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How to get free organic traffic to your Shopify store
One of the questions I get asked most at Stylaquin demos is “Does Stylaquin bring traffic to a website?” The answer to that is yes and no. Stylaquin engages and delights the traffic you have, so new visitors are more likely to become repeat traffic, it also brings in referral traffic from shoppers who enjoy shopping with Stylaquin, but it isn’t a good source of traffic for brand new stores. If you are a new store, just starting out, with little or no traffic, I want to help you get past 500 visitors a month so that Stylaquin will be able to help you grow. Here are 11 ways you can get free organic traffic to your website.
Just for kicks I asked ChatGPT how to get more traffic, and it spit out a decent framework, which didn’t include enough specifics to be useful. Then I asked Google Bard to see if there was anything that Google, lord of internet search, could add. Not really. Which made me realize that the question new and struggling business owners should be asking isn’t, “How do I get more free organic traffic?” The question should be “How do I get more free organic traffic in a way I can fit into my incredibly busy life, so that I can comfortably grow my business without losing my sanity.” There’s a time, and results interconnection that needs to be addressed, and you need to factor in what skills you have, and what skills you may need to develop or buy.
Where should you start?
I’m giving you a list of 11 really good options for getting more traffic. You’re probably getting excited, and then the spin starts. Which should I do first? How do I know which is the best for my website? Which will get the best results? Which will get the fastest results. Okay, hit pause, stop and breath. The worst thing you can do is bounce around from one to the other looking for a magic fix that will give you the power of a Kardashian. There is no magic fix. But the path to building your business can be fun and rewarding. You can also do it at a pace that won’t make you crazy and won’t keep you from doing the things that matter. I’m going to break down the list in the order you should work through. Some things are just basic marketing and some are more nuanced.
This easy to understand seven page guide will teach you how to create useful personas so that you can market more effectively and truly engage your customers.
1) Find the right customer for what you sell
The pros call this Market Research. Every successful business has a target customer who will be excited about what the company sells. It’s much easier to target a specific segment of customers than it is to do what we call “Spray and pray”, that is throwing everything you can think of, at as many people as possible, and hoping something catches on. If you want to get free organic traffic, it’s easier and more effective to define a narrow niche audience, say people who love lighthouses, people who wear bow ties, people who collect baseball cards or people who own scooters. The narrower your audience is, the easier it is to target them with content, keywords and ads. Here’s a link to the Smart Shopify Persona Builder which will get your started.
2) Create a product selection that appeals to your target customer
Once you know who you’re targeting, and you have a persona or personas, you’re ready to collect the products that will interest your target customers. The advent of drop shipping has made putting together a good product assortment easier. You don’t have to go to shows, visit vendors, an spend a lot of money on stock merchandise. You just have to pick out products from an online catalog, or add your designs to existing products. There are a ton of youtube videos where folks tell you how they made $25K per month selling teeshirts or gadgets. The one thing they all have in common is they started with a narrowly focused target audience and designed products for that audience.
3) Create a professional online presence and website
In order to sell your products to your target audience you’ll need to create a professional website that is visually appealing, easy to navigate, and optimized for search engines (SEO). Shopify makes this easy and comes with 12 free themes. Any of them will probably work for what you’re selling. All Shopify themes are based on the free Dawn theme with some alterations. If you’re on a tight budget, consider starting with a free theme, and once you have money coming in, switch to a paid theme. You can use the money you save for advertising when you get to that phase. To start, your site needs to look professional and be easy to shop. You need to have high quality photographs of your products and they must be a high enough resolution that they don’t look blurry.
If you’re not a professional artist, or a gifted amateur, don’t try to reinvent your theme’s design. I’m saying this as an art director with over 30 years experience, who has worked for billion dollar companies. The design is the least important part of your website. WHAT?!?! Yup, unless you have the skills to create a memorable brand at the start, just build your site with the design elements provided by the theme and be consistent. Don’t spend a lot of time trying to redesign something that a highly trained professional has already created and Shopify probably spent real money developing. Here’s a tip from art school: Art is theft. Every great artist stands on the work of the artist that came before. Look for inspiration in other stores that you admire and copy what they’re doing. You don’t need to start new trends, just keep things clean and tidy. When in doubt ask yourself “What would appeal to my target audience?” It’s always about your target audience, it’s never about you. Write that one down and tape it to your computer.
Don’t get mad at Google, outsmart it! Having trouble getting your site to rank well? Wondering how to get to the top positions without paying for placement? Google is just an algorithm, once you understand how it works, you can learn how to outsmart it. Download your copy today!
P.S. It’s free and we will never share your name. You can unsubscribe at any time.
4) Build free organic traffic with good SEO
If you’ve already gotten your Shopify website built, and chosen products, you may have to back track a bit. SEO, like everything else, starts with the target audience. I’ve added a link to our free e-book How to Outsmart Google that will go into more detail on how Google sees your site and how to use that to your advantage. In order to be successful, you’ll need to start with a narrow target audience, and choose products that customers in that niche are interested in. At the start, because you don’t have a list yet, you’ll be out in the web in a crowd with millions of others. That’s the equivalent of starting a store in Wyoming, on a dirt road, far from town and hoping that putting a sign on the building will bring in traffic. Your friends are gonna show up, but that’s about it.
The purpose of SEO is to make it easy for your target audience to find you. You do this by determining why each product will appeal to your target audience, and then writing copy that will include the words they will type into Google or Bing when they’re looking for that product. I’m going to say that again again, it’s crazy important. Determine why each product you sell will appeal to your target audience, then write copy that will include the words your customer will type into Google or Bing when they’re looking for that product in the copy. You can download our free e-book titled Smart Shopify Copy Builder to get detailed help on how to write good product copy that will work for search engines. If you don’t get the words your customers will type into Google in your product copy, Google will not send searchers to your product. It’s that simple.
5) Get free ad placement
In the Shopify App Store there’s a Google app. The app makes it easy to create a Google ads account and get the proper tracking set up on your site. You should do this even if you never run a Google ad.
Setting up a Google Ads account manually is not all that easy. The interface was designed by people who understand how tracking and analytics work and there is a huge amount of assumed knowledge that mere mortals may not possess. Installing the app makes the setup less painful.
The big win is you can be certain that your site is properly tagged for Google AND, once you get your products added, they will appear in the band of images at the top of the Google Search screen for free as long as Google deems them relevant to the search query. You don’t have to pay for placement, but you do need to make sure Google knows what the products are, and why someone would be interested in them. Google does what’s easy for them and not what works best for you. There are lots of Youtube videos that will walk you through how to set up the Google app. It will take longer than you think, so wear comfy clothes and bring a tasty beverage.
6) Keywords are the key
Sorry, I know that’s obvious, but if you want free organic traffic for your Shopify site, keywords are how you get it. They aren’t sexy, they aren’t always obvious, but they aren’t rocket science either. Hopefully you’ve downloaded and read How to Outsmart Google and now you understand how keywords work and how Google “thinks” about them.
There has been a lot of talk about AI and how that will improve search. The truth is Google has been using AI for years. Without going down the AI rabbit hole, just know that keywords, relevant copy and content are the pillars of your SEO strategy and they will be for a long, long, time.
Here’s another important reason to put real time and energy into Keywords, content and copy—It will save you money when you do start placing ads. Paid ads that don’t lead to a site with good SEO actually cost more than ads that go to a store with good SEO. Yah, Google does that. Because Google’s customer is the searcher (read How to Outsmart Google, it will change how you see the web.) Google promotes sites that have a targeted audience and keywords that will appeal to that audience. You don’t just get a good discount, it also improves your ad placement. Seriously, good SEO will save you real money once you get to placing ads. Don’t even think about starting ads till you get the SEO basics nailed down.
7) Use AI to help with keywords and content
It is a battle of the bots. Google’s AI reading copy written by Bard and ChatGPT, how very sci-fi! For many bits of online copy it’s faster, and with some practice it works quite well. You have to build a base of content in order to rank with Google and get free traffic. That’s a good bit of content. As of this post you can still get free versions of ChatGPT and Bard. If you decide to pay you’ll get more options and more detailed output for about $20/month. You can pay for companies who have developed scripts for ChatGPT that dial in the copy, but you can do that yourself. Here’s how.
- Tell ChatGPT to act as the head of marketing and copywriter for [your site].
- Tell ChatGPT who your target customer is.
- Give it information on the product you want to get copy for. [product name, what it does, why that matters to your target customer, as well as any relevant specifications]
- Ask it what the best keywords for that product would be to rank well with Google.
- Ask it to write a copy block that will appeal to your target audience using the keywords provided.
- Be sure to tell it not to make up anything.
Important Safety Tip: Be sure to pay attention to the output. AI hallucinates, AKA makes stuff up. It can make up quotes and cite references that don’t exist. Telling it not to make things up usually works, but check anyway. It’s a machine designed to tell you what you want to hear.
You can ask AI to use the same style as copy you have already written and like. You can ask it to write copy that’s sassy, or calm, or funny. Try different prompts till you find ones that get you copy that fits your brand and appeals to your target audience. Write down the prompts you used so you can continue to use them later. This will help create a consistent voice for your brand.
8) Create Content that resonates with Google
One of the time honored ways to get free organic traffic is to set up a blog and create relevant, engaging content that showcases your expertise and provides value to your target audience. But really, who has time? You can outsource blog posts and social media, or take it on yourself. If you decide to outsource, there are folks on Fiver and Upwork as well as online services that can get the job done for $50-$100/post.
If you decide to take it on yourself, you must be consistent. It’s better to write one good post a week and share it on social media than to write a whole bunch and have gaps of weeks in between. Why? Because Google crawls websites at a rate that is dependent on how often it finds new content. Big sites write three posts a week. But since posts take (me at least) a couple of hours to write without AI and slightly less with AI, (I only use it for outlines and research) then I have to come up with images and get them posted; that would be a full day of my time just to write three blog posts. I don’t have that kind of time, so I post once a week.
I’ve trained Google that their bots need to crawl my site every week in order to keep their search results accurate. In order to be the most successful search engine, Google needs to be accurate. Google is also tasked with crawling the web, which is massive, so they have to be strategic. Google only crawls the things that change often. If I post three times a week and then skip a couple of weeks Google may not even notice until it crawls my site and, seeing changes, it may crawl the next week, but once I stop posting, Google stops crawling. Consistency is the secret to success and, even posting twice a month will work better than posting in fits and starts.
To change the frequency that Google crawls your site, you need to add new relevant content every week. Why does that matter? Because Google considers “freshness” very important and gives precedence to sites that have fresh content. Here’s a link to a video about the importance of keeping your copy fresh.
9) Make sure that your Shopify site is mobile friendly.
In order for Google to send you free organic traffic, it requires, yes requires, that your site is mobile friendly. All of the Shopify themes start out mobile friendly. Since the paid themes are all built on Dawn, they are also probably mobile friendly. So if you’re on Shopify, you’ll start out mobile friendly, but you can still mess it up. Your mobile score will be impacted by five main things.
- Slow, or out of date theme.
- Photos that are too large to download quickly.
- Photos that don’t have alt text.
- Too many photos on a page, which makes the pages take a long time to load.
- Poor contrast between type and background.
You can check your site’s Lighthouse score (Google controls Lighthouse) to see if there is anything you need to fix. It will give you a score for mobile and desktop and tell you what needs to be fixed. Here’s the link to a free Lighthouse test from PageSpeed Insights.
Why does having a good mobile score matter? Well Google has prioritized mobile and, if your site isn’t mobile optimized, it won’t serve your site up in the organic search as high as similar sites with better mobile scores. Since over 50% of all online traffic is now mobile—it matters.
10) Social Media
Social media can get you free traffic, and it has been very successful for oodles of new stores. Social media is a bit like waving your arms in the air and shouting “Hey look at me!” online. The idea is to get attention and be interesting enough that people want to spend time with you. There are plenty of social media experts online who can guide you through the best practices, take a few minutes to google who the top players are for your niche and follow them for inspiration. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel to get traction. As with content creation, you do need to be consistent. Social media is a lot of work, especially if you don’t enjoy being on social media. Do a little every day and don’t let it pull you away from all the other things that matter.
11) Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t
Make a point to check your site’s analytics weekly so that you know what’s working and what isn’t. Google provides detailed information about where traffic is coming from. Once you added the Google App to your Shopify site you started the data flowing. You can get most of the info you need in the app, or you can deep dive by going to your Google Analytics page. Nothing happens overnight, it will take a few months to see progress. Once you have been consistent for a couple of months you should start to see movement. If you don’t see improvements from week to week and month to month, it’s a good bet that what you’re doing isn’t resonating with your audience, or isn’t being understood by Google.
Checking your stats weekly lets you see where to focus your time and effort. You only need to find one good channel to get the ball rolling.
Then what?
Once you’ve created a steady stream of traffic to your site, then it’s time to delight and engage them with Stylaquin! Shoppers who use Stylaquin will stay longer, view more items, come back more often, and buy more when they do. Stylaquin is the easy and inexpensive way to add an engaging online shopping experience that makes your store stand out in the crowded world of e-commerce.
Does Your Site Do This?
It can with Stylaquin! Stylaquin is the easy to add Shopify app that transforms your website. Stylaquin makes shopping faster, more engaging, and more fun. Stylaquin shoppers stay longer, view over 85% more products, come back more often, and buy more when they do. Find us in the Shopify App Store.
