5 Ideas to Promote Your Shopify Store

Setting up a Shopify store takes creativity, strategy, and planning, but promoting a Shopify store is an entirely different beast. If you want to attract clients, you’ll have to be especially smart about marketing and advertising. After all, no Shopify store will do well without some major promotion, particularly when it’s still early days.

To introduce a new store, you’ll need to turn heads away from more familiar or popular competitors. Let’s face it: that’s no easy feat. But don’t worry, there’s good news: if promoting your Shopify store is a big dark mystery for you, we’re here to flick on the lights.

We share solid strategies to inject into your store so your route to the top is smooth and swift.

1. Email Marketing

The marketing industry is dominated by visuals. Everywhere you look, you see ads plastered all over social media, banners, graphic designs, etc. The truth is: it works. Images speak to customers effectively, and that’s why every marketer wants to dip their toes into the riches of visual ads. So, you might be wondering if emails can increase conversion rates. Short answer? Yes.

According to Statista, there are 4 million daily email users. Yep, customers are on Facebook and Instagram all the time. Still, emails are an easy way to reach big audiences with personalized messages. Best of all, you can do it without all the gatekeeping, fees, and restrictions that come with marketing on third-party platforms. Not to mention emails are still the best and easiest way to maintain relationships with customers.

Have we mentioned ROI yet? You’ll be interested to know that email marketing has the highest ROI of all forms of marketing. To be exact, every $1 you spend yields $36 in return. Those are exactly the kind of numbers you want to see as a marketing newbie.

2. Social Media

Marketing is all about reaching out to people and making connections between customers and your business. Thanks to the internet, the constraints on the number of people you can reach grow smaller with every passing day. According to Datareportal, more than half of the world uses social media. What this means for you: if you’re aiming for big numbers, there’s no better place than social media for your Shopify ad campaign.

Not only does social media provide you with the platform, but it’s in social media’s interest that your campaign succeeds. Why? Because more successful business on the platform translates to more customers and marketers registering on their site. It’s a win-win! Social media companies constantly improve their ad capabilities for this reason, and now marketers can customize their ads to maximize performance in ways they couldn’t just a few years ago.

3. Optimize for Search Engines

Think about opening a physical store for your business. Let’s say you sell shoes. You’ll probably want to secure a good location where people shopping for shoes can find you. You also want to build reliable rapport with people in your surroundings to maximize referrals. Why? So that next time someone is wandering around the neighbourhood looking for shoes, they’ll be pointed in your direction.

Here’s the thing: promoting Shopify stores isn’t much different. Think of Google as the townsfolk you need to build rapport with, so they always recommend you to customers. That’s what SEO is all about. People searching for a product or service often turn to the internet for help. Google brings out results, and the potential customer clicks on one of the first few links Google delivered. Your goal is to be as high up those search rankings as possible to attract clicks to your Shopify store.

To rank high in Google’s recommended list, you need to optimize your website. SEO optimization is vital, especially if you plan on staying in business long-term. Suppose you don’t perform well in search engine rankings. In that case, you aren’t just losing out on visitors to your page, but those visitors are going directly to your competitors.

If you’re wondering how you can optimize SEO to promote your Shopify store, don’t worry, we’ll help you out with that. To get started, here are the areas you should focus your SEO strategy on:

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is the optimization of your web page’s content to meet Google’s standards. Search engines value user experience and prioritize websites that provide value to customers. That means your page should have consistent content that differentiates it from what can be found on competitor websites.

Some on-page SEO tips:

Keyword Research:

Do keyword research to find the terms you want to rank in searches. Your keyword should be relevant, but it’s smart to choose a term with less competition. Once you’ve settled on a keyword, you should aim to include it in the first 100 words of your article. This signals to search engines that it’s the focus of your page, and it also lets visitors know they’re in the right place.

It’s best to incorporate keywords into your page as naturally as possible. Keyword stuffing stopped working years ago, and now Google actively frowns upon pages that force keywords into their text in a bid to rank higher on searches. An ideal keyword density is between 1-2%.

Content Optimization

The text on your page should provide value to readers. To boost your search rankings, you need to give your visitors content and information that’s unique from what can be found on Google’s other high-ranking pages. Originality is valued more than regurgitation. Keep your content fresh and consistent.

Also, readability is essential. Readable text is easier for users and Google to understand, which is good for your search performance. You can make your page readable by breaking up your content into easy-to-read chunks, making generous use of headings and subheadings, and streamlining with bullet points, images, and actionable sentences.

Use Internal Linking

Internal linking is using URLs to connect to other pages on your website. These are important because they help Google understand the links and relationships between different pages on your site. It also adds depth to your site, which is good for SEO

Off-Page SEO

As the name implies, off-page SEO is the direct opposite of on-page SEO. These are measures taken away from your website to help you rank better in search engines. Think of off-page SEO as word-of-mouth marketing: it’s simply what other sites and pages have to say about your brand.

This is critical because Google’s algorithm doesn’t just factor in the contents of your page for SEO. They also consider your entire online presence. Off-page SEO in this context is mainly about building a healthy portfolio of backlinks to your Shopify store. Relevant backlinks to your site indicate to Google that your site content is valuable, boosting your SEO performance.

Some off-page SEO tips:

Guest Posts

Guest posts are basically just blogs, plain and simple. What separates them from regular blogs is that you write them for other websites instead of your own. Guest posts are done for a few reasons, like building your backlink portfolio, attracting traffic back to your site, raising awareness of your brand and products, etc.

For example, you write an article on the benefits of a product on your Shopify page. Then, instead of posting it on your blog, you post it on someone else’s blog and link back to the product on your website. This is a guest post, and you are a “guest blogger” on that website. Guest blogging regularly on high-quality websites increases your authority and, subsequently, SEO rankings.

Share Your Expertise

There are a lot of online services where reporters, journalists, students, etc., need insight from experts in specific fields and industries. Perhaps they want to know the benefit of certain products, and you happen to have those products on your Shopify store. Offer some knowledge through a quote or short article, and they will most likely link back to your store or website, giving you more healthy backlinks.

Competitor Analysis

You should research competitor websites, especially if you’re starting a new business, like your Shopify store. It doesn’t directly affect SEO performance, but it’s a good way of knowing how the top stores in your industry operate. This includes researching their backlinks, keywords, and content. You could do this manually or utilize a competitor analysis tool to generate SEO reports on other Shopify stores.

Technical SEO

As we said, SEO is all about pleasing Google and other search engines. Technical SEO refers to optimizing your website and server performance to their liking. To rank on search engines, they need to index your site smoothly, and they give preferential treatment to pages that display specific technical characteristics, like website responsiveness and user-friendliness. In other words, using your site should be easy for your visitors.

Technical SEO is often mixed up with on-page SEO because they’re both about on-page optimization. However, they’re actually very different. To simplify, on-page SEO is about optimizing content, while technical SEO deals with optimizing non-content aspects of your page, like design and usability.

How to optimize technical SEO on your site:

Optimize Page Speed

The average website visitor will wait a maximum of 6 seconds for your site to load. Any longer than that, and you’re on borrowed time. It’s vital to increase your site speed but not just for your visitors; it’s an SEO ranking factor, as well. Google values site speed a lot, and their SEO algorithms frown heavily on slow or laggy websites. This is an aspect of SEO you can’t afford to ignore. Even if your website has valuable content with Google-friendly keywords, a bad user experience will drag your rankings down.

Make Your Store Mobile-Friendly

People will access your site from all kinds of devices. Once your link is out there, you can’t control how users access it. To Google, a “responsive” site can be navigated and used easily by any device. Designing your site for computer web visitors while forgetting to optimize for mobile users is a common mistake websites make. Don’t do it: it ruins your search ranking.

Use SSL

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer, a security technology that encrypts the link between a web server and browser. SSLs are used to create HTTPS, which secures the connection whenever visitors use your site, guarding their data against hacks and viruses.

Making your website safe is important to Google since they want to make sure users are guaranteed privacy when using their search engine. That’s why, in 2014, Google added the use of SSLs by websites to its SEO algorithm. Since then, secure websites have been preferred in search results.

4. Pay Per Click Ads

Pay-per-click ads are a cost-effective way of driving traffic to your website. It’s an advertising model where you, the advertiser, pay a fixed amount to a publisher each time one of your ads gets clicked and leads a user to your website. The idea behind this is to “buy” visits to your page from the publisher. PPC advertising is offered by search engines and social media sites like Google, Facebook, and Twitter. The process involves one of these social media companies posting your ads, and you pay them each time their display earns you a website visitor.

The costs of PPC can vary significantly. Starting e-commerce stores, especially home-based ones, often start with as little as $1,000. On the other hand, established e-commerce companies that promote Shopify stores invest million in ad spend every single month.

Benefits of Pay-Per-Click Ads:

Immediate Results

The impact of PPC ads is felt almost immediately. While organic SEO can take months to convince search engines to promote your page, money talks instantly. Within a few hours, Google or any social media site you choose to advertise on will have shown your ad to thousands of people in search of your products and services

Cost-Effective

As far as return on advertising investment goes, it hardly gets better than PPC ads. You only pay for users that reach your website, and you can spend as little or as much as you want. This is significantly different from traditional online advertising methods, where you can pay excessive amounts on an ad campaign, and there’s still a high level of uncertainty about the potential results of your efforts. With PPC, you only pay for positive advertising results.

Laser-Targeting

Another great benefit of PPC is choosing your target audience according to set demographics like location, language, and keyword searches. For Shopify mobile advertising, you can even target users with specific devices. This allows you to optimize your ad performance further to increase your store’s conversion rates.

How to Set Up PPC Ads in 5 Steps

Google Ads is the most commonly used PPC, so we’ll focus on making a PPC ad with them, although Google also holds your hand through the process when creating your ad campaign.

• Step 1: Sign up and create a Google Ad account.
• Step 2: Choose which keywords you want to bid on.
• Step 3: Set your daily and monthly budget and place your bids for different keywords.
• Step 4: Write the content of your PPC advert and link it to a relevant page on your Shopify store. Your advert should ideally have a persuasive lead magnet.
• Step 5: Publish your ad and monitor its performance. Google allows you to change keywords as you learn what works and what doesn’t.

5. Hire Expert Marketers To Promote Your Store

Hiring experts to help you run your Shopify store might be a first or last-resort solution for you. You may see the need for an experienced set of hands from the get-go, or you may want to dip your toes into business management yourself. Whether your solo flight goes well or not, the need for an expert is likely to come up.

Why? Because running a Shopify store is a headache, particularly for rookies. It’s time-consuming, tedious, and there’s a steep learning curve. It can quickly become a full-time job since taking your foot off the pedal even for a moment risks market underperformance.

No matter at what point you decide to seek an expert’s opinion, it’s best to look for an agency to handle all parts of your business, from SEO to customer relations and ad campaigns.

That’s what Marketify is all about. We are a small marketing agency that can provide you with the Midas touch your business needs. We have extensive marketing experience, and having leadership that worked for Google gives us an edge for SEO and paid ads. Handling your Shopify store is stressful, but it doesn’t have to be.

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