Where did this myth come from…?

So many people believe SEO is simply choosing keywords and editing your meta tags to include them.

Even worse, when people include the keyword 20 times per page and think this makes a difference (in fact it can hurt you).

The truth is, optimizing your pages for keywords or as it is officially known as ‘on page SEO’ is just a small step in a much larger process that is SEO.

If fact Shopify SEO is made up of 6 key steps, keyword research, site architecture, on page SEO, technical SEO, content marketing (or blogging) and link building.

We’ve got a module dedicated to each of them in our Shopify SEO course.

This is a classic!

Yes, ok, of course you need links to your website to have strong SEO.

But the number of links is really not important.

It’s all about relevancy and quality when it comes to links.

You see, every website has something called ‘domain authority’, this is like a score Google gives you out of 100 to measure the strength of your sites SEO, and this scores decides who ranks #1 or #100.

To rank at the top of Google you need to have a strong domain authority score, and to get this you need links from other websites who have a good score too.

Even more than that, you need links from sites that are related to yours.

For example, as a shoe shop you’d want links from fashion blogs about shoes, not links from random websites about any old subject.

Ok, let’s keep learning…

Most people believe blogging and SEO are the same thing.

The fact is, creating content is just part of a larger SEO process.

The goal of content marketing or blogging, where SEO is concerned, is to create content that helps you attract links from other websites.

Therefore, creating content and publishing it on your store is only half the battle.

The other half, if you want to rank higher in search results, is to make sure that your content is attracting links from high quality and relevant sites.

This is called content promotion.

We teach you just how to do that in this professional course.

A lot of people set of on their SEO journey thinking that to get lots of traffic and sales they need to create a lot of content.

This is not true.

The purpose of content is to attract links to your store from other websites.

To interest people enough to give you a link you need to create great content.

Content that stands out above the 1-2 million blog posts that are published every day, yes that many.

So when it comes to blogging it makes more sense to take more time over each blog post you create and make them special.

Make them so great people want to link to them again and again.

If you simply churn out lots of 500 words blog posts that are neither well researched or well written, they’ll end up getting the attention they deserve. None.

In module 5 we teach you how to create stand out content that attracts links from the best websites in your industry.

Once you’ve created great content, you’re only halfway through the battle.

Just because you publish a blog post, doesn’t mean someone will find it. You’ve got to promote your content.

Promotion is 50% of the work of a blog post, always remember that!

You can promote content to attract links with email outreach, social media and by building shareability into your content following our proven content frameworks.

You see, there are certain types of content that people like to share and tricks to creating content that gets near guaranteed links from top websites, more on this in the course.

Now, aside from great content and high quality links, Google is also very interested in what they call ‘usability signals’.

This simply means, how visitors behave when they are on your site.

You see, Google’s one job is to answer people’s questions.

And they want to do this as fast as possible, in one click or even less if possible (the first link on the Google search page or the special featured answer box at the top).

If someone visits your site and leaves straight away or bounces, this tells Google your not answering their question.

So you get pushed down in the rankings.

Therefore the 3rd big secret to SEO is getting people to stick around.

This is done with great content and with a great user experience.

If your page loads slowly, looks ugly, is hard to read on mobile or anything else, the visitor will leave and you’ll slip down the rankings.

So UX is key to great SEO this year and moving forwards.