Shopify is a great platform for building your store, but just being on Shopify doesn’t mean you will get any organic traffic. Organic traffic comes from search engines and is why you hear so much about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and its benefits. Creating content and a user experience that brings in organic traffic is the least expensive way to get more customers.

Who controls organic traffic? Google, Bing, and other search engines send visitors to your site when their search query is a good fit for what they see on your website. They control all the organic traffic that goes to your site. Being on Shopify tells search engines that you are a store, but after that you are on your own. All the search engines have to go on is your product copy and any content pages or posts you have created. There are several SEO Apps you can add to your Shopify site, and you should add at least one to help you focus on specific words and phrases. But how do you know what to focus on? 

Focus on what your customers are looking for, that you can help with.

It sounds easier than it is, which if you’re reading this, you probably already know. Here’s where to start. Start with your top 10 products. Make a list and after each one write down the key benefit to your customer. Say you sell jewelry and one of your top 10 products is a pair of elephant earrings. What is the benefit? Look at what they give to the customer. Customers may like elephants, or elephants may be a trend and those customers are trend setters, or they may be part of an elephant club and members all get a pair. If you don’t know why a particular product is doing well, you can ask customers who have bought it. Add a note to your package when you ship the item asking for their thoughts, or send a follow-up email. 

Keeping with the elephant earrings example, let’s say you discover that it’s a trend. Add content to your site that talks about the trend and make sure it has internal links to the item you are selling as well as external links to highly regarded sources. This could be articles on the trend or blogs by influencers who are following the trend. 

It could also be a category

Let’s say you go through your top 10 products and you notice that several of them fall into the same category. Think about how customers who would be interested in that category would type it into Google. What problem are they trying to solve? Are they trying to solve it for themselves or someone else? If you have a competitor for that category of products you can use tools like SpyFu or SEMrush to peek behind the curtain.
Other helpful tools are AnswerThePublic, and Google’s own keyword planning tool.