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There are many ways to build your Shopify Store and make money, and one of the fastest is paid advert, but like the name, you have to pay to get the result. But, the question is, is paying for traffic the best and most sustainable approach to building your Store?

If it is, what should those that don’t have the finances to spend on adverts, do?

Search Engine Optimization is not just a cost-effective approach to use, but it is an approach – when done rightly – that can keep on bringing in those revenues even while you sleep.

As I said earlier, a paid ad is the fastest way, because SEO might take a little longer, especially if you’re just starting with very low Domain Authority. And SEO is not really that easy to learn, besides Google updates its search engine several times each year, which can dump lots of things you knew about SEO.

So in this guide, we’ll show you the exact SEO hacks for Shopify Store owners that you can use to start appearing on Google’s first page even if you’re a beginner. Yes, that’s right, even if you’re a beginner, and this is coming based on experience.

SEO Hacks for Shopify Store Owners

1. Perform Proper Keyword Research

Keyword research enables you to add the exact or related keywords your ideal customers are searching for, you don’t want to write a compelling product description (which is even necessary) and no one is searching for it. One of the easiest ways to perform keyword research is to use Google Search, which with a simple search like “Sun shades glasses,” can give you other options like “Sun Shade glasses for women,” etc.

The downside of using only Google Search is that it won’t show you the competitors, the SEO difficulty, and the volume of people searching it. And, these are very important because you don’t want to use keywords that have very high competition, which will not even give you the chance to rank even if you wrote the best product description or blog post.

So another freemium tool that can help you get info on the keyword is UberSuggest which provides you with the Vol, CPC [Cost Per Click (which you won’t necessarily need)], Paid Difficulty, and SEO Difficulty. 

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Also, one of the downsides of it is that if you’re using the free version you can only perform a maximum of 3 keywords per day (that’s very small if you intend to get results).

One of my favorite cost-effective tools for keyword research is “Keyword Everywhere,” because it gives you the number of times people are searching a keyword (volume), CPC, Competition, and SEO difficulty all for a very small fee annually. 

You also get to use the long tail keywords which is one of my favorites for Shopify Store owners that just started.

Moreover, Ahref remains the best when it comes to keyword research but there is no free version from them and you always have to pay $99 per month or $990 per year for the basic version.

2. Start Blogging

Shopify understands the power and importance of blogging which made them add a built-in blogging engine, so if you’re not taking advantage of the blog (which lots of store owners are not), you’re leaving lots of untapped traffic and sales. Blogging is one of the SEO hacks for Shopify Store owners that can boost your sales.

We understand the primary reason for starting a Shopify Store is to make money through sales, but nowadays, Google is now ranking content-written pages above transactional pages.

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Besides, your customers love it, and it’s one of the best ways to turn a simple reader into a buyer. An infographic prepared by Demandmetric showed that brands that blog earn 67% more leads per month than their counterparts. 

And, with the help of keyword research, as a new shop owner, you can start ranking on Google’s first page within a short period. You don’t even need to write long content nowadays, Google now considers short, original, quality content.

If you’re not a writing type, or you don’t have the time, you can outsource for help, freelancers are everywhere to help you out even if you have a low budget.

3. Optimize Metadata for SEO

The truth is, many people don’t even realize that metadata has a massive role in their ranking on search engines. Others might feel it’s so technical and want to shy away from it.

To boost your Shopify store, some of the best parts of Metadata to focus on are the title tags, page meta description, and URLs. Title tags go a long way to tell Google that a word that someone searched is related to your product, this is also where keyword research comes in because your keyword needs to be in your title tags.

You can still add some STRATEGIC click baits to your title tags to make ideal customers click on your product instead of your competitors. You can also add your keyword on your URL and meta description.

4. Optimize your Images 

Image optimization is one of the SEO hacks for Shopify Store owners that we can’t ignore because Search Engines use the alt tags to understand what your image is all about. This is also another area keyword plays a role (to tell you how important keywords are in your Shopify Store).

For instance, if a potential buyer searches for, “Vintage Simple Wedding Dress,” you can see that Google and other search engines first present the images.

So with proper keyword optimization, yours could be one of the first appearing on Google.

Moreover, due to poor network in some areas, the image of your product might not appear, so using the right alt tag will help them to identify which product it is without seeing the image.

5. Improve your Store Site Speed

As we get deeper into the age where attention span is getting shorter, and where so many bounce rates can make Google not rank your product at all, or to even de-rank your no.1 product on Google. Yes, Google can de-rank your page.

And poor loading speed can affect your visitors, which will affect your sales. In fact, Google said that the probability of a visitor leaving a page without interacting increases by 32% as page load time goes from 1s to 3s. And here’s where it gets worse when the load time goes from 1s to 5s the probability of bounce rate increases to 90%.

So your aim here is to ensure your Shopify Store loads very fast, at least faster than your competitors. 

You can start by analyzing the Mobile and Desktop performance of your pages with Google’s PageSpeed Insight tool, which will show you your Store or site speed performance and give your instructions like;

• Serve images in next-gen formats
• Reduce initial server response time
• Eliminate render-blocking resources
• Reduce unused JavaScript
• Avoid an excessive DOM size

Other methods to improve speed are compressing images, using AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), and deleting irrelevant apps on your store.

Conclusion

These SEO hacks for Shopify Store go a long way to improving your chances of ranking when done right. If you have ideas for other SEO tips to improve Shopify Store, you can let us know in the comment session.