23 Minute Read

Step by Step Guide To Submitting Your Business to the BBB (Updated for 2019)

Here is how to submit your business to the BBB:

1. Find Your Local BBB Location at BBB.org.
2. Verify Your Business Isn’t Already Listed.
3. Submit/Add Your Business to the BBB.
4. Login to Your New BBB Account
5. Update Your Business Listing on the BBB.

Now let’s break these down in more detail.

1. Find Your Local BBB Location on the Website

Go to BBB.org and find your local chapter by looking for the globe icon drop-down box near the top right of the homepage as shown below.

When the box pops up for you to enter your location, type the city that the business is located in in the text box and click, “Set Location”. This will then set the entire BBB site to show data from the local chapter of the BBB. These local chapters often cover a wide area, but you want your listing to be created in the correct one.

Once you have selected your location and the homepage reloads, scroll down to the bottom of the BBB homepage and verify that you now see your local BBB chapter/office.

If you see the correct area then you can go on to step 2.

2. Verify Your Business Isn’t Already Listed

Just to make sure that you don’t happen to already have a business listing on the BBB, search for your business name on the BBB homepage.

In the example below, I searched for my company and you can see that it shows up automatically as you are typing in the “Find” bar,  so I know my business is listed.

But I also looked for a company that I knew wouldn’t exist and here you get this page:

If your business is already listed then you must already have a free listing and for the sake of this step by step guide, you are done. However, if your business was not found then proceed on to step 3. 

3. Submit/Add Your Business to BBB

So at this point, you have 3 options to add your business to the BBB directory.

Option 1 – While you are already on the search results page after you verified your business wasn’t already listed there is a big button called, “Add a Business”.

You can click that button and it will take you a generic one-page form where you can enter information about your business.

Once you submit all the information it asks for then you will be contacted by a BBB representative from your local chapter about getting your business listed within a few days.

Option 2 (Recommended) – If you see a “Join/ Apply” link in the top navigation bar for your location then this is the best way to get listed in my opinion.

Click on the Join/Apply link.

It will direct you to a form that is specific to your area and has more questions about your business (size, professional licenses, years in business, etc).

Your responses will be sent directly to your local chapter and they will contact you within a few days as well.

Tip: For some local chapters, this form is used to get BBB accreditation as well as add a listing. If you are asked about accreditation then just ignore or say no to any recommendation to join the BBB accredited program. The form will still process and be sent.

Option 3 (Use this if you don’t see the Join/Apply link) – Since each local chapter of the BBB handles new registrations differently, there is a good chance that you may not see a direct Join/Apply link as in the screenshot above. Some locations have this and others do not.

If that’s the case you may have to take a more manual approach to get listed, but it is still worth it.

Click this link to go to the entire BBB directory by State page. It should look like this:

Then, pick the state (or province if you are in Canada) that your business is listed in. In this example, I will pick Florida.

Next choose, “Learn more about this BBB”

This will take you to the local chapter page where you will find the contact details listed. You could call them to request the best way to add your business, but I find that email works just as well. The local BBB representatives are usually very responsive. Often times 5 minutes or less!

Send an email to the email address on this page stating that you would like to get a FREE listing on the BBB and ask for instructions.

Here is an example of what you could ask them, just copy and paste from below into your email:

You will get an email like the one below with specific directions for how to apply in your area:

After you follow the instructions the representative gives you and fill out your business information with them, you will probably get a confirmation message from them like this:

You can ignore the part about the accreditation. Thats it you are done for now. You can move on to step 4.

4. Login To Your New BBB Account

At some point, after you have finished the steps above you should receive an email from the BBB with a UserID and Passcode to log in. This might take a day or two to receive so don’t forget it or accidentally delete the email or you will have to start all over again.

It will look something like this one and you will want to write down or save the UserID and Passcode to be able to login to the site in the future as well as completing the next steps.

The email you get may be slightly different but the process should be similar.

Next, click the link in the email and login to the local BBB chapter with the credentials provided.

Now you are ready to move on to Step 5.

5. Update Your Business Listing on the BBB

At this point, the BBB has created a listing for you and verified the information about your business that you gave them in the earlier steps. Now it is up to you to fill out some additional but very important about your business that will make your listing complete.

Verify that the basic business information is accurate.

The additional information they want may look similar to what you see below and may vary from area to area such as business category, service area, etc.

Once you have completed all the sections of information you will come to a confirmation type page. Look this over one more time before submitting to make sure everything is 100% accurate. You will NOT be able to go back and change it online. If something is incorrect you will have to call or email the BBB directly to make any corrections.

The confirmation will look like this:

Once you have submitted your information, all you can do is wait for your listing to be made live on the BBB site. It can be very quick or take a week or longer.

There is no way to speed this part up at all but just set a reminder on your calendar to check back in a few days to see if it has gone live.

The quickest way to find out if the new business profile is live is to go back to the BBB homepage and then search for your business name.

Once the page is published you will see your listing like this:

At this point, you are pretty much done. Now customers can submit a review or a complaint and the BBB will email you and give you a chance to respond.

It certainly isn’t the easiest local business listing to get but it still has some value. Let’s talk about that before you go.

Does a BBB Accreditation or Free Listing Help with SEO?

Up until this point we have been talking about how to set up a FREE listing with the BBB. But the question often comes up, is becoming a BBB accreditated business worth it for SEO?

A BBB free listing is worth it if you can get it in my opinion.

Being accredited may have some advantages as well.

Bottom line, it certainly won’t hurt your SEO and has these potential benefits:

1. Nofollow Link to Your Website

If you have a free listing then most likely the link is a “nofollow” link. That is just SEO speak for a link that doesn’t pass any authority or trust from the BBB site to your site. So in the search engines eyes, you don’t get a boost for having that link, but it can still drive a little traffic to your site from your BBB listing.

Some accreditated business listings (the paid ones) have a “follow” link but not many.

Phil Rozek from Local Visibility System makes this insightful comment: The “follow” links are rare. Only some chapters have grandfathered-in certain BBB-accredited members’ links, and some don’t do even that. So in some cases, you’ve got businesses that have been accredited for 20 years that have their “follow” links removed.”

One recent client that I know of that got BBB accreditation and was given a “nofollow” link.

Also, after crawling about 10,000 free and accredited listings using URL profiler and looking for the rel=nofollow attribute I found that only on the charity business listings had “follow” links to their website.

So it would appear in 2018 that there isn’t much of a link building value in the BBB as many already were aware.

2. Medium Quality Citation for Local SEO

If you are new to local SEO, head over and familiarize yourself with what a citation is this handy local SEO guide.

Your BBB  listing still provides a medium quality citation from a trusted website. In fact, BrightLocal ranked it the #1 citation for marketing professionals in 2018.

In reviewing the local ranking factors for 2017 Mary Bowling from Ignitor Digital said, “links can add a lot of location relevance, by joining the local Chamber of Commerce or the Better Business Bureau, sponsoring local events and local non-profits, getting mentioned in the local media – that sort of thing. Those all really help to boost your relevance for that particular location.”

So the takeaway here is that the free listing is worth the hour or so it takes to create this listing and I recommend you do it. You don’t have to be an accredited business to get this benefit.

3. BBB Listing Ranks Highly for Business Name in Google

One of the other local SEO advantages to having a BBB listing is that it will rank well in Google for brand searches of your business name. The BBB has even mentioned that directly. 

Here is an example of the Inbound Authority BBB profile ranking well for searches of my brand name:

This isn’t earth shattering but if you are doing some reputation management this could be a nice way to secure a spot if there is some bad stuff about your business in the search results.

It is even possible to get 2 pages from your BBB listing on the first page of Google for your brand name. In this example, Mark Terlep Roofing, a roofing company in West Palm Beach, FL has the BBB profile page as well as the BBB review page showing in the search results.

Since it is unlikely to get replaced by other directories over time it is a good solid way to occupy the 1st page and beyond for your business name and protect your company.

Plus, they are using AggregateRating schema to display the star ratings for the companies in the search results.

So get out there and get a listing if you can and get some reviews on it!

4. BBB is One of the Better Review Sites Out There

There are a few reasons why the Better Business Bureau is one of the better review sites on the web today.

• The submitted reviews are manually read by BBB staff before being published.
•  The review has to be from a real customer of the business.
• Abusive or reviews laced with profanity are not allowed.

These and other reasons make the BBB a worthwhile place to read more trustworthy reviews about a local business. They really try hard to represent the “real world” in what is published. While they don’t always succeed at this 100% it is still better than most review sites.

BONUS: Data Sources for Existing Listings on the BBB

Some SEO’s and businesses wonder where the BBB gets the business information from when an unclaimed listing is already in existence on the site. Here is what one BBB representative said about how they get that information:

“BBB receives data import from multiple sources.

• Data Aggregators: BBB imports data from various data aggregators and has in development a more robust system to import data with a scrubbing tool to maximize the data accuracy.
• Manual inputs: Consumers, businesses, regulators and others enter data into the BBB database. That information triggers a data collection/evaluation process. The amount and quality of the manual data launch applications to compare the import to existing database records and may, as needed, prompt outreach to obtain additional data records to complete the submission
• Standard Business Questionnaires SBQs: BBB issues requests for information (i.e. completion of SBQ’s) annually to records within the BBB database. Information requests are issued manually and via email depending on the data record. Businesses actively engaged with BBB may update records at any time.

Conclusion

If you decide to pay the few hundred dollars a year to become accredited or not is up to you. The SEO value may be limited, but there also could be other advantages such as using the badge on your website. But it is a no-brainer to spend less than one hour one time to try and get your free BBB listing. So what are you waiting for!

The Dilemma Many Local SEO’s Face When It Comes To Citations

We have all been there…

You and your team work hard to get the foundational work for your local SEO clients right.

This includes creating local business citations on a number of highly relevant or high-quality business listing sites.

Maybe you pay a citation building company to do this tedious but important work.

Perhaps you simply grab the top 15-20 main citation sites and a few industry-specific sites and call it a day.

But now what?

The listing is done and it looks great!

Name. Check! Address. Check! Phone number. Check! Website. Check!

You give it a couple weeks and then you check to see if Google has added the new business listing to their index.

Nothing… Nada!

You could just sit back and wait, and hope, and pray. In reality, you may never see your beloved citations show up in Google’s index.

Why not?

I don’t know. The internet is a big place and maybe they can’t crawl it all.

It could be some of these citation locations have bad technical SEO or lame site architecture that limits how much Google crawls.

No matter what the reason, what can be done to fix the problem?

That’s where this guide comes in.

Some of the ideas and suggestions seem simple, but they work. I will show you how and why (in detail).

This post is a product of a test that was done on the Local Search Forum and I thank all who helped and provided feedback along the way.

Why Does Getting Your Citation Indexed In Google Matter?

There are many more qualified experts on this subject than I am, but one look at the Local Search Ecosystem makes it clear that business listing data flows like a river towards the great ocean of Google.

My Version of An Idiot’s Guide to the Local Search Ecosystem.

Yes, the river of data goes to a lot more places than just Google, but for the sake of this discussion, we are focused on that destination.

This quote from Nyagoslav Zhekov of Whitespark puts it in perspective:

“Search Engines manage their own databases, however, they utilize the information provided to them through the above-mentioned sources (the four Primary Data Aggregators, and Other Key Sites). If the business data on any of these primary sources is incorrect it can override the information that is already available in the Search Engine’s database, this can lead to either new listings being created or changing existing listing data.”

So the point is, if Google has bad information that is already in the index, then it is probably in their database used for Local Search and newer more accurate data may not be overriding that data.

If they haven’t crawled and/or indexed the listings from the four primary data aggregators and the other key sites, they probably aren’t using that updated info to manage their own databases.

If Google doesn’t have up-to-date and accurate information via your accurate citations, that could affect your rankings.

Before we dive into how to get your local SEO citations indexed, let’s look at an example that shows that it may indeed be an effective method to improve rankings.

How This Test Began

On October 22th, 2018, I was searching for information on this very topic while working on my own business citations.

I had moved Inbound Authority three times in five years and there were bad NAP inconsistencies and I knew it was time to clean things up.

I had BrightLocal submit a data aggregator update a few months prior and so I started to check those listings to see how they looked.

After I realized that there were a lot of duplicates, I started doing a site:search in Google for each listing to see if I could find my citations in Google’s index.

I moved on to using the info:search operator in Google and found that 20-30 of my citations from top sites were not in their index.

I was bummed out that I had paid for these updates to the data aggregators and had gotten the top 20 or so good citations fixed but they weren’t even in Google.

I stumbled upon this nice article by Casey Meraz from Juris Digital citing some work that Darren Shaw had done back at MozCon in 2016 which was similar to what I was trying to accomplish. In addition Darren had suggested this more specific hack.

I loved Casey’s suggestion on how to go about getting these citations indexed and so I set out to try it.

At the same time, I came across this thread that someone else started in 2017 on the Sterling Sky Local Search Forum.

It had some nice ideas and suggestions to Thomas MyLocal’s question in the post and I wanted to take it a bit further and try to get some conclusive results.

The Citation Indexing Test Begins

I started by creating on my site a “Places to View Us on The Web” page as was suggested.

This page was nothing fancy and still isn’t.

I then fetched it as Google in Search Console and waited.

Nothing amazing after a few days happened.

Yan Gilbert & Joshua Mackens offered some good feedback and I added the new page on my site to the footer for kicks to see if that would help get these links crawled/indexed.

So, I added the link to my footer and had Google fetch the homepage and crawl all links. A couple days later, 9 out of the 20 citations on my new page had been added to the index.

The ones that made it in were:

1. Local.com
2. Yellowbook
3. Best of the Web
4. Neustar/Localeze
5. Infogroup
6. Foursquare
7. City Search
8. City Squares
9. Superpages

Some of these were Data Aggregators so that was a good thing.

A week or two goes by and I check it again. By this time I had added 12 more citations to the initial 20 on my page of links, bringing the total to 32.

21 of those 32 were now indexed!

So long story short, this idea certainly worked to get these citations indexed, but the bigger question as posed by Joy Hawkins was, “Does this improve rankings or traffic on the actual GMB listing?”

Does Getting Citations Indexed Improve Rankings?

I will let you be the judge of that yourself.

A couple of days after this experiment began, I took a screenshot of my rankings for the keyword “local SEO” using a new local rank tracker tool called Local Falcon.

This tool is awesome and I highly recommend you stop reading this post (just don’t forget to come back) and go try it on your business/clients because it gives you accurate Google Maps tracking to visualize how you rank in different parts of a city.

This was the result for my business around the time the test began on October 30, 2018.

My rankings are pretty bad as I haven’t done much work for my own site. That being said, what happened after getting these existing citations indexed?

Well on November 19, 2018, I used Local Falcon again to see if things had improved in any way.

There was an increase, especially in the outer bands of the results.

For example top row, the sixth pushpin from the left went from 13 to 7. The same in the bottom row where the fourth pushpin from the left went from 13 to 9.

Around the business, the rankings went up as well.

So I kept on letting Google do their thing and ran the rankings again on November 27, 2018.

All of the red was totally gone!

There is even a sprout of green in the middle.

I know that correlation isn’t causation. I can’t argue that these results were purely due to getting the citations indexed. I am just not sure.

I didn’t do anything else of note during this time to my website or do anything that should affect my rankings.

Again on December 25th, 2018:

Finally, I ran it again on February 22, 2019, for the latest update showing some improvemens outside the center area:

The bottom line

While this is not the holy grail of ranking in local SEO, it is certainly something to be added to the arsenal of tools at our disposal.

Jara Moser agrees that this is something she does for her clients and it makes a considerable difference.

She says, “We actively do this and have seen it make considerable improvements for new companies/rebrands. Existing businesses that haven’t changed names or locations this doesn’t have nearly the same level of impact.”

So your mileage may vary.

But imagine that working for a telephone answering service or a Personal Injury Lawyer in a competitive city.

In West Palm Beach, FL we are paying $199 a call for a click to call Google Ads campaign for such a law firm. How valuable would it be to move the needle for that clients ranking a spot or two in the maps pack?

What if a tactic like this can help them to rank better in a wider area than they were ranking for, for instance near a hospital?

It would be worth the hour of work to give it a shot.

So, how do you implement this strategy for you or your clients?

The Fastest Way To Get Your Citations Indexed (Step-by-Step)

So when I was running my test originally, it was a very manual process that involved a lot of copy, pasting, and site:searching in Google.

In fact here is what my note looked like when I started this test. I would check back each day to see what had been indexed.

Not Quite the “Quick & Dirty Citation Indexing Tool”

I wanted to build a tool to automate the steps of doing this more quickly but I decided that I probably would never get around to really building it with all the client work I have. However, I decided to streamline the process and automate as much of it as possible.

Here are the three tools you will need:

• BrightLocal – Citation Tracking
• This Google Spreadsheet called the Greenlane Indexation Tester (make a copy in your Google account)
• Text Fixer Website to create the HTML needed to embed on your site

Step 1 –  Download a Spreadsheet of Your Top Citations from BrightLocal

If you use Whitespark or another tool to manage your citations that’s fine. The goal is to get a list of your top 30-40 citations into a list or in Excel.

To do this on BrightLocal, follow these instructions:

Download the CSV.

Open the CSV in Excel.

Look for column “T’ called “Citation Link” and copy the top 30-40 rows of URLs. Just make sure they are your top citations. If your not sure what should be your top citations, then check out this article that discusses top citations for your business type.

Step 2 – Find Out Which Citations Are Indexed in Google and Which Ones Are Not

Open the Google Sheet document mentioned earlier.

The document will be pre-filled with some sample data and you can delete that.

Paste your list of urls into the URL field.

Click on the drop-down next to the “Reset” button and choose “Run”. Once the button turns green click it.

This will then scan to see if your citations have been indexed in Google or not.

You will probably be surprised how many of these aren’t indexed at all.

(Disclaimer: I don’t have any affiliation with this tool. I just know it works better than any other one I found so far. Your results may vary. If you are more of a nerd, then maybe this would be an option to use as well.)

Step 3 –  Convert List of Non-Indexed URLs to HTML Code

Now that the scan has run, you should see a tab/sheet at the bottom of the Google Sheet called, “Non-indexed URLs”.

Copy the list of URLs on that page to your clipboard.

Head over to the Text Fixer site to convert this list of URLs to HTML code.

These are the settings I used. You may need to tweak them depending on which CMS your website uses.

Click on the big orange button that says, “Convert URL to HTML link”

Here are the results:

Copy them to your clipboard.

Step 4 –  Create a New Page of Citation Links on Your Website

At this point, open up whatever you use to create a new page on your site. I use WordPress.

I called my page “Places to View Us On The Web” but you can name it anything you want.

Switch to the “code” editor and paste the code from your clipboard and then save the page.

Since this page may stay on your site for a while and be linked to internally, you may even want to spiff it up and make it look nice.

You can also incorporate this directly into your location pages if you have a multi-location business like this pest control company in Georgia. You can see on their service center location pages for Alpharetta, Ga, and Suwanee, GA they have added an “On The Web” toggle box with links to their top citations to help get them indexed. It is not intrusive and fits on the page well. If anyone looking into exterminator services on those pages want to they can look at their listings and other reviews from one place.

Yan Gilbert shares some good advice on this page when he says, “The page will have more chance of being indexed if it is filled out completely with added images etc.”

James Watt shares a similar thought about creating this page, “The only danger I can think of with this strategy is that you’d risk adding a page to the site that’s only for Google, not for humans. If you can frame the page in a way that makes sense for humans that stumble across it too though, then you’re fine.”

So you might as well make it look nice and make it for humans too. Many of these citation sites are good review sites as well. So anyone visiting your site could benefit by finding them and reviewing your business as a bonus.

Step 5 –  Internally Link to the Page & Fetch as Google in Search Console (Optional)

Finally, you may want to link to the new page in your footer or from some other page on your site to try and get some authority to it in hopes of getting those links indexed.

If you want to speed things up you can fetch the new page or the parent page linking to it in Google Search Console.

That’s it! You’re done.

Please let me know how this works for you and if it affects your rankings and GMB traffic.

If you have any suggestions for making this process smoother or more efficient, please leave them in the comments below.

32 Minute Read

Shopify is a hosted e-commerce platform that is used widely by thousands of retailers online. We are told that there are over 25,000 websites built on the Shopify platform, at the rate of 100 new shops a day!  Shopify is an ecommerce solutions made by designers, for designers. Because of this Shopify got the bad rap that it wasn’t an e-commerce SEO friendly platform when it first came out and for a number of years after. While that used to be the case, they have taken great strides to find a balance between being highly customizable yet not overly complicated from an SEO standpoint. The result has been  a blend of robust features yet ease of use. But as simple as Shopify has tried to make it, it still takes work to get your SEO efforts on Shopify just right, and above that to go beyond just the basics, to actually making your Shopify website a leader that brings in the bacon for years to come.

So like most people, you have setup a Shopify e-commerce website and are  waiting on the customers to come flying in. While that would be truly awesome, reality dictates that more is needed to help customers find your amazing products online. As you probably know, Google can play a large role in getting potential customers to your e-commerce website by sending search traffic related to your products to your site. Google does a pretty good job without any extra help in finding your content and making it findable, but it takes a bit more work to outpace your competition in the search results. We work with Shopify clients every day and decided that it would be useful to those who aren’t our clients to have an in depth guidebook on all things Shopify + SEO. This guidebook is a work in progress and will be regularly updated with more tips to succeeding using Shopify.

For realtime help with your Shopify SEO please join our Google Plus community and ask your questions.

Table of Contents:

Shopify SEO Basics
Shopify SEO Features
Planning for SEO in Advance
Google Webmaster Tools & Shopify
Google Analytics & Shopify
Migrating a Website to Shopify

Shopify SEO Basics

If you are new to SEO and need a crash course to get you up to speed with some of the techniques and suggestions in this guide then head over to SEOmoz and have a look at the Beginners Guide to SEO that they have created. That will get you ready to have an SEO throwdown on your website to teach it who is boss.

SEO is a learned practice. It takes a while to understand the big picture of how what you do on and off your site can dramatically improve how well your business fairs online. One of the most important things to remember when embarking on this journey is to never give up! Nothing good happens fast and the same is true of SEO on an e-commerce website. Just like the tortoise and the hare, Slow and steady wins the race. It helps to immerse yourself in the goings on of the SEO and internet marketing world by following some popular bloggers and resources. Below is a short list that can really provide you with valuable advice and motivation:

• SEOmoz Blog
• CPC Strategy’s Blog
• Search Engine Land
• Shopify’s Blog
• Google – Inside Search
• Inbound Authority Blog

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Shopify SEO Features

Doing SEO on the Shopify platform is not much different than on any other platform. For what we call the on-page SEO you just need to know what to put in the proper places in the code of your page. Thankfully, Shopify has made this easy by providing a place in the backend to enter this information. Here is a list of features that Shopify has built in to help your on-page SEO.

• Editable title tags on all pages/products
• Editable URL’s on all pages/products

• Editable ALT attribute on most images

• Editable home page meta description

• Built in .xml sitemap

If you have already upgraded to Shopify 2 you may notice that things look a little different on the product, collection, and blog pages in the SEO section. Below is an example of what you will see if you have chosen to upgrade. The fields for SEO are now at the bottom of the product page but perform the same functions. The one noteworthy addition is the option now to customize your own meta descriptions that show beneath your SEO title in Google search results. This is a much requested feature and it is nice to see that Shopify has listened to its users and added this. Although you may see a automatically populated description field, we highly recommend you craft your own custom meta description field that is appealing and motivates customers to click on your listing. You have to do this in around 160 characters so keep it fairly short.

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Planning for SEO in Advance

One of the most common mistakes website owners make is spending a lot of time working with a designer while building out the look and feel of their new e-commerce website, but not giving any thought to SEO during this process. The result, a great looking site that will get little traffic. Yes, you could spend thousands of dollars on Google Adwords or other paid search options to drive traffic to your site. But unless you have deep pockets that will put you out of business before you get started. The other option is this; think longterm and really provide something useful to your potential customers by means of a great set of products, awesome customer service, meaningful content on your site, and an attention to common SEO techniques and your site will prosper.

[quote style=”boxed”]”If you build it, they won’t come”, “If you build it, own it, love it, and always make it better – THEN they will come”![/quote]

So what are some important things to keep in mind when building a website on the Shopify platform?

Site Structure

Yes, this can be a complicated subject, but lets break it down and make it easy. Site structure/architecture can be likend to an architect planning to build a home. When you walk up a flight of stairs to get to the floor above, you are really glad that somebody planned for that staircase to actually attach to the floor above keeping you from falling flat on your face. Likewise, when you as a user visit a well planned and structured website, you are glad that you can get where you need to and find all the relevant information fast without getting frustrated and leaving the site, the equivalent of the website owners online business falling flat on its face due to poor planning.

Here in this picture is a pictorial representation of a good site structure for a Shopify e-commerce website:

A pyramid structure for a website allows the most possible link juice to get to all the website’s pages with the fewest number of links.

Category & Product Pages

The top ball would be your homepage, the next three down your category pages, and the smaller ones below them would be the subcategory pages and finally the bottom row would be product pages. The important part of understanding this is that you can then can create URL’s (or have your web developer who is building out your Shopify site do it) that clearly indicate this simple yet powerful architecture to the user and search engines. For example:

Site Architecture URL’s

Category	Sub-Category	Product Pages
http://www.mystore.com/software/	http://www.mystore.com/software/adobe/	http://www.mystore.com/software/adobe/acrobat-pro/
http://www.mystore.com/electronics/	http://www.mystore.com/electronics/mp3-player/	http://www.mystore.com/electronics/mp3-player/ipod-nano/
http://www.mystore.com/computers/	http://www.mystore.com/computers/apple/	http://www.mystore.com/computers/apple/macbook-pro/

*Shopify requires that you use certain keywords in the URL to conform to their platforms requirements. For example – “Products” “Collections” etc will show in your URL. There is nothing you can do about that and doesn’t really cause any major SEO issues. You would simply continue with the naming convention for your URL’s shown above after the required shopify string. For example: http://www.mystore.com/products/software/adobe/acrobat-pro/.

Using a structure like this is powerful for a few reasons:

1. It allows your site visitors find what they are looking for with a limited amount of clicking on the site.
2. It allows the power of other sites linking to your homepage to pass smoothly throughout the rest of your sites categories and pages, thus improving their power to rank.

One example of a Shopify sites URL structure that is excellent can be found on the AngryBirds.com website. Do you see how they have setup their site structure from looking at their URL’s below? Not only can visitors quickly determine where they are on the website by looking at the URL bar, but each time the Angry Birds homepage gets a backlink from another website, that link juice can flow like electricity or water flows through wires and pipes to all the category pages, sub category pages, and product pages instead of flowing into a lop-sided website structure that keeps the linkjuice in a bottleneck and prevents the other awesome product pages from ranking in the search engines.

Understanding site structure BEFORE building or designing your Shopify website is imperative, and it is always wise to get an SEO consultant that you trust involved before and during the buildout phase to make sure to get it right.

Plan to Write Unique Product Descriptions

If your website is going to be selling products from a manufacturer or other provide, chances are you are planning on just copying and pasting the product description from the manufacturers website onto yours. Bad idea… Here is why. All of your competitors selling the same products from the manufacturer are doing the same thing on their e-commerce websites. Therefore you are all competing for the same keywords with the same copy. Also, when was the last time that you were moved to buy a product from the boring and dry description on a manufacturers website. Your description is unique not only because it isn’t a copy of everyone else’s, it is unique in that it has your company’s flair for selling the product behind it. It has your Unique selling proposition in it. It has the power to motivate someone who sees your site in the search results decide to click your product page to see more. Then its power continues as it sells your product to the user using the power of persuasion.

It may take quite a bit of extra time to write unique product descriptions for all of your products, especially if you have hundreds or thousands of them, but it is worth it. Start slowly and like we talked about at the beginning, never give up!

The Benefits of Planning for SEO in Advance

The chart below shows the untold benefits of building in SEO from the start. It may be more expensive, time consuming, and technical but your competitors are doing it. Their efforts if they started sooner than you may already be paying off in the form of great rankings and even greater traffic to the site. How can you catch them without a strategy and hard core plan? Once you put that effort forth to build with SEO in mind and keep that momentum you too will break-even in that you will be making more money from your e-commerce website than you have put in. Then you begin the exciting road to a large return on investment for thinking longterm.

Chart showing the value of SEO over the longterm

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Sitemaps & Shopify

Shopify comes with XML sitemap functionality built in. A sitemap is a webpage that lists all of the various pages on your website in one easy to format that the search engines can use as a starting point when their web crawlers visit your Shopify site. Basically it is a cookie jar for the hungry Googlebot crawler who wants to find as many pages of content on the web as possible.

According to the Shopify knowledgebase, “All Shopify stores automatically generate a sitemap.xml file that contains all your products, pages, collections, and blog posts. The sitemap file is located at http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml. Because this sitemap file is referenced from your store’s robots.txt file, you do not need to manually submit it to Google and other search engines.” You will need access to your XML sitemap when you begin to submit your website to Google’s Webmaster Tools.

There is another type of sitemap called an HTML sitemap that helps both your users and the search engines find what they want on your site. Often times you will see websites with a link to this type of sitemap in the footer of their website. It provides a list of all the pages on the site in an easy to read format for users to quickly find the page they are looking for. It also has some search engine value as well. In Shopify you will have to create this file manually as a page on your site. You can use a tool like XML-Sitemaps.com to assist you with this, but you will have to place the resulting HTML code on your site manually.

[box type=”tick” style=”rounded”]After the sitemap creation is complete, look for the link that says, “Download HTML Sitemap”. Not the .XML one since Shopify creates that for you automatically[/box] back to top

Google Webmaster Tools & Shopify

Google Webmaster tools and for that matter even Bing Webmaster tools are important dashboards that the search engines provide to monitor the health and various search data for your site. It is also used to communicate site changes, submit sitemaps, and remove or add URL’s from or to your site.  Think of it as an answer to this question, “How Does Google view my site”? As an e-commerce site that depends on the search engines to send traffic to your site and thus money, you should be interested in how your site is viewed and provide as much info as possible to the engines to make it easier for them to index, crawl, and serve your pages in their results. The first thing you need to do to be able to access Google Webmaster Tools for your Shopify website is to verify that you own the site.

Verify Your Shopify Site on Google Webmaster Tools:

• Head over to Google’s Webmaster Tools and login with your google account or create a new one. You should use the same account as your Google Merchant account if you plan on advertising on Google Product Search.
• Find the “Add a Site” button and click it. 
• You will then be prompted to verify that you own the site and given two options, “recommended method” and “alternate methods”. Due to some restrictions that Shopify has you will need to use the “alternate methods” option to verify the site.

• Choose the “add a meta tag to your site’s home page” option, then copy the code provided so that we can add it into Shopify.
• Next, login to your Shopify backend and click on “Themes -> Template Editor” to access the code behind your Shopify theme.

• Next, paste the code that Google Webmaster Tools provided you into the theme.liquid file in the editor. You want to place is in thesection before the closingtag as shown in the image below.

• Once the code has been entered into Shopify, go back to your Google Webmaster Tools account and click “Verify Site”  

If all goes well you will get a confirmation message letting you  know that the site has been verified and you are good to go.

[box type=”note” style=”rounded” border=”full”]FYI – If your Shopify storefront is password protected you will be unable to verify the site in Google Webmaster Tools.[/box]

Add a Shopify Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools: 

• To add your Shopify sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools look for “Optimization -> Sitemaps” in the sidebar.

• Next, find the “Add/Test Sitemap” button and click it 
• Now enter your Shopify sitemap.xml file  into the box. Remember the URL will be like this: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml where “www.example.com” is your website or shopify url.
• Lastly, verify that there are no errors with your sitemap and you are done.

Other Important Google Webmaster Tools Features: 

As a Shopify site owner who is interested in his bottom line, there are a few other valuable resources inside of your Google Webmaster Tools account.

• Health -> Crawl Errors: This section will show you any errors that are found by missing pages or other server related issues. Since Shopify’s servers are loked after by professionals you shouldn’t see too many problems in the server related section, but you will find any 404 error page messages here. It is important to look here for 404 errors every couple weeks and correct the issues. More about that in the Advanced SEO section of the guidebook.
• Optimization -> HTML Improvements: This area will provide you with some simple areas for improvement with your title tags and meta descriptions.
• Messages: Here you will find any messages Google sends to you about your website. Since these are often very important and need to be acted upon immediately, it is a good idea to have these forward to your email. You can select that option by clicking this link after your logged in: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/preferences.

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Google Analytics & Shopify

It is vital as a website owner that you are able to track everything that visitors do on your website. What products are the most important to the majority of your users? Where is the traffic on your website coming from (Google, social media, comparison shopping engines, or directly from people typing your domain in their browser)? How much revenue are you making from each traffic source? What mobile device are people using when they visit your site? These are questions you should be asking yourself and the answers lie in Google Analytics. Yes, you could use any analytics tracking platform, but Google Analytics can provide Shopify users with a free and robust way to get rich details about their sites demographic.

There are two primary methods of setting up Google Analytics on a website. One is regular tracking. The other is e-commerce tracking. Since Shopify is an e-commerce hosting platform, we want the second one. By enabling e-commerce tracking on your site you will be able to associate revenue amounts with each visit in Google Analytics. This is very important and will benefit you greatly over the lifetime of your shop. Lets get started setting this up. Don’t worry, Shopify makes it easy.

•  Head over to Google Analytics and create a new Google account or login with an existing one (it is two separate accounts we are setting up, one for Google itself like Gmail and the next is for Google Analytics).
• In Analytics “create a new account” and fill in the appropriate information, agree to the terms and conditions and allow it to complete and send you to the “tracking code page”.
• Copy the User Account code at the top of the page to your clipboard. The number shown in the image below:

• Then login to your Shopify backend and look for “Preferences -> General Settings” in the admin dashboard on the top right as shown below.

• Next scroll down on this page until you get to the Google Analytics box near the bottom and paste your User Account (UA) number into the box and hit save.

• The last step now that you have added the proper code to shopify is to make sure Google Analytics has e-commerce tracking turned on. This is simple to do and can be found by going to your Google Analytics account you created, clicking on the top right “Admin” button, click on the “profile settings” tab, then look for the dropdown under “E-Commerce Settings” and say yes.

Making this important addition to your website will allow you to get an amazing amount of data back on who purchased what and for how much. If you end up running any sort of Google Adwords campaign you can integrate the Google Analytics and Google Adwords accounts together and that revenue data becomes even more valuable since you can see how much you made in sales vs how much you spent in ad spend. Below is a great example of the kinds of data you get from Google Analytics when you turn on e-commerce tracking.

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Migrating a Website to Shopify

Migrating a website from one platform/host to another can be one of the most nerve wracking events in the life of your online business. There are myriad’s of hidden dangers that are never fully anticipated until it is too late and something goes wrong. Since this guide focuses mainly on SEO we will try to look at a site migration from that standpoint and only focus on the dangers from a search engine perspective. Here are some very important things to do before moving your website to Shopify:

• Make sure to have a list of all the current live pages of your website and their exact URL (this is case sensitive since a URL with capitalization and one without are treated as two separate URL’s by search engines).
  • You can use a tool like Screaming Frog SEO Spider to crawl your old site before you migrate and get a URL list to work from. The free version will crawl up to 500 pages of a site.
  • The preferred method to get this list would be to already have access to Google Webmaster Tools on your old site and go into the “Traffic -> Links to Your Site -> Your Most Linked Content -> More” page and export the .csv that Google provides of the majority of your content sorted by which pages have the most links. That will come in handy when we have to handle the 301 redirects so we don’t lose search rankings during the migration.
• Gather a list of all of the logins for your payment gateway, shipping carrier, 3rd party plugins you may use like live chat, review providers, etc.
• Make sure you have working access to your domain registrar like Godaddy, Namecheap, Network Solutions, or whomever you use so you will be able to point your domain to Shopify when the site is ready to go live. For more on this you can check out Shopify’s DNS wiki.

Senario

Once you have your list of URL’s ready here comes the tedious work. Before we get into the how to, lets learn why what I am about to tell you is so important, and often neglected. Lets say your old site had 200 pages. Maybe 20 of these were really authoritative, useful pages to users, and had links from other sites pointed at them. Lets say that next to your homepage, the page found at URL: http://www.mystore.com/products/2879387/id2567 was your second most powerful page on the old website. On the new website you really want that URL to look better and make more sense to search engines and users so you have planned in advance to change that to: http://www.mystore.com/software/. If you don’t let the search engines know that you have renamed/moved that old page to the new one then they will simply get a 404 error each time they crawl the links on the web that point to that page and you will get no link juice passed to that new page. Years of good, natural backlinks could all be rendered useless in a site migration and your rankings can plummet! We don’t want that to happen, so here is how you fix that issue:

• From your list of URL’s from Webmaster tools or Screaming Frog, start with the most valuable pages/URL’s from the old site  and determine what the new URL is that most closely represents the content the old URL had.
• Next, open your Shopify backend and go to the “Navigation” tab.

• Look at the very bottom of the page for the section called “URL Redirects“. This is where you will enter the old URL on top and the New URL on the bottom. Once you save this your old page from the past site will now redirect to the new page you entered. This is called a 301 redirect and for the search engines, it tells them to pass most of the link juice from the old page to the new page.

• You will need to do this manually for each and every URL you wish to redirect. This is a tedious and painstaking process but it is vital to the health and future progress of your new Shopify website. If there are any URL’s that don’t really have a good corresponding page on the new site you can simple 301 redirect them to the homepage by entering a “/” (without quotes) into the new path box in Shopify.
• If your new site on Shopify is already live you should be able to test the 301 redirects to make sure they are working properly. Simply enter the old URL in your browser and hit enter and you should automatically be redirected like magic to the new URL you put in. If you are still setting up your Shopify store but haven’t pointed the domain to Shopify yet (you are still using the https://shopname.myshopify.com/ URL), the 301 redirects won’t work until you actually make the site live by pointing your domain to Shopify.

Anytime you change the URL structure of a site, you can expect to lose rankings in Google for a period of time. Usually this is 2 weeks or less, but can be up to 2 months! There are some methods to help get your site crawled faster that have to do with submitting old sitemaps to Google to get them to crawl the old pages and see the 301 redirects faster or using the Fetch as Googlebot feature in Google Webmaster Tools, but you may want to leave those to a professional to be safe.

If you want to be 100% sure that your pages are being 301 redirected properly you can use a tool like GSite Crawler to show you the http response code that is being returned.

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Did you find this guide helpful? Was there something missing that you would like us to add? Let us know in the comments! If you are still trying to decide whether to go with Shopify for your e-commerce store, we hope this guide helped you.

To get access to a free 30 Day Trial of Shopify click here