Last night a friend was sharing how he's going through his site and doing a content audit. He was focusing on throwing away content that doesn't get any traffic or is focused on topics outside his main market.
He was struggling with what to do with his best pages though. I shared with him my process for optimizing a page and I figured it would be useful for you too.
I've adapted and changed a few things to make sense for your Shopify store. I also use SEMRush but you can use any high-quality SEO tool like Moz or Ahrefs. Or skip those steps too.
You'd do this process every three months:
- Use Google Analytics to find which 3 pages got the most traffic over the last 3 months.
- Exclude pages you've already worked on in the last year.
- Check your main keyword performance and ranking for that page using SEMRush or Search Console.
- Look for any on-page issues or suggestions (SEMRush's On Page SEO Checker, Search Console)
- Add another 300 words or so of content with headers/assets/images/etc.
- Refresh the existing CTA or add a better CTA.
- Add more value (e.g. download, images, PDF).
- Link to two other articles to this page.
- Brainstorm 1-5 other pages to write about similar topics that can act as related.
The "exclusion" part in #1 is important. That way you'll cycle through your top 3 pages first, the next quarter you'll do pages 4-6, then 7-9, then 10-12, and finally back to 1-3 again next year.
That ensures you're not over-optimizing and you'll end up with a several high-quality pages.
Feel free to adjust the number of pages or how often you optimize them. 3 pages every 3 months is barely sustainable for me but if you have staff, more resources, or a huge store then you can bump that up. Just don't overwhelm yourself.
And also feel free to start with 1 page per quarter if you can't handle 3. Any optimization is better than none.
When reviewing your on-page issues, you'll want to make sure you have the correct structured data too. That can qualify you for search enhancements from Google like Rich Results or Rich Snippets.
If you're missing structured data or aren't sure, JSON-LD for SEO can automatically add much of the structured data that a Shopify store needs.
Eric Davis