You’re not writing enough!
The problem with eCommerce websites is that they can be low in content.
Most other websites contain a lot of information. For example, a local business website might talk about their services, their team, case studies, FAQs, testimonials etc…
A small Shopify store, by contrast, might have just 10 products, with a few lines of description for each, and maybe an ‘About us’ page with 200 words. The rest of the site might be pages like shipping/privacy policy, which are not relevant for SEO.
There just isn’t much content talking about your products.
Imagine you are Google. You can’t see the layout the way humans do, you can’t see images either. All you get is a bunch of scattered sentences, and based on this you need to figure out exactly what this site is about and which searches to match it with.
If you barely talk about your products or industry, Google has very little to work with.
Thought experiment: your total website word count
Consider how much text is on your entire site. I’m betting some small or new Shopify stores out there have less than 5k words in total.
You can get a rough word count for your entire store using this tool built by Weglot (the translation app) - wordcount.weglot.com. It’s not very accurate and misses some pages, but it’s useful for a quick estimation.
For context: my Shopify store has only 5 products, and it’s showing 10k words in total.
Now forget about word count
The above was just an experiment to see if you are lacking content. But don’t focus on the number (website word count tools aren’t accurate anyway).
Google has stated multiple times that word count isn’t very important. They are looking for quality, not quantity.
With the rise of AI, word count is becoming even more irrelevant. It’s just so easy to produce a bunch of useless words. Saying a lot while saying nothing. So do not start fluffing up your pages to be longer than they need to be. This is likely to do more harm than good.
What’s far more important is that your content addresses what people are looking for.
It needs to answer people’s questions, it needs to demonstrate experience and expertise in your products.
The easiest way to write - just answer questions!
The perfect opportunity is when a customer contacts you to ask something about your product. Don’t let that go to waste!
Answer them in detail, go above and beyond with your explanation, and then immediately copy/paste that info into one of these places:
- the product description or sections on the product page
- an FAQ page
- a blog post
The blog is the easiest way to bulk up your content because you’re free to write about whatever you want, as much as you want. You can add images (so you show up in Google images search) and you can add lots of internal links to products and collections (boosting authority of those pages).
Blogging has the most potential for SEO. That’s why Shopify comes with blog functionality out of the box. If you’re not blogging then you’re not serious about SEO.
Don’t worry, your blog posts don’t have to be long or complicated. It can be as easy as answering commonly asked questions.
If customers aren’t contacting you yet, you just need to do a bit of research to find these questions.
In the next email, I’ll show you some tools and websites to find commonly asked questions, and how to format your posts or FAQ pages so that Google can pick up your answers.
See you next time!
Ed