You created a Shopify store with the hope of boosting your business’s sales by reaching more people who want your products. You’ve had your site up and running for a few months, but you’re not earning as many sales as you thought you would. What are you doing wrong?

Well, if you haven’t optimized your Shopify store, it may explain why you aren’t reaching as many people as you thought. But how do you go about optimizing your Shopify store?

Luckily, we’ve got six tips on how to optimize your Shopify store so you can drive more leads and sales for your business. Keep reading to learn more about search engine optimization (SEO) for your store!

P.S. Want to get more marketing tips and tricks for your Shopify store? Join 150,000+ marketers by subscribing to our email list!

Shopify SEO tip #1: Target relevant keywords

To improve SEO on Shopify, start by targeting relevant keywords. Keywords determine where your site appears in search results. You need to optimize your site for applicable key terms to help you appear in the right search results and drive interested traffic.

Here’s how to optimize your Shopify website for relevant keywords:

1. Conduct keyword research: To find relevant key terms, you need to conduct keyword research. You can use a keyword research tool like KeywordsFX to help you find the right terms for your Shopify store.
2. Focus on long-tail keywords: Long-tail keywords contain three or more words, like “Men’s blue running sneakers.” These keywords are better for your site because they’re more specific, which helps you know the user’s search intent and see that they’re interested in your products.
3. Integrate keywords into your site: Once you find relevant terms for your product pages, you’ll want to integrate them into your site to help your pages rank for those terms. Don’t overuse your keywords, as it will lead to keyword stuffing and negatively impact your ranking.
4. Add keywords to title tags, meta descriptions, and headings: Title tags, meta descriptions, and headings are key places to put your keyword so you can rank in search results (along with body text). Placing keywords in these high-value spots will help you rank better for those keywords.

Shopify SEO tip #2: Improve the user experience

When you’re optimizing your Shopify store, you want to focus on building a better user experience. User experience is critical to keeping leads engaged on your page and learning about your products. Poor user experience leads to a higher bounce rate and lower search engine rankings.

So, how can you improve user experience?

Ensure your site loads quickly

Shopify plugins are extremely valuable for helping you create a more efficient and effective website. You can add hundreds of plugins to your site, from ones that improve your shopping cart to ones that help you ship products more efficiently.

While these plugins are great for helping you provide a better customer experience, they can also be detrimental. Installing too many Shopify plugins can slow down your site severely.

So, why does it matter if your website is slow?

Well, slow websites cause a $2.6 billion revenue loss annually. So, something as simple as a page taking a few too many seconds to load can cause your business to miss out on sales.

To improve site load time, look at what apps you’re using on your Shopify store and determine if you need them. If they aren’t necessary, nix them from your site to speed it up.

You can also follow other page speed improvement tips, like:

1. Reducing redirects
2. Compressing image sizes
3. Leveraging browser caching
4. Minifying JavaScript
5. Minifying CSS

Add visual elements to boost engagement

When it comes to shopping online, visuals play a critical role in the user experience. Users can’t physically see the products, so they must rely on multimedia like photos and videos to help them see your product.

Visuals are valuable to your site because they help break up text and provide points of interest.

When you add visuals to your site, whether it’s photos, videos, or graphics, you want to ensure that they’re high-quality. Low-quality images that are blurry or stretched will deter people from your site — the quality of your visuals will influence people’s perceptions about your product’s quality.

Add visuals on your homepage, product pages, and more. Give your audience a 360-degree view of your product so they can see every feature and every angle. It will give them better insight into your product and lead to more conversions.

Adding these visuals will keep your audience engaged on the page to increase dwell time and, subsequently, your website’s rankings in search results.

Make your navigation easy to use

When users browse your site, you don’t want them to struggle to find the products they need. Create a simple navigation to make it easy for your audience to find the products they want.

In this example from Manitobah Mukluks, they break down their product categories into men’s, women’s, and children’s shoes. They also have a separate category for their gloves and mitts, as well as clearance items.

This navigation is simple and easy to follow.

When you hover over each category, you can see the navigation breaks down into subcategories, making it even easier for shoppers to find exactly what they need.

Having simple and easy-to-use navigation like this keeps shoppers on the page because they can find the products they need without the hassle. This longer duration sends a positive signal to Google that your page is relevant, which leads to an increase in rankings in the search results.

Shopify SEO tip #3: Optimize your product pages

When you’re optimizing your Shopify store, don’t forget to optimize your product pages. You need to deliver high-quality product pages that inform your audience and make them feel confident about choosing your products.

Here’s how you can optimize your product pages:

1. Include high-quality photos: Your audience uses your photos to determine if your product is a good fit for them. Make sure your images have a high resolution and capture your product from all angles.
2. Provide necessary details in product descriptions: Provide your audience with all the information they need in your product description. You can talk about the product materials and key features to show how your product fits their needs or offers a solution to their problem.

1. Show product options: If you offer products in multiple colors, styles, or sizes, make sure you make it easy to see their product options so shoppers can find the product that fits their needs best.

Shopify SEO tip #4: Create content to drive traffic to your site

Content plays a critical role in helping you improve SEO on Shopify. Content marketing helps you boost traffic on your site, keep leads engaged on your site longer, and increase brand recognition to drive more sales.

When you create content, you share your knowledge and expertise with your audience. They view you as a trusted source in your industry and feel more confident in choosing your business.

To get started with content creation, you need to identify topics to cover. You’ll want to keep your ideas related to your industry to ensure you’re driving traffic to your page that’s interested in your business.

So, for example, Manitobah Mukluks is mainly a shoe company. When they create content, they’ll want to focus on content that has to do with footwear and fashion. If they made blog posts about coffee mugs, they wouldn’t drive the right traffic to their site.

You can find topics by:

1. Browsing Google to see what’s already out there
2. Using tools like Google Trends
3. Searching for keywords relevant to your business

Once you have a topic, you’ll choose your content format. You can use numerous formats, including:

1. Blogs
2. Videos
3. Infographics
4. Ebooks
5. Guides
6. And more

Creating diverse content types will help you improve SEO on Shopify because you’ll attract more people and different audiences within your target market to your site. Just make sure you’re using relevant keywords on your content pages, too, so you can rank in the right search results!

Shopify SEO tip #5: Use call to action (CTA) buttons to guide users

Next on our list of Shopify SEO tips is to use CTA buttons. CTA buttons are critical because they help guide your audience to the next step. Whether it’s to visit a specific product page or to add your product to their cart, you need to make CTAs that stand out.

Manitobah Mukluks highlights their CTA button with a red outline to make it stand out to shoppers.

On the other hand, Nordstrom Rack chose a CTA button color that makes it pop off the page from its white background.

There are multiple styles you can use for CTA buttons. It may take some experimenting to figure out what kind of button and color works best for your page. That brings us to the last of our Shopify SEO tips.

Shopify SEO tip #6: Test everything

When you learn how to optimize your Shopify website, you’ll learn how important it is to test everything. Your Shopify site may look great the first time you create it, but there is always room for improvement.

You want to test different elements on your site to ensure you’re putting out the best version of your site. When you test, make sure you test one element, like a CTA button, at a time. If you experiment with too many at once, it will muddy the results and make it unclear what’s impacting your site.

Test elements like:

1. CTAs
2. Headings
3. Photos
4. Location of forms
5. Information asked for on a form

By testing these elements, you’ll create the best version of your site and provide an optimal experience for your audience.

Optimize your Shopify store today

Now that you know how to optimize your Shopify website, you can improve your site to rank better in search results. If you don’t feel confident in improving your site, WebFX is here to help.

We’ve got a team of over 250 Shopify experts ready to help you optimize your site to drive better results. In the past five years, we’ve driven over $2.4 billion in sales and over 6.3 million leads for our clients. You can feel confident that we’ll drive results for your business too.

Ready to get started? Contact us online or call us today at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist about our Shopify optimization services!