5 Tools To Prepare Your Shopify Store For Future of Search

Google is intent on making a few, but sure changes: the behemoth search company wants to make the web a cleaner place. It wants to make money, and it wants to extend search to mobile. As it goes about changing its mysterious algorithms as relentlessly as ever, small businesses and marketers are scrambling to redefine the way they work.

If you are in ecommerce, all these changes have direct costs with respect to your transactions. Every change you make with respect to your digital marketing workflow has direct ramifications on your sales, revenue, and profits.

Shopify is a great platform to launch your ecommerce store: it doesn’t demand an arm and a leg to get a full-fledged, functional, and beautiful looking ecommerce store for less than the cost of a latte per day. However, the future of search is nebulous. Your ecommerce business needs a new approach.  It can’t operate on bets, predictions, and assumptions.

As Mark Hayes of shopify.com suggests, there’s a need to organize your ecommerce store – with the landing pages, product descriptions, blogs, copy, and other content – for SEO.  Here are a few small business tools from Shopify’s App Store to help prepare for the future of search:

WordPress Importer for Shopify

Shopify, by itself, doesn’t come with a CRM system built in to help you blog. We know by now that blogging is like breathing for businesses. You can’t possibly run an ecommerce business without maintaining a blog with regularly published content. SEO isn’t even a possibility before you have your own blog since Google loves dynamic, well-linked, and enthusiastically shared content while it almost ignores static pages.

Since WordPress also happens to be one of the most common CMS platforms that businesses love to use owing to ease of use, functionality, and extendibility, WordPress Importer works to import your WordPress-based blog to your Shopify store. Even after you import your WordPress blog to Shopify, the app lets you use images, launch pages, and handle comments as you would. It’s the perfect bridge for your WordPress dependency and Shopify’s ecommerce magic.

SEO Meta Manager

Blogging is a great way to get general traffic. It’s a great tool to establish your credibility and to gain traction, amass followers, and become a thought leader within your niche. Your Shopify store, however, has plenty of products too. Each of those products will need well-written descriptions and copy to work for conversions. For ecommerce, not all traffic is “general”. Sometimes, we also get visitors through search engines with a clear “intent to buy”.

Product descriptions should be a clever mix of keywords with copy that shows personality. It should be the kind of copy that works. How do you work these descriptions for the search engines then? You’d use SEO Meta Manager, that’s what. Using SEO Meta Manager allows you to enhance your product visibility on search, control how your products are displayed on search results, and drive direct traffic to your store.

Titles and descriptions can never be boring again. Further, the tool now also features “Google Search Result Simulator” which shows you how your listings will look like in an actual search. Talk about live, real time feedback, eh?

Plugin SEO

In spite of all your hard work and hawk-like supervision on your SEO efforts for your store, you’ll realize that not everything is always perfect. As Murphy’s law goes, “If something has to go wrong, it will”. That’s why it makes sense to have a handy tool such as Plugin SEO, which can identify problems with your store. It’d be worth spending your time on fixing these problems, as they could be the reason why you are bleeding traffic (or worse still, cash). Think of Plugin SEO as an automated auditor for SEO who gives out simple reports and verdicts.

It’s one of those few things you can setup and forget to get a repeated audit on your ecommerce store continuously.

MixRank for Shopify

What’s life without competitor search? There’s always a lot to learn from your competitors. They could be using tactics you could be missing out on. If they are making money off Google search visitors, they might be getting something right. Using Mixrank, you can instantly uncover the secrets to your competitors’ SEO strategies. Monitor and track millions of ads, landing pages, Google Adwords campaigns to get the data you need. You may also choose to scale up and go for the same advertising platforms that your competitors are certainly benefiting from.

Everything’s fair in love, war, and SEO. Period.

Simple SEO

Now, Google isn’t the beginning and the end of the world. It might just make sense to relieve you from being so dependent on Google. So, then come the other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo. You could just get another entire subset of customers from other search engines by using a simple Shopify app such as Simple SEO. More relevant traffic from other search engines (including Google, of course) always makes sense. More traffic is more sales and no ecommerce store owner would complain. The tool helps you work on Meta tags, titles, and descriptions to make your ecommerce store visible across the web.

While we can safely assume that your Shopify store looks terrific, how effective is your approach to SEO? Which of these Shopify apps do you use currently?