Every business owner seeks to gain an edge over competitors and boost revenue in the highly competitive business world.
With over 2.3 million daily active users from 175 countries globally, Shopify offers a perfect opportunity to bring your brand to the forefront and grow your online reputation.
Although the platform’s popularity is a plus, it also follows up with a downside: fierce competition. You’ll struggle to draw customer attention if you do not know how to perform Shopify store optimization.
Unfortunately, the phrase, “If you build it, they will come,” is outdated and doesn’t work in today’s highly competitive digital world. To build a solid strategy and optimize your store for better reach, give this guide a read.
What Is Shopify Store Optimization?
Shopify Store optimization refers to boosting your Shopify page load time, making it accessible for website users, and uploading helpful content.
Studies show that every 1-second load slowdown means losing up to 1.6 billion sales.
The scenario takes an intense turn when we see Google considers a page’s speed when ranking websites for mobile searches.
Besides the loading time, you must consider factors to upgrade user experience and perform keyword research to drive more traffic.
7 Effective Ways to Optimize Your Shopify Store
Perhaps you invested time and money designing a quality product. However, that alone doesn’t guarantee your success as an ecommerce owner.
First, because many others in the industry design quality products, and second, the top-notch product that fails to reach the target audience won’t sell.
So, what’s the point of stressing too much over quality if your product fails to sell by the end of the day? While we aren’t undermining the value of product quality, you must consider other factors to rank and boost sales.
Here are a few tried and tested methods to optimize your Shopify store and boost revenue:
1. Optimize Your Website Structure
Visitors quickly lose attention when they struggle to operate your website. How your content is structured plays a crucial role in ranking and drawing attention.
When shoppers quickly navigate the website and seamlessly find what they’ve been looking for, they may spend more time on your site. After all, 94% of customers say they prefer easily navigable websites.
So, the more time they spend on your page, the higher the chance they’ll purchase a product.
This begs the question, how to make your site more navigable?
Keep your website minimal and simplify its features. Avoid going overboard and creating categories and subcategories.
The simpler the website’s structure, the easier it is for search engines to crawl your site and rank products. For instance, your products must ideally only be a few clicks away from the homepage. This makes it easy for customers to find what they’re looking for.
You can easily organize your content with Shopify using a simple structure: Homepage > Category Pages > Product Pages.
When optimizing your site, always remember you’re building it for customers. So besides product and category pages, including the Contact and About page of your brand to let customers reach out to you.
Also, including a search box is crucial to enable visitors to look for the desired products hassle-free.
2. Boost User Experience
Did you know 88% of online shoppers do not return to a website after a bad user experience?
This means you’ll lose a massive chunk of your revenue if you don’t optimize your page for user experience.
Seamless user experience makes shoppers happ and also helps you rank on search results.
Here are a few quick tricks to boost user experience:
Make Your Store Fast
An easily navigable and quick website eases user experience. This means they won’t mind spending more time on your site. To boost your store’s speed, make sure you:
- Opt for a mobile-friendly theme
- Delete apps you do not use
- Use small-sized graphics
- Avoid adding sliders
Choose a Minimal Design
A minimal design is more responsive and makes your store visually appealing regardless of the device – tablet, smartphone, or desktop.
Such themes boost user experience and keep visitors on-site longer. Also, since Google considers the time a user spends as a determinant of a site’s value, having a responsive store is a win-win for you.
3. Perform Keyword Research
Keyword research is the core of SEO. But how will you find relevant keywords to boost website traffic? We do not recommend leveraging fancy tools right off the bat. Instead, create a list of 5 primary topics relevant to your product.
Think about a product from the customer’s perspective. What keywords would you use to find a specific product?
If you’re uncertain about the topics, you can draw inspiration from the following:
- Hashtags on social media related to your products
- Search content related to your product on online community forums like Quora or Reddit
- Spy on competitor sites and see what titles and meta descriptions they use
- Consider your buyer personas to create relevant topics
Once you find relevant topics, you can research target keywords. At this point, you’re free to use some open-source or paid tools to find what your target audience searches for.
4. Optimize Product Pages
Once you have the right keywords, it’s time to optimize your product pages for those keywords. Start with your homepage, followed by the product collection page. Later, you can move to best-selling product pages (those that drive more profit)
Also, if you’re new to the store, you must still optimize the homepage. Here are a few other methods to pick pages for optimization.
- Those product pages that created hype as soon as you launched the store
- Product pages with the most searched keywords
Optimizing Tile Tags
Once you pick the pages to optimize, it’s time to name them. What unique name would you like to assign to your pages across the Shopify store?
Here’s a quick example to draw inspiration from:
- Keyword 1 – Keyword 2 – Store Name
- Tie-Dye T-shirts – Purchase Cool Tie-Dye T-Shirts – The Store name
Optimizing Title and Meta Description
Next comes the title and meta description optimization. You need an original copy for SEO purposes and, secondly, because your audience will appreciate original content.
Make sure you use keywords in the copy naturally and avoid stuffing them. You can always check for other, less-wordy keywords if you think a few sound unnatural or compromise your copy’s quality.
You must also optimize alt text for SEO. Again, this must not be forced but rather done naturally.
5. Rank With Efficient Content Marketing Strategy
Content is King stands true in a highly digital world like today. Although the title and product description is one thing, you must maintain a blog section to provide value to your customers and enlighten them by sharing helpful insights.
Again, you may struggle to find topics to write on. However, you can always put yourself in the customer’s shoes and think about what you’d want to know as a buyer.
Pen down those topics and create titles around them. Alternatively, you can hire a content writer for the purpose. Since creativity and out of box thinking are key traits in writers, they’d suggest topics that cater to your unique business needs.
Your content speaks volumes about you as a brand. It shows you have something more to offer to customers besides products. Quality content will help you build a reputation among customers and may play a role in positive word of mouth.
6. Conduct A/B Testing
A/B testing, also called Split testing, offers an excellent way to determine what works for your website. For instance, maybe your visitors turn away due to a complicated site theme. You can use another theme to see if it helps boost traffic and sales.
If it does, you’ll finalize the theme and avoid using the first one because it had nothing to contribute. You can perform A/B testing for your store’s design, CTA layout, and much more.
Trident A/B is a reliable tool that helps boost conversion rates by letting you create effective digital experiences. It offers the flexibility to test desired page elements and allows you to find the best version for your online store!
7. Build Links to Your Shopify Store
Backlinks help search engines determine whether the online audience values your site. The off-page optimization technique helps build reputation and credibility. Here are a few methods to get links to your store.
- Influencers. You can always contact influencers in your industry and conduct interviews to generate links.
- Manufacturers. If you sell products designed by reputable companies, they may have a policy that allows authorized retailers to get a link. You can always drop them an email to confirm.
- Broken links. Searching for broken links for similar services and products like yours can get tricky since it requires some investigation. However, once you find some, you can reach out to the owner and ask them to link it to your site. Since broken links aren’t ideal for SEO, this solution helps repair one for both parties and lets you get a backlink.
You can also read: Most Effective Tactics of A/B Testing For Success of Your Business
Conclusion
Ranking high on SERPs is a pipe dream for many. Gladly, you can make it possible by leveraging the Shopify store optimization practices discussed above. The more you do to enhance the user experience, the higher the chance of climbing the industry ladder.