6 ways SEO Manager can quickly improve your Shopify store's SEO
Maintaining your store’s SEO is an ongoing, long process. It’s never just a one-and-done kind of task. In order to see real returns, you need to be constantly monitoring, making changes, and optimizing your store.
Now add this on top of everything else you need to do day-to-day in the running of your Shopify store, and it’s easy for SEO to slip down the priority list. You may know how important SEO is, but it’s still difficult to manage closely when you have orders waiting to be dispatched, products being developed, marketing strategies, and more.
Well, as with many things for Shopify stores - there’s an app for that!
SEO Manager: An SEO super tool for Shopify
When you want to get ahead with your store’s SEO, you need to have the right tools for the job. SEO Manager is an app specifically designed for Shopify merchants, with the kind of tools essential for implementing and maintaining a solid SEO strategy. It was developed by experienced Shopify Experts, and its developer, Venntov, is one of the longest standing in the Shopify ecosystem.
It comes with a suite of tools ready to use out of the box when you install. These range from SEO maintenance essentials like 404 notifications and repairs, to automations that will make your SEO efforts super efficient in no time. Ecommerce SEO can be so specific, and having a tool that’s built for Shopify stores and can be managed from within Shopify Admin is a worthwhile investment for your strategy.
How to use SEO Manager to improve your SEO
#1 - Automatically optimize page metadata
Metadata is essentially your store’s first impression in search results. Meta titles and descriptions are what appear for your link in SERPs, like the example below:
That means you want them to be formatted correctly, with all the right information included. If you have a handful of products, this may not be too difficult to manage manually. But if you’re managing new products regularly or have a catalog with hundreds of products, it will become difficult to keep track of metadata among everything else you need to do for each product page.
Thankfully, SEO Manager can automate metadata for you. Simply create a template using the tags provided, and the app will automatically generate and add the metadata to a page when it’s created. This keeps things efficient, allowing you and your team to focus on page content, photography, and other tasks necessary for a great product page or blog.
#2 - Implement structured data to make your links stand out in SERPs
Want to take up even more space in SERPs? Then you’ll want to explore structured data. This is extra code called schema that’s added to a page that will tell search engines more about that page. When we’re looking at ecommerce, that might be things like the price and availability of the product. Having this makes it more likely that your pages will appear as featured snippets in search results, making them stand out from standard blue links.
It also makes it more likely for pages to rank higher, if the extra information contained in the schema matches the intent of a user’s query. Plus, it can help to reduce bounce rates on pages as potential customers will be able to see information right on the results page. If the product isn’t in their price range, or is currently unavailable, they won’t go on the link. This can sound like a bad thing, but what it really means is you’re only going to get highly engaged, interested site visitors.
Typically, adding structured markup requires knowledge of JSON-LD or the help of a developer. However with SEO Manager, you can automatically add structured data to your pages. You can customize the information you want to appear, and even add details of the review app you use to populate the product rating.
#3 - Keep track of how your store is performing day-to-day
Running all the tests necessary to get a full view of your store’s SEO can be time consuming. Instead, why not get the info you need in an easily understandable way right within Shopify Admin?
SEO Manager’s SEO health score gives you a clear, real-time understanding of your store’s overall SEO position, along with averages so you can see how your store stacks up.
Your store is tested against different SEO metrics daily, and you’ll be able to see when the last test was run. The app will even break it down page by page, so you can quickly see which pages need some extra SEO attention.
#4 - Get actionable SEO insights on key pages
Want to get into the nitty gritty of each page’s SEO? SEO Manager also provides you with an SEO score for each page, and if you dive into the page within SEO Manager you’ll get a clear picture of where you’re doing well…and where the page could do with improvement.
The insights given are clear and easy to understand, and also easily actionable. This takes any guesswork out of optimizing your pages, meaning you can make adjustments that will actually make an impact to your SEO. There are also other tools within the page editor, like the keyword checker tool, integrated Google Trends, and more.
#5 - Quickly target and fix broken links
If you’ve ever run into a 404 you know how frustrating it can be. So, don’t let your customers fall into the same disappointment. The difficulty is that these broken links often don’t make themselves known right away meaning you only fix it when it’s already causing damage. 404s not only make for a poor user experience, but can cause bounce rates to rise, both of which can be bad for your SEO.
404s or broken links can be easily identified, flagged and fixed in SEO Manager. The app will scan your store regularly checking for any broken links, and will add them to the broken link dashboard. From here, you can quickly and easily create a redirect so the 404 leads to a new page rather than a dead end for site visitors. You can even select a number of 404s and export them to CSV so you can edit them in bulk - once uploaded, SEO Manager will create the redirects.
And if you want to make it even easier, you can set up notifications so that whenever a broken link is discovered, you get an email to let you know.
#6 - Protect your pages with product availability and out-of-stock redirect tools
Busy period and a product has run out of stock temporarily? Selling a limited edition product that won’t be back for a long time? You’re going to need a plan for what happens to that page to protect its SEO. These scenarios create dead ends for users, and they’ll simply leave your site. So, instead, give them an alternative option.
SEO Manager’s product availability tool allows you to set when a product will be available until. This will make it so Google doesn’t crawl and index it after a certain date, making it unlikely to appear in SERPs.
The out-of-stock redirect feature allows you to set up a temporary redirect when a product is out of stock. The link is completely up to you - it can be set to a specific landing page you’ve created, your homepage, or the product category. This gives users an alternative option when the product they were looking for isn’t available. Best of all, the feature automatically turns itself on when the product is out of stock, and off when the inventory is replenished.
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SEO is tricky business, but with the right tools you can ensure your store is ready to climb those rankings and attract even more customers through search. SEO Manager makes it easier for Shopify merchants to manage, monitor, and improve their optimization efforts, right from within Shopify Admin.