Content
5 Steps to Promote Your Online Store on Shopify
August 14, 2024
18 min
Shopify is a service that provides tools to create your online store. Shopify allows you to sell products on the newly created site, keep records and analytics, and set up other sales channels, such as social networks, email, contextual advertising, and marketplaces.
In this article, Promodo’s Senior PPC and SEO specialists revealed peculiarities on how to promote Shopify store.
Shopify works on a subscription basis. The service provides basic tools for creating a website, personalized free and paid themes for personalizing pages, a dashboard for analyzing products and orders, internal analytics, and integration with social platforms and marketplaces. Convenience is that you are independent of developers and can make changes on the fly, as well as accessibility - Shopify's basic subscription costs $39 per month. More expensive subscription formats have more employee accounts with store access, advanced analytics, and a lower fee percentage.
But even with a basic tariff, you can create an online store with an optimized website. You must add your email, password, and store name during registration. Shopify will automatically generate a URL based on the name containing the domain "myshopify.com". However, it can and should be changed by purchasing a personalized domain or adding an existing one.
Shopify offers to buy a domain directly on the platform. It should reflect the brand identity, be unique, and at the same time, be easy to memorize.
The main keyword in the domain can positively affect the promotion of the site.
To buy a domain on Shopify, go to the "Settings" menu and select the "Domain" section. In the search box, enter the name you want and choose the options Shopify offers. The average cost starts at $15 per year, but prices can reach more than $60. If you already have a domain, you must associate it with the account and update the DNS settings.
After registering the store, we add products. For any of the Shopify plans, the number of pages is unlimited. To add a product, click on "Products" in the left-side menu.
The product card includes:
You can also add product variations if, for example, you have a different color or size. Don't neglect this setting if you have multiple variations, as Shopify offers to add a meta description for each product variation. Accordingly, if you sell socks, and a person searches for "red socks" - your product may appear in the Google results. We will talk about how to set up the SEO product description to better promote Shopify store below.
You can customize the platforms on which your product will be sold. Shopify offers several options:
You can add and configure sales channels in the side menu. In the future, to choose a sales channel at the product level, you will need to check the box on the product page in the menu on the right.
When promoting Shopify store, you must select the desired theme—among free templates or paid offers. Small businesses often choose free templates because they can be customized to their own brand—change the color and font, add a photo or video, customize each page, and arrange elements.
Besides the main page and product collection, you need to add others. They will help to better optimize the site, and will also be useful to users.
Brand history/About us. You can write a separate block on the main page or create a new one. If you are a small business, your story will become an additional level of contact with the consumer, and a really exciting story will help form a first impression and attract a person.
Contact information. Another important page should include email for feedback, contacts for collaboration, address or social media links.
FAQ. You can prepare a page with ready-made answers to questions that customers often have. For example, if you are a craft brand offering the latest product to the consumer. In order not to use extra space for the description on the product page, all important questions can be collected separately.
Company policy. Last but not least, prepare a page with privacy policy, terms of delivery and returns. This information improves the user experience and site ranking.
Once you’ve created your online store, the question remain How to market your Shopify store? The easiest way to increase traffic to your online store is to optimize your content so that the search engine finds it relevant to user queries related to your products. That is why a large part of the work of promoting an online store is on Shopify SEO.
Since you're "renting" a site on Shopify, you don't have access to all the developer tools. This makes it difficult to work with technical SEO, but gives the potential to work with keywords, meta descriptions, blog, and content of your online store.
While editing the page's content, you can add formatting, headings, upload photos, and insert videos. Shopify automatically generates a page title and meta description based on the content you enter the page details section.
By default, the page title is used for the title tag, and the H1 and description are used for the meta description.
Page titles are an important ranking factor. They provide search engines with information about the page's content and often appear as the title of search results.
Meta descriptions often appear under the title in search results. They should summarize page content for potential customers and can help improve conversions to your site.
You need to be careful when changing the H1 pages in Shopify. The URL is formed based on the title—when the title changes, the address will also change, which can have negative consequences for SEO. Therefore, we recommend that you save the old address during changes so it is not updated.
In the same way, meta tags can be written at the level of the product or collection card. To do this, first:
Conduct keyword research: You can do this with Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, or SEMrush.
Analyze the search volume: After finding relevant keywords, evaluate the competition and add only those with high search volume and medium or low competition to the product meta description.
You can find these settings at the bottom of the product page by opening the "Search engine listing" section.
Website speed is one issues to consider when marketing for Shopify store, as it has site speed optimization limitations. It also complicates the development of the online store itself, which can become slower with the increase in the category of products or new plugins. Since there is no access to the site code, you can only use plugins from Shopify or do the optimization yourself. You can find some apps in the Shopify app store.
We also recommend optimizing pictures from the beginning of working with the catalog. Prepare high-quality, maximally compressed images. And don't forget to add alt text. The maximum length allowed is 512 characters, but 125 or less is recommended.
Shopify has its own Shopify app store that makes your work easier. Here are some plugins that will help analyze the search engine optimization of your online store.
Plug in SEO: This application helps you find and fix SEO problems, provides recommendations and automatic fixes.
SEO Manager: Allows you to control basic SEO elements such as meta tags, schemes and URL structure.
Smart SEO: Automates the addition of meta tags and structured data to improve search engine visibility.
One answer to the question of how to generate sales on Shopify is internal plugins. With their help, you can quickly combine the data of the advertising account with the online store, monitor analytics, and even configure campaigns from the Shopify account.
To add Facebook and Instagram as sales channels, you need to download the official plugin from the Shopify App Store.
Thanks to Facebook Pixel and Conversion API, all data will be collected. This is a very convenient setting supported by Shopify that helps improve the accuracy of conversion tracking and optimize ad campaigns.
The next important setting is pixel. You need to connect it to your Shopify store or create a new one in order to track the actions of users on your website when they come to it from Facebook or Instagram ads. What does the Pixel do?
If you don't have a Meta Pixel, you can create one after connecting your Meta account to your Shopify store. To do this, it is enough to go to the "Facebook and Instagram" plugin, which will be located on the left side toolbar after downloading.
After that, in the plugin settings, scroll down to the Pixel settings section. Choose an existing one or create a new one thanks to the corresponding button. You need to agree to the data transfer and wait a few seconds for Shopify to merge the Pixel.
If you plan to run ad campaigns on Google, you'll also need to link your Shopify account to your Google Business Profile first. You can do this by downloading the official plugin in the Shopify App store.
The integration will allow you to run advertising campaigns in Google Ads, display products in Google Shopping and automatically upload them to Google Merchant Center. You can also run advertising campaigns on YouTube.
After you click Download, you'll need to sign in to the Google Account linked to your business and Google Merchant Center.
You can run ads directly from Shopify or through Google.
“From my experience, it is better to start advertising a new store in Meta. This is due to the fact that Meta has a better optimization algorithm for conversions - you will get the first statistics in the first 3-4 days of the campaign. Google is slower in this regard. If the advertising account and online store are new, it needs about a week to collect statistics.
But Shopify sites have one big advantage — the level of trust. Meta and Google understand that Shopify has its own strict verification policy and does not allow questionable businesses. I had a case of an adult products store on Shopify that Google missed even in Shopping. Yes, he didn't really "like" us for the theme of the store, but there were no questions about the site itself”.
Volodymyr Tomashevskyi, Senior PPC specialist at Promodo
One of the non-obvious ideas of how to market Shopify store is making data-based decisions with analytical information. Shopify offers internal analytics where you can track key metrics for your online store.
You can view the analytics by going to the Analytics section on the left side menu.
Shopify can also be integrated with Google Analytics. This integration will give you a deeper understanding of:
To integrate GA4 with Shopify, you need to:
Next, you will need the already installed "Google and YouTube" plugin.
In the left side menu, find the section Online store and Preferences. Next, click on the Google Analytics block 👉 "Manage pixel here" 👉 connect your Google account. In the "Your Google Analytics Property" section, add a tag for the GA4 property that you want to connect to your Shopify store. That is, the one you created from scratch or already exists.
One of the effective ideas of how to get sales on Shopify is connecting the business to social media. Let’s view how to do it on different platforms.
If your business has social media pages, you can add icons to your Shopify site. This will improve users' interaction with your brand and make it easier for them to find it.
To do this, you need:
For this, we will need the same official Meta plugin that we talked about when setting up paid channels. Once you've connected your Meta business account, you'll have access to Instagram and Facebook stores where you can sell your Shopify products. To do this, you will need to select the desired products and wait for Meta's approval.
It's important that the business account you connect to Shopify matches your business's social media, and that your Instagram and Facebook accounts are linked.
If you work with a foreign audience, you should consider creating a business account on Pinterest and integrating it with your Shopify store. Why is this important?
Also, read Promodo's case study for an American premium modern furniture retailer, where we found Pinterest to arrange significant social traffic.
Shopify is a convenient and affordable tool for business owners, but it has many nuances at the start. Promodo specialists will help you with SEO, prepare a split for working with paid channels and set up analytics. Contact us!
Journalist at Promodo
For over 4 years, I have been working as a journalist in the communications and marketing industry. I help brands communicate effectively through written content, engage with market experts, and create professional materials on topics related to business and marketing, sharing insights on working with marketing tools.
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