While growing your e-commerce business there’s a lot you’re managing; from finances, employees, taxes, website design to marketing, sales and support. It’s easy to neglect certain aspects. In particular, consider your Shopify store since that’s what brings the most important part of your business, sales.
If you fail to conduct regular health check-ups and assessments you’ll find that your store is out of date, poorly optimized and unfortunately not performing at its best. This leads to a noticeable decrease in traffic, conversions and sales. But how do you go about updating and optimizing your Shopify Store? Here are 8 effective ways to optimize your Shopify store in order to increase sales.
#1 Conduct a Store Health Overview
Use the Shopify E-commerce store grader. This tool works even if you don’t have a Shopify site. The grader inspects four elements and highlights areas that need your attention. The four elements are SEO, usability, content and social and technical code.
#2 Examine Current Store Policies
You need to inspect your store policies to ensure they’re favorable for your customers. Your conversions will be negatively affected if they aren’t. Inspect the following five policies and optimize accordingly:
1. Shipping Policy
2. Refund Policy
3. Return Policy
4. Exchange Policy
5. Privacy Policy.
Shopify offers a Privacy Policy Generator and a Refund Policy Generator to ensure your policies are up to date.
#3 Optimize Your Pages
Whilst you should review all your pages, start with the essentials. Your About, FAQ and contact page are generally the most visited pages on your Shopify site. Review the following with each of the pages:
1. Copy & Message
The message you convey on each page needs to be clear, focused and concise. The title and content need to match.
2. Search Engine Optimization
Make sure your page titles, meta descriptions, and URL are complete. This helps with indexing in Google. Focus on these three elements:
- Titles – The optimal title length is between 50-60 characters. Google cuts off long titles, based on the pixel length. By keeping your titles under 55 characters you can expect 95% of your titles to display properly. Where possible place important keywords to the front of the title tag.
- Meta Description – This needs to be less than 60 characters. Remember to include one of your keywords in the meta description.
- URL – Make it short and include relevant keywords. Be cautious when changing URLs to pages. Anyone who has bookmarked your site before a URL change will now visit a broken link. If you need to change URLs, make sure you re-direct visitors. Learn more about that here.
3. Extra Considerations
If you’re shipping information or rates have changed make sure you update them. Also, review common customer questions and include these in your FAQ page. This ensures an up to date page. It also helps to check copy for spelling mistakes. Can you get your message across with less copy?
#4 Optimize Your Product Listings
Optimizing your product listings is arguably the most important aspect. We’ve written a detailed post on this here, but to clarify, we’ll revisit this.
1. Manage your titles and descriptions
- Make sure your titles and descriptions are clear.
- They need to contain the necessary information for customers to make an informed purchase decision.
- Follow this format: Brand > Product Name > Colour > Style > Material > Size > Important Features e.g. Nokia Lumia 435 Cellphone
- Avoid use of capital letters throughout.
- Exclude related accessories not included in the price
- Exclude words consumers are unlikely to search for e.g. adjectives like beautiful.
2. Optimize your product categories
Many consumer shopping engines (Price Check, Google Shopping etc), don’t allow multiple categories. You have to choose one. Test which is suitable by taking two similar products and use a different keyword for each (A/B Testing). Choose the best-performing one.
3. Review your product images
- Make sure they are of the highest quality. This is particularly important if you consider customers can’t touch or feel a product.
- Consider taking multiple images from different angles.
- The White background will always be your best friend.
- Avoid text that detracts from your image.
4. Ensure your product listing URL is Text; be wary of broken links
- Avoid having any numbers in your product listing URL.
- Include relevant keywords.
- Further be cautious when changing the URL of your products to avoid broken links. If you do this, re-direct traffic as outlined earlier.
5. Check that your account budget is up to date
Your listings run the risk of dropping if you run out of a budget. This leads to decreased visibility. Deposit ad-spend to manage your bid.
6. Regularly update your data feed.
Your data feed typically looks like this:
1. Title
2. Descriptions
3. Category
4. Product Image
5. URL
6. SKU
7. Weight
8. Dimensions
9. Stock Information
10. Price
You don’t want shoppers clicking on a product only to find that you’re out of stock – update regularly.
#5 Review Coupons
Review your coupons to find discount codes that never had an expiry date on them. Delete those that have expired. Failing to do so, means people can use the coupon codes long after the promotion has finished.
#6 Integrate with Pinterest
Pinterest is the second largest traffic source for Shopify sites. Not only that, but Pinners spend an average of $50 per order. Also, Shopify and Pinterest have a partnership which allows you to sell on Pinterest through “buyable pins.” Consider leveraging the power of Pinterest and this unique partnership for increased traffic.
#7 Create a Facebook Store
Add a Facebook store so your fans can buy from you Facebook. Aside from creating an extra channel for revenue you also benefit through a lower cost-per-click. Why? Facebook rewards you for keeping traffic within their social network.
#8 Maintain a Regular Blogging Schedule
Blogging is a powerful tool. Statistics reveal that marketers who prioritize blogging are 13 times more likely to achieve a positive ROI. Further websites have 434% more indexed pages. Focus on providing regular, high-value content and watch the traffic increase.
Optimizing and updating your Shopify store can initially be a time-consuming process. But with practice, it’ll become a breeze. Conduct regular store checkups. Optimize your product pages, specifically your product listings. And also consider leveraging the power of Facebook, Pinterest, and Blogging for improved optimization. Do this and reap the benefits of increased traffic, conversions, and sales.