We tested 500 Shopify Sites. Here's what we learnt.
Everyone thinks they are not doing enough for SEO. From page load speed to backlink building, there are lots to do. We ran 1,000 pages (500 landing pages & 500 product pages) through Google Page Speed Insights and those site against Ubersuggest. This is what we've learnt.
Your own site
If you want to test out your own site, check out
Summary of Results
-
Landing pages tend to score about 8% lower than product pages
- Mostly because of pop-ups
-
Mobile tends to score 59% lower than Desktop.
- Lots of merchants ignore their mobile experiences)
- The average site ranks for about 552 keywords.
- The median site ranks for about 302 keywords.
-
The average backlinks per store might be in the thousands (24,222).
- Note: Lots of the backlinks come from a similar site & having backlinks from the same site doesn't have the same SEO juice
-
The median backlinks per store is only about 8.
- So, there’s loads of space for improvement here.
Disclaimers. Test Parameters.
We understand that 500 stores is only about 0.05% of the 1,000,000 Shopify stores out there.
To make the results more achievable, we took stores that ranked between 150,00 to 300,00 (So the 15-30% percentile) in terms of Alexa rank.
For backlinks, "No Follow" links were ignored for this study
We ran them against free tools: Google PageSpeed Insights + Ubersuggest
Both great tools to get you started on your SEO journey.
Google Page Speed Insight
Mobile Landing Pages
The average page speed score on mobile is 27 for landing pages.
The median page speed score on mobile is 24 for landing pages.
The score distribution looks something like this :
Mobile Product Pages
The average page speed score on mobile is 31 for product pages.
The median page speed score on mobile is 27 for product pages.
The score distribution looks something like this
Desktop Landing Pages
The average page speed score on desktop is 67 for landing pages.
The median page speed score on desktop is 67 for landing pages.
The score distribution looks something like this :
Desktop Product Pages
The average page speed score on desktop is 71 for product pages.
The median page speed score on desktop is 23 for product pages.
The score distribution looks something like this
Across Devices
The average score for desktop (across landing pages & product) pages is 69.
The average score for mobile (across landing pages & product) pages is 29.
The median score for desktop (across landing pages & product) pages is 70.
The median score for mobile (across landing pages & product) pages is 26.
The desktop vs mobile average combined score distribution for both pages look like this:
Ubersuggest
Keywords
The average ranks for about 552 keywords.
The median ranks for about 302 keywords.
The distribution of keywords rank looks something like this:
Backlinks
The average backlinks per store might be in the thousands (24,222).
The median backlinks per store is only about 8.
The distribution of backlinks rank looks something like this:
Further Findings
We found the general rankings of these 500 sites (according to Alexa) and we ran the numbers to check which factors correlated to their Alexa ranking.
The top three were
- Mobile Load Speed of Product pages
- Organic Keywords
- Number of backlinks
Note: We know there could be a hundred other factors (e.g. We don’t know how much these sites pay for their traffic)
Key Takeaways
Mobile Experience
Working on mobile experience for both your landing pages and product pages is no longer a "good-to-have".
Takeways:
- Set some plugins to only work on desktop so they don’t slow down the experience
- Work on your product page scores first because that where you will be running ads to
- Monitor the keywords for your product pages because those will help you rank
PS: If you need help on your on-page SEO for products, check us out.
Keywords
Ranking for keywords is really hard. You have to think of this as a long-term strategy.
Google tends to rank sites for multiple keywords.
The median is 302 keywords so it will take you quite a while to get there.
Backlinks
Backlinks are much easier to build.
If you had at least 10 backlinks from relevant sites, you would be way ahead of the pack.
If you have been doing content for a while, I would spend 80% of my time working on building backlinks.
Help me make this better
Hey, thanks for reading to this point.
If you have any comments or suggestions on how to make this post better, email me at fu@product-lens.com.
Cheers!
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