Today, I will be talking about blogging in Shopify, and you know specifically why blogging is important as a store owner and then the fundamentals or the the the standard practices that you can do to set up your blog, so that you know you can set yourself up For success in the future, so on to the first question, why blogging is important I’ll tell you why blocking is important is essentially, there are two audience types that you are appealing to with your content, right, your blogs, etc.
One are humans and two are robots right now for the few. If you think about that at all times, when you’re managing your content, then you’ll do fine. Looking at the first group, if you are humans now there are lots of competition. There’s lots of competition out in the internet in e-commerce, a lot of people selling the same products at you know, roughly the same price or even at the slightly different price differentiation.
So what makes you stand out? What makes you different to the person next to you? Essentially, it’s your story, your brand identity that will get you over the line of a competitor with the same price and blogging enables you to project to that audience. Your story, and you know to base basically strengthen your brand identity, provide subject matter, expertise and you know a few of authority which in turn creates trust and trust is something our buyers want from us.
So having blogs for people is a very, very good idea. Now the other portion of the audience are search engines right now, search engines like blogs and the not because they enjoy reading them, but because the content all adds into the algorithm that determines where you fit in search engine rankings for specific keywords, right and so by Creating blogs you, you effectively extend your content, because if you create a product and that product a has, you know X amount of in it of words in its description, images and so forth.
That’s the end of it. You’ve created that product. Now, how do you extend that? How do you extend your authoritative Nisour, your your keyword density without just creating longer descriptions? Well, you would create you know you could build blogs associated to that subject. You know to provide that so search engines when they look at you on the number of keyword, density and content type, and I know it’ll enhance your actual stores, weight or gravitas, so investing in content right now in the start here, investing in content is an investment In long term, traffic creation and retention, so by creating content, you gather more traffic via search engines, because you know the weight of it adds to your overall SEO and by doing that, you draw more people to your store to your site and then that content, assuming It’s of a you know, good quality will also then ensure, there’s longer term retention and ultimately, loyalty which should, in turn, lead to greater revenue down the track.
So content is king. There’s no doubt about it. So let’s go over and have a look at what a blog looks like in Shopify. So here’s my demo store now to find blogs. You would look into the online store here and you’ll see it’s aptly named blog posts, which is a bit of an anomaly to some degree right, because in some of Shopify you have blogs which are, in essence a collection of articles. That’s how it’s defined on the back end, but you know they turn them posts here now what you want to do before you do anything so I’ve got a number of you can see a number of blog post, slash articles here is: if you go to manage Blogs, this is where you will see your your actual collection of articles for, at the name of it.
Now all new stores get one called news, which is a bit again a bit generic a bit. Nothing. What you want to do is go into this managed blog. So you want to click on it right and you probably want it. The first thing you want to do is change the title now. Why would you do that? Well, let’s go back to the store here, the demo store and scroll down to one of these articles. The health benefits of pineapples and what you’re going to see in the URL is you’re going to see a store and then you’re going to see blogs and then you’re going to see this now having this is news that doesn’t really add much to your to your Seo at all right, so you can get a little gain there straight away by actually having something that’s relative to what you’re trying to to sell or project within that path.
Right, it’ll add weight to it. So having news there is that so it’s a it’s a bit too generic. I would change it to something. That’s more relative now, when you do change it besides changing the title here. What you also need to do is also click on this button. Here you go edit SEO. The page title will come default from the bolt, the blog name, but you should also update this meta description, because this is what it’s going to show in in the search engines.
If people are actually your blog comes up in that list and you’re kind of isn’t also another area where you can add a little bit of weighting into your into your content by making sure you project the right number of keywords or phrases, etc. Right and there’s plenty of articles around SEO on that, so I’ve just added her. You know the fact that it’s a definitive guide to fresh best, fresh fruit and a review of the best fruit, tropical fruit, organic fruit and seasonal fruits right so you’ve got 160 character limit.
You shouldn’t really extend it. You should just try to keep this short and poignant, but you know so that it people understand what they’re looking at to the right here is how you handle comments. Now this is VA Shopify’s native comment system. If you are using an alternative, you know like a third party, then you wouldn’t really care about how this is done. In this case, you know you need pens. I actually think it’s it’s worthwhile, having commentary enabled, because you do want people to interact with you.
If you put interact with your content, they’re more engaged and there’s no doubt about it right so having comments are disabled. Fine! That’s! If you know you won’t get any trolling or anything like that, but you’re limiting that interactional for people to ask questions which a good blog should actually ask a question. But you may want to not go for the all. Just allow anyone to comment and publish because you’ll probably end up alert of spam, so pinning moderation is a good call.
So let’s go back right. Let’s go back now we’re going to have a look at our articles within this blog. Oh there we go go back. One more now we’re going to look at that one. I was just looking at all right, so these are the key elements within your article. You’ve got your title again. You want to include something: that’s relative to the content and, overall, your store to a degree. So in this case, I put health benefits of pineapples, because you know people may be interested in that specifically when searching so it’s a direct keyword like a long keyword string and we’ve got visibility.
If it’s hidden, it’s not going to be visible to any of your readers, and what we’ve got here is some basic content. I’ve put an image in here now when you put images into your your blogs. What you want to do is you want to put generally it reasonably, how high-rez have them sized and then you want to set the image size here and there’s a good reason for this. The reason is that when you upload an image into Shopify, CDN it’ll save it off into a number of different sizes so that it can call them back as and they are required in the size that is required.
So you can put a high-res image there and then you can downsize it or choose whatever size. You want right, but it won’t overburden and the payload, in other words, what make a page slower by if you set the size incorrectly, because it’ll pull back the wrote the right one, alt text is also important again from if you’re not use it. In my case here I’m using it to display image captions, but if you think about it from the rear, the robot audience, then it’s relative, because alt text, while hidden to the human, is not hidden to the robot.
So your search engines will be crawling that and be looking at text drinks. Now, there’s whole bunch of articles on SEO for text for alt text rings. So I’m not going to go into that and but in this case I’m using it as an informative portion for the human audience as well. So I’m just kind of cancel the editing that now it’s just another quick pointer. Is that your images when you upload them should also include, but for the robot audience some descriptive text in this case? Probably you know, store name article and then you know something relative to the image itself, so that again it adds more to the robot view.
So I got a couple of images in here now. You always want to put a featured image on your articles unless that’s not fitting in with your your theme, because, ultimately humans are visual creatures and we are drawn to imagery probably more than text to a large degree, because we, you know, tell upgrade, as I say, A picture tells a story of a thousand words, as opposed to the other way now featured image.
You also want to do the same piece. You definitely want to add an image alt text text to your to your featured image and because then again, it’s good for the robotic audience which is good for search engines. Here we have author and this is the blogging, so we can change all these things now. What’s also quite key is little side piece here tags. Now I’ve got it, you can see. I’ve got a number of tags in here.
Tags are a way of categorizing your article content, so that if you display tags on your store, someone who’s interested in you know, it’s just read an article sees the tag or vitamin C click on the CC and then all other articles related to vitamin C will Be displayed in their search and likewise, if you’re, using any sort of app or product that displays related articles in that uses, tags then having this filled in makes sense that there’s no real downside to having a lot of tags, obviously just been sure they are meaningful.
To the content, I think that’s that’s really. The key at all times now SEO edit the web SEO you’re not going to really have to do too much here. It’ll take unless you don’t like what the content is. It’ll take the top end of the the article like lots of the title and the handle you can modify a little bit, but you can only modify from the article name down. So the rest of the URL remains the same right, and that is the sort of core portion to your your image or you have another.
You image your article set up, there’s a number of little formatting options here, for when you put the actual content in and if you need to see what the actual HTML looks like you can. Click on this and I’ll show you because that’s all it is really. It’s just an HTML blob of or string. If you will, that then is reconstituted and displayed as as your as your blog article. So let’s have a look. What you know if you’re appealing to the whole the human side right so we’ve talked a little bit about the robot side here.
Is that very much that article as you can see the nice little high-res featured image here, which is quite catching and we’ve got? You know it’s nicely set up: we’ve got image captions the ones I was displaying here. We have a social social network, sharing options on the images of Pinterest, so they could pin that to Pinterest. Likewise, you could do yourself. We have some sharing options here where we can share to Facebook to Twitter.
We have a product offering in which is related to the content itself, and you know we scroll down a little bit of author detail here and an opportunity to then you know jump from this article into another article of relevant content. So this is quite a well put together if I was reading it. It’s engaging and you know see outside of the text content itself, but it looks good and that’s when you’re doing things for humans.
Aesthetically should be pleasing right so that you should try to do the styling, etc, robots, don’t care about the aesthetics they care about the text and that’s the the real way to put it. So if you you focus on delivering to both audiences within within the articles you create, then you can’t go wrong and you know going back to why content is an investment and why you should make sure you do, but blog articles is, while you can pay to Do AdWords to do promotions, etc for your store that those are one-time like there’s a one-time events, creating content that is then indexed and added to and grows and cetera over time is what will bring you down to the you will get you to that point of The holy grail of organic traffic, which means non paid for traffic, which is what what all store owners should be aiming for, ultimately, is to have a loyal base of organic traffic, and that’s that’s blogging in Shopify hope you found that useful and any questions etc.
Please reach out to us either via the youtube blog or our article or support options on our website, and thank you very much for reading.
Don't have time to do the blogging thing?
Maybe Copywriting services are for you.
Jimmy's Internet Marketing Business Blog 