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Your website is your online storefront, where visitors can learn more about your offerings, gain trust in your brand, and eventually become customers. But how do you get those customers to visit your Shopify store?
There are many free and paid ways to drive traffic to your online store. In this article, I am going to give an in-depth overview of some effective ways to increase traffic and page rank, and the best part is, many of these methods are free to implement.
How To Increase SEO for Shopify Stores
There are a number of search engine optimization tactics you can perform on your website to increase page rank in search engines such as Google and increase your web traffic.
Let’s talk a bit about how search engines rank your website. Basically, a search engine will crawl your pages and index them in its library. It will scour your website content and assign a value based on how relevant it thinks your page is to users looking for certain content.
If you only have products in your storefront with little to no content and short descriptions without keywords, your website will not be very relevant to Google and won’t index well, meaning it won’t show on the first couple pages of Google search, or at all.
To prevent this from happening, we can implement a few proven methods to increase your page SEO.
Use Titles Effectively to Increase your Shopify Store SEO
Google will place a heavier value on keywords that are together with title tags. If you put your keywords into your product title, ideally in the first couple words for your most valuable keywords, the search engine will see these as being more relevant, and increase your rank for those keywords.
Titles are of utmost importance to giving web users insight into what sort of content is on a page and why it’s relevant to their search query. It’s the fundamental piece of data they will use to decide which page to click on.
Create unique titles for each page and product. Keep your page titles under 55 characters and include your target keyword.
Match your title to the phrase people are searching for in Google.
Use the H1 and H2 headers when you format text within product descriptions and when blogging on your website, which brings me to my next tip.
Blog on your Shopify Store to Help It Rank for Keywords
Use the blog feature on your storefront to create valuable content that will help it rank for important keywords. To start, choose a list of your top keywords and phrases that people would search for when looking for your product. Compile a list of these keywords and then build articles around them.
For example, if your Shopify store sells phone cases, you could publish a blog article such as:
“Top 5 Rugged Phone Cases for Outdoor Enthusiasts in 2021”
Producing high-quality content that your target audience is searching for is easy.
Type in your product name/type into the google search bar or Amazon search bar and see what auto-populates. These will be the top searches people are looking for when looking for your product type. Base your content around these search findings.
If people are searching for “How to waterproof a phone,” you could write an article titled, “How to Pick the Right Phone Case To Waterproof a Phone.”
How To Use Long-Tail Keywords To Get Higher Page Rank
While short keywords are searched more frequently, it will be harder to rank for them on search engines. The trick is to target long-tail keywords, which will give you a higher chance of ranking on the coveted first page of Google for searches specific to your products.
Long Tail Keywords are the longer, highly specific phrases people use when searching in search engines.
People are using more and more specific phrases to search online. Use a keyword tool such as Keywords Everywhere to help you find these long-tail keyword phrases to target.
Instead of trying to rank for “iPhone case”, try for “Best iphone case for camping” or “Samsung phone case for gym.”
We can use also tools such as the Google Keyword Tool to find long-tail keywords.
It is not necessary to repeat each long-tail phrase verbatim. Just look at the words at the end of the phrase that change. Example:
- iphone case for camping
- iphone case vs Samsung case
- iphone case that holds credit cards
We would want to pick and choose the relevant words at the end and add them to our page. We could include the words “holds credit cards” and “vs Samsung case” and “camping.”
Adding these modifiers to your product descriptions and blog copy will help your page index for a larger amount of search queries.
How to Use Referral Traffic To Increase Shopify Store Traffic
Referral traffic is when one website links to another and is an important piece of information Google uses to determine how relevant your site is to searchers. An easy way to get referral traffic is to submit your Shopify store to online directories.
Look for online lists or directories for your category or industry. There are many free websites such as these where you can create a profile and link to your Shopify store. Choose directories that your niche would be likely to visit.
21 Web Directories That Still Have Value
48 Free Websites to List Your Business
Create Internal Website Links to Help Your SEO
When creating content for your Shopify or website blog, consider opportunities for internal links. These are links from one page of your website to another. It helps with SEO and makes your website more useful for your customers.
Google has a metric called PageRank, which measures the value of a page by the number and quality of pages that link to it.
Linking from your most visited, highest authority pages can make other pages rank well. You can also link from your lower priority pages to the most visited, higher authority pages.
To identify which pages on your website have the best page rank and authority, you can use a free tool such as the Moz Toolbar for Chrome.
Build Backlinks From Authority Websites To Increase Your Traffic
A backlink is a link from your website to another website. Backlinks can be from influencers, bloggers, or other websites that have an interest in your product posts or blog posts.
11 “Do-Able” Ways to Get High Authority Backlinks in 2021
20+ Actionable Tips to Get SEO Backlinks from High DA sites [2021]
Comment on Other Blogs To Generate Traffic To Your Site.
Find sites that have content related to your store and niche and leave comments on their blog posts. Make sure the websites and post content is related to your niche.
There is a formula to follow when creating these blog comments that include your page link, so that you come off as relevant and interesting. If you sound like spam, it will be a turnoff to potential visitors.
How To Do Blog Commenting – Everything You Need to Know
Using Social Media To Drive Traffic To Your Shopify
Social media is a great tool to increase traffic to your Shopify store but the trick is to use your content to add value to the conversation and again, without coming off as spammy.
You will need to provide value to your followers, in the form of content, so they will be persuaded to keep visiting your profile and hopefully your store website.
Adding your site link to your profile on Instagram, TikTok and Facebook is a given. Also consider linking to products within content you produce in the form of posts or video descriptions.
Not every post has to be a product link, but you can intermix them into your high-value content.
Monitor Your Site Traffic Using Free Tools
If you’re not familiar with Google Analytics and Search Console, there is no time like the present. These free and valuable tools provide insight as to where you traffic is coming from and what pages they are visiting. You can even see which traffic source led sales (conversions).
You can sign up for a free Google Search Console account if you don’t currently have one. With this tool, you can submit sitemaps for your site and monitor how many submitted pages have actually been added to Google’s index, among other things.
The 17 Best Free SEO Tools You Should Use in 2021
Using What You Learned Today About SEO
Reading about improving your Shopify store traffic is step one, but you have to take the necessary step to implement these processes to see a real improvement on your store traffic.
Break up the sections and tackle them one-by-one. Choose one method to implement a day, or week. Over time, your site traffic will improve!
Remember, a website is always a work in progress.
As always, never stop learning and happy selling!
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