Already selling on Shopify or just planning to start?
Here are three tips that can help your customers find your store!
Shopify SEO for Print-On-Demand Stores: 3 Tips for Free Traffic
Hey, it’s Noni from Printful’s marketing team.
In this video, we’re going to look at three tips that can improve your Shopify store and
bring more free traffic your way.
First thing to note is that Shopify is an ecommerce platform, not a marketplace like
Etsy or Amazon.
Using an ecommerce platform means that your store is built as a standalone website.
This has a number of benefits.
First, having your own website means you can personalize your store as you see fit.
Store design is almost entirely up to you and your preferences, and you can choose what
features to add to your store.
However, one of the main drawbacks with a standalone website is that traffic to your
site comes only from your marketing activities and search engines.
That's where search engine optimization or SEO comes in.
When you compete in search engines as a standalone website, you have the whole internet to fight
with for your potential customer attention.
Because of this, it’s important that you optimize your page and make sure you stand
out.
These tips will help you do just that.
If you have never heard about search engine optimization and want to learn more, check
out our video on ecommerce SEO for beginners.
And while you're at it, don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel and click on that bell
icon to never miss out on videos like this one.
1.
Optimize your product listings For online store owners, product listings
are the most important pieces of content on their page.
It’s where users can best get to know your product and make a decision on purchase.
To make sure your products stay visible on search engines, these are the sections you
should pay attention to.
Titles are the most SEO-powerful elements for two reasons:
First, they are the main part of your page crawlers use to analyze what your page is
about.
The first 2–3 words used in the title are the most important ones and will determine
what you will rank for the highest.
Second, they give the user a first impression of your site on search engines, social media
posts, and even web browser tabs.
Check if your titles contain the main keywords you want to rank for.
Find terms that describe your product and give it a chance to be discovered.
Product titles aren’t the place to get fancy with your vocabulary—keep things simple.
For example, the keywords “personalized pet bowl” are general, but describe the
product perfectly.
As sophisticated as it may sound, no one will ever search for “decadent animal feeding
receptacle.”
Product descriptions are where you can get a bit more creative.
Use your keyword research and imagination to come up with catchy but search-friendly
descriptions.
In this section, highlight what makes your product exclusive.
The most important rule for this section is to make sure all your product descriptions
are unique.
Whether it’s within the same domain or different ones, search engines hate duplicate content.
This also includes copying info from your supplier product pages, such as Printful.
Our default descriptions are a way for you to understand the product better.
Your customers and online search engines will much prefer listings written by you!
Once you're done with your edits, pay close attention to the search engine listing preview
and see if it includes all your best keywords and is providing unique information about
your product, so that Google can rank it higher in their search.
If not, make adjustments.
2.
Get SEO help from these free apps Using Shopify as a platform for your ecommerce
store has a lot of benefits.
One of them is an app store that offers everything under the sun.
Here are three apps that we recommend to boost your SEO.
1.
SEO Site Audit Sometimes you do everything you can to generate
traffic to your website and grow your audience and sales.
But now and then it doesn't happen as you planned, and you don't understand why.
A complete site audit can give you a deeper understanding of the reason.
SEO Site Audit is a Shopify SEO app that ranks your site for business, marketing, technical
and ecommerce purposes, and provides data you can use to improve your store's performance.
Price: Free.
2.
Bulk Image Edit Why do you need an image editor?
Because file size matters—the faster your page loads, the higher your ecommerce store
ranks in Google.
The higher the rank, the more traffic you will get and the more money you will make.
Bulk Image Edit reduces up to 51% of the image file sizes without losing any visible image
quality.
It will help you make all your images conform to the same width/height ratio.
It also resizes or crops images to fit any social media or sales channel listing.
In addition to that, it’s important that your visuals on your Shopify store are SEO
optimized, so people can find your product when they’re on Google Image Search.
Now, when you do an image search on Google, it doesn’t list the images based on what’s
actually in them, but on the keywords used in the image names and alt tags.
If you have a photo on your page that perfectly illustrates “pink women’s shirt,” but
you’ve uploaded it with the file name “3225234z,” it won’t rank.
Before uploading an image to your store, it's smart to include relevant keywords in file
names.
To avoid technical mishaps with file names, remember:
You need to use hyphens, not spaces, between words
Keep it descriptive yet short (3–8 words) Avoid function words (the, a, an, it, to,
etc.)
If you haven't done this so far, Bulk Image Edit can help you with editing already uploaded
file names and ALT texts.
Price: Free.
Upgraded plans from $9.99/month.
3.
SEO Products Optimizer Need help from someone that analyzes your
product listings and gives suggestions on how you can improve your product copy?
SEO Products Optimizer will let you have a quick view on your SEO score for each of your
products.
It uses the last updates from Google to give you real-time recommendations that may skyrocket
your store in the search results.
Price: Free.
Upgraded plans from $14/month.
3.
Start linkbuilding To raise awareness of your content and improve
its rankings, start linkbuilding to boost your site traffic.
You can do this by getting as many backlinks as you can.
Backlinks are links from other sites leading to your page.
They can increase traffic driven to your site, boost your page’s credibility and competitiveness,
and increase your chances to rank higher in search results.
Backlinks can be acquired organically—other pages can link to your content by choice,
or manually—you can reach out to other pages.
The latter is called linkbuilding.
Before approaching potential leads, see if their content is relevant to yours.
Imagine your page being linked in their content: Would it make sense?
Does your content add any relevant information to theirs?
Is there a spot on their page where your link would fit?
If your answer to all three questions is yes, then you’re good to go.
If not—find a better lead.
There are no fool-proof ways to do linkbuilding.
It’s still all about creating valuable content and convincing leads that they are getting
more out of the deal than you are.
Before sending the author your pitch, determine if you’d still gladly add a link to your
content if the tables were turned.
And those all three tips I have for you today.
If you're interested in more ways to make your store even better, check out the Printful
website with original blog posts, webinars, Printful product footage videos you can use
in your store and more!
Do you have a Shopify store?
Do you have any tips that others might find useful?
Share your experiences in the comments!