big issues that comes up with e-commerce sites classic. So lots of e-commerce sites have problems with duplicate content, because people will create a product and then they’ll go, well I know I’ve got six different colours, so I’m actually going to replicate this product and have the red shoe, the blue shoe, the green shoe.
And I can’t really be bothered to write extra content. I can’t really want to write unique content because I haven’t got much time. So, I’m going to get duplicate content. And while we know that it’s not a penalty, it doesn’t result in a penalty. It can look like a penalty. Because, Google gets a bit confused.
Marieke van de Rakt:
Google gets confused.
Kate Toon:
It does. We all get confused.
Marieke van de Rakt:
And if Google gets confused. It just doesn’t rank anything anymore.
Kate Toon:
It doesn’t, that’s it. There’ll be someone over there who’s done a better job and they’ll rank them above you.
Marieke van de Rakt:
Because they’re… Sorry.
Kate Toon:
We’re just so excited. So exciting. And so, one of the ways that we recommend fixing this is setting up something called a canonical link. And the canonical link pretty much says, Hey Google, I know that these products are all similar, but if you could only rank one of them, could it be this one? This is my favourite. And again, this has been something that’s classically difficult to do in Shopify, but Yoast helps this does it. Yoast does that.
Marieke van de Rakt:
Yeah. So I think it really does it automatically for you in most cases. Yeah. This is technical SEO. It’s not my expertise, but I looked this up. We help you set up the canonical URL, which is really important. Google will just not understand what you’re doing.
Kate Toon:
So it’s marked for indexing by the search engines. It happens automatically in about 99.9% of the cases. And there many cases that are a bit fiddly and it’s not working. Then you’ve got that live chat to help. Now when you launch-
Marieke van de Rakt:
Then you reach out to Sid.
Kate Toon:
But you also have offer a free trial so you can use it free for 14 days. Cool. Well look, I want to go through a few little things with Shopify. If I’ve got my store and I’ve just started working on SEO and I’ve decided after this podcast that I’m going to give Yoast SEO a try, and I’ve installed the app, what would be some of the first things that you would recommend that I do?
Marieke van de Rakt:
I would recommend writing awesome content. Because I think in the end, that’s what Google likes. And if you installed the Yoast SEO, all the technical stuff is pretty much taken care of. So, that’s an actionable thing you can do. And everybody hates me because nobody wants to write content, but that would be the thing that I would do. And even if you’re at a shop thinking about maybe I can write some blog posts that could really help with your ranking as well. Because, Google just loves content. So think about what terms people are searching for. Make sure to use those exact words in your copy, because that’s what Google will write, but that will also resonate with your audience. Well, because that’s the way you are going to stand out in the search engine. Just make sure that your Google and social profile. So just go into that content optimization tool and start optimising.
Kate Toon:
World you recommend maybe starting on rewriting some of your existing product descriptions, and would you in that approach, it’d be quite nerve-racking, wouldn’t it? Would you pick your five best sellers or your five worst sellers? What would your approach be?
Marieke van de Rakt:
Yeah, that’s an in interesting question.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. Well I think it is because you don’t want to mess up what you’ve already got, but you also, don’t want to waste time on products that maybe sell one a month. It’s interesting. Isn’t it?
Marieke van de Rakt:
So I would look into things that are doing well, but could do better, and perhaps see, just also look at your pages and think, okay, these are doing really well. What is it? Why are those ranking? And what can I do with pages that are doing a little less and are important to me? So I also use your brain. That’s always a good tip I’m giving to people for free. If you just think about what pages are most important to me, which are my key products, which products are the things that my audience is really happy with, which I get great reviews of. And if they’re not ranking as high as you think, those would be the ones I would look into. And then you can learn a lot from the pages that are ranking high, because you’re probably doing something great there. So what are you doing there that you could also do in those other pages?
Kate Toon:
Yeah. I mean, I think it’s interesting because you can look at those pages and go, is it happy accident that these pages are ranking well? Do Google just throw me an opportunity here? And actually when I look at them, well they’re actually not that well optimised, Google’s kind of ranked me for this keyword, because there’s no better alternative. But if I actually used it in some key spots, I could actually improve that. Maybe you could work on your readability score, even just small changes in readability can massively help people convert. You’ve already got them to your product, but now you’re trying to woo them. And often the copy is unreadable, it’s all ability. It’s long sentences, as you said. So even just improving the readability could just move you up a notch. And the thing I think about SEO is it’s not about dramatic changes. It’s not about going in and changing the title tag on 150 products. It’s about making some small changes, watching the results. As you said, looking at what’s performing well and replicating it.
Marieke van de Rakt:
And what you also could do, remember the last time we had a podcast, we came up with a nice Mary Kondo.
Kate Toon:
Oh we love a bit of Marie Kondo. Yes. Do a bit of culling, do a bit of culling of products.
Marieke van de Rakt:
Does it spark joy?
Kate Toon:
Yeah. Does it spark joy.
Marieke van de Rakt:
Yeah. I think also look at what pages do I have, what products do I have that are sold out. And, I’m not thinking of ever selling them again. Just get rid of those pages. Of course redirect them neatly. So people tend to have a lot of pages on their website. They feel if you have a hard time writing, then you’re probably really proud of what you’ve written, but if it’s not valid anymore, then you should just get rid of it. Because, Google has to crawl through all of those pages. So it could really pay off to clean up, think about what sparks joy and what doesn’t and just get rid of all the things you’re not doing anymore.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. I mean, we talked about that on Marieke’s previous episode. So feel free to go back and listen to that. And the truth is with most stores, it’s literally 20% of the inventory that makes 80% of the sale. What your best sellers are and that there’s some stuff in there. That’s just let it hang around because it feels like too much trouble. So I agree. Cut it back. I mean, I can see a lot of well-known SEOs talking on Twitter about working with big brands to massively cut back the amount of products that they’re selling in their stores, because it’s just too much to crawl through. And also too much as a user to navigate. We want choice, but we don’t want to infinite choice. We want to feel that these products are curated, and they’re your best products, not just everything that’s in your bloody warehouse that you want to get shot of.
So I love that. We’ve got some questions from our audience, but before I ask you those, I wanted to come back, you’re a content beast. And we touched a little bit there about blogging. A lot of eCommerce store owners are like, oh I’m already updating the site with fresh content. I’ve got my new products. Do I really need to have a blog as well? And I mean, we’re both going to agree on that. Yes you do. As an eCommerce store. And it come up to me like, well, what am I going to talk about? But what would be some of your suggestions for an eCommerce store and for some easy blogs, some easy hits they can have straight away with their blogs?
Marieke van de Rakt:
So I would think what makes you stand out from all the other sites, even if you’re reselling products, it must be something that you are picking out. I’m going to sell this and this and this. So if it’s your personal taste, then you should write about… Then probably your the brand. If that’s it. So then you can write about things you encounter in your own life. But if you want to stand out in SEO, you should think about, okay, my audience, what are they searching for? And what can I do to ride that will attract the search engines and will then convert people to buy my products. So, it would probably perhaps be the things you do in your life in which you use the products or in which you can… So I would stay really close to what you’re selling and who you are and why you’re selling it. And those could be the topics that you start right about.
Kate Toon:
Why did you choose to start your store? Why do you picked these product, and what design aesthetic do you have and then case study posts about people who’ve used your product before. Common questions. I mean, you can have an FAQ page, but each of those FAQs can be expanded out into a full blog post. And then you might get this, you can snippet. And I also think there’s lots of opportunities for doing roundups where you maybe you feature other sites that have complimentary, but not competitive products. And you all write posts that promote each other and get those reciprocal links and get that brand building. There’s lots of opportunities to do our favourite winter warmers, what to wear for Halloween and it might seem cheesy and you might think, look, everyone’s done it. But the thing is you’re reader. You follow all these other people.
So yes, you may have read this post before, but I only follow you. So I’m not reading all these other posts about winter warmers because I’m your audience. And a great piece of content helps build that trust. We want to buy from brands that we like, want to buy from brands where we can see the person behind the brand. Don’t we? And you’re not going to that with a product description. We’re just not going to see that. Yeah.
Marieke van de Rakt:
And no, a product description will always be rather short and Google likes more lengthy. So I would also look at people are searching in your internal search. What are they searching for? Because those could be things that you want to rank for. And maybe you can write a blog post about that. That could be good things to start and to tweak on topics on why to write about. It can be hard. I get that.
Kate Toon:
It is.
Marieke van de Rakt:
It’s got be really great fun though.
Kate Toon:
It can. And I think you don’t overthink it. A little test grand for you is to write some of these kind of posts on social media on Instagram and see how they go down. And if you find one that really people are enjoying, take that and expand it out into a longer piece of content that sits on your site. Because, that post on social media it’s gone tomorrow and no one’s ever going to see it again. But if you put it on your site, every visitor that comes has an opportunity to read that again and again and again. So, okay. We’ve got some questions from our audience. So Anastasia Genevieve up from Chalk and Cheese asks, “I’ve started looking into the Shopify app, but I’m concerned about what I’ve heard about things about apps, leaving a mess behind if you ever break up with them.” And this is true, right? So you think you’ve uninstalled the app, but you haven’t, there’s loads of debris left in the back end of Shopify. Is that what happens with Yoast or is it quite a clean breakup?
Marieke van de Rakt:
It’s a clean breakup. So we looked into this and I was shocked about that, because it’s hard to switch apps. It really is. So I think we’re the first one to also build an importer and an export. So you can switch apps. We are not making a mess, but there are a lot of apps that are making… I’ve seen it. It’s true. but because we’re from WordPress, you’re not allowed to make a mess on WordPress.
Kate Toon:
Oh yeah. The rules are very different. So I love that. They do. So they’re already obviously Shopify apps. And what you’ve got in the same way that Yoast does this on WordPress. Another concern that people have is I’ve already done some SEO work. And if I install Yoast, it’s going to delete everything I’ve done. No, no, no. You can export all the effort that you’ve done previously and import it into the new app. So all your title tags, all your matters, you can transport them and Yoast will do that for you. And then you’ve all set up in the new thing. But then I guess you’ve got to worry about deleting your old SEO app and sometimes you-
Marieke van de Rakt:
Yeah. So I get that. So if you’re worried about that, I would reach out to our support team and they will navigate you through that. But it is a genuine concern people have. And I understand that.
Kate Toon:
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It’s not great. Because it slows sight down, and you think you’ve got rid of it. And then there’s weird bits of code. And again, one of the other things that is really great about Yoast on WordPress is it really plays well with other apps and it really stays up to date with whatever Google’s up to. So I remember talking to Yoast and he was saying that, actually have conversations with the guys at WooCommerce and the guys at Google, and WooCommerce says, “Hey, look, we’re going to do an update. We’re going to change this and this.” And you go, okay, well that means we need to tweak this, this and this. Is that going to be the same with Shopify? Do you have that level of transparency with them?
Marieke van de Rakt:
We’re not as well integrated in the Shopify app. We are closely connected with Shopify people themselves. But of course there are other apps, but we aren’t working together with a lot of them now, because we have to. So I think with the big ones, we’re actually working well together and we made some new friends.
Kate Toon:
Made some new friends. Well that’s good. And the thing is as well, obviously you need to be across the themes and everyone needs to play together. And I guess often I mentioned myself, I’m a bit of a freebie girl. And I think that just comes from when I started out trying to bootstrap everything, but often with apps and themes and platforms, you do get what you pay for. I now have a paid theme on Divi. I have other paid plugins and you know, pay for those because they have much more responsibility to maintain the app, to keep it up to date and to offer support. Often you can get an app or a plugin and it looks great, but then you actually look at it. Hasn’t been updated since 2019. And therefore it’s going to have problems.
Marieke van de Rakt:
It’s going to have problems. And perhaps also some security things.
Kate Toon:
I’ve got a great question from Marco Wittich. Who’s one of my favourite members of my community. He has a really successful Shopify site in the US. You should check it out. It’s called Campfire Treats. And he says, well, is it any good?
Marieke van de Rakt:
It is.
Kate Toon:
There you go, Marco. Straight from Marieke.
Marieke van de Rakt:
Marco, it’s the best app out there. You have this other app. I don’t know what it’s called. I’m sorry, but they also have the green bullets.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. Oh really?
Marieke van de Rakt:
Exactly. Even if you need more information about the bullets, they link to our site.
Kate Toon:
Oh my God. That’s so cheeky. That’s so cheeky.
Marieke van de Rakt:
Well, it’s also a compliment. But if you are going to use such an SEO app, you could might as well use the real thing.
Kate Toon:
Use the OG, I think, those traffic lights though. And we’ll finish off with this, but I’m going to ask you for a final tip after this, just on improving SEO. But I remember again, talking to Yoast about those traffic lights and he was saying they were the bane of his life. He loves them and he hates them. Because people, they want green all the time. Because, green is good. And sometimes you have to settle the orange because sometimes perfectly optimising the SEO is not right for that page. Sometimes… Yeah.
Marieke van de Rakt:
I think your overall bullet should be green, but then you’re allowed to have a red bullet even. So we have one. Eight or nine checks and, I don’t know, more even I think. And so if one or two or even three of them, aren’t green then your overall bullet, depending on which one it is though, overall bullet will turn green. If that overall bullet is green, then take off your hand. It’s good. Then it’s good. You don’t have to do anything anymore.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. Stop fiddling. All right. Well finish off with a general SEO tip. You are the content queen. So what’s one tip that you can give our listeners to start improving their SEO today. And please don’t say just write good content, or I will scream.
Marieke van de Rakt:
What I was going to say. Now, what I think, and that this is something that’s easier done in WordPress than it’s done in Shopify. And I’m promising all of your listeners that we’re working on getting that in Shopify as well. I think your site structure is something you should do. So your internal linking. So what I would do is really think about which pages I really want to rank with, which are the ones. If you think of four or five pages, that should be your core things. And work on those and also make sure that your internal linking structure works in such a way that those pages have the most internal links because when Google scrolls, it will see those pages as most important. Well in WordPress, we have these little workouts that help you get those pages, more internal links and all in the right way because you have to do it correctly. Shopify, we don’t have that yet, because we can’t just get that.
Well, that functionality should be different because Shopify is different platform. So we’re working on and figuring out how we’re going to build this in Shopify and help you set up a side structure. But even for Shopify sites, I would think what are the four or five most important pages, make sure to really get some internal links towards them. Some external links would be great as well. And get those ranking in the search engines.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. I love that. Well, Marieke, it’s always a delight to talk to you. When this episode comes out, we’ll also be running a live in I love SEO group, doing a demonstration of the backend, as Marieke said, Shopify showing you how to set it up, showing you how to use it to optimise one of your products. So if you’re listening to this, head to the, I love SEO group, type Yoast into the search and you’ll find that live there as well. Or sign up to our newsletter and that live will be coming out via the newsletter as well. So if you are a bit nervous and you want to watch a little demo of me fiddling around that you can, I’m new. I’ve used it for years on WordPress, but I’ve never used it on Shopify. So it’s going to be interesting. So that will be lots of fun. We’ll also be doing a live demo in the misfit entrepreneur group. So you can check it out there as well. So Marieke, thank you very much.
Marieke van de Rakt:
Well, you’re welcome. I had a great time talking to you. I didn’t say anything weird this time.
Kate Toon:
I’m not sure that’s entirely true, but anyway. No, I love it. I love it. I love talking to you. Thank you so much for coming on and explaining all about this wonderful new adventure. So yeah, we’re just going to wonder when Yoast for Wix and Yoast for Squarespace and Yoast for Weebly.
Marieke van de Rakt:
We’ll keep you posted.
Kate Toon:
Keep me posted. All right. Fantastic. Thanks Marieke.
Marieke van de Rakt:
Okay, bye.
Kate Toon:
So there you go. Shopify Yoast SEO app. And as you’ll probably realise, Yoast are sponsoring the podcast for a little bit. You’ll have heard some of our pre-roll ads. You’ll be seeing offers and information across the socials and emails, got a lot of time for that company. So anyway, if you want to learn more, head to the, I LOVE SEO Group, watch those demos and read some of the posts. Okay. That’s the end of this week’s show. If you would like to leave a review, I’d be very grateful because we’re running out. So if you have time to leave a review, I’ll be very super, super grateful. We do have one today though from Whim Windy from the United States.
It just says, “SEO, great show.” I love that. I’m going to get that on a t-shirt. Anyway, thanks to you for listening. If you like the show, don’t forget to leave a five star rating and review on iTunes, Stitches, Spotify, or wherever you heard it. You’ll get a shout out on the show and don’t forget to check out the show notes for this episode where you can learn more about Yoast. Get the useful links and leave a comment about the show. So, until next time, happy Shopify SEOing.
