How to Boost Traffic to Your Shopify Store to Drive Sales
Even with the many eCommerce platforms in the market, Shopify proves to be one of the best for small businesses and big enterprises alike. After all, this program can help you build your online store in just a few clicks.
While creating a Shopify store is inherently easy, improving your sales is another thing. For this to happen, you need to drive more organic traffic flow into your store.
As with every other website, the best way to increase the number of your visitors is to improve your site’s search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO for Shopify is all about boosting your rank, so you get more potential buyers into your website. This is essential for all online shop owners since 93% of all visits come from search engine results.
If you want to make high sales in record time, then you need to follow these tips on Shopify SEO Optimization:
Table of Contents
Use the right kind of URL
Your URL is responsible for making a good first impression on your visitors, as well as search engine bots. As such, you need to make it more attractive by keeping it short while still incorporating the keyword in the structure.
So why is it important to have a short URL? For one, short URLs rank better than long ones. It also allows you to brand your links. More importantly, it makes the process of sharing your links easier for your customers.
If you can’t seem to shorten your URL, no matter how hard you try, you can try Bit.ly and Ow.ly. These programs can help reduce the characters of your otherwise lengthy URLs.
Adding the right keywords in your URL can also help improve Shopify SEO. It helps search engines to understand your website so that they can index it properly.
Use long-tail keywords
Long-tail keywords are specific key phrases that make use of three or more keywords. Compared to one or two keywords, long-tail keywords can help you rank better in search engines. That’s because Google, Bing, and other search engines prefer these.
Another good thing about long-tail keywords is the fact that not a lot of websites leverage these. It’s hard to rank high for “shoe racks,” but you may have a better chance with “shoe racks for sale.”
As such, a long-tail keyword can help you soar higher in search engines, generating more traffic and possible sales conversions along the way.
You can look up the best long-tail keywords for your website through Google Keyword Planner and Moz Keyword Explorer.
To make the most out of these keywords, always use them in your website’s titles, meta descriptions, and content.
It’s all about links
Search engines determine a website’s relevance through several factors. Having high-quality links is one of them.
SEO for Shopify can be improved by building these two types of links, namely:
Inbound Link
This link is from another website and leads back to your Shopify store.
Having a lot of inbound links will help you rank higher because search engines see your content as something valuable. Of course, being highly visible in Google or Bing will bring you more visitors, and ergo, more sales.
Outbound Link
Also known as an external link, this comes from your website and redirects to another site. Again, this can help boost your rankings on the web.
Work on your website’s loading time
You can’t risk having a slow-loading Shopify store. Customers are more likely to leave a turtle-paced website in favor of a faster-booting one. Even a microsecond delay can impact your sales.
That said, you need to make sure that your online store is running fast and smoothly. After all, Google considers page speed as one of its factors for ranking.
Enable social sharing
About 3.5 billion people around the world use social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, to name a few. The figures are expected to increase throughout the years.
Add to that, many consumers refer to these platforms before they buy something. 87% of buyers consult social media write-ups or reviews before they purchase. Additionally, 55% of online shoppers make purchases through the websites mentioned above.
Because of these possibilities, you should make your website social media-friendly. You can do that by adding social media share buttons. This will enable buyers to share or send links to your products through their social media accounts.
With billions of people using these platforms, you are highly likely to draw the attention of potential buyers.
Create quality content
While some clients purchase stuff out of compulsion, most customers undergo several stages before they buy anything:
- Awareness stage
This is when the client realizes that she has a concern (for example, unorganized shoes) that needs a solution (shoe rack).
- Consideration stage
In this stage, your customer is looking for various solutions (different types of shoe racks) that can address her problem.
- Decision stage
After much consideration, a buyer arrives at the decision stage, where she purchases the best solution (shoe rack) for her needs.
That said, running a Shopify store is not just about keeping a full inventory. You would want your clients to make a decision that will eventually lead to a purchase in your store. An excellent way to do so is to equip your website with valuable content.
When you provide customers with purchase guides and other indispensable material, you help simplify their lives. This can help build a good relationship, so much so that the client elects to buy from your Shopify store.
Another thing to consider is the fact that search engines love compelling content. It is one of the factors that could land you on Google’s top spot.
Although the results are not immediate, purposeful content will help improve your engine rankings in the long run.
Here are ways to create content that will boost SEO for Shopify stores:
Author evergreen content:
While new content is always exciting, you could also benefit from timeless articles. Such are called evergreen content.
True enough, they serve as definitive resources to most readers because they continue to be relevant no matter what year it is. As such, they can continue to drive traffic to your website.
Remember, evergreen content serves as a comprehensive resource. You will need some time for this as it usually takes anywhere from 2,000 to 20,000 words.
Create new information:
People love reading about news, current events, and the latest trends. As such, making such posts can help usher in more traffic to your Shopify site.
When you create compelling articles, you gain a positive reputation. It also helps you to earn backlinks, which are more than essential in boosting your search engine rankings.
Don’t forget to use Google Trends to search for trending topics.
Guest blog:
As the name suggests, this is all about creating posts for other websites. It’s as simple as making an article for another person and getting one in return.
Guest blogging is a good way to establish yourself as an authority in your niche. This is especially the case if you write for reputable blog sites.
More than just educating old and new clients, guest blogging can help drive visitors to your Shopify store. That’s because you get to interact with new customers. When you create an informative article, you can convince these potential buyers to shop at your store.
More importantly, guest blogs can also earn you some inbound links. As mentioned, this can help improve your search engine rankings.
Vlog Post:
Vlog, short for video blog, is another form of compelling marketing content. To wit, 78% of websites were able to get more traffic after posting videos. This may be due to the fact 92% of users tend to share video content with family and friends.
To get more clients to visit your Shopify store, you need to create videos that are relevant to your products. You can upload this to YouTube and share the link with your readers. This can help increase visitor traffic since Google prefers showing videos in searches.
Videos can also help you rank higher in search engines and rake in more buyers. After all, Google and Bing consider YouTube as an authoritative website.
Infographics
Most people are visual learners. As such, they enjoy infographics, which is an amalgamation of the words ‘information’ and ‘graphics.’ This type of media promotes an easy understanding of otherwise confusing data.
Infographics allow you to simplify presentations, show data and trends, provide insights, map relationships, and break down difficult concepts, to name a few.
According to experts, infographics are three times more likely to be clicked than any other content. In fact, it is 30 times more likely to be clicked than a text-only blog post.
You need not be a graphic artist to create a useful infographic. Many free programs provide visual formats and template layouts. With the help of such programs, you can make infographics that draw a lot of attention – and possibly better sales!
Potential customers serve as the lifelines of any Shopify store. To get more buyers, you need to rank higher in search engine rankings. While this may seem complicated, the tips mentioned above can help you boost your Shopify traffic and generate more sales in the long run.