Getting Sales From Your Shopify Website

There’s a reason why Shopify is one of the most popular ecommerce platforms in the world with well over a million stores and counting.  Plenty of reasons actually.  Shopify makes setting up a virtual store simple and easy – even for non-techies – and it’s totally customisable as well as being affordable.

That’s all well and good, but if you don’t have traffic to your Shopify website, you won’t have any sales.

How to Drive Sales From Your Shopify Website

Here we look at three main ways of driving traffic to your website so you can start seeing real results.

1. The First Way to Drive Traffic Is Through SEO.

The majority of your target market will be using the search engines to find you, whether this is using your business name or keywords that describe your business in a niche and relevant way, so you need to make sure that your website is showing up where it counts.

Effective SEO will drive organic traffic to your website and boost your online visibility, so if you don’t have the time or the skills to put a strategy in place, you should consider hiring an SEO expert. SEO is massively important for ecommerce success, and your investment will pay dividends.

These Are Some Key Techniques to Include in Your SEO Strategy:

• Doing thorough keyword research. You might also find our post “Using Google Search For Keyword Research” very useful!
• Having great content on your website and updating your pages with original, relevant material on a regular basis
• Writing captivating meta descriptions
• Making sure your pages’ title tags have the right keywords to match the searcher’s intent

The structure of your Shopify website is also crucially important for SEO.   The site must be easy to read and easy to navigate, it should flow naturally and logically, with the right balance between design and functionality.

Simplicity is your friend and people are your priority.  You don’t want to force people to go hunting for what they’re looking for.  It’s about building a structure that puts your visitors first and the search engines second.

Make sure your Category (Collections on Shopify) and Product pages are only a couple of clicks away from your home page.

For both these pages, keyword research is a must and the pages need to be well optimised.  Shopify recommends that each category and each product page contains at least 250 words of descriptive text.

For the category pages, the H1 headings need to be relevant to the targeted keywords and you can add content above and below the products.  You can even include some relevant FAQs.  The category pages are great for SEO because this is where you can rank for keywords where people are searching for your product type rather than the specific brand or type of product. Also, don’t go overboard with creating too many categories and sub-categories.  Rather focus on creating pages that are easy for the user to read and the search engines to crawl.

When it comes to product pages, unique product descriptions are vital.  These are like your virtual sales assistant and should describe the product, what it does and what makes it special.  These descriptions should be compelling and persuasive, giving a reason why the shopper should buy the product.  These descriptions also need to be original and though it may be tempting to save time and effort by copying and pasting the manufacturer’s descriptions, duplicate content is an SEO no-no.  Writing your own unique descriptions will ultimately pay dividends in terms of higher rankings, increased traffic and more sales.

Set Up Google Search Console for Your Shopify Site

I would also highly recommend setting up a Google Search Console for your website. This is the quickest and easiest way to tell Google that your website exists, especially if it is a brand-new domain name and you have just launched your business. Once you have set-up the Google Search Console you can add a sitemap, Shopify will automatically create a sitemap for you which you can find here www.yourwebsitename.com.au/sitemap.xml.

You need to submit this into Google Search Console to ensure that your site is accurately indexed, you only need to do this once, once you have added your sitemap this will automatically be updated each time a new page is added to the website.

2. The Next Way to Drive Traffic Is Google Shopping

Google Shopping is the platform from Google which allows products from your site to appear in the search results, there is both a paid and a free version of Google Shopping. If you do a search on Google for a product and click on the “Shopping” tab you will see a range of products for sale.

Say you’re in the market for a new television set.  You enter ‘smart tv’ into the search engine and up comes a list of websites plus a whole heap of thumbnail images.  These comprise both sponsored and free ads that comprise the Google Shopping platform (Google knows when a searcher has a transactional search intent).  It’s more like an advertising platform than an actual marketplace, but it is a really useful way for people to browse and compare products from different suppliers.

It doesn’t cost anything to set Google Shopping up through Shopify, simply install the Shopify Google Shopping app https://apps.shopify.com/google.  You can also trial paid ads through this app.  You will also need a Google Merchant Centre and will find instructions how to get this on the app.

3. Social Media

Social media marketing is another great way of staying close to your customers and building relationships as well as creating a bit of hype around your brand or products.  An effective social media strategy will drive traffic and boost sales on your Shopify site, but getting it right takes some doing.

You need your socials to be fresh, engaging and updated regularly, but you don’t want them to drain your valuable time.  You need to work out your goals and pick the channels that best match your market, your objectives and your resources.

If you’re struggling to get your website found online and sales are sluggish, The SEO School could be your ticket to success.

It’s a new self-paced online course, specially designed for business owners and website managers who want to learn all the tricks of the SEO trade.  It is the brainchild of Perth SEO specialist, Karen Dauncey, who has used her 20 years of experience in the digital marketing industry to create a practical, easy-to-follow and hands-on course which demystifies SEO and provides plenty of insider secrets and tried and tested techniques.

Find out more or book your course at The SEO School.

If you found this article useful, you should definitely check out “Three Things You Should Do To Improve Your Shopify Website“

Karen Dauncey

Karen Dauncey has been working in SEO since 2003. She specialises in helping businesses get found online through Google using Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) She is the founder and creator of The SEO School an online SEO Course to help teach business owners how to do their own SEO. She regularly delivers educational programs for both Local, State and Federal Government and is an advisor for the ASBAS Digital Solutions Program. Karen’s passion and commitment to help small business owners get found online is the driving force behind her online school, making SEO advice accessible to all with free resources and online courses.

Karen's wealth of SEO knowledge and practical digital marketing experience comes from running her own SEO and Google Ads agency, Blue Cherry Online Marketing since 2008. Karen has optimised over 1000 websites, managed millions of dollars' worth of spend on Google Ads and has a solid understanding of the constantly shifting industry of digital marketing and SEO. This gives her a unique advantage when it comes to being able to recommend the right online marketing strategies for your business. This gives her a unique advantage when it comes to being able to recommend the right online marketing strategies for your business. She was recently recognised as an SEO Expert for the popular course creation platform, Kajabi as well as appearing on ABC Radio
for her expert opinion on the ACCC's investigation into search engines.

Karen has attended search engine conferences in London, Stockholm, Adelaide and Sydney, and was also invited to attend a pilot Business Coaching Course at Google’s Head Office. She has a Diploma in Marketing from the Chartered Institute of Marketing in the UK.

She is also the co-owner of the Digital Experts Directory, an online directory for female serviced-based businesses to promote their business (with a great backlink for SEO).

To keep up to date with the latest in SEO, join her Facebook group The SEO School Community or follow her on Facebook or LinkedIn.