Many shopify merchant are making great use of online platforms to promote their products and services, and to reach more clients globally. Over time, the shopify platform has become an effective and essential ecommerce channel to all business owners looking for a simple and quick channel to launch their business online.

Shopify is a specialized ecommerce platform that provides tools to e-merchants to build their very own online store, and helps in organizing the layout of the store’s appearance through themes or templates. There are so many opportunities attached to this ecommerce platform such as the integration of shopping carts, order processing, payment features and social networking.

The platform was launched in 2006 and has been used by many shopify merchant since its incorporation, leading to its utilization increase every year. The recent Covid 19 pandemic is also attributed to its immense boost and increase by e-merchants and consumers. Statistics reveal that shopify total revenue for 2020 is $2,929.5 million, which is an 86% increase over 2019.

There are still so many new business owners who have no knowledge about the shopify platform or how to get started with it, which is why this article has been prepared for the sole purpose of helping you get started on the platform and understanding the relevance of SEO for a successful ecommerce platform.

Shopify Merchant - Ecommerce

CREATE YOUR ONLINE STORE

Create your site and strengthen your brand using the personalization offered by Shopify by choosing from over hundred professional themes made by designers. Your online store will include a shopping cart suitable for mobile commerce, so your customers can visit your site and buy from their mobile phones or tablets.

The platform provides a 14-day free trial and you will also have the opportunity to own your own domain name using the one you already have, or buy one from the Shopify platform, and to collaborate with an expert who will support you in the personalization of your store.

MANAGE YOUR ONLINE STORE

Shopify offers you many advantages to manage your store thereby having good customer relationship management.

It provides data on your customers which allows you to know more about the profiles of your consumers. You can also create a list of customers by grouping together those who have the same interests, which is those who tend to buy the same products. This will help you with product suggestions that might interest them when sending emails.

Order processing is also simplified by making available the opportunity to process multiple orders.

MANAGE YOUR PRODUCTS

One of the other features of Shopify is managing your products. At this level, the platform is quite complete. You will be able to manage your stocks and classify your products by monitoring the price, supplier product category, quantities, weight difference, etc.

SHOPPING CART

Shopify provides a reliable and secure shopping cart for ecommerce websites. It allows for different payment gateways with the use of credit cards, PayPal, 2checkout, skrill, paystack, stripe, etc. 

You can also offer free shipping to your customers with the platform.

DATA ANALYSIS

Shopify provides a dashboard that allows tracking of key indicators such as traffic, number of orders and sales. You can also generate, export and analyze them in order to adapt your strategy to the elements of the reports.

WEB HOSTING

This feature is included in Shopify plans as it helps keep your customers’ information and your business data secure. When you choose your domain name on Shopify, you also benefit from associated email addresses that you can redirect to your Gmail address.

MOBILE FRIENDLY ACCESS

The platform is also mobile-friendly. For customers, everything is optimized to offer a smooth experience on their phones or tablets. They will be able to order and view your products in a suitable format.

For a shopify merchant, there is an application that allows you to manage your store in great detail, all from your phone.

USE OF SEO AND SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

How do you want to sell anything if customers can’t find you? SEO optimization is really important for your ecommerce store. Basically search engine optimization is the process that improves the visibility of a website or online store in search engines.

Why is this so important? It is important because the better you are referenced in search engines, the more traffic to your site and the more potential customers you will attract.

As an online store owner, you should carefully evaluate your site in order to develop a personalized SEO strategy and action plan that will allow you to improve your online presence. Shopify allows you to edit title tags and Meta tags, which allows you to easily rank on keywords relevant to your business so your site will also benefit from the rating system optimized for search engines.

For social media marketing, you have the option to launch promotional campaigns, also known as pay per click (PPC) advertising, which can be useful if you want to push influencer marketing to your site and also sell easily using different social networks.

Your customers as well as your target audience on Facebook or other social media platforms will be able to order your products without leaving the platform.



Shopify Merchant - Ten Optimization Tips 

PPC STRATEGY

Many shopify merchant opt for a pay-per-click (PPC) strategy to increase their store’s visibility, but seem to forget the obvious: the cost of PPC continues to rise, and the moment you stop paying, you lose all the visibility gained.

Additionally, some consumers do not trust sponsored links, banners, and other online advertisements. Ecommerce stores cannot therefore simply be satisfied with a PPC strategy and must implement natural referencing methods to increase their visibility.

That being said, a recent Google study revealed that when some sites stopped using Google adwords, 89% of paid clicks did not convert to SEO clicks. So you need to use PPC in addition to SEO.

META DESCRIPTIONS  

When it comes to optimizing their site, many ecommerce stores believe that it is enough to put the same Meta description for every page. But this is another SEO mistake you shouldn’t make, the Meta description should include relevant keywords to help your store get “clicked” as soon as it appears in the search engine result page (SERP).

Also, shopify themes can automatically generate different Meta descriptions for each page.

CONTENT STRATEGY

Taking a deliberate action to regularly add unique and good quality content to your ecommerce site will not only provide value to users, but also improve your search engine rankings. Use this strategy and add content related to the products and services you sell.

All Shopify stores automatically include a blogging platform which you can use to post such content.

DUPLICATE CONTENT

Publishing duplicate content provokes Google's search engine. However, many online stores actually have a lot of duplicate content due to product listings and descriptions and thus tend to be penalized by such behavior.

PRODUCT LINKING

One other common mistake that many ecommerce sites make is to bury their product pages deep in their link structure. This will not only make the products harder for users to find, but it will also affect the PageRank scores of the product pages, thus lowering their possibility of appearing at the top of search results.

Having your product content directly accessible through a link on your home page will make it more accessible to both search engines and your customers.

PRODUCT IMAGES

Image search has become very popular, and more and more Internet users are using it to find products to buy online.

Ecommerce sites must therefore add relevant keywords in the Alt attribute of each of the images on their site.

To achieve the best result, make sure that every keyword used for an image is completely relevant and avoid putting too many keywords in the Alt attributes.

PRODUCT DESCRIPTIONS

Developing the database of your products can take time, so to go faster many online stores simply "copy and paste" on their site the product description made by the manufacturer.

Do not do this if you want to improve your SEO! Systematically rewrite each product description to make sure it is unique and search engine friendly. Be sure to use different words that people are more likely to use in their search.

ANCHOR TEXT

By adding keywords to the internal links of your website, you will improve the visibility of your store on search engines. Rather than using the classic "click here" link, insert your link on text that includes the keywords for which the linked page should be referenced.  Also, consider adding such keyword links in product descriptions to link them to similar products on your site.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS 

Since unique content is extremely important to SEO, providing a field in which users can enter their product reviews is an effective method of passively generating unique content for your online store.

The Shopify app store has several great customer review apps to improve your store.

STORE STRUCTURE

The way you structure your site impacts its visibility. You need to structure your ecommerce store so that it has several landing pages. These pages can be specific to a brand or a type of product. This will allow you to optimize multiple pages and multiple keyword groups, which will increase your site’s visibility in Google search results. 

CONCLUSION

The use of the shopify platform continues to increase every year. Shopify merchant and consumers are constantly making use of it. They use SEO strategies to rank high in their business.

For new business owners working on globally connecting with more clients, shopify can be the right channel for you with the right application of optimization techniques.

Deyo digital is focused on boosting your business with the use of SEO and PPC in order to help your business increase its bottom line.