An open guide to Shopify store owners hungry for expert help with their SEO…
“How To Get More Free Traffic From Google To Your Shopify Store…”
SEO Expert Trusted By Shopify Staff Reveals His Previously Hidden Step-By-Step Strategy To Bolster Sales From Google Search…
You have a good store, good products, and good customer service.
…but you don’t understand the technicalities of SEO. You’ve probably been burned by some agency or freelancer in the past that was more useful than a bucket with a hole at the bottom.
Search-engine optimisation (SEO) is the best way to get more people for free to your Shopify store. It is the process of optimizing your on-page and off-page to get your store showing in the top search results of Google. (I’ll soon explain how exactly to do this so your flat sales line curls up.)
A Google retail study found 75% of people turn to search engines to learn about products. Search engines are used more in online purchases than any other source like social networks, apps, or deal sites.
This begs the question: are you appearing first in Google’s search results for your best keywords so people buy from you?
If not, you should consider working with a Shopify SEO expert to drive revenue through Google search.
My name is Joshua Uebergang and I am the Head of Strategy at Digital Darts, a certified Shopify Marketing Expert who specializes in search marketing.
When Shopify Staff Have A Problem, They Turn To Us
In 2018 we worked directly with Shopify to consult on improving the SEO of their whole ecommerce platform. Shopify themselves listen to what we do and teach.
When Shopify Plus Merchant success managers have a store stuck on SEO, they refer them to us. I’ve been told by staff that the guide I wrote, The Expert Guide To Shopify SEO circulates the Shopify offices.
The short of it is: we are damn good at what we do.
I’ve seen the same stories time-and-time again. A business gets fed up with the technical problems of Magento (or some other platform). They move to Shopify or they have already moved, and see the decline in organic traffic as they freak out. Other stores may have an SEO agency, but have doubts about their ability to work optimally with Shopify. Some other stores just want to know their SEO is in the best hands.
Shopify is our bread and butter. Nothing surprises us. It has unique qualities about it that require attention. We’ve taken stores trotting along like an injured horse to help them win the Google race with our methodology.
We do this with an SEO system I developed called “STEP” to secure more visitors and sales leveraging organic search for your Shopify store.
The Step-by-Step SEO Strategy to Rapidly Grow Your Shopify Sales
You may have heard SEO is about using keywords in the right places. Keyword research is foundational to a good strategy but is only 5% of ecommerce SEO.
World-class SEO is not about the number of backlinks or your keyword count. A good ecommerce SEO strategy uses technical optimisations, content, and relationships. The end result is a load of sales driven by bloggers and the media who mention your store.
Bloggers and media will link to your store to boost your SEO rankings and drive referral traffic when SEO is done well.
Here’s our step-by-step SEO strategy and approach to get you more revenue from Google organic search:
1. Strategy
- A discussion of what you want to achieve with the SEO service. What will make you filled with joy? You understand exactly what to expect.
- Review analytics to see your current website traffic, rankings, and opportunities.
- Research search phrases your potential customers or clients use. Different phrases represent different stages of a user’s “think-see-do” buying process. You may rank number one or have keywords you want to rank for, but do they result or assist in sales? We use a variety of modern tools and paid services, a decade of online marketing knowledge, and the good old tactic of human conversation with you to discover your golden keywords.
- Analyse competitors. What will it take to get where you want?
- Define a timeline of goals and results. “What gets measured gets managed,” said management expert Peter Drucker.
2. Technical
a. On-page SEO
On-page optimisation refers to changes that happen on your website.
- Content creation. Good product guides, reviews, videos, and related articles in your industry is the most reliable driver of visitors and sales for our clients. If you blog, you learn how to make it get you sales.
- Content optimisation. Includes meta descriptions, title tags, and unique product descriptions. All changes are made to improve SEO and even conversions. We know how to write response-inducing copy too.
- Page creation. Sometimes it’s best to set-up a new page for a particular keyword if your website does not have an appropriate page. We then craft its content to achieve SEO goals and have it suit your business. Door-way pages are avoided.
- How can the site be made more trustworthy? There needs to be a clear support page, contact page, and shipping and returns policy. Google looks for these trust factors.
- Bonus: Analytics setup and adjustments to accurately track revenue and key performance indicators. You learn exactly what works to create rapid growth upwards of 100%+.
- Full check and setup of crawlability so every page on your store has maximum chance to get you visitors.
- Image optimization. Includes renaming of files with a keyword focus and alt tag optimisation.
- Canonicalization of URLs. Non-www, index.php, and various versions of the same pages are consolidated.
- URL architecture.
- Correct broken links, other links that produce undesirable response codes, and crawl errors seen by Google. This also helps visitors have a better experience on your website.
- Schema markup. Very helpful for ecommerce stores to display data like pricing, reviews, and videos in search results to boost your click-through rate.
- On-page link renaming and creation. Good internal links are one of many on-page SEO factors.
- Speed optimizations. Includes image compression, g-zip compression, browser expiry times, and caching.
- Social meta data setup to optimize pages for sales and SEO when they are shared on social networks.
b. Off-page SEO
A link from another site to yours in the eyes of Google is a thumbs up that your site is popular, is trustworthy, and should rank higher. Most SEO strategies and companies fail at this stage with cheap outsourcing – and never achieve the visitors and revenue because of it. Your off-page SEO includes:
- Quality links through good content, relationships, and discussion. Build relationships with people because people link to you, not websites. Always ask, is this link for visitors or SEO? It should be for visitors.
- Outreach to websites that mention you but do not link.
- Blogger collaboration with reviews and giveaways.
- Public relations. We pay over $6,000 annually to access an up-to-date media database for our SEO clients to help with their public relations. Let me tell you, nothing is as good for SEO as getting mentioned on a major news website. It’s hard to get mentioned, but we’ve been trained to pitch well by journalists through reputable industry training programs and have all the contacts you can dream of.
- Reputation management. Did you know Google grades how healthy your online store is by what people say about it all over the Internet? Your reputation needs to be positive.
3. Evolve
- Tracking and reporting. Our in-house tracking software monitors your rankings on a daily basis. As an SEO client, you receive access to a simple private online portal where you view all key data to track SEO performance. You also get a monthly report via email. Everything is accountable.
- Optimisation. A good SEO strategy refines itself. What keywords get traffic and sales? How can this be further built? The longer your campaign runs, the stronger your presence becomes.
- Expansion. What new keywords can be pursued? What pages and content need to be created?
- Keep ahead. Your competitors do SEO too. Never stop your SEO strategy.
4. Protection
- Education of best SEO practices like avoiding common SEO mistakes. Google’s algorithms perpetually change. Know the best practices which remain constant and protect your rankings. Sleep easy knowing your SEO strategy is right.
- Training. You get training to further grow from organic search (if you want) for an extra nudge.
- What Google changes are upcoming or were released that affect you? We look out for you so you can relax and profit.
We work through this STEP strategy to drive you more organic visitors and sales. Using our experience, we pick what will have the most impact for your store then focus on that before moving onto the next vital sign.
How Do You Know If This is Right for You?
- You need more visitors to your store to increase sales
- You have a Shopify store
- People are searching for your products or the problems your products solve
- You want to work with a Shopify ecommerce expert who will advise you on all things with your store
- Profit is your goal in doing the SEO campaign
Every month you get a clear report explaining what was done, what needs to be done, and the results achieved. You know exactly how you’re going to see how much more revenue was driven from the SEO work.
Will You Finally Get The Traffic You Deserve To Your Store?
Or will you continue to let your traffic flat-line? Change for the better. Now’s your opportunity to work with a Shopify expert to grow your store. There’s no cheap junior fresh out of university.
If you’d like Digital Darts to become your secret Shopify weapon, get started below. Prices are in Australian dollars. I recommend the National plan for most stores to get great SEO results:
- The SEO package perfect for Shopify stores that ship internationally.
- 30-minute kick-off call to understand your business and your customers
- Full on-page and technical SEO
- Complete content strategy and creation
- Comprehensive off-page SEO
- Ongoing consultation and strategy review
- In-depth monthly report
- Managed by Shopify Expert
- 100% guarantee
- The most popular choice for Shopify stores to dominate Google.
- 30-minute kick-off call to understand your business and your customers
- Full on-page and technical SEO
- Complete content strategy
- Off-page SEO
- Ongoing consultation and strategy review
- In-depth monthly report
- Managed by Shopify Expert
- 100% guarantee
- The simplest option for Shopify stores wanting basic but good SEO.
- 30-minute kick-off call to understand your business and your customers
- Full on-page and technical SEO
- No content strategy
- Basic off-page SEO
- In-depth monthly report
- Managed by Shopify Expert
- 100% guarantee
Some Client Comments
Since working with Digital Darts, year-to-date, we’ve seen 60% increase in our revenue. Considering we’ve been operating since 2012, and we’re established, that’s massive growth. We’ve also seen our number 1-3 keywords jump significantly higher than what we initially set as a goal. So it was 250 that we wanted, and we’re now at 1500 in 1-3 which is enormous.
I’m Emma Filliponi, E-commerce manager at Blue Bungalow. We are an online fashion retailer established in 2012. We’ve got one retail store and two websites. One for our New Zealand customer base and we’ve got our main site, which services Australia and the rest of the world.
We were working with another SEO agency and we had been recommended Digital Darts to handle the migration from Magento over to Shopify. So that’s when we started working together. But that went so smoothly we saw relatively no drop in sessions at all and actually saw an uplift in revenue post-migration, which was amazing because there are horror stories about people losing their traffic when you don’t handle migration properly. So it was with that experience that we then decided that Digital Darts was really great for us and we’ve been now working together for 12 months.
What I like most is the transparency in terms of what work is actually being done. It’s so common that people would work with a freelance SEO specialist who doesn’t want to have any face-to-face contact and you actually don’t know what’s being done to achieve those results. With Digital Darts, we’re in contact frequently during the month. I know exactly what’s being done. I can see the tangible results. It’s just so easy to work together and there’s no set contact hours that we have to abide by. I would recommend anybody who has a Shopify website who is wanting someone who is open and honest to work with Digital Darts.
The growth that we’ve experienced means that I don’t have to worry about SEO. It’s in safe hands. Every month I brief the direction. That gets done and then when I look at the results, it’s happened without me having to worry about it. Before working with Digital Darts, I was getting quite into the detail of SEO which can take days out of your life. So to not have to have that burden me and take my focus away from the other things is amazing.
Emma Filliponi
BlueBungalow.com.au
I have always been hesitant to hire anyone for SEO. However Josh is unique in the SEO field. He uses his expert knowledge of Adwords to formulate an SEO strategy that focuses on ROI and keywords that convert to higher profits not just more traffic. In 4 months, Josh has us ranked at #1 on Google for the most profitable keywords in a highly competitive space. Looking forward to working with Josh for a long time.
Casey Coleman
CaliWhite.co.uk
We migrated to Shopify and worried that our multi-regional stores were improperly setup for SEO and Analytics.
Joshua from Digital Darts did an SEO audit and provided a clear custom written report that showed the various SEO best practices in the stores that needed adjustment. He then made the technical fixes to make both our stores more Google-friendly. After 2 months the organic traffic to our Canadian store has grown 358% with continued growth to 751% after 5 months.
I appreciate working with someone who delivers the result when I was confused. I recommend Digital Darts to anyone who suspects they are not making the most out of their Shopify.
Jon
TonicLiving.com
We worked with other SEO companies who failed to improve organic rankings and sales. They also didn’t provide any transparent reports.
Digital Darts helped us to increase our website traffic 114% and sales 129% through SEO in less than one year. Surprisingly our conversion rate increased at the same time by 31%. That means more quality traffic to our store. I loved the transparency and the most important is the monthly report with exact, clear, readable data.
We operate our store from a non-English speaking country so we had a language barrier on the website, collections, and product descriptions. After on-page SEO work we have a clearer store that ranks higher and converts better. The Digital Darts team are real Shopify experts able to mentor us with critical business questions about Shopify.
If you want to get long-term, high quality, and reportable traffic to your website, you should work with Digital Darts.
Yusuf Prens
GalenLeather.com
FAQ
Click to view answers to frequently asked questions about our SEO service:
How are you different from other SEO companies?
You can see it in our strategy above. That’s how we’re different. Other companies will not do all that matters often only working on basic SEO like title tags and keywords. We are Shopify specialists.
Most SEO companies have it wrong. They focus on rankings, not revenue. You should not care about extra visitors unless they convert into real dollars. It’s about generating the right kind of traffic. You get a highly personalized SEO service for your store where we zoom in on what matters to get you the best results in the quickest time.
What guarantees do you make?
We hear your goals and expectations as part of the SEO onboarding. We set traffic goals for the SEO that benchmark campaign performance.
I cannot give a money-back guarantee because we spend hours upon hours working with you. Rest assure, I guarantee you will get world-class SEO. I’m confident you will want to keep working together once you see the expertise put in and growth.
What is your secret to getting visitors and revenue?
I prefer to not call it a secret. We boost visitors and revenue with a clear proven strategy, creativity, and hard work based off a decade of digital marketing experience. Our SEO strategies are “white hat”. This means we follow best practices described by the major search engines. The white hat strategies ensure your store is protected from penalties and more likely to increase, rather than decrease, in rankings when Google updates occur.
What websites do you work with?
We only work with Shopify stores and do not work on stores that promote gambling, pharmaceuticals, or offensive content.
How long until I see first-page results?
That’s a loaded question. We can get you first-page rankings overnight, but will you get visitors and sales? Past client results show that the speed you get top rankings is influenced by the competitiveness of a keyword, the authority of competitors in Google’s eyes, and the authority of your site. These three factors are broad determinants of how fast you rank in Google.
Some clients get a jump in their very first month of SEO. Others take four months before the number of daily visitors curl up. If your site is penalized, it can take longer before hockey-stick growth occurs.
Short-tail keywords like “computer” take more than a year (and are extremely difficult) to rank for because thousands of high-quality websites compete for the keyword. “Sydney computers” is quicker and could take one year, yet it’s still a competitive phrase to pursue. There are many search terms your website is ranking for that you’d never consider.
First-page results is not a good measure of successful SEO. Think of SEO as a rising tide and your website being the ship. When your SEO improves, it’s common for your website to rank higher for many keywords. This leads to figures like 10% growth every month.
It’s good to have a goal for mega search terms, but it isn’t required for success. We discover then optimize what search queries lead to more visitors and sales in the shortest time.
Can you do an SEO audit?
We have a short, but helpful SEO audit we can do then discuss with you for free. This will show you some areas for improvement that we can work on to boost your Google rankings.
There is also a comprehensive SEO audit that looks at every factor of your store’s SEO to see the current problems and opportunities. Store owners who work with existing SEO agencies or those who have declined in their Google rankings find this particularly helpful. The comprehensive audit is a one-off AU$3997. The audit is about a 35-40 page custom-written report looking at every major SEO variable.
Get in contact letting me know your problems with SEO and what you hope we can solve for you.
Have a Question?
Have a discussion with me. Ask any burning question that’s on your mind. Fill in your contact details.