Increase conversions with Shopify Product Tags

We’ve seen firsthand the power of product tagging, with 100’s of online shops using Digitile to tag and manage their product image files. As subject matter experts, we want to show those running Shopify-based businesses how product tags can create more conversions for their stores.  Some require Shopify Apps while others are just best practices and know-how.

Shopify tags help out in a number of ways. They give web crawlers better information in indexing your website and can improve Shopify seo search rankings, provide customers with a more efficient way to navigate, and make eCommerce management easier.

Tip #1: Boost Your SEO With Shopify Product Tags

Improving the search engine optimization of your Shopify website can give you a boost in organic traffic and lead to better conversion rates. Product tags can be used in a number of strategic ways in improving your Shopify SEO.

Display Shopify product tags on Product Pages

Google’s web crawlers scan through websites and determine what they’re about. Displaying product tags gives Google additional content it can use to better index the information on the page.  If you don’t know how to display product tags on your page, check out this Shopify help article.

Match product image alt-tags with keywords

Google uses alt-text to classify images, as it can’t analyze them visually. Look at the main keywords in your Shopify product descriptions and add them as alt-tags to the product images. This will give Google’s crawlers important data in identifying what these images contain.

Place keywords at the beginning of product descriptions

Make sure that an item’s top 1-2 keywords are at the beginning of a product description. It’s tempting to want to cram too many keywords in, but hold off as Shopify’s SEO algorithm will ding you on this.

Tip #2: How Google Analytics Can Boost Your Shopify SEO Practices

Google Analytics is one of the strongest Shopify apps that brings direct analytical value to boost your store’s SEO.  When you launch your Shopify store, don’t forget to set it up with Google Analytics. After it has been up and running for a few months, you’ll have hard data showing how it’s doing. There are a few different reports you can create from these analytics that will show you which keywords are driving the most traffic. 

If you want to see keyword data for specific landing pages follow this path:

Acquisition->Search Console->Landing Pages

If you’d like to take a look at all of the keywords bringing in organic traffic follow this one:

Acquisition->Search Console->Queries

These reports give you a great deal of important information, showing you the keywords that draw the most impressions, page clicks, and the average page rank position. 

You can use this data to reverse engineer traffic back to your Shopify website. The keywords in these reports will show you what terms to add to product descriptions and tags, as well as functioning to cross-reference the keywords of other related products. Over time, you should see the number of pages that rank for these keywords and Shopify tags increase with higher impressions, clicks, and better page rank positions.

Whether you’re just starting out or have had your website for a while, there are always ways to improve Shopify SEO. We recommend you check out  Google’s Keyword Planner and Ahref’s tool in generating keywords for your store. 

You might have too many products to spend the time and effort in integrating SEO for every single item. We suggest working on improving the SEO of the top, middle, and bottom selling products. Down the road, you’ll be able to gauge the effect of this SEO work to determine if it’s worth applying to even more items.

Tip #3 How Shopify Tags Reduce Shopping Abandonment

High-intent buyers know what they want to buy and start by searching for the specific item they’re interested in buying. In fact, intent buyers are 7-10x more likely to convert when they find what they’re looking to buy.  You can have up to 250 product tags on each product detail page (PDP).  

You should review Shopify Behavior Reports to understand which search terms your shoppers use to describe products they’re interested in buying. Once you review the reports, ensure the search terms are tied to the right products and as many relevant products as you can tag. Shopify product tags will improve your shoppers’ onsite search experience.

Shopify tags allow for better filtering of categories and products, helping customers to get to the products they’re after faster. Having this structure in place has been found to increase the average basket size by 10-25%.

Tags also help you in maintaining your product categories. Use tags to group related products so that you can make changes to them more quickly, rather than having to manually find them.

Tip #4 How to Automate Creating Shopify Product Tags?

Digitile’s Image recognition automatically detects attributes from images and turns this intelligence into automatic product tagging. This technology allows retailers to easily scale their product data. When intent buyers do a site search for a “powder blue hat” that doesn’t match a product name or description, they’ll get a relevant search result.  This technology is affordable for any size brand and quickly automates product tags so your brand no longer loses intent buyers.

Tip #5 Include Breadcrumbs for Improved SEO

Breadcrumbs help search engine crawlers understand the architecture and layers of your website. Furthermore, breadcrumbs help browsers appreciate product hierarchy which can improve your click-thru rates because they’ll see the information in the SERP.

Tip #6 How Shopify Product Tags Increase the Average Shopping Cart Value

The number and types of items in the cart of your average shopper can tell you a lot about your retail business. What they purchase can show you if you’re doing a good job in organizing your products, and that customers are able to find all of the products they may be interested in.

By using product tags and setting automated collection conditions, it’s possible to generate Shopify collections that contain products that compliment the products that are in someone’s cart. This creates the opportunity for them to add more related items to their cart, and increase sales.

Product tags also let you identify patterns of underperforming products. You get the chance to see what items aren’t selling well and to change the tag names to be more descriptive, remove ineffective tags, or add new ones to better reflect the products and to help people find them.

Related Blog – How Shopify Merchants Can Optimize Site Search to Drive Higher Sales?

Tip # 7 Optimize SEO Page Title

Every page includes an SEO Title that displays in Google & Bing SERP results. Optimize your title to include the most important keywords that entice browsers to click and that inform search engines what the page is about.

Tip # 8 Add Structured Data with Schema.org

If you’re not technical, find a schema.org plugin that works with Shopify and your theme. Structure data works behind the scene and describes the various types of pages on your site to search engines. For instance, an FAQ page has a different structured data schema than a product page. If you’re looking for a source to understand structured data review Yoast what is structured data video.

Tip # 9 How to Build a Blog Tag Strategy to Drive Sales

Blogging is a great way to help your business grow through organic traffic. Search engines are hungry for new, unique content and a regularly updated blog is one of the best tools to get the job done.  Setting up a blog with your Shopify store will give both web crawlers and your customers something valuable.

Use tags to organize your blog posts

Classify your blog posts into categories or by subject. Customers can click through these tags to find other related posts. When a customer searches for a tag in your online store, matching blog posts will also appear in the search results. This functions well in giving people what they need to make a buying decision.

Match blog topics with your product categories

Anyone doing keyword searches and looking up information related to the products you carry is a potential customer. You’ve gained their attention, and they’re that much closer to purchasing something from you. With your blog posts, target the top 5-10 keywords, and come up with topics related to your product categories. Share with them specific product pages connected to these blog posts and what they’re searching for.

Index Your Blog With Google Search Console

After you publish your blog go into Google Search Console to request the page be indexed by Google.  In fact, as you make material updates to your blog you should always request the page be indexed. Adding this step to your process will speed up the process that Google recognizes the changes.

Tip # 10 Do more on social in less time

Digitile automates categorizing Google Drive and Dropbox image libraries at scale to enable Shopify teams to deliver marketing campaigns across social and eCommerce platforms faster and more efficiently.  This is a lifesaver when you’re used to individually downloading every file folder by folder, Digitile’s platform makes it super easy to directly export images for each social network without having to download images to your local drive and then upload them into each social media platform.

Tip # 11 More Shopify Product Variant URLs Do Not create more SEO value

Each product variation having its separate URL confuses Google’s algorithm and diminishes the overall value of each of the product pages.  If you’re considering separate Shopify product variants it should be for an improved customer experience and business reasons.  If the product variant has a high search volume then a separate product variant will help you drive more traffic and conversions.

Criteria for separate product variant url:

1. There’s a demand for the product variant people search for a specific color, or size
2. You have enough content to support and warrant a separate product variant url

Tip # 12 How Can Shopify Collection Conditions Help SEO?

Shopify Collection names should include keywords terms that your website visitors intuitively search for in Google. If you sell swimwear and have a Shopify Collection called Loose Fit Swim Tops with a corresponding page title, description and URL search engines will match those search phrases and rank your collection page high.  In turn, helping your product pages turn up for more general search queries than a search for that specific product name.

Tip # 13 Add Hot Selling Product Image URL’s to Your Sitemap

You may not even know what a sitemap is or where to locate your Shopify sitemap—but adding your hottest product image URL to your website sitemap helps search engine robots to crawl your URLs more intelligently. This can ultimately influence how search engines view your website’s quality.

How to confirm your sitemap has your product image URL and inform Google you have a new sitemap.xml to crawl.

1. Shopify sitemap.xml files are generated automatically. You can find them at the root directory of your Shopify store’s domains, such as johns-apparel.com/sitemap.xml.
2. After you update your sitemap, login to Google Search Console -> Sitemap -> Add New Sitemap as sitemap.xml and submit.  Do this step each time you have a hot selling product.

Tip # 14 Review and Delete Duplicate URL’s on Your Sitemap

Shopify automatically creates your sitemap.xml page.  However, by default, Shopify includes all published pages. Depending on your business and seasonality, Collections and products come and go but they’re no longer linked to the site.  Depending on how often you remove collections, products and variants it’s wise to review your sitemap monthly or quarterly view what pages need to be unpublished in Shopify so they no longer appear in your sitemap.

Tip # 15 Shopify SEO Apps

Yotpo Product Reviews & Photos – Their plug-and-play app lets you start generating reviews to make your content eligible for rich review stars in SERPs.  Yotpo’s a trustworthy enterprise company.

Schema App Total Schema Markup – Schema helps search engines better understand your content. Which makes your product pages eligible for rich snippets.

Tip # 16 Do Emojis Help or Hurt SEO titles and meta descriptions?

Google supports emojis in the SEO title and meta description. However, Google’s algorithm makes decisions whether the emoji is relevant.  Here are three reasons why emojis may not be displayed by Google in your title description.

1. The emoji is considered misleading
2. The emoji looks spammy
3. The emoji is out of place and doesn’t drive value or make sense

👉 Final Thoughts: 16 Ways Shopify Product Tags Drive Traffic and Conversions

Shopify product tags are beneficial in improving a user’s experience, gaining visibility to your Shopify store, and helping you with eCommerce management. Use Digitile to automatically categorize and create a unified system to tag, access, and manage images across your Cloud Storage, Social Networks, and eCommerce platforms.