A beginner's guide to SEO in simple steps.

Hey, I'm Vahram. I recently created an e-commerce website where I create and sell unique t shirts and other goods for developers and "geeky" people in general.
This is the second part of series of articles where I share my experience of doing SEO for it.

Keyword research

Google search console

First of all we need to setup the google search console for the domain, so we can monitor progress of our work. To start with that we need to visit https://search.google.com/search-console.
In the google search console we need to add a property for our website and then verify it.
If we feel comfortable managing dns records I think it's preferable to use the domain property method.
Otherwise we can use URL Prefix property and verify it by adding an html tag to our homepage.

For shopify stores, an easy way to add the html verification tag is to use the AVADA SEO Suite free app.
I'm not gonna go into much details of how to setup and verify the search console since there are a lot of recourses out there for it.
But feel free to contact me if more information is needed on the subject.

Google analytics

An also really important tool to setup is google analytics.
It helps us see the number of visitors each day, the traffic sources, bounce rates, trends and much more.
It's really powerful and essential SEO tool.
To start with it we need to visit https://analytics.google.com/ the go to admin panel.
There we need to create a new "Account" for the specific website.
Eventually we gonna need to add a small script to our website to enable the tracking.
For shopify stores we only need the google analytics tracking id which looks similar to this: "UA-123456789-1".
To add the tracking id we need to go to the shopify admin panel -> Online Stores -> Preferences -> Google Analytics account.

Keyword research tools

The next step is to do some research to find good keywords to target for.
This is really important because it gives us an insight of what keywords or phrases related to our business people are searching and how saturated those keywords are. The goal here is to target good and low competition keywords
to get better and faster results with our SEO approach.

There are a lot of tools for keywords research.

Google keyword planner

A good free option is the google keyword planner the Google's official tool for keyword research.
This tool is actually part of the Google Adwords, but it can be used without running any ads.
You can check it out here: https://bit.ly/thrdhbkeywordplanner
Using keyword planner we can see the monthly search amount and the competition for a specific keyword or phrase.
It can also help us discover new keyword ideas.
I'll try to show more details about how to use it in a future article.

KWFinder

Another really good tool for keyword research is KWFinder.
This is a freemium tool, after registration you can use it for limited
amount of search every day or you can use the free 10 day trial to see if it suits your needs.
This is a really powerful tools, it gives you great insights for each keyword or phrase.

Among others we can see:

• Search volume for per month for the past year
• Cost per click in google ads
• Level of competition
• SEO difficulty

The SEO difficulty is a good indication of whether we should choose a specific keyword for targeting or search for some better one.
Here are some screenshots of results for "developer t shirt" phrase.

We can see that the difficulty score is 34, which makes it not a bad choice, but we can also see other
related phrases to maybe get some better ideas.

You can use this link to try it out for free or register for 10 days free trial.

So this will be it for this part.

You can check out our collection of T-Shirts and other products for developers here.

You can check out this article in Medium using the following link.

Keep an eye for the next one coming soon.