As any ecommerce business owner knows, Shopify is the ultimate place to list your products online. But in a sea of online retailers, it can be hard to stand out from the crowd. The best way to do this, of course, is to climb the rankings for your selected keywords, get the best visibility possible on your Shopify site, and have top-notch creative content if you’re looking to grow your business.
As with any website, understanding SEO and CRO is the key to optimizing for visibility and sales. Let’s get into it!
Optimize your Shopify store for SEO
Before we run through how to use SEO tactics to optimize your Shopify store, we must first understand what SEO is, and how it relates to your Shopify product listings.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing your website against a search engine’s criteria, to place higher in the rankings for chosen or keywords. At its very base level, we can use keywords in our content to tell the search engine that our website is relevant for content around those keywords. For example, a pizza restaurant would want to focus on keywords “pizza” and “restaurant” rather than irrelevant keywords like “burgers.”
So where does Shopify come into the SEO equation? As with any website, it’s important to optimize your Shopify store—and product listings—for search engines. This can be done through your product titles and descriptions, your page structure, your URLS, and so much more. We’ll give tips on how to optimize each of these as we go through this guide.
Keywords
Now that we understand the premise of SEO, we know that the first step to getting your website higher in the rankings is to select which keywords you wish to optimize your pages for. Choose keywords that are both relevant to your products and your audience.
For instance, if you’re just starting out, continuing the pizza restaurant example, choosing “pizza” as your main keyword can set you up for failure– with so much competition, your keyword will be just a drop in the ocean against big players. In this case, you might want to choose a longtail keyword such as “build your own pizza restaurant”. This effectively creates a niche, singling out customers who are looking specifically for a pizza place that allows them to build their own pizzas, rather than a pizza joint in general. That in turn increases your chance for a conversion, as they will be more invested.
Pro tip: long tail keywords are those which are longer and more specific. It’s an SEO best practice to include high volume (many searches), longtail (niche) keywords in your keyword strategy. If you’re feeling stuck, choose one “seed” keyword to start, pop it into a generator and start widening its reach.
Product titles and descriptions
As with any online retail listing, be it on Shopify, Amazon, or elsewhere, the product is only as good as its title and description. This is the key information that potential customers need when making their buying decision—and will sway those customers, if done effectively.
Now that you know about keywords, and how it affects your place in the search rankings, you can likely guess our next piece of advice! Be sure to include keywords in both your title and description, which both highlight your product, and contain key information that potential customers need when choosing what to buy.
Title
The title of the product helps search engines identify what your page is about. The product title should have the name of the product. You can also add the dimensions or size of the product. Remember, less is more here; resist the urge to overstuff the title!
Be sure to place your brand name at the beginning, and then follow with topline information:
- Product name
- Important descriptor (such as the color, the size and dimensions, or the material)
- Important features (this would be its defining feature which makes it stand out from its competitors)
When creating your title, try to avoid putting it entirely in capital letters, and exclude unnecessary information that might deter customers, or is included elsewhere, such as the price.
Once you’ve chosen your title, take a moment to step back and consider it through the eyes of potential customers. Is it unique enough to stand apart from the competition? Does it include your differentiating features and all necessary information that a potential customer would need before they click?
It’s important to review your product listing through the eyes of the customer and adjust as your audience and trends shift.
Product descriptions
When drafting your product description, keep the guidelines for writing product titles in mind, but simply expand! Include the keywords you want to rank for and speak about them in greater detail. Remember, the potential customers that are reading your description have already clicked on your title because they deemed it fit to their needs and wish to know more—so give them more!
One way you can give more information is to demonstrate how the customer might use your product. For instance, if you’re selling picture frames, you might paint a picture of a mother hanging a photo of her children in the family room, or an art collector displaying their prized pieces in a home gallery.
As with the title, make sure to keep your product descriptions up to date—including the keywords you use—as trends, and customer needs, change. If you’re feeling stuck for time, you can also use a product description generator.
Shopify store structure: H1, H2, and H3 Tags
A bit more on the technical side of SEO, it’s also important to keep your H1, H2, and H3 tags in mind when optimizing your Shopify product listings.
While you might have a title at the top of your product page, this isn’t necessarily the information that Google, or other search engines, are taking into consideration when they rank your page for the selected keyword. In other words, you need to ensure that you’re speaking the search engine’s language when you structure the content on your page.
Use H1 tags for your most important keywords, then H2 for your second-tiered keywords, and so on.
Duplicate content
One of the ways search engines can bump you down is if you have duplicate content. This goes for product page content, meta titles, and meta descriptions. This is important to consider if you have a store that sells similar products. For instance, a clothing store might have multiple product pages for “white t-shirt”, as they have this item in three sizes. To avoid this penalty, try using meta titles such as “white t-shirt, small”, “white t-shirt, medium”, and so on.
Unprofitable products
As with Amazon, the performance of your products on Shopify is considered when your store is ranked by search engine. If you have many “dead” products—or those that arn’t as profitable as the rest—it might be a good strategy to take them off of your store for a time, so as not to jeopardize the chances for your other products to take off. Sometimes, you can be penalized on this criterion for sold-out products, too.
SKUs
SKUs, or Stock Keeping Units, are a way to categorize your product listings. As with all the criteria we’ve discussed so far, this can also play a part in how your products and Shopify store rank online. Ensure that these are unique, as you don’t want to run into a similar issue as the duplicate content we talked about, earlier in this article. Again, it’s important to clean up your SKUs and ensure your “white t-shirt, small”, has a separate SKU to your “white t-shirt, medium”.
Improve loading times
The page loading speed can help reduce the bounce rate on your store. Users will get frustrated and leave your site if it loads too slowly (and their next stop will be your competitor's site). Page load speeds can reduce conversions, and Google ranks faster sites highly, so improving your site load times will be good for SEO and the user experience.
Is your head spinning yet? Don’t worry, we got you. Implement the following techniques to help reduce load times:
Compress images
High-quality product images will increase your sales—but not if they take longer to load. Try compressing images using online tools to reduce the file size by half while keeping the quality of the image intact.
{{resizer-ad="/external-components"}}
Get rid of nonessential widgets
Too many widgets, apps, and other plugins can affect the site loading times. Remove any nonessential widgets to streamline your website and keep customers’ eyes on your products.
Avoid third-party themes
We’ll say it again for the people in the back: Shopify has a large library of themes for you to choose from and customize. If you do decide to go with a third-party theme, make sure it’s not slowing down your site's loading time. If you suspect this may be an issue, contact the developer of your third-party themes to identify ways to improve the load times.
There are several Shopify apps you can use to improve page loading speeds. We recommend doing some research to find the app you can use with your Shopify store.
Optimize your Shopify product pages for conversions
When it comes to your Shopify pages, you need to do more than pick a fresh design. Customers need to be able to find the product information they want—and fast! One way to do that is by creating exceptional product pages. Your product pages don't have to be boring or one-size-fits-all, but there are a few things you need to include to improve Shopify product pages.
Below are the must-haves to create better-looking pages:
Categories and custom labels
Using labels is both important for your store’s SEO, as well as the customer experience and overall UX of your Shopify store. Shopify has an easy-to-use labeling system. By using labels effectively, customers can find exactly what they’re looking for—and if you incorporate those keywords we talked about, search engines can find what they’re looking for too!
Using the same example discussed earlier, you can break up your items by “women’s t-shirts” and “men’s t-shirts.” Or, you could use “small t-shirts,” “medium t-shirts,” and “large t-shirts”.
Choosing labels in accordance with your keywords is especially important, as it plays a significant role in how the search engine ranks your content. If you want to sell your white t-shirts, make sure you’re using the keyword “white t-shirt” in your label, so that the search engine picks it up, rather than something like “t-shirts”, for example. Always be vigilant to categorize your products effectively.It’ll save some hassle in the future!
Here are a few simple ways you can use labels and tags effectively on your Shopify store, and boost sales for your online retail business:
- Use your keywords—as we discussed, using keywords in your labels creates a consistent experience for both your potential customers and the search engine
- Use multiple tags—don’t limit yourself to one tag! Try to optimize for multiple, so that you have more chances to rank
- Adjust as needed—keep an eye on how your product listings are doing in the search engine, and modify and update as needed
Use great images
One of the first things people will spot when they get to your Shopify product page are the images. Product photography is essential because it shows your customers what to expect in the product and gives them a feel for your brand overall.
Always use high-quality images that showcase your product. Images will give customers an idea of what you are selling. Don't forget to put the right quality, size, format, and image name.
{{shopify-ad="/external-components"}}
Feature authentic customer reviews
Reviews are a form of user-generated content and an excellent way to build trust with your customers. The reviews should be from real customers. Make it possible for customers to leave reviews on your online store. Check out the many product review apps available on the Shopify App Store.
Unique description
You may be tempted to use the product description given by the manufacturer, but that’s boring and you’re not boring! Write a unique description that explains the problem your product solves. This is a great opportunity to inject your brand voice for personality and consistency sake.
Call to action
The call to action on a Shopify product page is arguably the most important part of your site: the buy button. Make sure it stands out. Use white space around the call to action, keep it center stage, and experiment with its placement, text, and style where possible (all of these experiments would be great A/B tests!).
Tips to help keep your Shopify store fresh and unique
It’s Shopify’s ecommerce world and we’re just living in it. Since its inception in 2006, Shopify has become THE ecommerce platform. Not only does it allow you to sell your products online, it has everything you need to have a successful online store. You get customer support, payment processing, inventory management, and shipping. It even allows you to customize your store with various templates and themes, and has a huge library of apps to help grow and support your business. It is the self-proclaimed all-in-one commerce platform to start, run and grow a business.
With Shopify making business 101 so easy, the real challenge most people face with ecommerce stores is standing out from the crowd. With the right tools, you can grow your ecommerce store to any level you want. Here is how to make a unique Shopify store.
Choose the best theme for your brand
Think of your website theme as your website’s wardrobe: It’s going to be the first thing people notice when they land on your site. If it’s outdated or irrelevant to your business or brand, it’s going to confuse your audience. Having the right theme will affect your website performance, user experience, atmosphere, and how your site feels. Shopify has plenty of themes that allow for further customization. Some themes are available for free, but most of them go for $140 to $180.
The templates are categorized according to industry, so you can choose the category that fits your business. When selecting a theme, there’s more to consider than just your budget; think about how you want to display your products, what your competitors are using, your necessary features, and the user experience. When it comes to the theme, don't worry too much about the color schemes and the typography. You can customize them later! If you want to get really customized, you can always get the help of a freelance developer to choose and adapt the best theme for your store.
Build brand loyalty
Every business needs customer loyalty if they are going to achieve any level of success. Repeat customers will bring more business to your online store because they are highly likely to make a purchase. Plus, they are more likely to leave positive reviews and spread the word about your brand and products if they’ve returned to purchase again and again.
So, how do you build your brand loyalty to keep customers coming back for more? Engaging with and building relationships with previous customers is the key. If you have an established rapport with your customers, you can more easily encourage them to leave reviews on your site. Positive reviews creates trust with new prospects. You'll get more customers coming to your online store in no time!
Site imagery
You can display your unique personality by stylizing your promotional and hero photos. Having a plain white background is suitable for traditional and professional sites but your imagery doesn’t (and shouldn’t) stop there.
To set your images up for the best chance at a high ranking, and thereby your Shopify store by proxy, follow these tips:
- Choose high-resolution images
- Be consistent when choosing image sizes
- Use multiple images to show your product at different angles
- Optimize your image sizes—use compressed images to reduce loading time
Put your product on a colorful background or in lifestyle settings, add models interacting with your product, and create brand and product videos. Don’t skimp on having professional photos and videos throughout your site—not just on product pages.
Copy
You can also use text to showcase your brand’s personality throughout your Shopify site. If your target audience is young, use emojis and casual lingo. Use formal language if you want to increase customer trust.
The tone you use in your copy isn’t only restricted to the home and about pages, but it also should apply to your product descriptions. Consistency is super important here so users understand and identify with who you are as a business and a brand.
Update your site regularly
Always keep your site looking fresh and maintained by updating it regularly. Updating it regularly will attract more customers. Update your site when you post a new blog, launch new promotions, add new images, or refresh the product list.
Hone your conversions
Even after building your site, you still need to optimize your target audience. This where user testing can come into play to help guide you on how to optimize conversions.
One effective user test to optimize conversion rates is A/B testing. With A/B testing, you can tailor your site according to your customers' needs by learning directly from them and their actions. Try A/B testing with:
- Navigational options
- Location of CTAs
- Phrase the labels
- Use colors for specific buttons
- Design your social media buttons
- Use images that promote conversions
Customize themes and templates
You can customize your themes to give your site extra personalization. Customize your color scheme, logos, and typography. You can also choose unique ways to show off your social media buttons.
Shopify makes it easy to swap your themes without interfering with your store operations, as long as you don't make changes to collections or products in your design. If you’re just changing up the design, that could be a community template or a Shopify theme. It’s a little more involved if you’re wanting to make significant changes to your collection or products.
To keep things running smoothly, the easier route is setting up a separate development store to develop your theme and preview the designs. Make sure the development store matches the live environment. By doing so, you can bring the new themes to the live site. Update the collections while still on the existing theme before you activate the new theme. The new page templates will not be available until your new theme has been activated.
Modify collections
Modifying your product structure can cause a butterfly effect you should be aware of. You should do a complete review of the setup and make any adjustments to the products before rolling out the theme.
The workflow below will help you make minor changes to a live site:
- Duplicate your current theme. Make sure you give the new theme an explicit name to avoid confusion.
- Make the changes to your duplicated copy.
- Save changes.
- Test the changes in the preview.
- Publish your theme.
The changes you make to the duplicated copy will not affect the published theme because the duplicated theme will pick up the changes you have made to your Shopify store. If a customer adds a new product, you can access it from the duplicate theme. If you make changes to the navigation, it will show up on the live store. You can keep products and pages until you are ready to display them. The changes you make to the navigation will be seen publicly immediately after saving them. You can keep your products and collections private until you want to make them live.
Get Shopify product content that converts
As an ecommerce store owner, you might say that your product images are a crucial part of your website—and you would be right! One of the most important parts of your product listing, and heavily weighted in the potential customer’s buying decision, you need to ensure that your product images are accurate, relevant, and reflect your product in the best possible light.
The ecommerce world is a competitive one but with the above tips and tools, you can build your store and stand out–no matter the strategy you use. With the right product, you can always build a successful Shopify store! Grow your Shopify store and launch new Shopify products with soona’s Shopify starter pack.
Optimize your images using Listing Insights
Meet Listing Insights, a groundbreaking leap forward in ecommerce visual optimization. You can now harness the power of AI to gain valuable data about how your creative performs on your Shopify store!
Here’s how to get your first soona score:
- Integrate your Shopify storefront with the soona dashboard via Product Catalog.
- Receive your soona score, a comprehensive visual content score that assesses your product listing.
- Unlock targeted creative recommendations to improve your product listing’s performance.
Shopify optimization FAQs
Can you edit the Shopify store once it’s live?
Yes! It's possible to edit your Shopify store while it's live. You can add a new theme and make changes on the fly - your customers will not see any changes until you publish it. You can make updates to your current theme by going to the online store > actions > duplicate. You can work on that duplicated version until you’re done with edits. Click publish, and the changes will be made in the live version.
Any changes you make to the collections, products, or menus in the back end will show live in those areas as long as they are linked to the current storefront. Shopify allows you to make changes without affecting the user experience of your store.
As any ecommerce business owner knows, Shopify is the ultimate place to list your products online. But in a sea of online retailers, it can be hard to stand out from the crowd. The best way to do this, of course, is to climb the rankings for your selected keywords, get the best visibility possible on your Shopify site, and have top-notch creative content if you’re looking to grow your business.
As with any website, understanding SEO and CRO is the key to optimizing for visibility and sales. Let’s get into it!
Optimize your Shopify store for SEO
Before we run through how to use SEO tactics to optimize your Shopify store, we must first understand what SEO is, and how it relates to your Shopify product listings.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing your website against a search engine’s criteria, to place higher in the rankings for chosen or keywords. At its very base level, we can use keywords in our content to tell the search engine that our website is relevant for content around those keywords. For example, a pizza restaurant would want to focus on keywords “pizza” and “restaurant” rather than irrelevant keywords like “burgers.”
So where does Shopify come into the SEO equation? As with any website, it’s important to optimize your Shopify store—and product listings—for search engines. This can be done through your product titles and descriptions, your page structure, your URLS, and so much more. We’ll give tips on how to optimize each of these as we go through this guide.
Keywords
Now that we understand the premise of SEO, we know that the first step to getting your website higher in the rankings is to select which keywords you wish to optimize your pages for. Choose keywords that are both relevant to your products and your audience.
For instance, if you’re just starting out, continuing the pizza restaurant example, choosing “pizza” as your main keyword can set you up for failure– with so much competition, your keyword will be just a drop in the ocean against big players. In this case, you might want to choose a longtail keyword such as “build your own pizza restaurant”. This effectively creates a niche, singling out customers who are looking specifically for a pizza place that allows them to build their own pizzas, rather than a pizza joint in general. That in turn increases your chance for a conversion, as they will be more invested.
Pro tip: long tail keywords are those which are longer and more specific. It’s an SEO best practice to include high volume (many searches), longtail (niche) keywords in your keyword strategy. If you’re feeling stuck, choose one “seed” keyword to start, pop it into a generator and start widening its reach.
Product titles and descriptions
As with any online retail listing, be it on Shopify, Amazon, or elsewhere, the product is only as good as its title and description. This is the key information that potential customers need when making their buying decision—and will sway those customers, if done effectively.
Now that you know about keywords, and how it affects your place in the search rankings, you can likely guess our next piece of advice! Be sure to include keywords in both your title and description, which both highlight your product, and contain key information that potential customers need when choosing what to buy.
Title
The title of the product helps search engines identify what your page is about. The product title should have the name of the product. You can also add the dimensions or size of the product. Remember, less is more here; resist the urge to overstuff the title!
Be sure to place your brand name at the beginning, and then follow with topline information:
- Product name
- Important descriptor (such as the color, the size and dimensions, or the material)
- Important features (this would be its defining feature which makes it stand out from its competitors)
When creating your title, try to avoid putting it entirely in capital letters, and exclude unnecessary information that might deter customers, or is included elsewhere, such as the price.
Once you’ve chosen your title, take a moment to step back and consider it through the eyes of potential customers. Is it unique enough to stand apart from the competition? Does it include your differentiating features and all necessary information that a potential customer would need before they click?
It’s important to review your product listing through the eyes of the customer and adjust as your audience and trends shift.
Product descriptions
When drafting your product description, keep the guidelines for writing product titles in mind, but simply expand! Include the keywords you want to rank for and speak about them in greater detail. Remember, the potential customers that are reading your description have already clicked on your title because they deemed it fit to their needs and wish to know more—so give them more!
One way you can give more information is to demonstrate how the customer might use your product. For instance, if you’re selling picture frames, you might paint a picture of a mother hanging a photo of her children in the family room, or an art collector displaying their prized pieces in a home gallery.
As with the title, make sure to keep your product descriptions up to date—including the keywords you use—as trends, and customer needs, change. If you’re feeling stuck for time, you can also use a product description generator.
Shopify store structure: H1, H2, and H3 Tags
A bit more on the technical side of SEO, it’s also important to keep your H1, H2, and H3 tags in mind when optimizing your Shopify product listings.
While you might have a title at the top of your product page, this isn’t necessarily the information that Google, or other search engines, are taking into consideration when they rank your page for the selected keyword. In other words, you need to ensure that you’re speaking the search engine’s language when you structure the content on your page.
Use H1 tags for your most important keywords, then H2 for your second-tiered keywords, and so on.
Duplicate content
One of the ways search engines can bump you down is if you have duplicate content. This goes for product page content, meta titles, and meta descriptions. This is important to consider if you have a store that sells similar products. For instance, a clothing store might have multiple product pages for “white t-shirt”, as they have this item in three sizes. To avoid this penalty, try using meta titles such as “white t-shirt, small”, “white t-shirt, medium”, and so on.
Unprofitable products
As with Amazon, the performance of your products on Shopify is considered when your store is ranked by search engine. If you have many “dead” products—or those that arn’t as profitable as the rest—it might be a good strategy to take them off of your store for a time, so as not to jeopardize the chances for your other products to take off. Sometimes, you can be penalized on this criterion for sold-out products, too.
SKUs
SKUs, or Stock Keeping Units, are a way to categorize your product listings. As with all the criteria we’ve discussed so far, this can also play a part in how your products and Shopify store rank online. Ensure that these are unique, as you don’t want to run into a similar issue as the duplicate content we talked about, earlier in this article. Again, it’s important to clean up your SKUs and ensure your “white t-shirt, small”, has a separate SKU to your “white t-shirt, medium”.
Improve loading times
The page loading speed can help reduce the bounce rate on your store. Users will get frustrated and leave your site if it loads too slowly (and their next stop will be your competitor's site). Page load speeds can reduce conversions, and Google ranks faster sites highly, so improving your site load times will be good for SEO and the user experience.
Is your head spinning yet? Don’t worry, we got you. Implement the following techniques to help reduce load times:
Compress images
High-quality product images will increase your sales—but not if they take longer to load. Try compressing images using online tools to reduce the file size by half while keeping the quality of the image intact.
{{resizer-ad="/external-components"}}
Get rid of nonessential widgets
Too many widgets, apps, and other plugins can affect the site loading times. Remove any nonessential widgets to streamline your website and keep customers’ eyes on your products.
Avoid third-party themes
We’ll say it again for the people in the back: Shopify has a large library of themes for you to choose from and customize. If you do decide to go with a third-party theme, make sure it’s not slowing down your site's loading time. If you suspect this may be an issue, contact the developer of your third-party themes to identify ways to improve the load times.
There are several Shopify apps you can use to improve page loading speeds. We recommend doing some research to find the app you can use with your Shopify store.
Optimize your Shopify product pages for conversions
When it comes to your Shopify pages, you need to do more than pick a fresh design. Customers need to be able to find the product information they want—and fast! One way to do that is by creating exceptional product pages. Your product pages don't have to be boring or one-size-fits-all, but there are a few things you need to include to improve Shopify product pages.
Below are the must-haves to create better-looking pages:
Categories and custom labels
Using labels is both important for your store’s SEO, as well as the customer experience and overall UX of your Shopify store. Shopify has an easy-to-use labeling system. By using labels effectively, customers can find exactly what they’re looking for—and if you incorporate those keywords we talked about, search engines can find what they’re looking for too!
Using the same example discussed earlier, you can break up your items by “women’s t-shirts” and “men’s t-shirts.” Or, you could use “small t-shirts,” “medium t-shirts,” and “large t-shirts”.
Choosing labels in accordance with your keywords is especially important, as it plays a significant role in how the search engine ranks your content. If you want to sell your white t-shirts, make sure you’re using the keyword “white t-shirt” in your label, so that the search engine picks it up, rather than something like “t-shirts”, for example. Always be vigilant to categorize your products effectively.It’ll save some hassle in the future!
Here are a few simple ways you can use labels and tags effectively on your Shopify store, and boost sales for your online retail business:
- Use your keywords—as we discussed, using keywords in your labels creates a consistent experience for both your potential customers and the search engine
- Use multiple tags—don’t limit yourself to one tag! Try to optimize for multiple, so that you have more chances to rank
- Adjust as needed—keep an eye on how your product listings are doing in the search engine, and modify and update as needed
Use great images
One of the first things people will spot when they get to your Shopify product page are the images. Product photography is essential because it shows your customers what to expect in the product and gives them a feel for your brand overall.
Always use high-quality images that showcase your product. Images will give customers an idea of what you are selling. Don't forget to put the right quality, size, format, and image name.
{{shopify-ad="/external-components"}}
Feature authentic customer reviews
Reviews are a form of user-generated content and an excellent way to build trust with your customers. The reviews should be from real customers. Make it possible for customers to leave reviews on your online store. Check out the many product review apps available on the Shopify App Store.
Unique description
You may be tempted to use the product description given by the manufacturer, but that’s boring and you’re not boring! Write a unique description that explains the problem your product solves. This is a great opportunity to inject your brand voice for personality and consistency sake.
Call to action
The call to action on a Shopify product page is arguably the most important part of your site: the buy button. Make sure it stands out. Use white space around the call to action, keep it center stage, and experiment with its placement, text, and style where possible (all of these experiments would be great A/B tests!).
Tips to help keep your Shopify store fresh and unique
It’s Shopify’s ecommerce world and we’re just living in it. Since its inception in 2006, Shopify has become THE ecommerce platform. Not only does it allow you to sell your products online, it has everything you need to have a successful online store. You get customer support, payment processing, inventory management, and shipping. It even allows you to customize your store with various templates and themes, and has a huge library of apps to help grow and support your business. It is the self-proclaimed all-in-one commerce platform to start, run and grow a business.
With Shopify making business 101 so easy, the real challenge most people face with ecommerce stores is standing out from the crowd. With the right tools, you can grow your ecommerce store to any level you want. Here is how to make a unique Shopify store.
Choose the best theme for your brand
Think of your website theme as your website’s wardrobe: It’s going to be the first thing people notice when they land on your site. If it’s outdated or irrelevant to your business or brand, it’s going to confuse your audience. Having the right theme will affect your website performance, user experience, atmosphere, and how your site feels. Shopify has plenty of themes that allow for further customization. Some themes are available for free, but most of them go for $140 to $180.
The templates are categorized according to industry, so you can choose the category that fits your business. When selecting a theme, there’s more to consider than just your budget; think about how you want to display your products, what your competitors are using, your necessary features, and the user experience. When it comes to the theme, don't worry too much about the color schemes and the typography. You can customize them later! If you want to get really customized, you can always get the help of a freelance developer to choose and adapt the best theme for your store.
Build brand loyalty
Every business needs customer loyalty if they are going to achieve any level of success. Repeat customers will bring more business to your online store because they are highly likely to make a purchase. Plus, they are more likely to leave positive reviews and spread the word about your brand and products if they’ve returned to purchase again and again.
So, how do you build your brand loyalty to keep customers coming back for more? Engaging with and building relationships with previous customers is the key. If you have an established rapport with your customers, you can more easily encourage them to leave reviews on your site. Positive reviews creates trust with new prospects. You'll get more customers coming to your online store in no time!
Site imagery
You can display your unique personality by stylizing your promotional and hero photos. Having a plain white background is suitable for traditional and professional sites but your imagery doesn’t (and shouldn’t) stop there.
To set your images up for the best chance at a high ranking, and thereby your Shopify store by proxy, follow these tips:
- Choose high-resolution images
- Be consistent when choosing image sizes
- Use multiple images to show your product at different angles
- Optimize your image sizes—use compressed images to reduce loading time
Put your product on a colorful background or in lifestyle settings, add models interacting with your product, and create brand and product videos. Don’t skimp on having professional photos and videos throughout your site—not just on product pages.
Copy
You can also use text to showcase your brand’s personality throughout your Shopify site. If your target audience is young, use emojis and casual lingo. Use formal language if you want to increase customer trust.
The tone you use in your copy isn’t only restricted to the home and about pages, but it also should apply to your product descriptions. Consistency is super important here so users understand and identify with who you are as a business and a brand.
Update your site regularly
Always keep your site looking fresh and maintained by updating it regularly. Updating it regularly will attract more customers. Update your site when you post a new blog, launch new promotions, add new images, or refresh the product list.
Hone your conversions
Even after building your site, you still need to optimize your target audience. This where user testing can come into play to help guide you on how to optimize conversions.
One effective user test to optimize conversion rates is A/B testing. With A/B testing, you can tailor your site according to your customers' needs by learning directly from them and their actions. Try A/B testing with:
- Navigational options
- Location of CTAs
- Phrase the labels
- Use colors for specific buttons
- Design your social media buttons
- Use images that promote conversions
Customize themes and templates
You can customize your themes to give your site extra personalization. Customize your color scheme, logos, and typography. You can also choose unique ways to show off your social media buttons.
Shopify makes it easy to swap your themes without interfering with your store operations, as long as you don't make changes to collections or products in your design. If you’re just changing up the design, that could be a community template or a Shopify theme. It’s a little more involved if you’re wanting to make significant changes to your collection or products.
To keep things running smoothly, the easier route is setting up a separate development store to develop your theme and preview the designs. Make sure the development store matches the live environment. By doing so, you can bring the new themes to the live site. Update the collections while still on the existing theme before you activate the new theme. The new page templates will not be available until your new theme has been activated.
Modify collections
Modifying your product structure can cause a butterfly effect you should be aware of. You should do a complete review of the setup and make any adjustments to the products before rolling out the theme.
The workflow below will help you make minor changes to a live site:
- Duplicate your current theme. Make sure you give the new theme an explicit name to avoid confusion.
- Make the changes to your duplicated copy.
- Save changes.
- Test the changes in the preview.
- Publish your theme.
The changes you make to the duplicated copy will not affect the published theme because the duplicated theme will pick up the changes you have made to your Shopify store. If a customer adds a new product, you can access it from the duplicate theme. If you make changes to the navigation, it will show up on the live store. You can keep products and pages until you are ready to display them. The changes you make to the navigation will be seen publicly immediately after saving them. You can keep your products and collections private until you want to make them live.
Get Shopify product content that converts
As an ecommerce store owner, you might say that your product images are a crucial part of your website—and you would be right! One of the most important parts of your product listing, and heavily weighted in the potential customer’s buying decision, you need to ensure that your product images are accurate, relevant, and reflect your product in the best possible light.
The ecommerce world is a competitive one but with the above tips and tools, you can build your store and stand out–no matter the strategy you use. With the right product, you can always build a successful Shopify store! Grow your Shopify store and launch new Shopify products with soona’s Shopify starter pack.
Optimize your images using Listing Insights
Meet Listing Insights, a groundbreaking leap forward in ecommerce visual optimization. You can now harness the power of AI to gain valuable data about how your creative performs on your Shopify store!
Here’s how to get your first soona score:
- Integrate your Shopify storefront with the soona dashboard via Product Catalog.
- Receive your soona score, a comprehensive visual content score that assesses your product listing.
- Unlock targeted creative recommendations to improve your product listing’s performance.
Shopify optimization FAQs
Can you edit the Shopify store once it’s live?
Yes! It's possible to edit your Shopify store while it's live. You can add a new theme and make changes on the fly - your customers will not see any changes until you publish it. You can make updates to your current theme by going to the online store > actions > duplicate. You can work on that duplicated version until you’re done with edits. Click publish, and the changes will be made in the live version.
Any changes you make to the collections, products, or menus in the back end will show live in those areas as long as they are linked to the current storefront. Shopify allows you to make changes without affecting the user experience of your store.
