Something that’s important for SEOs to consider is that in order to understand your content, Google needs to translate it into a numeric value. This is the beset way that search engines can efficiently understand the contents of the web at scale. This conversion is done through what’s called an “embedding model”.

What’s extremely powerful is that once you convert two sets of text into numeric values, you can then measure the “distance” between them (cosine similarity). This is a mathematical  representation of how close to each text value is to one another. The closer they are, the more similar the content is and the more relevant it’s perceived to be. In fact, search engines like Google directly use Similarity to understand if a given page is a close enough match for a given query.

At Go Fish Digital, we wanted to better showcase how Google search and vector embeddings worth together. To demonstrate this, we created a simple Python script that allows you to use BERT in order to calculate how similar a given piece of text is for a target keyword. By running this script you can see there’s a direct Similarity calculation between a given piece of text on the site and the target query.

Here’s how you use it:

Download The Python Script Below

In a text editor, copy & paste the below Python script somewhere on your computer and name it “BERT.py”

————————-

import torch
from transformers import BertTokenizer, BertModel
from sklearn.metrics.pairwise import cosine_similarity

def get_embedding(text, model, tokenizer):
inputs = tokenizer(text, return_tensors=’pt’)
outputs = model(**inputs)
return outputs.last_hidden_state.mean(dim=1).detach().numpy()

def main():
sentence = input(“Sentence: “)
keyword = input(“Keyword: “)

tokenizer = BertTokenizer.from_pretrained(‘bert-base-uncased’)
model = BertModel.from_pretrained(‘bert-base-uncased’)

sentence_embedding = get_embedding(sentence, model, tokenizer)
keyword_embedding = get_embedding(keyword, model, tokenizer)

# Calculate cosine similarity
similarity_score = cosine_similarity(sentence_embedding, keyword_embedding)[0][0]

# Truncate embeddings for display
sentence_embedding_truncated = sentence_embedding[0][:10]
keyword_embedding_truncated = keyword_embedding[0][:10]

print(f”Sentence: {sentence}”)
print(f”Embedding: {sentence_embedding_truncated.tolist()} …”)
print(f”Keyword: {keyword}”)
print(f”Embedding: {keyword_embedding_truncated.tolist()} …”)
print(f”Similarity Score: {similarity_score:.4f}”)

if __name__ == “__main__”:
main()

Install Transformers In Your Terminal

Next, you’ll want to install the Transformers library from Hugging Face. Open up your Terminal and run the following command:

pip install transformers torch

Execute BERT.py

Next you’ll want to execute the actual Python script. In your Terminal, you’re going to want to navigate to the folder on your machine where you have the file saved. To do this, you can right-click your BERT.py file and then hold down the “Option” key. You’ll see an option to “Copy as a pathname”. You can use the “cd” command to change directories to that pathname.

For me, I used this command to access my downloads folder:

cd /Users/username/Downloads/

Once there, you’ll simply run the python script by using the following command:

python BERT.py

You’ll then be prompted to fill out both the content you want to analyze and the keyword you want to compare is against. Type a sentence you’ like to analyze and then hit enter.  Next, enter in the keyword you’re targeting.

Generating Embeddings From Text

The first thing the script does is generate a 768 point vector array, or an embedding, for both the sentence and the target keyword.  We truncated this to just 10 vectors for visual purposes. When we say that google creates an embedding, we mean they generate one of these 768 point vector for a piece of content on your site.  This may be entities, paragraphs, headings, or other chunks of text on your page.  In fact, Google can use this same process to convert an image into a 768 point vector array.   Once they have text and images converted into numbers, they can start to process them algorithmically.   One way is to measure how far apart two vectors are.

Analyze Your Content Similarity Score

Next, the Python script will take thw generated embeddings for the sentence and keyword and output a “Similarity Score”. This will be a score from 0 to 1 on how relevant the text is to the query that you entered.

Now this is an extremely simplified way of understanding how relevant your content is to a given query. However it is useful to understand the technical process Google uses to process, understand, and score your content.  You can also use this type of approach as it lets you put a numeric value to your content in terms of how targeted it actually is for the query you want to analyze.

Go Fish Digital’s Similarity Tools

At Go Fish Digital, we’ve actually build some custom Chrome extensions that are able to perform this type of analysis for every section of content on an entire page. The tool will ask for a input query, scrape each section of content on a page, calculate Similarity and then score all analyzed sections. You can see the processed visualized below:

This means, that for an entire page, you can analyze your content section by section to see what’s scoring high in terms of Similarity and what isn’t. You can also run this analysis on competitor pages to see where potential gaps might be. We’re currently running demos on how this tool works for individual sites so don’t hesitate to reach out if you want to learn more.

How To Use BERT To Analyze How Relevant Your Content Is is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

It’s no surprise that we’re seeing more and more websites utilizing Shopify and Shopify Plus. While it’s easy to point to the pandemic as the event that has triggered this “eCommerce renaissance”, the data shows that it’s been going on well before that. Looking at Shopify Plus usage statistics on BuiltWith, we can see that the platform has been gaining popularity since 2017.

While we’ve previously written about our best practices for general Shopify SEO, we wanted to write a more specific guide for Shopify Plus SEO. While the underlying technology is largely the same, we generally see different types of clients adopting the Shopify Plus platform. These are generally larger brands with bigger marketing teams.

What Is Shopify Plus SEO?

Shopify Plus SEO is a set of search engine optimization adjustments to Shopify Plus sites. Shopify Plus SEO initiatives include removing duplicate product page links, reducing JavaScript-dependent content, faceted navigation adjustments and more.

Related Content:

• Technical SEO Agency
• Ecommerce SEO Agency
• Shopify SEO Services
• Franchise SEO Agency
• Enterprise SEO Services

Shopify Plus sites tend to have larger inventories, more customization, and utilize more complex marketing technologies. With this in mind, we wanted to detail our best practices for when working with these types from an SEO perspective and the common issues a Shopify Plus store might encounter.

1. Duplicate Product Pages

One of the biggest SEO issues we find on Shopify Plus websites is the existence of duplicate content. Duplicate content occurs when the same content can be accessed at two or more unique URLs. Shopify Plus sites have a variety of ways in which they create duplicate content.

The first is duplicate product pages. Oftentimes, category pages on Shopify Plus will link to duplicate product pages.

For example, let’s take a look at the Untuckit website. We can notice that navigating to one of their product pages from a category page, we find the “Flannel Manning Shirt” (now discontinued). We can see that the URL has both /collections/ and /products/ in the URL path:

https://www.untuckit.com/collections/flannels/products/manning

However, when we check the canonical tag of that particular page, we can see it points to another URL altogether. This URL only has /products/ the path: https://www.untuckit.com/products/manning

When we navigate to this page, we can see that it’s actually an exact duplicate of the URL listed above.

This creates an issue for Shopify Plus SEO. This means that the page that’s getting linked to from the category page is not the canonical URL. Instead, the category page is linking to a duplicate page that’s also capable of getting crawled/indexed.

As well, the larger issue is that this set up creates duplicate content at scale. Every single product linked to from category pages is a duplicate page. This means that Shopify Plus sites create a lot of potential duplicate content for important pages for SEO.

While the canonical tag is helpful to give Google consolidation signals for indexation, canonical tags are hints and not directives. This means that Google can ignore canonical tags and index the duplicate anyway.

Fortunately, there is a way to ensure that your Shopify Plus website’s category pages link to the correct product pages. By making an adjustment to the product-grid-item.liquid file, you can ensure that Shopify links to the correct product URLs on all of your site’s category pages. To learn more about how to fix this, you can read our guide on Shopify duplicate content.

2. JavaScript Rendered Content

Another major SEO consideration for Shopify Plus sites is JavaScript rendered content. Websites using Shopify Plus are more prone to having JavaScript crawling and indexing issues. This is because these stores generally carry larger inventories and are used by bigger brands. As a result, it’s more likely that developers have made adjustments or implemented JavaScript frameworks to deliver the content over the lifetime of the site.

While Google has gotten much better at crawling and indexing JavaScript over the years, this process still isn’t perfect. JavaScript SEO best practices still need to be followed for any site using the technology. If JavaScript hinders or outright hides content from getting crawled and indexed by Googlebot, this can have a deterrent effect on rankings.

For example, let’s take a look at Motherhood Maternity’s Nursing Bras category page. We can see that when we navigate to the URL, a standard category page is loaded. Here we can see the navigation, banner image, and product listings.

However, when turn off JavaScript, we see that the banner image and product listings are nowhere to be found:

In order to further inspect this, we can use “View Source” to see the raw HTML of the page. This will show us the content of the page that’s accessible to search engines before any JavaScript is executed. When searching around for products such as the “Average Busted Seamless Maternity And Nursing Bra”, we can see that it cannot be found on the page:

This shows us that JavaScript is required in order to properly load key content of the page as isn’t accessible in the raw HTML. This is an indication that we’ll want to further review if Google is able to properly index our product listings.

When looking at Motherhood Maternity’s organic traffic, we can see that it has sharply declined over the past couple of years.

It’s possible that Google is having trouble indexing the JavaScript content which could be a source of the traffic drops. Since they use the FastSimon technology, they might want to test if pre-rendering the content helps improve organic rankings.

If your site is on Shopify Plus, you definitely want to be auditing your usage of JavaScript and testing to see if Google can properly index any JS rendered content. My colleague Pierce Brelinsky has written a fantastic JavaScript SEO guide that will help walk you through the process.

3. Faceted Navigation

Another major SEO consideration for Shopify Plus sites is faceted navigation. As Shopify Plus sites are likely to have larger inventories, they’re more likely to have implemented a faceted navigation. This functionality allows users to easily sort and filter category pages across different criteria (Size, Price, Material) to find the products most relevant to them. Faceted navigation can be great for users who are trying to browse through a large variety of products.

However, faceted navigations can cause significant SEO issues by creating a large amount of duplicate content. In many setups, every facet that’s selected creates a new URL. These URLs can quickly add up to a huge number of pages. In a case study from Google, they found that their store with 158 products created 380,000 URLs! URLs created by the faceted navigation are generally duplicate or similar to the source page as they only contain sorted and filtered views of the root category page. This can create large duplicate content issues.

Using an example, we can see that very thing on the Women’s Eyeglasses category page on Bonlook.

This category page contains a faceted navigation that allows users to filter by different parameters such as Size, Gender, Shape, and more:

When selecting options from the faceted navigation, we can see that this changes the URL, creating a unique path for Google to crawl. When selecting the “Black”, “Female”, and “Cat Eye” options, we can see that this loads the following URL:

Notice how this content is very similar to the root category page. This could definitely be considered similar or duplicate content. If Google is able to index all of the parameterized pages created by the faceted navigation, this could lead to massive duplicate content issues.

Fortunately, this content is blocked by Shopify’s default rules in the robots.txt file. This prevents Google from crawling the many duplicate pages created by the faceted navigation.

However, if your Shopify Plus store uses faceted navigation, you’ll want to be sure to analyze if Google is able to crawl and index the large number of URLs that could be created. Oftentimes, we see that faceted navigations are not blocked by Shopify’s default robots.txt rules. This could lead to a large amount of crawl budget focused on low quality and duplicate pages.

4. Internal Site Search

Internal site search is another important part of Shopify Plus sites. As these sites have a large number of SKUs, it becomes critical for users to be able to use this functionality in order to quickly access the products they’re looking for on the store. If your store doesn’t have internal site search, we’d highly recommend adding it in a prominent location. Our data has shown that users who utilize internal site search can be much more likely to convert than users who don’t use it.

With internal site search, you need to be testing it to make sure that it’s not causing any SEO problems. The most common issue we find is that some Shopify stores can allow their internal search page to be crawled and potentially indexed. This could result in low quality pages in Google’s index that could impact the quality assessment of the rest of the site.

When looking at the Lord & Taylor website, we can see that they allow their internal search to be crawled. For instance, below we can see an internal search result page when looking for “Tote Bags.”

While this page is useful for users looking for Tote Bags, this is not a page that we would want to be crawled or indexed. Lord & Taylor already has created a Tote Bags category page that should be the primary ranking page for SEO.

However, when looking at their robots.txt file, we can see that Lord & Taylor does not block this page from being crawled by Googlebot:

As a result, Lord & Taylor might want to take steps to adjust their Shopify robots.txt file to block the crawling of their internal search pages. This will ensure that Google is not able to crawl through these low quality pages and potentially index them.

If you’re using internal site search, we recommend that you perform tests to ensure that Google cannot crawl your internal site search pages. If it can, we recommend creating rules in the Shopify robots.txt.liquid file to block Google from crawling them.

5. Structured Data

When working with any eCommerce site, structured data is an absolute must to consider. Structured data is a code that you can add to your website’s pages that makes it easier for search engines to understand the content of your page. Structured data can more directly tell search engines what the overall topic of a page is about as opposed to them having to interpret the content.

When working with Shopify Plus sites, we’ve found that many sites have inconsistent structured data. In most cases, elements such as the theme and Shopify apps automatically add structured data to the site. Unfortunately, most of the time we see that these technologies result in incorrect, incomplete, or duplicate structured data on the site.

For instance, here’s an example of a product page on Huel.com that doesn’t contain any structured data.

Overall, we recommend that Shopify Plus sites use the following structured data mappings. Please note that every page on your site should only have a single instance of each schema element:

1. Home Page: Organization
2. Category Pages: CollectionPage or OfferCatalog
3. Product Pages: Product
4. Blog Posts: Article

When it comes to implementation, you first need to check what structured data exists on each of your different page types. You can use tools like the Schema Validator to test this. You’ll then need to create a plan to ensure that the structured data mappings above get applied to each page type. This might involve working with a developer to remove some of the existing schema and then adding the proper mapped structured data.

If you don’t have developer resources, we highly recommend using Schema App Total Schema Markup to add schema to your Shopify site. This app does a fantastic job of implementing the mappings above and can also help you remove structured data added by the theme without the help of a developer.

For a deeper dive on Shopify Plus schema, you can read our Guide To Shopify Structured Data.

6. Site Speed

Performance is always something that’s top of mind for enterprise sites. Generally speaking, bigger brands that have larger marketing teams will have websites that end up getting slower over the long run. This is often because these sites are more prone to have different functionalities and technologies added to them over time. Analytics teams will add more tracking scripts and marketing teams request functionalities such as chatbots and animations. As a result, this can lead to slower performance on enterprise sites.

Data from HTTP Archive

The good news for Shopify Plus sites is that the Shopify is already pretty fast out of the box. Recent data shows that the Shopify platform generally has some of the best Core Web Vitals of any other popular CMS (WordPress, Drupal, Wix, etc). This sets up Shopify store owners in a great position for site performance.

Of course, there are always initiatives that can be done to improve site performance. A study from Walmart discovered that every one second improvement in site performance can result in a +2% conversion rate for your site. For this reason, Shopify Plus sites need to keep performance top of mind.

From our years of working with Shopify sites, we’ve started to develop frameworks to help speed up Shopify stores. Below are some of the techniques and thought processes we use to help improve Shopify Plus performance:

1. Audit Shopify apps and remove any unused or unnecessary ones.
2. Implement lazy loading using the lasysizes.js library
3. Ensure images are only uploaded at their display size
4. Use Crush.pics to automatically compress Shopify images
5. If starting a new store, find a lightweight Shopify theme

If you want more details on how to improve your store’s performance, you can read our Shopify Speed Optimization Guide.

Conclusion

While the SEO basics are the same between Shopify and Shopify Plus, the types of brands on Shopify Plus will most likely face more complex challenges. Larger inventories to manage, JavaScript frameworks, and increased technologies are all challenges that Shopify Plus stores are likely to face and store owners need to be aware of how these elements impact SEO. Hopefully this guide serves as a good starting point to helping improve your Shopify Plus store from an SEO perspective. If you have any questions about our Shopify Plus SEO services, please reach out to us!

Other Shopify SEO Resources

• Shopify Speed Optimization
• Improving Shopify Duplicate Content
• Shopify Sitemap.xml Guide
• Shopify Structured Data & Schema
• Shopify Robots.txt Guide
• Shopify SEO Tools
• All Shopify SEO Articles

A Guide To Shopify Plus SEO is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Related Content:

• • Dentist SEO Agency
  • Franchise SEO Agency

Related Article:

• The 8 Best Digital Marketing Strategies For Dentists

Below you can find our playbook for how to improve the SEO of dental websites.

1. Research Your Dental SEO Keywords

When starting your dental SEO campaign, the first step that you’ll want to take is to perform keyword research for your business. Keyword research is simply the process of identifying the keywords that your potential clients could be searching for when looking for services that you offer. For example, a dentist in Miami, FL the following keywords may be important to their business:

1. miami dentist
2. dentist in miami
3. family dentist miami
4. teeth whitening services miami
5. cosmetic dentistry miami

You must be identifying the most important keywords that users could be searching to find your dental practice. You’ll want to inventory all the different services that you offer to perform research to see if users are searching for terms around them. To find these terms, there are several different tools that you can use:

1. Google Search Console
2. Google Keyword Planner
3. Moz Keyword Explorer (Paid)
4. Ahrefs Keyword Explorer (Paid)

The most important one to start with is your Google Search Console account. Once logged in, you can navigate to the “Performance” report. Here you should be able to see data on the actual search terms that users queried to find your dental practice.

Manually review search terms that you think align with your core service offerings and add them to a spreadsheet. After you’ve collected all the relevant ones you can find, consider using the other tools above for additional research. Keep adding terms to your spreadsheet until you believe the list accurately reflects the majority of your service offerings.

2. Track Your Keywords

Once your keyword research list is complete, you’ll want to be sure that you’re tracking your local dental keywords. Keyword tracking is software that monitors where your keywords are ranking in the search results. For instance, our Miami dentist could track the term “dentist miami” and see that she ranks in the #3 position.

By utilizing keyword tracking, your business can accomplish two different goals:

1. Monitor ranking positions for individual search terms
2. Review aggregated rankings to understand the overall SEO health of your site

For individual keyword rankings, this can give you insights on specific pages to optimize. For example, if you see that our rankings have dropped for “miami teeth whitening” over time, then you can prioritize changes to that specific page.

The other advantage of tracking keywords is getting a pulse on overall SEO health. Most keyword rank tools will show you how you’re performing across all keywords over time. This data can give you insights into how your site is trending. Are overall rankings improving, staying the same, or declining?

These insights can be valuable to help you understand the overall direction of your dental practice’s SEO. If you see that things are improving, you’ll know that your current strategy and initiatives are on a good path. If not, you might want to consider reevaluating the actions you’re taking to improve things.

To track keywords, you’ll need some type of software to do so. Most solutions are paid but many have reasonable costs and small business plans. Below you can find some of the most popular choices for keyword tracking:

1. Ahrefs
2. Moz Pro
3. SEMRush

3. Improve Local SEO For Your Dentistry

Now that you’ve researched and are tracking your core keywords, it’s time to start making changes to improve your visibility in the search engines. The very first step that you’ll want to take is your practice’s “local SEO” presence.

When users are looking for a product or service that they can get in a specific geographic area, local SEO becomes a major factor. Generally, the most prominent part of local SEO is the “map pack results”. These are results that appear that contain the names, addresses, phone numbers, and map listings of local businesses. Here you can see a map pack result for “dentist miami”.

Of course, because we specified the exact location that we were looking in, Google is showing us businesses in that area. However, Google will often show local results, even when the location isn’t specified. For instance, a user in Miami Beach might see search results like this when just querying the term “dentist”.

This is because even though we didn’t specify a location, Google implicitly understands that we’re looking for a local business. Therefore, it shows local businesses in the search results by default. This means that your site could be capable of ranking well for broad search terms such as “dentist” or “dentist near me”.

To improve your visibility in these results, you’ll want to take action to optimize your Google Business profile.

Google Business Profile Optimization for Dental Practices

For anything to be eligible to rank in the map packs, you’ll need:

1. A Google Business profile
2. Proper categories set
3. Proximity near the location you want to rank

If you haven’t claimed your Google Business profile, you’ll want to take that step immediately. Fortunately, Google has provided documentation that makes this a fairly straightforward process.

1. Navigate to Google Maps
2. Search for your business name
3. Choose “Claim this business” and follow the steps

By claiming your business, you’ll now be able to directly make edits to your Google Business profile. This will allow you to control important information such as your name, address, and hours of operation. Be sure to review all of these elements to ensure their accuracy. It’s very common to see issues such as incorrect business hours. Inaccurate information like this could lead to frustrated patients or even lost business opportunities.

The next step that you’ll want to take is to set proper Google Business categories. If you don’t have categories that line up with the keywords users are searching for, your business won’t be able to appear in the local SEO results. It’s imperative that you fill out these categories as comprehensively as you possibly can.

For example, here are categories for an Orthodontist that also offers dental and implant services.

While the categories you choose will depend on your specific business, below are some good options for dental providers to consider choosing from:

• Dentist
• Cosmetic dentist
• Pediatric dentist
• Dental implants provider
• Dental clinic
• Orthodontist
• Dental hygienist
• Emergency dental service

By claiming your Google Business profile and optimizing your categories, your business will be in a much better position to perform well in the local results. Now you can consider more advanced local SEO tactics such as improving citations, local backlinks, and generating business reviews.

4. Create Dental Practice Area Landing Pages For SEO

Your dental practice likely has multiple different services. Different services might include dental implants, teeth whitening, same-day services, etc. A dental SEO initiative that you’ll want to check early on is that you have landing pages created for each service that you offer. This is important for several reasons:

1. Customers can read specific information about exactly what your practice provides for each service
2. Search engines will be able to rank those pages for keywords users search around them. A user searching for “emergency dental services” might see your “Same Day” page rank in Google as opposed to your home page

For example, this site appears to offer emergency services but it does not have a dedicated “Emergency” page created on their site.

This could be a missed opportunity as creating this page could help their site improve visibility for terms such as “emergency dentist Miami”. This is likely a very high intent search.

Below you can see examples of services that you would want to create a dedicated landing page on your site:

1. Teeth Whiting
2. Dental Implants
3. Bridges
4. Veneers
5. Bonding
6. Dentures
7. Invisalign

You’ll want to be sure that most services you offer have a mapped landing page that talks about them in-depth. If you’re unsure of which pages to create, consider reviewing competitor websites to see what types of pages they have created.

5. Build Local Backlinks To Boost Search Engine Rankings

One of the most important components of SEO is building links to your site. Links from other sites act as “votes of confidence” that your domain contains quality material and is worth referencing. Broadly speaking, the more links you have pointing to your site from trusted sources, the easier it will be for your site to rank well in the search engines.

For local sites, a great way to get started with this initiative is to find local sources of influence and identify ways to build backlinks. In the vast majority of communities, there are local newspapers, clubs, charities, food blogs, businesses, and other organizations that would make for good opportunities.

There are a few benefits of going after local links specifically. Generally, they’ll be easier to acquire. You’ll most likely be dealing with smaller organizations where it is easier to get in touch with the person who runs the website. As well, your ties to the local community will make your partnership a more natural fit. Local links can also be an important step in showing search engines that your site is relevant to a particular geographic area.

Going back to our Miami example, it looks like a local publication runs a “Best Dentists” list that ranks the top practices in the area. This could be a great opportunity to get a relevant local link and help drive customers directly from the article.

Local sponsorships can also be another great path to go. Plenty of events and organizations would take sponsors from local businesses. For example, this dental practice is sponsoring a local board game event on Meetup.com. In return, they’re getting a link back.

There are many different places where you can look for local links. Some of the best include:

1. Events
2. Partner businesses
3. Meetups
4. Clubs
5. Charities

If you’re looking to go deeper here, this is a great guide from Moz that will give you very actionable advice on how to build links in your local area by using events.

6. Use Dentist Structured Data

A great way to improve Google’s understanding of your site is to utilize structured data. Structured data is code that can be placed on a particular page to improve Google’s understanding of what the content is about. While Google is very adept at understanding a page’s contents, this can give the search engine an additional layer of confidence.

While there are many different schema types, the most relevant one for dental practices is “Dentist” structured data.

Within the “Dentist” schema, you can tell Google very specific things about your practice. You can provide Google with information such as:

1. Business name (name)
2. Phone number (telephone)
3. Address (address)
4. Hours of operation (openingHours)
5. Social media profiles (sameAs)
6. Google Maps link (hasMap)

Below is an example of structured data that you could use on your site.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Dentist",
  "name": "Your Name",
  "image": "www.exampleimage.jpg",
  "@id": "",
  "url": "www.example.com",
  "telephone": "111-111-1111",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "10 Maple Drive",
    "addressLocality": "Miami",
    "addressRegion": "FL",
    "postalCode": "33101",
    "addressCountry": "US"
  }  
}
</script>

Generally, structured data is best implemented by a developer. If you worked with one to create your site, consider asking them to add this structured data to your home page. If you’re more technical, you could generate a custom one using the Schema Generator and add it to the site via the template or a tool like Google Tag Manager.

7. Review The UX Of Your Dentistry Site

Another great review that can significantly impact your dental SEO performance is reviewing the overall user experience of your site. By and large, Google wants to rank sites that make it easy for the user to find the exact content that they’re looking for. You’ll want to review your website and look for any opportunities to make your site easier and help get users to the information they want.

While many different factors go into a site’s user experience, here are some elements that you should ensure your site has:

1. Clear calls to action
2. Pages that inform key decision-making factors (insurance, payment)
3. Landing pages for specific dental services
4. A fast website experience
5. Straightforward navigation paths
6. Strong imagery that captures the value proposition of the page
7. A clean design that allows for a readable website
8. Internal search functionality

For example, when we navigate to this site’s home page we can see that there are two obvious calls to action presented to the user. In the above-the-fold content, you’re immediately provided options to either get more information on “Financing” or “Membership”. This makes it very clear what the next steps are for the user.

This is another good example of a site UX that provides users with a strong user experience. Directly in the site navigation, they outline important pages that users will want to interact with before making a decision. Here they can see what services are offered, insurances accepted, and payment options.

By clearly outlining these critical pages, it makes it easier for users to discover the information and make a decision on whether or not this dental provider is the best for their personal needs.

Dental SEO Conclusion

There are a lot of opportunities to improve your dental site’s search visibility. By understanding core principles such as your site’s keywords, local SEO and UX best practices, you’ll put your site in a much better position to perform well in the search engines. While dentist SEO can be a longer-term play, the results can definitely be worth it as your site can more consistently generate traffic and new patients.

Local SEO For Dentists: A Guide For Dental Practices is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Related Content:

• Dentist SEO Agency
• Dental Office Website Design & Development

Fortunately, at Go Fish Digital we have a lot of experience in providing digital marketing support for the dental community. While there are many different digital marketing channels that you can use, there are some that are a particularly good match for the localized nature of dental businesses.

What Are The Best Digital Marketing Strategies For Dentists?

The best digital marketing strategies for dentists are:

• Local SEO
• Traditional SEO
• Google Search Ads
• Local Search Ads
• Content Marketing
• Email Marketing
• UX Improvements
• Reputation Management

Below you can find more information on each one.

1. Local SEO For Dentists

In dentist digital marketing, one of the most important areas of SEO is the “map pack” results that you see in Google’s search results. These are a type of local SEO result that you see when searching for businesses that serve a particular geographical area. Oftentimes, you’ll see these results when you search for keywords that contain geographical information (city/town/neighborhood) or when users query terms like “near me”.

However, this isn’t the only time when Google will show local results. Even broader keyword searches will show them. Take this example of a search for “dentist” where you can see Google displaying dental practices in the immediate area.

This is because even though the geography isn’t specified, Google implicitly understands that users are looking for local businesses to solve a local need. Therefore, the search engine only shows results in that particular area.

This is an extremely powerful concept for dental businesses to understand. This means that your company could appear for very broad keywords such as “dentist” or “cosmetic dentist” in your local geography. In order to improve the chances that your business appears in these results, you’ll want to be sure that you’re implementing local SEO best practices. While there are a variety of strategies here, one of the best ones that you can implement is claiming and optimizing your Google Business profile.

Google Business Profile Optimization For Your Dental Office

Your Google Business profile is the single most important element of your dental local SEO strategy. Without one, your business won’t be eligible to appear in the map pack results.

The first step you should take is to claim your Google Business profile. To start this process, you’ll simply:

1. Search for your practice name on Google Maps
2. If you find your business address, you’ll select it and choose “Claim this business”

Once you’ve claimed your business, your next step is to ensure that you’ve properly set your business categories. If you don’t set your categories, you won’t be eligible to appear in the local results for keywords related to those categories. You’ll want to be sure that this is filled out as thoroughly as possible.

Here you can see categories set for an orthodontist business that also provides dental implants.

While the categories that you set will be completely custom to your business, here are some popular ones that you could consider choosing from:

• Dentist
• Cosmetic dentist
• Pediatric dentist
• Dental implants provider
• Dental clinic
• Orthodontist
• Dental hygienist
• Emergency dental service

Doing these steps to claim and optimize your Google Business profile will set you on a good path to ensuring that you have a strong local SEO foundation. Of course, you may need to take this even further and work on generating citations, reviews and local backlinks to your website.

2. Standard SEO For Dental Offices

When performing dental digital marketing, you’ll also want to take steps to improve the “standard SEO” of your site. Here, “standard SEO” just means any results in Google that aren’t part of the “map pack listings”. These results won’t have an interactive map or business location pins.

Instead, they’ll look more like the default search results that you’re used to seeing.

These results aren’t influenced by the information in your Google Business profile or other signals like proximity to users. Instead, these results are more based on universal SEO principles such as quality of content, relevant landing pages and internal/external linking signals.

While there are many elements that need to be reviewed from an SEO perspective, one of the best initiatives that your dental practice can take is to ensure that you have dedicated landing pages for all the services that you offer. If your practice offers dental implants, sedation dentistry, and teeth whitening, you’ll want to be sure that you have dedicated pages for each service.

This will ensure that your site has specific pages mapped to your practice areas. Now these pages will be eligible to appear for high intent queries such as “dental implants near me”. Ensure that you inventory all your core services and ensure there’s a matching landing page for each one.

3. Google Search Ads For Dentist Offices

While SEO initiatives are an extremely lucrative way of improving your dental digital marketing in the long term, it can take time to see results. If you’re looking for immediate return, paid media advertising could be a good path for your practice. With advertising you’ll pay for prominent placements directly but will start seeing results as soon as your campaign begins.

One of the most popular forms of advertising is Google Ads search campaigns. With search campaigns, your practice has the ability to appear at the very top of the search results. Here you can see an example of Google ad results for the keyword “sacramento ca family dentist”

The most powerful feature of Google search ads is that you can choose exactly which keywords you want your results to appear for. For instance, if you want your dentistry to grow more clients for “Dentures” and “Sedation”, you can create campaigns where your results will only appear when users search for keywords related to those practice areas.

With search ads, you’ll be able to leverage the popularity of Google’s ad platform to drive traffic to the exact pages that you want. This helps you connect with customers at the exact moment that they’re looking for your services.

4. Local Search Ads For Dentists

Another way to enhance your dentistry’s digital marketing is to advertise directly on Google Maps using Local Search Ads. By utilizing local search ads, your ads are more integrated into the Google maps experience. This further encourages users to take vital actions such as making calls, requesting appoints or getting driving directions to your office.

Local search ads can often appear at the very top of the map pack, directly above the organic listings.

They can also appear directly in the Google Maps interface as users are scanning a very specific geographic area.

Local search ads will be dedicated by the optimization of your Google Business profile. Before starting them, ensure you followed the steps in the “Google Business Optimization” section to ensure that you have claimed and set all relevant categories for your local business page.

5. Content Marketing Strategies for Dentists

Content marketing is another dental digital marketing strategy that your practice should consider.

Broadly, the premise behind content marketing is to create helpful and educational online resources. These resources help educate and solve the problems you users have, increasing their touch points and affinity for your brand. Over time, content marketing initiatives can help your company be the one that comes to mind when consumers of that content are eventually ready to become customers.

While content marketing can come in many forms, a blog is by far the most popular method. Here, you can write about your solutions to common customer problems that may tie back to your services.

For example, Donald Snyder Orthodontics wrote a specific guide on “Can You Whiten Your Teeth While Wearing Braces?”

As a result, this page generates 1,700 sessions a month for users looking for information on how to solve this specific problem.

Here’s another example of a dentist site that wrote an article on “No Toothbrush? No Toothpaste? No Problem“. This article dives into best practices for how to brush your teeth without toothpaste or toothbrushes and gives several helpful examples. As a result, they perform well in the search results for terms such as “brush teeth without toothpaste”.

Ideally, you’ll want to identify types of problems your potential customers are having and create content that helps solve those problems. From there you’ll create assets on your site that you can show prospective customers, can rank in the search engines or be utilized in your other marketing initiatives.

6. Email Marketing For Your Dental Patients

For almost any business, developing an email list can be a great digital marketing strategy. Email marketing provides a lot of benefits that other digital marketing mediums don’t possess. Emails provide direct access to your core customers and your messaging is less likely to get lost in noisy feeds. Emails are also algorithm independent. Your visibility won’t be at the mercy of major tech companies that make changes to how their algorithms work. Email marketing can help you not only connect with new patients but help maintain your relationships with existing ones.

While how you utilize email will depend on your marketing goals, below are some campaigns that you could consider:

1. Dental health best practices & tips
2. Appointment confirmations & reminders
3. Company news
4. New service & product announcements
5. Internal promotions
6. New patient email sequences

If you’re interested in exploring more, Constant Contact has created a great guide for email marketing best practices for dentists.

7. User Experience Improvements To Increase Patient Leads

Reviewing the overall user experience of your site is another great digital marketing strategy for dental sites. This is an extremely scalable approach as UX improvements can help bolster the performance of all your channels. Traffic from search engines, advertising platforms, email marketing and other channels can all be positively impacted.

While there are many ways to think about UX improvement, here are some initiatives that you could look into:

1. Calls to action: Elements such as “Schedule Appointment” CTAs should be easily accessible and highlighted in the design
2. Mobile UX: Can users easily navigate the site and find key information on mobile devices?
3. Website navigation: Can users find key information such as insurance, services, photos, payment and more?
4. Site performance: Faster performance can result in improved conversions from a digital channels?
5. Site imagery: Do your key pages use strong images that clearly demonstrate the content’s value proposition?
6. Trust signals: Do you clearly highlight trust signals such as industry certifications, credentials and reputable organizations?
7. Competitive reviews: How does your UX compare to key competitors in the same market or even different geographies?

Improving the overall UX can be a fantastic way to improve the quality of each session. In turn, this improves the efficiency and performance of all digital channels that are driving traffic to your site.

If you feel that quite a few significant changes need to be made, you might even consider looking for options to completely redesign the site.

8. Reputation Management For Dentists

As your customers get closer to the point of narrowing in on your dentistry, it’s likely that they’ll perform more research online about your specific brand. They’ll want to find any information they can about other people’s experience with your office in terms of the staff, environment, professionalism, wait times and much more.

Generally, to perform this type of research, users will perform searches related to your company or individual practitioners. This is a critical point in the conversion path and could significantly influence whether a user turns into a long-term patient. You’ll want to be certain that you have a strong online reputation and users are mainly encountering positive information about your business.

For example, a user may have had strong interactions with your website by discovering it multiple times via paid advertising and organic results. However, upon looking further into your business, they may encounter negative results that put them off the path of conversion.

To audit your dentistry’s reputation, perform the following searches on Google:

1. Company name
2. Dentist names
3. Company + reviews

If you’re finding any negative results in those searches, you’ll want to take immediate steps towards improving your reputation.

For example, if you’re seeing Yelp pages with lower than 4 stars, you might consider improving Yelp reviews. If you’re finding negative stories or press around your company, you might even consider options to suppress negative search results.

Its also worthwhile to check your reviews on individual review platforms to ensure that users looking via those methods are seeing positive sentiments about your brand. The most popular platforms for dentists include:

1. Google
2. Yelp
3. US News
4. Healthgrades
5. Sharecare

If you’re seriously undertaking dental digital marketing strategies, don’t underrate this step. Ensure all of your hard work isn’t lost due to reputation issues that users could be finding in the search results.

Digital Marketing for Dentists: The 8 Best Strategies is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Transcription: 

Alright, now that the dust is settled, I wanted to go over some of our top five takeaways from the Google Search API leaks.

First, a big preface: just because something is included in the API leaks does not necessarily mean it is used as a ranking factor. However, these are some of our biggest takeaways and some of the biggest changes that we’re going to be making to our strategies moving forward based on the information found in the API leaks.

The first takeaway, and probably the biggest, is that Google is clearly using clicks more aggressively than we previously thought as part of the ranking factors. If we look at references to Navboost, Google’s system for getting feedback on click data, it’s referenced 130 different times in this documentation. There are all types of variables: clicksBad, clicksGood, clickInterval, totalClicks. It’s very clear that they’re using clicks more heavily than we ever thought to get feedback on search results. So, it appears that optimizing for clicks might have stronger impacts than we previously thought. Navboost is the system they are using to inform all of this, and it’s referenced a lot in the Google documentation.

The second takeaway is that freshness really matters. This is something we’ve known at Go Fish Digital. We’ve done different tests around this and seen very strong results from updating freshness. This was verified in the Search API leak. In Mike King’s analysis, he found that Google uses three different variables: bylineDate, semanticDate, and more, heavily leaning on the dates used in content. Our belief is that if Google thinks the content is outdated, it can’t trust the content. For example, Google wouldn’t trust an article from 2020 to rank for “best smartphones”; it would need an article from the present day. So, freshness really matters, and we see evidence of that in the API leaks as well.

The third takeaway is that we believe Google is using more than just an individual piece of anchor text to judge the context of links. This is something our founder Dan Hinckley found. There are two different attributes: fullLeftContext and fullRightContext. The description talks about how the full context of the text around the anchor text is considered. Google might be using the sentence before and the sentence after the anchor text to understand its context. So, even if you use generic anchor text like “click here,” Google might still figure out its context.

The fourth takeaway, which I found super interesting, comes from an article on Search Engine Land that unpacked the Google API leaks. They found that Google uses a urlHistory variable. Andrew Ansley found that Google might keep 20 different versions of a given webpage in the index. If a document has more than 20 changes, they only keep the last 20 changes. This means Google might keep historical references of your content on their servers. At Go Fish Digital, we’ve seen Google using old title tags we had moved on from, which this explains: Google kept a historical record of the URL and maybe, based on click data, used the old version.

The final takeaway is that Google almost certainly uses some type of topical authority and overall site authority metrics. We’ve seen this in variables like siteAuthority. Despite Google saying they don’t use Domain Authority, here it directly references site authority. Google seems to care about a site’s core area of focus, referenced in variables like siteFocusXcore and siteEmbedding. These indicate Google wants you to claim expertise in a certain vertical and not stray too far from it. Embeddings convert your text into numeric values, which could be used to measure how far your content deviates from your topical authority.

Those are our biggest takeaways from the Search API leaks. I’d love to hear any insights you have found. These are some really interesting insights, and I’m excited to see the new testing and findings as people continue to uncover these leaks and discover new insights.

The Top 5 Takeaways From Google’s Search API Leaks is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

At Go Fish Digital, our Shopify SEO agency works with a lot of sites using the platform. One of the most common things we get asked about is what structured data works best for Shopify. With all of the different structured data types that are available, it can feel very confusing as to which ones are the best for store owners.

Other Useful Articles: 

• Shopify Speed Optimization
• Improving Shopify Duplicate Content
• Shopify Sitemap.xml Guide

While there’s never a singular answer to this question, over time we have built a general framework around how to implement structured data on Shopify sites. So if you’re interested in improving structured data for your Shopify site, read on and I’ll share that framework with you.

What Is Structured Data?

Structured data is a standardized code that tells search engines what the content of a Web page is about. Structured data can tell Google if a particular page is about a business, product, review, article, and much more. While there are different types of structured data, the most common and easiest to implement is JSON-LD.

Below you can see an example of what structured data in JSON-LD looks like:

In the above structured data, you can see how the code highlights key data on the page such as the name, author, description, and type of page. This is what structured data does. It easily highlights this key information in a format that is readable to search engines.

Which Structured Data Types Work The Best For Shopify?

One of the reasons structured data is such a big topic is because there are so many different types out there. Oftentimes, it can feel overwhelming to go through Schema.org and choose the structured data that’s most relevant for your site. While there generally isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution (there never is in SEO), there are general best practices for marking up Shopify sites.

Overall, we find these to be the best structured data mappings for Shopify sites:

1. Home Page: Organization
2. Collection Pages: CollectionPage / OfferCatalog, BreadcrumbList
3. Product Pages: Product, BreadcrumbList
4. Blog Posts: Article

Let’s dive a little deeper into each one and how they help:

Organization

Organization schema tells Google that your page represents some type of business. It then gives Google information about your business such as your business name, address, phone number, and URL. You can see an example of Organization schema below:

In general, the best practice for Organization schema is to place it on the site’s home page. However, many sites make the mistake of placing it on every page of the site. This isn’t best practice as it’s telling search engines that the primary focus of every page on your site is about your organization. Instead, you’ll want your schema to identify the most specific topic that your page is about.

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• Technical SEO Agency
• Ecommerce SEO Agency
• Shopify SEO Services
• Enterprise SEO Services

In general, Organization schema will give Google just a little more information about your business as a whole and can help influence things such as a Knowledge Panel appearing. However, Organization schema is a bit lower priority overall since it only impacts a single page on the site.

CollectionPage / OfferCatalog

Category pages on eCommerce sites rarely get marked up with structured data. I believe this is a missed opportunity with many sites, as category pages have data on them that’s certainly worth marking up.

Enter CollectionPage and OfferCatalog schema types.

I first encountered these structured data types when reading an article by Distilled that suggested these schema types for eCommerce pages. When looking into them more, I thought that it was a really great idea. These structured data types allow you to markup key information about the product listings that appear on category pages such as the product name, URL, price, position on the page, etc. For instance, here’s an example of CollectionPage schema:

And here you can see an example of OfferCatalog schema that’s injected through the “Total Schema Markup App”

Which one you choose is up to you but be sure you’re implementing only one instance of CollectionPage or OfferCatalog schema per page. You don’t want to include both schema types on all of your collection pages.

BreadcrumbList

BreadcrumbList structured data is a schema type that highlights your breadcrumb internal links to Google. This structured data informs Google that those horizontal links are in fact part of a breadcrumb element. BreadcrumbList structured data can also give Google more information about the overall hierarchy of your site and the parent/child relationship between your category and subcategory pages. Since breadcrumb internal links generally appear on both collection and product pages, you’ll want to see if you can include them on both page types.

For example, here’s a set of breadcrumb internal links on Staples.ca, which uses Shopify:

When looking at their schema, we can see that this is marked up with BreadcrumbList structured data:

Since this site is larger, this BreadcrumbList structured data might help Google better understand the taxonomy of the site and how the categories and subcategories are all interrelated.

However, please note that sometimes implementing BreadcrumbList structured data on Shopify can be tricky. When products are associated with a very large number of collections, this can lead to extremely long breadcrumb strings. We’ve seen examples where 20+ breadcrumb links are added to a page since the product is associated with a lot of different collections. Therefore, you need to ensure that your products are all tightly taxonomized if you’re looking to integrate breadcrumbs and BreadcrumbList structured data on your site.

Product

Product structured data is generally considered the highest priority structured data type on Shopify sites. This is because it marks up a lot of product data to Google. This includes information such as:

1. Product name
2. URL
3. Price
4. Availability
5. SKU
6. Description

Below, you can see an example of “Product” structured data appearing on a Shopify product page:

Product structured data should also include the aggregateRating property. This property will highlight data about the reviews contained on the page such as how many there are (reviewCount) and what the average rating of the product is (ratingValue)

This, of course, gives Google the ability to show rich review star results directly in the SERPs. Google will also often show other data about the product directly in the SERPs such as reviews and pricing information.

Article

The last structured data type that we generally recommend for Shopify sites is “Article” structured data. This type of schema can be used to markup informational content such as news stories, guides, or blogs.

Article schema highlights information such as:

1. headline
2. URL
3. datePublished
4. dateModified
5. description

For this reason, Article structured data is a perfect fit for Shopify blogs. You can find an example of “Article” schema here:

The reason we prefer Article schema to other types of schema that markup informational content (BlogPosting) is because Google provides direct guidance around “Article” schema, meaning that the search engine might place extra emphasis on it.

They also note that “Adding Article structured data to your news, blog, and sports article page can enhance your appearance in Google Search results.” This means that by using Article structured data, you might be setting your content up to receive rich results or special treatment from Google either now or at a later date.

Implementation

Of course, you might be thinking that all of this information is great to have in practice but how do you actually implement structured data on your site? With most of our clients, we find that there are generally two different ways to implement structured data on Shopify: using an app or having a developer implement it for you. Both of these methods have their advantages and disadvantages so we’ll go over each one below.

Using An App – Schema App Total Schema Markup

Pros: Easily to implement; Marks up category, product, and blog pages
Cons: Must pay a monthly fee for schema; Not as customizable

If you don’t have a developer on hand and don’t feel comfortable messing around too much with the liquid code, then implementing structured data via an app might be a good solution for you. Similar to WordPress plugins, Shopify apps allow you to easily add functionalities to your site without needing a developer to do so. However, the downside here is that Shopify’s app ecosystem is mostly paid. This means that by using an app, you’ll be charged on an ongoing basis to have structured data set up on your site.

If you plan on using an app to implement structured data on Shopify, then we highly recommend using the “Schema App Total Schema Markup” by Schema App. This app does a fantastic job of marking up the highest priority pages on your site out of the box. Once you add the Schema App, it should add different structured data to your various page types:

1. Home Page: Organization
2. Collection Pages: OfferCatalog
3. Product Pages: Product
4. Blog: BlogPosting

While typically category pages don’t get the same love as product pages in terms of markup, this is what makes OfferCatalog schema so great. This structured data marks up all of your product listings on category pages including information about each product name, URL, price, description, and more.

This is a fantastic way to easily provide Google with more information about what’s contained on your Shopify site’s category pages.

Schema App Total Schema Markup also adds “Product” structured data to your Shopify site’s product pages. As previously discussed, this is great as it will markup key information about your product to Google.

However, after implementing the Schema App on your site, you might notice that there are multiple instances of Product structured data on your pages:

This issue occurs because the Schema App is inserting structured data on top of another file or technology. While this can vary by site, we find that the biggest culprits are:

• The Shopify theme
• Other apps on the site

Generally, the first place to look is the Shopify theme. Many themes actually have microdata structured data built in an effort to give your site some “Product” schema. However, the issue is that this schema generally isn’t very robust and is now competing with your Schema App. Multiple instances of this schema might result in Google or other search engines having issues properly reading it.

Fortunately, Schema App has a solution. In the app, you can turn on a setting called “Microdata filtering is enabled.” This will tell the SchemaApp to remove any schema that’s generated by the Shopify theme.

The result should be that only a single “Product” structured data element appears on the site’s product pages.

Another cause of this duplication might be from other Shopify apps. For example, some review apps will automatically add “Product” structured data to their reviews widget. If this is the case, you’ll want to consider reaching out to that app’s support team. Oftentimes, they’ll be able to change settings on their end to remove the Product structured data that’s getting injected through the app.

Developer Implementation

Pros: No long term fee, completely customizable
Cons: Requires a developer to implement

If you have a developer on hand, you might want to consider having them implement structured data on your Shopify site. The great thing about this is that you won’t need to incur a monthly charge to maintain the site’s structured data. As well, you’ll be able to completely customize the structured data to how you see fit. If you want to use “Article” structured data on your blog posts as opposed to BlogPosting, a developer should easily be able to do that for you.

If you’re working with a developer, we’d highly suggest giving them very clear directions on the types of structured data you want added and to which page types. We find it very helpful to even create an example of what structured data should look like on the home page, collection pages, product pages, and the blog. For this, using a tool like Merkle’s Schema Markup Generator is invaluable.

Conclusion

Adding structured data to your Shopify store can help search engines improve their understanding of your website’s content. Shopify structured data is best implemented through the template level so the easiest way to think about it is in terms of home, category, product, and blog pages and which type of structured data should be mapped to those pages.

Of course, when implementing structured data on Shopify, you’ll need to be sure to remove any conflicting schema elements that are already present on the site from the theme or third party apps. However, once you do the upfront work and clean things up, structured data on Shopify should work in the background and do so seamlessly moving forward. If you have any questions above structured data or Shopify SEO services, you can reach out to us!

Other Shopify SEO Resources

• Shopify Speed Optimization
• Improving Shopify Duplicate Content
• Shopify Sitemap.xml Guide
• Shopify Robots.txt Guide
• Shopify SEO Tools
• Shopify Plus SEO
• All Shopify SEO Articles

Shopify Structured Data: Schema Markup For Shopify is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

SEO on eCommerce sites can be extremely challenging. eCommerce sites can have massive amounts of pages due to factors such as large inventories, faceted navigation, and robust site functionality. Due to the size of these sites, SEO becomes a much larger challenge as solutions oftentimes need to be scaled across thousands or millions of URLs.

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• Ecommerce SEO Agency
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At Go Fish Digital, we run into our fair share of eCommerce sites and I thought it would be helpful to show you our eCommerce SEO checklist. While there are a lot of items on this checklist below, here are some of the highest priority items:

Our Ecommerce SEO Checklist:

• Set up Ecommerce Tracking
• Check Google’s Index Coverage report
• Review the site’s log files
• Limit JavaScript rendered content
• Map out the site architecture
• Scale internal linking
• Audit faceted navigations
• Use global title tags & meta descriptions
• Perform keyword research
• Reclaim broken backlinks

You can review the entire checklist below to see how we analyze eCommerce sites.

Table Of Contents

1. Analytics
2. Crawling & Indexing
3. Website Architecture
4. Keyword Research
5. On-Page SEO
6. Site Performance
7. Backlinks
8. Guides By Platform
9. Ecommerce Tools

1. Analytics

Proper analytics are essential to the success of any SEO campaign. This is especially true for eCommerce sites. Due to their size, these sites often collect enormous amounts of data around traffic, engagement, rankings, conversions and more. This data can be a key driver for many digital and external marketing initiatives. For these reasons, it’s imperative that your site is tracking as much clean data as possible.

1a. Google Analytics

• Ensure Google Analytics is installed and tracking properly. You can confirm this by filtering down to your session and confirming a single session in Real-Time reporting.

• Implement Ecommerce Tracking to track revenue in Google Analytics
• Create other goals in Google Analytics: email subscriptions, cart adds, account sign-ups
• Set up event tracking for other key user actions: video plays, CTA clicks
• Enable Site Search tracking to monitor internal site searches
• Turn on Enhanced Ecommerce reporting
• Create filters to remove any internal traffic or bot traffic from getting reported

1b. Google Search Console

• Ensure that a property has been created and verified for Google Search Console
• Submit your sitemap.xml

2. Crawling & Indexing

You can have the best content in the world, but if it isn’t getting crawled and indexed, users won’t be able to discover it in the search engines. Generally, eCommerce sites have more robust functionality than standard sites and this functionality can cause large scale issues with how your site is crawled and indexed. There are a good number of elements that impact these initiatives on your website.

2a. Site Crawl

• Perform a crawl of the site using Screaming Frog. If the site is extremely large, you may need to set up a virtual machine using AWS to crawl from the cloud.
• Monitor to see if the crawl can finish. If it appears it cannot, there may be significant cawl budget issues.
• Review any internal 3xx/4xx status codes. If global elements are creating these then consider fixing these issues first.
• Check for any instances of non-indexable URLs (“Noindex”, “Canonoicalised”, “Blocked by Robots.txt”. Determine why these are not set to be indexable pages and if any adjustments should be made.
• Save the crawl. This will allow it to be easily uploaded at a later date.

2b. Sitemap.xml

• Check to see if your site is generating a sitemap.xml. If not, create a new sitemap.xml file.
• Crawl the sitemap.xml.
  • Ensure that all key pages are included
  • Remove any non-indexable pages (3xx, 4xx, canonicalized, ”noindex”)

• If the site utilizes a sitemap index file, ensure that all child sitemaps are grouped into clear categories (Brands, Products, Categories, Blogs, etc). If the child sitemaps will be large, consider splitting them up into additional sitemap index files.

2c. Robots.txt

• Check to see if the site is generating a robots.txt file. This should be located at example.com/robots.txt
• Review the “Disallow” commands. Are these commands accidentally blocking content that should be crawlable or have a large number of backlinks pointing to them?
• Check that the robots.txt is blocking the crawl of URLs that shouldn’t be indexed (i.e. parameterized URLs).
• Ensure a link to the sitemap.xml is present in the robots.txt

2d. Index Coverage Report

• Identify the primary crawler of your website in Google’s Index Coverage

• Check the “Excluded” report for URLs that should be getting indexed. Higher priority statuses include “Crawled – currently not indexed”, “Discovered – currently not indexed”, “Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user”.

• Check the “Valid” report for URLs that shouldn’t be getting indexed. The “Indexed, not submitted in sitemap” status can be good to audit for these URLs.

2e. Log File Analysis

• Review the log files from the site. This can be done with tools such as the Screaming Frog Log Analyser.
• Note the most frequently crawled URLs on the site. Are there high priority landing pages that are missing from the most frequently crawled pages? If so, determine ways to improve their internal linking and accessibility.

• Identify any URLs that are getting crawled that should be (i.e. parameterized URLs). Adjust the site’s crawl settings to block the crawl/indexation of these URLs.
• Fix any commonly crawled 3xx/4xx status codes.
• Identify orphaned content that has been crawled but does not receive any traffic.
• Review the log files for any other crawl data that stands out. Screaming Frog has a great guide to log file analysis.

2f. JavaScript Audit:

• Turn off JavaScript in your browser and manually review key page types. Note which global content elements are dependent on JavaScript to load. You can also use the View Rendered Source extension to compare the original source code to the DOM.
• Use Google’s URL Inspector to render these pages. Check to ensure Googlebot is able to crawl and index these elements.
• For content you’re unsure is loading properly, use “site:” search operators to check Google’s index for that content.
• For key content that is unable to be indexed, consider eliminating JavaScript dependencies.

2g. Faceted Navigation/Sorting:

• Check for faceted navigation. Manually review to see if this navigation is generating a large number of URLs.

• Use the “site:” & “inurl:” search operators in Google to determine if parameterized URLs are getting indexed.
• Review crawl directives associated with URLs generated by the faceted navigation (canonicals, “nofollow” tags, robots.txt, URL parameters report). If the log file analysis shows that undesirable URLs are still getting crawled, adjustments may need to be made to these crawl directives. This post provides a great guide on how to adjust those crawl directives and the pros and cons of each option.
• Monitor the site’s crawling and indexation prin Search Console once adjustments have been made.

3. Website Architecture

When Google crawls large sites, it’s extremely important that it’s able to access and understand all of the URLs it’s encountering. Having an intuitive website architecture is essential for ensuring that Google is able to access all of your product listing and product description pages. As well, intelligent architecture allows Google to properly categorize your content into logical parent and child categories. Here is how we typically review a given site’s architecture.

3a. Navigation:

• Ensure that all of your key category pages are included in your navigation. This will allow Google and users to easily access them.
• Review the naming conventions used in the navigation. Ensure they’re optimized for your target keywords.
• Review how many total navigation options the site has. Ideally, the navigation will provide users with links to the most useful categories without “flattening” the architecture too much.
• Review the categorization of navigation. Ensure that subcategories are properly grouped into logical parent categories.

3b. Internal Linking:

• Identify product listing pages that use infinite scrolling. Ensure that any infinite scrolling is SEO-friendly.
• Review the paginated internal linking. Consider adding a link to the last page in the series if one isn’t present. This makes it easier for Google to crawl products deeper in the site architecture.
• Review the site crawl to find pages that are deep in the architecture of the site. If certain groups of pages consistently have crawl depths of 4+, consider adding internal links to them.
• Remove tracking parameters from any internal links

• Ensure product description pages utilize “Related Items” internal links. This will naturally improve Google’s crawl to other product description pages and help improve conversions and user engagement.
• Create an HTML sitemap that lists all key product categories. This will provide an additional step of ensuring that key product listing and description pages aren’t too deep in the site architecture.

4. Keyword Research

Like any site, it’s important to understand the keywords that are most likely to generate revenue for your company. By understanding and properly prioritizing your keywords, you’ll know which SEO initiatives and content are most likely to move the needle in terms of revenue. Here is a great process to find the most valuable keywords for your site.

• Create a new spreadsheet that will be your “Master Keyword” sheet.
• Export your keywords from Search Console’s “Search Results” report. Add keywords that generate the majority of your clicks/impressions.
• Navigate to the “Search Queries” report in Google Analytics. Identify keywords that generate the majority of revenue from Google AdWords. Add these keywords to the “Master Keyword” sheet.

• Use tools such as AHREFs to perform a content gap analysis of you and your competitors to determine keywords where they’re ranking well and you’re not. Add any core keywords to the “Master Keyword” sheet.
• Map all keywords to associated landing pages on your site. Ideally, there will be a 1:1 match between a particular keyword group and an individual landing pages
• For keywords with no associated page, consider creating a new one to be mapped to that keyword. This may be able to be done by using existing content created by the faceted navigation or the site’s internal search data.
• Upload all of your keywords to your rank tracking solution of choice.

5. On-Page SEO

Of course, on-page SEO is still highly relevant to eCommerce sites. This means ensuring that you’re sending strong on-page signals for your relevant keywords. The primary difference between standard sites and eCommerce is that any on-page changes will need to be made at scale. The following process can help you find templated solutions to optimize your product listing and product description pages.

5a. Meta Data

• Optimize all of your page category and product title tags. If your site is large this may need to be done programmatically.
• Optimize all of your page category and product meta descriptions. Once again, if your site is large, this may need to be done programmatically.

Product Listing Pages

• Ensure that the product listing page represents logical overall categories that users would be searching for. Consider consolidating categories that are too similar or splitting up categories that are too different.
• Review the individual product information listed on product listing pages (pricing, reviews, description, etc). Should additional content be included on the product listing page to give users even more information?
• Audit your product listing pages to ensure that individual products match the category they’re in.

• Research if using an intermediary category page is a good fit for certain product listing pages. These pages act as content hubs for more broad categories and don’t include links to description pages.

Product Pages

• Ensure that all product pages have unique descriptions. This will help avoid duplicate content from getting indexed by Google.

• Review product pages to ensure that key information is included. This could include pricing, datasheets, shipping and return information. Consider programmatically adding any important information that is missing from product pages.
• Create a policy for how unavailable products should be handled. Ensure products that don’t exist return 404 status codes or products that have changed URLs properly 301 redirect.

5b. Structured Data

• Add “Product” structured data to all product pages. This schema should mark up key information such as the name, price, and rating.
• Add “Article” structured data to all of your site’s blog content.
• Navigate to Search Console’s “Enhancements” report. Fix any URLs with “Errors” reported.
• Verify that all structured data validates properly using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.

5c. Mobile SEO:

• Run the site through Google’s Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool to verify it is compatible with mobile devices.
• Resize your browser to check to see if the site is responsive or adaptive. Responsive sites will resize with the browser. Adaptive sites will only resize when the page is refreshed
• Browse the site manually on a mobile device. Note any UX improvements that could be made. Common adjustments include improved internal search, navigation, product & category page design.
• Compare the desktop and mobile versions of the site. Note any differences in content, navigation or usability that could impact the UX or crawl of the site. You can use Merkle’s Mobile-First Index Tool to help with this.
• If the site has any mobile URLs (m.example.com), ensure they have a rel=alternate tag that points to the corresponding desktop URL.

6. Site Performance

Site performance is important for more than just SEO. The speed of your site determines the UX for all of your digital marketing initiatives including paid, social, email and more. Improvements to your site performance not only improve user engagement but have been shown to have a direct impact on the revenue the site is able to generate.

6a. Benchmarking

• Get benchmark performance metrics from Google PageSpeed Insights. Use Batch Speed to quickly pull data around a large sample of URLs.
• Run competitors through Batch Speed as well.
• Compare benchmark metrics to competitors: First Contentful Paint, Time To Interactive, Time To First Byte

6b. Improvements

• Defer render-blocking JavaScrit code until later in page load
• Improve database query efficiencies for pages with high TTFB metrics

• Run Chrome’s Coverage Report to find files with large quantities of unused code. Consider eliminating or reducing in size.
• Resize and compress large image assets on high priority pages.
• Lazy load image assets on product listing pages.
• Audit JavaScript files that could be contributing to long load times using Chrome’s Performance report. Consider removing or replacing with a lighter-weight option.

7. Backlinks

Backlinks are still a key component of Google’s algorithm, so it’s important to ensure that your site is driving as much authority as possible. eCommerce sites have a lot to consider in this regard as rotating inventories, previous development work, and historical site changes can impact the equity the site is receiving and distributing. Often times, your equity can be unclaimed, lost or diluted throughout time.

• Use tools such as AHREFs, Moz, or SEMRush to analyze the site’s backlink profile.
• Compare the site’s linking root domains to competitors. This can give you an idea of how authoritative your site is compared to theirs.

• Locate URLs returning 302 status codes with a large number of backlinks. Adjust these URLs to return 301 redirects to pass more link equity to the destination URLs.
• Locate URLs returning 404 status codes with a large number of backlinks. 301 redirect these URLs to live pages on the site to reclaim any lost link equity.
• Using AHREFs or Moz, create reports to find unlinked brand mentions. Reach out to any site that mentions your company but does not link to the site.

8. Guides By Platform:

One thing to think about for your eCommerce SEO is the platform you utilize. Each platform might have a different set of SEO considerations.

Here are some great guides for some of the most common ones:

• Shopify SEO
• Magento SEO
• WooCommerce SEO

9. Ecommerce SEO Tools

We utilize a large number of SEO tools on a day to day basis. Below, you can find the ones we think are the more relevant to eCommerce sites.

Crawlers

• Deepcrawl
• Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Crawling/Indexation

• Search Console URL Parameters Tool
• Index Coverage Report
• Robots.txt Tester

Log File Analysis

• Screaming Frog Log File Analyser
• Botify

Site Speed

• Google PageSpeed Insights
• BatchSpeed.com
• Chrome’s Coverage Report

Structured Data

• Structured Data Testing Tool
• Search Console Structured Data Reports
• Merkle Schema Generator

Backlink Analysis

• AHREFs
• Moz Link Explorer

Due to their size, eCommerce sites present their own unique set of challenges. However, by following the above checklist hopefully provides you with actionable items to improve SEO. Do you have any other items that are on your eCommerce SEO Audit Checklist? If so, feel free to drop them in the comments below!

The Best Ecommerce SEO Checklist is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

The Shopify platform is becoming increasingly popular among eCommerce providers. As more and more brands shift to doing business digitally, Shopify provides an easy solution for many to manage their eCommerce presence.

However, as we’ve noted in our previous Shopify SEO article, there are some SEO adjustments that store owners must consider with the platform. One of the biggest issues with the Shopify platform is the fact that it creates duplicate content out of the box.

Related Content:

• Technical SEO Agency
• Ecommerce SEO Agency
• Shopify SEO Services
• Enterprise SEO Services

Duplicate content can hinder ranking performance. This is because multiple versions of the same content are accessible at different URLs, meaning that internal and external equity signals can be split amongst multiple pages. This creates multiple weaker pages as opposed to one strong one. This forces Google to decide which of the duplicate URLs to provide ranking credit to, and it may give a lower ranking to a higher priority URL. For that reason, it’s always best to eliminate duplicate content when possible.

What Is Shopify Duplicate Content?

Shopify duplicate content is a set of pages that contain the exact same information. Shopify sites can create duplicate content through the product pages, paginated URLs and product tags.

Shopify Duplicate Content & Canonical Tags

It’s very important to note that while Shopify creates duplicate content, it does take some steps to consolidate. In the examples below, Shopify does make correct use of the canonical tag to reference what the ranking page should be. This helps Google consolidate these duplicate URLs into one.

However, it’s best practice to not rely on canonical tags, as they are hints as opposed to directives. Where possible, try to eliminate duplicate content completely.

Learn the steps to eliminate Shopify duplicate content below.

1. Duplicate Product URLs

Currently, one of the biggest ways that Shopify generates duplicate content is by creating duplicate product page links. These duplicate product page links are generated on category pages.

Here’s an example:

When navigating to a category page on a Shopify site, we can see the page contains our product listings. This should be a list of links that are associated with that category:

When clicking on one of these pages, you’ll be brought to a product page with the text /collections/ & /products/ in the URL path. The format will look something like this.

domain.com/collections/.*/products/.*

Here you can see an example of this:

However, if you inspect the canonical tag of that page, you will find that the tag references a different URL. This will be a URL with only the text /products/ in the URL path. The format would look like this:

domain.com/products/.*

We can see that this page is an exact duplicate of the page listed above:

This means that every single product that’s listed on your Shopify site’s category pages is a duplicate page:

By default, here is what your Shopify store is signaling to Google:

1. Here are my category pages with links to product pages. I want you to crawl and pass equity to them.
2. Once you get there, there’s going to be a tag that tells you to crawl and pass equity to these other pages. I want you to index those instead.

Essentially, this means that your whole site structure is linking to URLs that can’t actually rank. Instead, your products that are receiving internal links are telling Google to index other pages. Ideally, all of your site’s internal links should point to pages that are capable of ranking.

The Solution:

Fortunately, there’s a very easy fix for this. All you have to do is make a simple adjustment to your Shopify theme files. By adjusting this code, you should be able to fix this issue on all of your category pages at scale.

Here’s how you can fix this issue.

1. In the left sidebar, select Online Store > Themes
2. Select Actions > Edit Code
3. Find the “Snippets” folder, and select “product-grid-item.liquid”
4. Adjust the following code:

FROM: <a href=”{{ product.url | within: current_collection }}” class=”product-grid-item”>

TO: <a href=”{{ product.url }}” class=”product-grid-item”>

By adjusting this code, this will ensure that all of your links to product pages should be adjusted to their correct URL path.

Congratulations! You just fixed Shopify’s major duplicate content problem at scale by adjusting a single line of code.

2. Duplicate Category Pages in the Pagination

There’s another duplicate content issue that Shopify creates. This issue occurs within the pagination of category pages.

To show an example, let’s actually start on page two of a particular category page. Scrolling down to the bottom of the page, we can observe the pagination beneath the individual product listings:

Page 2 Of Pagination

Of course, these pagination links point to different sets of products that fall under a particular category of the Shopify site. Now from page two, let’s click the pagination button to page one.

When we click this, we can see that we get a URL with the parameter ?page=1 appended to the end:

This is actually a duplicate page of the source collections page. In this example, it would be a duplicate of the URL https://www.terrebleu.ca/collections/all.

This is because a URL with “?page=1” will always be the same as the original non-parameterized category page. Notice how the pages below exist at different URLs but contain the exact same content:

Original Category Page

Pagination URL With ?page=1 Parameter

The Solution:

To adjust this, we typically use a bit of JavaScript to change the link to page one of a given series. Below is an example of JavaScript that our developers have used for clients in the past to remove these duplicate links. Big shout out to our developer Laurentiu Danu for this solution!

if($(".pagination").length) {

    var fniv = $(".pagination .prev").next("span").find("a").attr("href");

    if(fniv.indexOf("?page=1") >= 0) {

  let newval = fniv.replace('?page=1','');

      $(".pagination .prev").next("span").find("a").attr("href", newval);

    }

    if($(".pagination .prev").length){

    if($(".pagination .prev a").attr("href").indexOf("?page=1") >= 0) {

          let newval = fniv.replace('?page=1','');

          $(".pagination .prev a").attr("href", newval);

    }

    }

  }

This JavaScript essentially searches the pagination wrapper to find any instances of “?page=1”. If it finds an instance of that string, it will remove it from the URL within the pagination. Of course, you may need to have a developer customize the code for your site to work with your Shopify theme.

This should help eliminate some Shopify duplicate content created by the pagination.

3. Duplicate Content Created By Shopify Tags

The final thing to be on the lookout for with Shopify duplicate content is pages that are generated by product tags. Within each product, there is a module on the right hand sidebar that allows you to add tags to an individual product:

These tags will create separate category pages that list all of the products contained within that tag. While this can be a great way to start grouping products together, it can also create potential duplicate content issues within Shopify.

For instance, what if a group of products in a tag you create is very similar to one of your core category pages? In that instance, there would be similar/duplicate content: your primary category page and the category pages created by the tag.

For instance, below you can see an example of two very similar pages. The first one is the site’s primary landing page for “Ground Coffee”. The second is a duplicate page created by the “Coffee” tag the site has placed on these products:

Primary Landing Page

A duplicate page created by the “Coffee” tag

We can see that since the products in the main landing page and products with the “Coffee” tag are similar, the site has created duplicate content. We want to remove the tag from the index to ensure we can still use the tagging functionality without Google being able to index the duplicate URL.

The Solution:

Fortunately, there is an easy fix. The first step is to check whether this is even an issue with your site. These tagged pages often have the format /collections/all/. You can use the following search operator on your Shopify site to see any product tag pages that might be indexed: site:example.com/collections/all/

This should show you a list of tag pages:

Next, you should review these pages to see if any of these could be potential duplicates of your primary landing pages.

If you determine that these pages could be considered duplicate content, you can simply remove them from the index by adding a “noindex” tag. Fortunately, it’s very easy to add a “noindex” tag via a specific URL path. By using the request.path command in the theme.liquid file, you should be able to easily “noindex” all of these tag pages.

{% if request.path contains "/collections/all/" %}

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

{% endif %}

Note that this is not always the case. Sometimes, the pages will not follow the URL format of /collections/all/. In that event, you can use this search operator to find the blog tags: site:example.com intitle:”tagged”. This should also show you all of the product tag pages that are appearing in the index. You may need to write multiple “noindex” rules in the theme.liquid file to ensure these are removed from the index.

Conclusion

With the emergence of Shopify, it’s important for both brands and SEOs to understand how to work with Shopify stores in the coming years. We’re seeing more and more brands utilize the eCommerce platform to improve their digital commerce. By understanding Shopify’s duplicate content issues, you’ll put your store in a much more advantageous position to rank well in search engines. While this is certainly not the only SEO improvement you need to make, it will set your store up with a solid technical foundation. If you have any questions on duplicate content or our Shopify SEO services, feel free to reach out!

Other Shopify SEO Resources

• Shopify Speed Optimization
• Shopify Sitemap.xml Guide
• Shopify Robots.txt Guide
• Shopify Structured Data
• Shopify SEO Tools
• Shopify Plus SEO
• All Shopify SEO Articles

How to Fix Shopify Duplicate Content is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Related Content:

• Technical SEO Agency
• Franchise SEO Agency
• WordPress SEO Services
• Enterprise SEO Services

Writing or rewriting all of the title tags and meta descriptions, while working keywords into the copy, is a tremendous accomplishment for any mid- to large-sized website. And, unfortunately, just finishing them in the spreadsheet doesn’t mean you are done.  You still have to actually get them into the CMS.

While this is easily done manually on a 10 page website, the time it takes to implement them for an enterprise site with thousands of pages could take up many precious hours.

For me, when it came time to add hundreds of title tags and meta descriptions, I knew the process was going to be extremely tedious and time consuming. After a while, myself and the WordPress SEO agency here at Go Fish Digital had a discussion on how we could automate this process.

What we found was a way to bulk import metadata such as title tags and meta descriptions for clients on WordPress using the Yoast SEO Plugin.

Items You Will Need To Bulk Import Metadata To Yoast

Before you begin, you’re going to need to do a little bit of prep work to ensure that you have all the required information and software to import the data:

1. FTP & front-end access to the site (must be in WordPress)
2. A CSV of the updated metadata
3. The Really Simple CSV Importer
4. The Yoast SEO for WordPress Plugin
5. Cyberduck

Once you have the above items, then you’re ready to begin.

How To Bulk Import Metadata To Yoast

These are the steps to bulk import metadata using Yoast:

1. Backup your website
2. Extract every page’s post_id
3. Map your post_id to the URL
4. Bulk upload the data using a plugin

1. Backup Your Website

Before doing anything concerning changing large amounts of data on a website, it’s always a good idea to perform a site backup first. This is especially important if you are going to be changing information on hundreds of pages at once.

If you end up uploading the wrong data, you could be spending twice as much time going back through every page and manually changing the metadata again. Do yourself a favor and avoid this situation by performing a site backup before you start this task.

2. Extract Every Page’s post_id In WordPress

In order to import the metadata to the right location, you’re going to need to map it to the proper page. We can do this using the WordPress Post ID. Simply put, the post_id is a unique number assigned to every page on your WordPress site. You can actually see it in the URL when you’re editing a particular page.

While you can find the post_id at the page level, the problem is that WordPress’s built in functionality doesn’t allow you to easily export all of a domain’s post_id’s. Instead, you’ll have to manually upload a PHP file to your server to get this information.

Fortunately, we’ve created a PHP snippet that will return the post_id. Save the following snippet as a PHP file named “export.php”.

————————-

<?php

include “wp-load.php”;

$wp_querywpcq1 = null;
$wp_querywpcq1 = new WP_Query();
$argswpcq1 = array(‘post_type’ => array(‘post’), ‘posts_per_page’ => 12, ‘order’ => ‘DESC’, ‘orderby’ => ‘date’, ‘paged’ => $paged);
$wp_querywpcq1->query($argswpcq1);
if ($wp_querywpcq1->have_posts() && $wp_querywpcq1->found_posts > 0):
while ( $wp_querywpcq1->have_posts() ) : $wp_querywpcq1->the_post();

echo “\n{“.$post->ID.”},{“.get_the_permalink().”},{“.get_the_title().”}”;

endwhile;
endif;
?>

————————-

Next, you’re going to need to connect to the server. Open up your favorite FTP client software (I use CyberDuck) and enter the proper credentials to connect. Once you’re connected, all you have to do is simply drag your “export.php” file into the root folder.

Now that you’ve uploaded your PHP snippet, it’s time to run it. To do this, go to “yourdomain.com/export.php”. This will execute your snippet and provide you with a document of all of the URLs on your website mapped to their associated post_id.

Export this information to a CSV and use “Text to Columns” to separate the URLs and post_ids.

3. Map Your post_id To The URL

Now that you have mapped a post_id to every URL on your website, it’s time to fetch the post_ids of just the pages you are changing. In a separate tab on your CSV, ensure that you have the following three columns of information about the pages to be updated:

1. URL
2. Recommended Metadata
3. post_id (blank for now)

Next use the VLOOKUP function to grab the post_id from your original list. You should use the URL as the key for this function.

In this example, I changed the “Recommended Title Tag” field to “_yoast_wpseo_title”. This field is what allows Yoast to change the title tag of a post when the CSV is uploaded. However, this field will change based on what type of metadata you are importing to Yoast. Finally, after you have mapped the post_ids to the URLs, you can go ahead and delete the “URL” column. The final CSV you upload should only contain the following two columns:

1. post_id
2. Recommended Metadata (_yoast_wpseo_title in this example)

The great thing about this process is that you can bulk edit a lot of the information in Yoast using their Custom Fields. By referencing the table below, you should be able to update the metadata in Yoast for title tags, meta descriptions, canonical URLs and much more:

*Note: We have only tested this using title tags and meta descriptions

4. Import Your CSV

Now that your CSV is ready, it’s time to upload it to WordPress. Download and activate the Really Simple CSV Importer plugin. Once installed, navigate to Tools >> Import >>CSV and upload the document. Sit back and let WordPress do the rest of the work for you. After the import is complete, run a crawl of the website to ensure that the information was imported properly.

Once you refine this process, it should only take around half and hour to bulk import metadata for hundreds or even thousands of pages to Yoast. Enjoy!

How To Bulk Import Title Tags And Meta Descriptions To Yoast is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

One of the key considerations for Shopify store owners is site performance. Your website performance directly impacts your website’s ability to convert users. The faster your site is, the more users you are likely to convert. As well, if you’re looking to improve your Shopify store’s SEO, performance is a small ranking factor in Google’s algorithm.

Related Content:

• Technical SEO Agency
• Ecommerce SEO Agency
• Shopify SEO Services
• Enterprise SEO Services

Additionally, site performance impacts all of your other digital marketing initiatives. Whether it’s paid, email, online reputation management or social marketing, your website speed will impact users from all of these different channels. If you’re site is receiving a fair amount of traffic from these channels, then even just a small improvement in performance and can result in noticeable revenue improvements.

A one second improvement in site speed can result in +$8,000 in revenue for this site.

This is why ensuring that your Shopify site performs well is crucial to the success of your store. Speeding up your Shopify site can not only enhance your user’s experience but may also have a direct impact on your bottom line.

What Site Speed Optimizations Does Shopify Already Have?

One of the nice parts about Shopify is that your store does come with some speed optimizations out of the box. In general, Shopify sites are pretty fast as compared to other solutions. This is great news for Shopify store owners as the platform is generally faster than platforms such as Magento.

After creating a new Shopify site, you’ll find that the following performance features should already be implemented:

• Leverage Browser Caching: Shopify should already cache your site’s internal resources by default. Caching allows some of your content such as images, JavaScript and CSS to be stored locally within users’ browsers. This means they will not have to re-download the content when view the same resource twice. This can speed up your store as users will be able to see some of your site’s content much faster than they were previously. Note, if you’re seeing third party resources get flagged for caching issues, there is nothing you can do to directly adjust the caching.
• Utilize A CDN: Shopify utilizes the Fastly CDN. A CDN (Content Delivery Network) allows some of your site’s content to be stored on servers across the World. This reduces the physical distance between your users and your site’s content. Reducing the physical distance helps improve your site performance.

How To Optimize Shopify Site Speed:

Here are 8 steps to speed up a Shopify site:

• Choose A Lightweight Shopify Theme
• Reduce Large Image Sizes
• Compress Images
• Replace GIFs With Static Images
• Lazy Load Images
• Limit Third Party JavaScript & Shopify Apps
• Migrate Tracking Codes To Google Tag Manager
• Run Your Store Through Google PageSpeed Insights

1. Choose A Lightweight Shopify Theme (Original Data)

Choosing a fast Shopify theme can immediately put your website in a great position from a performance standpoint. Some themes might come with unnecessary bloat out of the box, putting your site at a performance disadvantage. Conversely, a more lightweight theme will set your site up for strong performance moving forward.

To give you an idea of some of the better performing themes, we tested 200+ templates that are available in the Shopify Theme store and logged their benchmark First Contentful Paint (FCP) and Time To Interactive (TTI) from Google PageSpeed Insights.  Below you can find the top performing themes our tests identified:

1. Create Theme (1.1 FCP, 7.8 TTI)
2. Toy Theme (1.1 FCP, 7.7 TTI)
3. Warm Theme (1.9 FCP, 7.8 TTI)
4. Light Theme (1.1 FCP, 7.8 TTI)
5. Outdoors Theme (1.1 FCP, 8.1 TTI)

Of course this is not to say that high-performing themes cannot be made slower or that these are the best options for your site. However, if speed optimization is top of mind for you, these might be ones to consider choosing.

2. Reduce Large Image Sizes

Resizing large image assets can be one of the best ways to speed up a Shopify site. When evaluating a lot of Shopify sites, we’ve noticed that many businesses have a propensity to use large numbers of images. This makes sense since images are a staple of eCommerce stores. This is even more true in verticals such as retail where images are a necessity to highlight products.

While images are a fantastic way of improving the UX and branding of your store, they often come with a performance tradeoff. Image files are generally much larger in size than standard HTML or CSS. The result of using a large number of images on the page can be a very heavy page weight that takes users longer to download than a less image-intensive page:

This page uses 173 image requests with a total size of 14MB in image assets

As well, unoptimized images can make your site’s page even heavier. Images will often be uploaded at sizes much larger than their “render size”. This is the size that users actually see in the browser:

This page contains an actual size of almost 2x the render size

When images are uploaded at sizes much larger than the render size, this causes unnecessary performance issues. This means that users must download a larger image than is actually required for it to render. The result is that users must waste extra browser resources and data in order to actually see the content.

You can find larger images on a given page by using Chrome DevTools. Simply right click and select “Inspect”. Navigate to the “Network” tab and refresh the page. This will show you all of the resources used to load your page. You can then sort by “Size” to find the largest assets.

If you see any large images (100+ KB), find that image on your page and once again right click and choose “Inspect”. Hovering over the image link will show you the render size as compared to the actual (intrinsic) size.

3. Compress Images

Images can also be unoptimized when they are not compressed. It’s very common to see Shopify stores where no compression has been applied to uploaded images which leads to larger image sizes than are necessary.

By using compression, you can ensure that your image assets have much smaller file sizes than the original image. The smaller file size will allow browsers to load your website content faster.

When it comes to image compression, we prefer using a combination of these two methods:

• Shopify Apps: Some apps will automatically compress images upon upload. We’ve had good experiences with Crush.pics.
• Optimizilla: This allows you to manually compress large image assets before uploading to your site.

4. Replace GIFs With Static Images

An undeniable trend we’ve seen with slower Shopify stores is the utilization of GIFs. GIFs can be extremely valuable as they provide a more interactive experience for users. Once again, this can help improve your site from a UX and brand perspective.

However, GIF assets are extremely large. Using even just one GIF on a page can dramatically increase its size:

This single GIF asset accounts for 2.8MB 

We’ve seen instances where just using two or three GIFs has accounted for 10MB+ of a single page. These files significantly add to page weight so we recommend trying to replace them with static images where possible. This can result in significant resource savings and improved Shopify speed optimization.

5. Lazy Load Images

When running our list of Shopify sites through PageSpeed Insights, one of the most common recommendations we found was “Defer offscreen images”. This is an indication that all of the site’s image assets are loading at once:

Since many Shopify sites use lots of images, looking into lazy loading makes sense in a large number of instances. This can speed up your Shopify website as all of your site’s images won’t load at once, only as a user scrolls down the page.

If you’re interested in implementing lazy loading, Shopify has pretty good help documentation around this. We’ve had the best success for our clients by working with our developers to implement the lazysizes library.

6. Limit Third Party JavaScript & Shopify Apps

A Shopify store is using a huge number of apps and third party resources. This is resulting in a large number of requests the browser must make

Similar to WordPress plugins, Shopify has “Apps” that easily allow site owners to add functionality to their websites without the need for a developer background. Apps are a fantastic way to augment your site’s abilities. The same goes for any additional third party scripts.

However, remember that these additions come at a performance cost.

Every time you add apps or scripts to your website, this adds to the total number of requests your site is making. Additionally, the size of these scripts should be taken into consideration. Too many apps or third party codes can decrease the performance of your Shopify store.

An example of a Shopify store that utilizes a large number of third party tracking codes

Because these resources can hurt site performance, it’s important to regularly review all of the tracking code, Shopify Apps and any other third party resource you’re using. We find that it’s helpful to have an honest conversation with your marketing and development team. Asking these five questions about each resource can be helpful to make a decision on it:

1. How often do we actually use this feature?
2. Is this a “must-have” or “nice to have”?
3. Is there a lighter-weight option that we could use?
4. Is the benefit we get from this worth a performance trade-off?
5. Are there any metrics we can reference to see how often this feature is used by our users?

Of course the answers to these questions will certainly vary based on your store and business model. For instance, a chat feature might be crucial to some stores but nonessential for others. After answering these questions, we then recommend working with your development team to figure out which elements can be safely removed.

Not sure where to start? Here are some third party codes we’ve found Shopify stores utilizing that tend to have larger impacts on performance:

• Lucky Orange
• Sumo
• Sentry
• ZenDesk
• Drift
• PayPal
• Klaviyo
• Privy
• Yotpo

Of course, we are not advocating against any of these technologies. However, if you know you’re utilizing one of them, it’s good to be aware that it might be having an impact on the performance of your Shopify store. If your testing reveals that these could be causing issues, consider removing or replacing them to speed up your Shopify site.

7. Migrate Tracking Codes To Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager is a solution that allows you to easily add and remove tags from your website without ever having to touch the code. It is a fantastic way to manage all of your website’s tracking code in one place. As well, one of the great things about Google Tag Manager is that the all of the code loads asynchronously. This means that the code loaded through Google Tag Manager will not block the rendering of your site’s content. This means that you could consider going through a “tag migration” to move some of your tracking code to Google Tag Manager. You can do this by performing the following steps:

1. Add Google Tag Manager to your Shopify store
2. Navigate to Tags > New and look for built-in tags in “Tag Types” that you’re using on Shopify.
3. Implement these tags on Google Tag Manager
4. If you didn’t find any built-in tag, you can choose “Custom HTML” and add your tag
5. Set your triggering properly. Often times this is set to “All Pages”
6. Publish your Google Tag Manager changes
7. Navigate back to Shopify and remove any apps that you added via Google Tag Manager
8. Navigate to your store and test that your new tags are working properly. You can do this using Google Tag Manager’s “Preview” mode

Consider moving tracking pixels such as Google Analytics, Hotjar, Facebook and other third party codes to Google Tag Manager.

8. Run Your Store Through Google PageSpeed Insights

Google PageSpeed Insights is Google’s site speed testing tool. It analyzes your site and provides both metrics about how your site is performing as well as recommendations as to how you can improve your site’s speed. To run a test, simply navigate to the tool and enter the page you would like to see performance data for. You should see something like the following screenshot:

You can a good amount of data back and it can be fairly overwhelming. Let’s discuss the key data points that we look:

• First Contentful Paint: How long it takes for the first bit of content to be rendered. This is important to show the user that content is starting to load.
• Time To Interactive: How long it takes for the page to first become interactive to the user.

Generally, we’ll look at those two metrics first to get an idea of how a particular page is loading. This can provide great benchmark data that you can then go back and re-measure to see if your site speed improvements are having an impact.

Shopify Store Performance Tests (Original Data)

One thing that you might want to know is how your store compares to other Shopify sites. To give you a reference point, we performed an analysis on some of the most prominent Shopify stores to benchmark their performance.

Methodology:

To collect this data, we measured the homepage performance of 400+ Shopify sites. We collected data points such as First Contentful Paint, Time to Interactive, Page Size, Image Size and Total Requests. All performance data is for the mobile version of the site. We then compared the top and bottom 20% of pages based on the Google PageSpeed score.

Top 20%:

• First Contentful Paint: 2.78 seconds
• Time To Interactive: 8.98 seconds
• Total Page Size: 2.01 MB
• Total Image Assets: 1.11 MB
• Requests: 72

Average:

• First Contentful Paint: 3.8 seconds
• Time To Interactive: 22.1 seconds
• Total Page Size: 4.41 MB
• Total Image Assets: 2.1 MB
• Requests: 171

Bottom 20%:

• First Contentful Paint: 5.89 seconds
• Time To Interactive: 30.37 seconds
• Total Page Size: 5.54 MB
• Total Image Assets: 2.59 MB
• Requests: 235

Additional Resources

As well, if you’re looking for some additional ways that you can improve the performance of your Shopify site the resources below should help. We’ve aggregated our favorite site speed tools and resources that can be used to improve performance on Shopify sites and sites with other content management systems.

Page Speed Testing Tools:

1. Pingdom
2. Google Pagespeed Insights
3. WebPageTest.org
4. Chrome DevTools
5. Google Lighthouse
6. Think With Google

Image Optimization:

• Optimizilla
• Crush.pics

Read More:

• Optimizing Site Speed With Chrome Developer Tools
• The Ultimate Guide To Site Speed

If you’re looking to optimize your Shopify store’s speed, these can be great adjustments to make. Improving image optimization, reducing requests, and implementing lazy loading can be great ways to ensure your site loads faster. Hopefully the result is higher performance that improves the user experience for all your digital channels. If you’re looking to improve your Shopify store’s site performance or SEO, you can learn more about our Shopify SEO services.

A Guide To Shopify Speed Optimization is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.