Little did any of us know in early 2020, all of our collective futures would take such an unprecedented turn. Many of us buckled down for what we thought would be a somewhat short disruption to our day-to-day lives and modifications to how we run our businesses. But, as the weeks turned to months—and the months have now passed the one-year mark—we’re beginning to understand the impacts this global pandemic will have on the future of doing business.

Shopify is a hosting environment that prides itself on making websites easy to build. It can be a great tool to leverage for online businesses and allows just about anyone to easily set up a store on their website and sell products. It’s attractive to a variety of online businesses because of its convenience and ease of use and implementation. But that convenience can also make it very difficult to deliver a top-performing website.

When reviewing the requirements necessary to achieve a top search engine ranking for your ecommerce business, it's important to understand what elements play into successful digital marketing. Site performance and the search engine optimization (SEO) of your site are essential. For obvious reasons, if your site doesn’t pull up quickly—in less than three seconds—there is little chance you’ll garner ranking on the first page of any search engine results. Making your business virtually invisible to potential customers.

Earlier this summer, Google announced that it will roll out new search updates in 2021. The shift focuses strongly on overall site performance and user page experience, but could cause many websites to lose much of their existing traffic. 

To prevent your business from becoming invisible in search, it’s important to understand what ranking factors will be part of the new focus. Making changes now will help you stay ahead of the curve—and the competition.