Shopify has become pretty popular over the past years, and thousands of businesses have opened up an online store using it.
Most Shopify store owners like to use Facebook ads, Google ads, or YouTube ads to drive traffic to their store. And that is also what most influencers teach.
However, in today’s article, I’m going to show you how to get sales on Shopify without ads. So, if you are new and don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on ads or have simply been looking for some alternative marketing methods, you’ll want to stick through this article with me.
There are quite a few ways you can get sales on Shopify without running ads. However, my personal favorite method on how to get sales on Shopify without ads is leveraging Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
SEO is a process that allows us to gain organic traffic from search engines like Google without having to pay for ads. This process also works for any other type of E-commerce store or website, not just Shopify.
How Shopify SEO Works
As I’m sure you know, Google is a search engine that lists all the websites on the internet and shows the user the most relevant result based on the keyword they enter.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your pages such as your blog post or even product pages to rank in search engines. We do this by creating our pages so that Google understands what they are about and then matches them to the search phrase that the user types in.
Don’t worry if this all sounds a little confusing, as I will go into more detail about how we do this later on in this article.
A Real-Life Example of an eCommerce Shopify Store Using SEO
For this example, we’re going to use the keyword “Charcoal Facial Cleanser.” Again, people looking for this product will be typing it into Google to find it. As you may know, this has become quite a popular product for E-commerce stores to sell, so I think it makes an excellent example.
If we scroll down a little and look at the results, all of these pages that you see have performed SEO, so that Google ranks them there. All of them did not have to pay for any ads to get those spots. Google has just found those pages and matched them to what the user has looked for.
These pages ranking did not have to pay a single dime on ads.
What they did instead was research what people are typing into Google and build content around it.
However, SEO is a long-term process, and it does take a lot of initial effort to build up authority so that Google trusts you. For this reason, if you’re just starting, you’ll want to look for keywords where you aren’t competing with major companies.
For example, if you are starting and find a keyword that you’d like to rank for, but the first page is just full of major companies like CBS and Amazon, it’s probably a red flag. The reason being that they are major companies and have built up more trust and authority, which you can’t compete with.
Don’t worry; I will explain how to find keywords a little later on in this article.
Benefits of SEO For Your Shopify Store
SEO is one of the best traffic sources there is, as it has a range of benefits that help grow your Shopify store. Below, I’ve explained the top 3 benefits of using SEO for your Shopify store.
Evergreen Content Brings In Consistent Traffic
When you create evergreen content around your products, it continuously brings in traffic. Whereas if you use ads, the second you stop paying, you stop receiving traffic.
With SEO, however, you can create a piece of content like a blog post, put it out there, and it can bring you traffic every single day for free and continuously. Pretty cool, right?
Builds Brand Awareness
Another significant benefit of SEO is that it helps you build brand awareness. Your target audience is obviously using Google to search for keywords related to your products. SEO allows you to position yourself right there with content that educates your audience and introduces them to your brand.
This ultimately helps your brand grow tremendously.
It Increases Your Conversions
Another cool thing about SEO is that it can improve your overall brand image and increase conversions.
One of the reasons for this is the informational content on your site, as it helps educate your readers. Now, they’re more likely to feel positive about your brand, which makes them much more likely to sign up for your email newsletters and purchase.
How To Perform SEO For Your Shopify Store
SEO is quite a broad topic, meaning I can’t show you everything in one blog post. However, I would like to explain the general outline of how you can rank in Google and generate organic traffic.
So, as I mentioned earlier, there is a lot of research involved in SEO. In fact, we can get some extremely beneficial estimates of how many people are searching for a keyword, how hard it is to rank & more.
Various software pieces help us with this, but here are some of my favorites:
- SEMrush (This is a paid comprehensive all-in-one tool that will help us with most of the research)
Browser Extensions:
- Keyword Everywhere (Paid, but low cost)
- Ahrefs (Paid, part of an Ahrefs subscription)
Alternatively, you can also use the Surfer Chrome extension, which will do a similar thing but is free.
The SEO Process explained
So, here’s a broad outline of how we rank in search engines:
- We perform keyword research using the tools mentioned and target profitable keyword
- We create optimized content around the keywords that we can compete for
- Google eventually finds that content and ranks us
Then, depending on the difficulty and competition, we may also perform some off-page SEO, for example, by building backlinks. That’s later down the line, though, so don’t worry about it right now.
Keyword Research & Competitor Analysis
The first step of the process is finding keywords that you’d like to rank for.
Using Keywords Everywhere, you can head over to Google and start typing in words related to your business. If you’re not sure what terms to type in, just put yourself into the mind of your target audience as if you were looking for your products.
Once you have done so, you will see the organic results of your competitors. There’s a couple of ways you can find keywords from here, which I have explained below.
Keywords Everywhere – If you look on the right side of your screen, you’ll see Keywords everywhere will give you a load of suggestions that you can use.
Stealing Your Competitors Keywords – You can also take the sites’ URLs in the results and paste them into SEMrush. The tool will then spit out all the keywords that are bringing them traffic, which you can later create content on and rank for. So, you’re practically stealing their traffic.
Google itself – Google can also be a great way to find additional keywords. If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll see that it will show you “Searches related to (keyword)”. Google wouldn’t suggest these out of thin air, meaning people are searching for them. So, they can also be great keywords to target.
Finding Low Competition Keywords
You should also find keywords that aren’t too competitive, especially when you are starting. When you look for keywords, you’ll want to make sure that the pages ranking on the first page are Shopify stores or smaller blogs.
Because if you try to compete with huge companies like Amazon, CBS & anything similar, it will probably be too hard, especially when you’re starting. Again, this is because they’ve had years to build up their authority, while you don’t have any yet.
Suppose you’re a complete beginner; it’s best to go for long-tail keywords, i.e., keywords that have 3 words or more. These will have a lot less competition and will help you build up authority.
Examples of Keywords
As you can imagine, there are endless keywords that you can target. But I just wanted to show you some types that you can include in your keyword strategy.
Buyer-Intent Keywords – These are keywords such as “Buy X product”. As you’d guess, the conversions are very high on these types of keywords, but so will the competition. Still, they can be extremely profitable, so I thought I’d let you know about them.
Informational Keywords – Informational keywords inform the user about something. It may be the product or the topic in general. Often, there is also slight buyer-intent behind these. For example, on keywords such as “How To Solve X Problem,” if you present your product as the solution, the conversions would probably be relatively high. Or, someone searching for “Benefits of X Product” is also quite likely to purchase.
Informational keywords are great, as they can introduce visitors to your brand, and you can link to your products or opt-in pages to generate conversions.
Creating Content For Your Shopify Brand
Finally, once you have your keywords, you’ll want to create blog posts around them. I recommend learning general on-page SEO best practices first, so you understand how to optimize a page.
Once you’ve learned the basics of on-page SEO, the best way to rank your articles is to mimic the content strategy of the sites already ranking on the first page.
So, you optimize your pages in a similar way to how they’ve done, and then you’ll rank in a similar position and will be able to steal their traffic.
Final Thoughts
That’s it! I hope you have enjoyed this article on how to get sales on Shopify without ads.
I understand that you might still have a lot of questions about SEO, and that’s totally normal. But, it is quite a broad field that I couldn’t just explain in one blog post.
If you would like to learn more about SEO and related topics, make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel, where I upload weekly.
