Shopify Expert Insights

Yesterday I spent the whole day at the Shopify Retail tour. They'd invited me, along with a few other folks, to answer questions about Shopify and Ecommerce from existing and potential Shopify customers. From 10am until 4:30pm, I talked to a diverse and interesting lot of folks.

But every single person asked me some variation of one universal question: "how do I SEO?"

I get why they're asking. If your site appears at the top of google searches for a variety of things related to your products, you'll have loads of traffic. And potentially you didn't pay for it, if only you could crack the code on SEO! If only you knew the magic formula of H1 and alt tags to make the google machine happy.

But that's not realistic. It's at best an attempt to game a hugely complex and constantly changing algorithm into giving you traffic you don't deserve.

I say you don't deserve it because you're trying to cheat the system. Instead, let's come up with a real strategy that works.

Step 1: Let's forget about obsessing over html. If you're using a new premium theme from a good developer like Pixel Union or Out of The Sandbox then you've already done 99% of everything you need to support technical SEO efforts. Open graph, schema markup, etc. All there and done. Don't waste more time and money on this because you'll never get a good ROI out of it. Let's face facts: google engineers are smarter than you.

Step 2: on site SEO. Google wants what your customers want: relevant, valuable content. You have to write articles, guides, interviews, and all the other valuable content you enjoy on other sites. My most successful Shopify Plus couldn't care less about SEO. Instead of fussing with alt tags, he hired three writers to produce great blog content for him. It only costs $1200/mo which is way cheap for the ROI he gets. Here's the best part: he never worries about writing the perfect SEO copy, because he's instead creating on-topic and relevant articles. You can do the same thing. Write on your own or hire someone.

I already know your objection: "Kurt I'm a lousy writer and I can't afford a writer." I've got a hack for you that I use. Dictate your articles using the text to speech already built in to your device. Macs are great at this. Then send it to a copy editor. I pay $30/article on average for copy editing.

Step 3: off-site SEO. Links to your site from sites with a similar audience are massively important. (Note: The spammy blog comment links you buy from a snake oil salesman SEO pro for $500/mo are the opposite of this.)

Here's where we need to again forget about SEO; start thinking like a public relations firm. The best SEO strategy I've ever seen is PR outreach. Find blogs, forums, YouTube channels, and Instagram rockstars who are in your niche. Now email them. Email them and offer them free product in exchange for an honest review. This is a numbers game but it's the only way you'll get relevant links with qualified traffic. This tactic is powerful in that you'll be able to trade up the chain. You'll start with small blogs and as word of mouth grows you'll be able to build relationships that move you up to blogs getting millions of daily visitors. This tactic isn't particularly difficult but it is time consuming. You can hire someone to do it for you which will save you time and speed things up because outreach professionals already have a network to leverage. (I personally recommend Kai Davis for this kind of work, he's pulled great results for my clients.)

What's the takeaway here? Instead of trying to learn the finer points of semantic HTML while guessing at google's algorithm, all you need to do is share your passion. Make your love of your niche infectious and the SEO will follow.

Here's a quick tip this week that will work in 99% of stores.

What's the number one reason for abandoned carts? Unexpected shipping costs. People have weird anxiety and feelings about shipping.

So how do you have your shipping rules setup in Shopify? I bet it's something vague like "Standard Shipping" and "Free Shipping," right?

The problem with that is you're only selling one question about shipping: cost. What about expected delivery time? Or carrier?

Here's the quick fix. Rename your shipping rules with the specific carrier and service that you use, and the expected shipping time. For example, "USPS Priority Mail (2-4 Days)" is so much clearer than "Standard Shipping."

Here's a good example from Everestbands.com:

They way their rules are setup, the customer will only ever see two shipping options: standard or free, and express. That's another good point: avoid choice paralysis by only offering people 1 or 2 shipping options.

Give it a shot! (This even gives you a leg up on Amazon who doesn't tell you what carrier you're going to get.)

There are two pages every Shopify store I’ve ever set up has: a Contact Page and an About Page. (If I can toot my own horn, we totally nailed our own Contact page. It gets more compliments than any other page on our site.) If you’re like many people, you’ve struggled to write an about page because you don’t know what to put on it. But more importantly, you don’t know what to put on it because you don’t really know the purpose of the page.

I’m going to clear up both of those things for you.

I was talking to my friend Jordan Gal from CartHook about some of his experiences running a wildly successful ecommerce store with his brothers, and he shared with me an anecdote that gave me an ah-ha moment.

Jordan had LiveChat on his site, and it let him track people in real-time. And by doing that, they quickly noticed a pattern: shoppers would find a product and add it to their cart. (At this point they’ve decided they want to buy that product.) Once in the cart, some folks would proceed to checkout, and others would do something strange: they’d visit the about page. This is because they were making a second and often overlooked decision: “Yes, I want to buy this item, but do I want to buy it from this store?”

Think about it, when you’re in a brick & mortar store, you know it’s a legitimate operation. Leases were signed, licenses paid for, etc. The web doesn’t have that same implicit trust factor. No matter how nice the website is, if the visitor hasn’t heard of it before, it inspires about as much implicit trust as a guy selling t-shirts out of a van in the parking lot.

So in lieu of any physical location to visit, some visitors may visit the about page to get a sense of how trustworthy you are. (And why not, your website is, after all, an anonymous stranger asking for their credit card number in the dim parking lot of the internet.) So the first and foremost thing to do on your About page is to introduce yourself. Get out of the shadows, and include your photo, and a little bit about yourself. How did you come to run an ecommerce store? What do you love about it? Things that personalize you. Then go a step further in building trust and include your store’s contact information. A toll-free number especially boosts trust. Being accessible is important.

After you’ve given the visitor a sense of who you are with your about page and how to get ahold of you, they may start to wonder about what a relationship is like with you. This is where you trot out everything you have that minimizes risk for the customer:

• Guarantees
• Easy Returns
• Free Shipping
• Guaranteed Fast Shipping
• And even Testimonials

When you offer all of the above, you’re going the extra step that your competitors haven’t. A customer choosing between two sites, may go with the more expensive site if it’s more trustworthy. So get out there and update your About page. It may only take you 15 minutes and it could boost your conversion rate.