As the rapid influx of brands to ecommerce continues, online retailers have to find new ways of differentiating themselves in a highly competitive market.
It’s estimated that there are over 26 million ecommerce websites in the world and some 4.6 million of them are on Shopify. If you want your business to stand out among these, you have to find a way of creating a unique connection with your customers.
Establishing yourself as an authority in your space is a great way to build customer trust. When your audience looks to you as a leader or trendsetter in your industry, you can translate that attention into increased sales and revenue.
And you don’t have to splurge a ton of cash to do this either. Steadily improving SEO for your Shopify store can see you vastly boost your website’s domain authority and search ranking, and therefore, your market position.
Tips to Improve SEO and Domain Authority on Shopify
Search engine optimization can often be a virtuous cycle of self-fulfillment. Better SEO can improve your search ranking and visibility, leading to more traffic to your website. Consistently high traffic, in turn, can lead to improved SEO value for your domain. Here are a few tips to get started and build customer trust with SEO.
- Keyword Research
Keyword strategy is one of the most crucial parts of SEO. It informs subsequent steps, such as content creation, backlink building, and even PPC campaigns.
Your keywords tell search engines like Google which queries you want to rank for. For instance, if you sell consumer electronics, you’ll want to indicate which kind. You could retail anything from smartphones to computer hardware and household appliances.
If you have a USP or a differentiator that is central to your offering, you might want to include that in the keyword too (e.g. affordable kitchen appliances, premium smartphones, etc). In this sense, keywords are an extension of your brand and marketing strategy.
Targeting the right keywords and keeping them consistent throughout your web copy reinforces the message for search engines and helps to build customer trust.
- Add a Blog
Blogs are a great way to engage with your customers. They can help you highlight any developments in your company, reach out to specific audiences, as well as advertise any promotions or new arrivals. You can use them to create a dedicated following and community around your brand, helping you build customer trust.
A blog is also an excellent tool to improve Shopify SEO. More blogs mean more opportunities to embed keywords, attract traffic, and boost domain authority. They also serve as a great landing page for email campaigns and backlinks.
It’s important to ensure that all your content, including your blogs and web pages, is unique. Publishing plagiarized content will see both your domain authority and search ranking nosedive and harm your efforts to build customer trust.
- Technical SEO
SEO is both a strategic and technical skill. Backend improvements to your site that help improve the user experience for visitors contribute tremendously to your SEO score. This includes improving website speed and responsiveness.
Consider that the probability of a user bouncing off your page increases 32% if your page load speed time is from one to three seconds. And over 73% of UX designers believe that non-responsive design is the top reason your prospects leave your website.
You can improve page load speed by optimizing the file size of your images and videos.
Depending on your industry, you might want to lead with mobile-first web design and adapt it for other devices, including desktops. Close to 50% of ecommerce sales are driven by mobile users, which means if you’re not catering to that segment of your audience, you’re failing to build customer trust.
Finally, including backend SEO elements, such as structured data, can help search engines better index your content. Ensure you submit an updated sitemap for your domain to search engines to help them efficiently crawl and index your site.
- Link Strategy
Effective interlinking and backlinking is a big part of upgrading your site’s SEO. Building high-quality backlinks drives not just traffic from the webmaster, but also valuable link equity, which contributes to your domain authority.
Typically, guest posts should be submitted to relevant webmasters whose audiences have a utility for your products. Including well-placed backlinks to your website can indicate to Google that your website is a well-regarded authority in the space.
Ideally, the anchor text, the keyword that carries the hyperlink, should be relevant to the content on the page being linked. This drives good semantic value and helps build customer trust, reinforcing that your page is relevant to that topic for search engines.
Supplement your backlinking efforts with robust internal linking. This is where you link web pages on your website to one another. For example, your blog posts are a good spot to link any relevant product pages. This helps you promote your products, improve SEO, and get more customers on Shopify.
- Videos and Product Images
Customers tend to shop with their eyes. High-quality images are an absolute must for any ecommerce store to build trust. Ensure your images are high-res, allowing people to zoom in and take a closer look at what they’re buying.
Optimize text and image positioning so that the copy doesn’t take up a huge amount of space and people can easily access and view the photos. Supplement images with well-produced videos that effectively showcase your products for a more effective, two-pronged approach.
According to Wyzowl, 88% of people have gone on to buy a product or service after watching a video about it. It’s also the most preferred format with over 91% of customers asking to see more video content from brands they support.
Stellar product and brand videos can engage your prospects and give them a better idea of what they’re buying, helping to build customer trust. Search engines realize that videos contribute to user experience, therefore, web pages with videos tend to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Customer Reviews
Social proof is an important part of making buying decisions. This is why it’s important to include customer review functionality on your ecommerce website. Over 99.9% of customers tend to read reviews online when they shop, and some 96% of them will search specifically for negative reviews.
Reviews and testimonials help to build customer trust in the same way that a word-of-mouth recommendation from someone may prompt you to opt for a particular seller; they help potential customers understand the experience of other buyers. A number of positive endorsements can provide them with just the extra push they need to click ‘Buy.’
Furthermore, the repeated mentions of your brand name in reviews can also help you improve Shopify SEO. It’s fairly easy to add product reviews on Shopify via an app.
- Customer Support
A purchase is only the start of the customer relationship. Nurturing it and providing the right support is key to building customer trust and generating repeat purchases.
You can do this by offering friendly, rapid customer support to handle any issues with shipping or order handling. Make your contact details highly visible and easily accessible. While you might not be able to offer live support at all hours, you can integrate AI-enabled live chat to provide customers with quick automated responses to their queries.
Having a clear, properly advertised returns and exchanges policy is a good idea to manage expectations beforehand, as is publishing detailed FAQs. All of this conveys to shoppers that you care about customer experience and helps to build trust in the long term.
Cement Yourself as a Market Leader With Coalition
Coalition Technologies is a multiple-award winning agency and is recognized as one of the world’s leaders in the SEO and digital space. We’re ecommerce experts, having generated over half a billion dollars in revenue for over 1,000 clients worldwide. Check out some of our case studies or customer reviews.
Work with professionals who know how to build and sustain customer trust through proven methodologies. Reach out to Coalition for a consultation and free competitor strategy review today.
For more info on launching on Shopify, checkout our The Most Comprehensive Shopify Store Setup Guide Ever to kicking off your first store.
