Get more WOW from the products you have now

Posted on November 13, 2023 by Stylaquin1

How to Promote the right products on your Shopify store's home page

Imagine your home page as the digital red carpet to your store, where you have the power to make a dazzling impression on potential customers. When you strategically select and showcase your products here, you’re not just displaying beautiful items, you’re creating an experience that resonates with your audience. By understanding your customers’ tastes, staying on top of the latest trends, and curating a captivating home page, you can turn visitors into loyal shoppers. So, get ready to boost those conversion rates and sales like a boss! Your home page is your secret weapon in the competitive world of online retail, and it’s time to shine!

Understanding Your Target Audience

Understanding your target audience is the compass that guides your success in the world of online fashion retail. It’s not just about selling products; it’s about creating a shopping experience tailored to their desires and needs. Knowing your target audience intimately allows you to speak directly to their hearts and capture their attention on your home page. To achieve this, start by identifying who your target customer is. How old are they? What do they care about? What’s trending in their world? Put yourself in their shoes.

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.

Start with Bestsellers

The best place to go for inspiration on what to put on the home page is your best sellers. Bestsellers should have a prominent place on every home page. Why? Because they’re proven winners. Bestsellers are also a roadmap to seasonality. You probably won’t have the same bestsellers in August that you do in November.

Let Shopify do the heavy lifting

Go to your Shopify sales report, make sure it includes the date the product was sold, the number of products sold as units, the product name and SKU, the price and the profit. Download the report and open it in excel or whatever spreadsheet software you use. Open the file and subtotal the report by product. Some spreadsheets call this categories rather than subtitles. You are trying to find the products with the highest units of sales. If you have Stylaquin installed you can use the Insights Panel to see your best sellers. We have a video titled Bestsellers you can check out to learn more. Just change the date range to see a specific time.

Use color

This will make spotting the winners easier to see later. Color the cells with the top ten or so products with a bright green color. Then color the next ten or so products with bright blue, and color the following ten or so with bright gold. This will give you an easy way to spot where the best sellers are showing up in each season.

Sort your table by date

This way you can see where the best sellers are working their magic. Are they all Q4 gifts? Are they summer self purchase? What can you learn from them? Are there any the show up consistently throughout the year? We call those perennial best sellers and they typically are problem solvers.

Add a Styling Board and a Wishlist!

The Stylaquin Idea Board keeps customers engaged in two ways: it’s an interactive styling board where shoppers can collect and curate all the things that interest them; and it also acts as a wishlist that shoppers can return to. Find us in the Shopify App Store.

But wait! What about new products?

There has long been a debate about which is more powerful—new products or best sellers. If you want to dive in even deeper here’s a post on the subject. But the short answer is that most of the customers coming to your site will be new. That’s just how the online world works. So showcasing new products on your home page in place of bestsellers is risky. What if the new products are a bust? There are stores that can make showcasing only new products work, and clothing and accessories are frequently about tends. How do you pick? Not to worry, you can test it!

A/B testing is easy in Shopify

Head over to the App Store and you’ll find lots of apps that offer A/B testing. A/B testing lets you create two versions of a page which are randomly shown to visitors. It allows you to see which version gets you more clicks. You can A/B test headlines, product assortments, images and offers. Be sure to keep your A/B tests clean by not changing too many things at once. It’s also a good idea to keep a diary of what you’ve tested so you can keep track of learnings.

Keep learning, growing and being creative! ““

Hey Marketers—Permission Slip will make you sad

Posted on October 5, 2023 by Stylaquin1

There's a Privacy App called Permission Slip that's Coming for Your Customers

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, bad marketers are like fire ants, they find any little crack in wall and they swarm in to get at the goodies. Privacy apps are proof that customers are fed up and saying “STOP!” As this gets worse, and it will, there will be apps and hoops and bots, and, and, and… Bad marketers are making it hard for the rest of us. Bad Marketers—stop it!

What is Permission Slip?

Permission Slip is an app for Apple and Android phones that’s free from Consumer Reports that promises to banish ads and make the internet safe for browsing. The gadget guys were breathless about how great it was in the article I read. I haven’t added it to my phone yet because I like being marketed to. Permission Slip’s fate will be determined by customers who may discover that no ads isn’t ideal either. Good marketing actually make their lives better by sharing solutions to their problems, showcasing new things of interest, and highlighting great pricing on things they buy. Great marketing makes shopping fun, creates community and inspires devotion.

So why are customers resorting to apps?

Does Your Site Do This?

The problem is that we need to get real about what it takes to get customers and keep them. It isn’t bombarding them with sales and ads, and it isn’t stalking them. (Though the stalking thing does seem to work better than I thought it would. Yah, my hands are not clean on this.) Regardless of what black arts we dabble in, the truth is that our relationship with our customers is largely transactional. Online stores without a brick and mortar location are especially vulnerable to losing the fun factor of shopping.

Shopping is either a chore or entertainment

There are folks who hate to shop and only do it to eat, and not be naked. There are folks who love going shopping and can’t wait to see what’s new or on sale. Cyber Monday sends chills up their spine. Online shopping is currently designed for the folks who want to get in, find what they need, and get out fast. We should maybe give a little more love to the ones who actually love it, since they spend more. Just saying.

Add a Styling Board and a Wishlist!

And then there’s the confusion factor

Have you ever watched someone who loves to shop actually shop? They open a different tab for each product they like because they want to consider it, but don’t want to add it to the cart. This is a great truth. All the folks reading this, who love to shop, are smiling and nodding, while the non-shoppers are having an Ah Ha! moment about all the times they borrowed a computer and thought “Good grief, why would anyone have so many open tabs?”

Who are these strange people?

For the sake of gender equality we’ll just call them power-shoppers. (Women! They’re mostly women!) Power-shoppers like choice. Power-shoppers don’t want just a blue shirt, they want the perfect blue shirt that goes with the pants they love, and the jacket, and the shoes. Power-shoppers deserve an elevated shopping experience that works for the way they shop. If you want to see what that looks like, (and you managed to ignore all the cool blinking images in this post), check out Stylaquin! Stylaquin is a Shopify app that transforms the online shopping experience for power-shoppers. Shoppers stay longer, view more items, come back more often, and buy more when they do! Go ahead and check it out!

How Time on Site impacts SEO

Posted on September 14, 2023 by Stylaquin1

Enticing customers to stay longer can have a big impact on your SEO rank

Why is time on site important? It’s the often overlooked metric that measures how engaged and interested visitors are with your website. The longer a visitor spends on a website, the more likely they are to interact with the content, explore different products, and ultimately make a purchase.

Let’s break that down into 4 components.

Increased engagement: The longer a visitor spends on a website, the more engaged they’re likely to be with your content. We spend time with stores we like, so increasing time on site also leads to increased brand awareness, product interest, and ultimately, sales.
Improved user experience: If visitors are spending a lot of time on a website, it’s a good indication that they’re finding the site easy to navigate and the content valuable. This kind of positive user experience increases customer loyalty.
Better search engine rankings: Time on site is one of the metrics that search engines use to determine the quality and relevance of a website. If visitors are spending a lot of time on a site, search engines see this as a sign that the site is providing high-quality content and improve its ranking accordingly.
Higher conversion rates: When visitors spend more time on a website, they learn more about the brand and products, which leads to trust, which, as I mentioned in the Post on SEO Metrics, leads to higher conversion rates. In addition, longer time on site is often an indicator that a customer is closer to making a purchase.

Does Your Site Do This?

Okay, you’re sold, but how do you get customers to stay longer?

Here are some thing to consider:

Improve the user experience: A good user experience is crucial for keeping visitors on a site for longer periods of time. This includes factors such as site speed, easy navigation, and clear product descriptions.
Offer engaging content: Providing high-quality, relevant content can help to keep visitors engaged and interested. This can include product videos, blog posts, customer reviews.
Eye Candy: Making sure your site visually appeals to your target customer is crucial for extending time on site. High-end customers want to see beautiful photography and lifestyle images. Everyone wants to see photography that clearly shows the products. Clear photos that show features also reduces returns.
Personalization: Personalizing the user experience based on a visitor’s behavior and preferences can help to increase engagement and time on site. This can include personalized product recommendations, and customized landing pages for customers who are coming from an ad, blog, or other trigger.
Incentives and rewards: Offering incentives such as free shipping, discounts, and loyalty programs can help to keep visitors on a site for longer periods of time and increase the likelihood of making a purchase.
Optimize for mobile: As more and more consumers shop on their mobile devices, optimizing for mobile is crucial for increasing time on site. This includes using a mobile-responsive design and optimizing for mobile search. This is especially important if you have a younger customer, but granny is on her phone now and girl likes to shop.
Utilize social media: Social media can be a powerful tool for driving traffic to an online store and increasing time on site. Make sure your social media content links back to your website and also encourage social sharing.
Making it fun to shop: This is my favorite. We all do more of the things we enjoy and shopping is more fun with Stylaquin. How much fun? Data shows that Stylaquin shoppers stay on site a whopping 70% longer and view 185% more items. Here’s a link to a short video that explains how Stylaquin works.

So to wrap all this up, time on site is an often overlooked metric that absolutely impacts your site rank with search engines. Making your site more attractive, more personal, more interesting and more fun to shop will entice your customers to stay longer, buy more and come back more often.

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.

AI is going to destroy keyword SEO

Posted on August 3, 2023 by Stylaquin1

AI built websites are going to destroy keyword SEO

Here’s a bold prediction about how AI will change SEO: engagement is going to become the single most important metric in determining your website’s Google rank, and it’s going to happen a lot sooner than you think. I read an article by tech thought leader, Om Malik, titled AI & Internet’s existential crisis. The threat he pointed out is that AI can create almost infinite websites with SEO designed to rank well with Google and other search engines in less time than it takes a person to come up with a good keyword strategy. Remember content farms that were only limited by the number of humans they could find to create cheap content? Now there’s no longer a limiting human factor. The sites that use AI to manage SEO will outperform the sites that are created by humans. The proliferation of machine-made sites, linking and amplifying each other in an ever-expanding web of SEO keyword goop will inevitably muddy the waters of the internet to the point that keywords, and even content itself, can no longer be trusted as the best way to direct searchers. Wow. That’s going to make online marketing even harder. It will look like what happened to email marketing—only it will happen in months, not years.

So what’s the pushback?

What will the search engines do when faced with a tsunami of content? Well, Google recently limited the content crawled on websites and started favoring new content. That means the AI content bots will adjust and start refreshing content more often. AI can iterate on one top-ranking piece of content infinitely. Every time search engines defend against an AI strategy to beat the algorithm, AI sites are going to come up with new strategies. It’s going to be a never-ending whack-a-mole game at mind-boggling speeds. The Google and Bing bots are going to be using AI to detect AI content. AI-generated sites are going to be constantly adjusting to stay ahead of the algorithm. But, wait. STOP! If all the legitimate sites are using AI too, how will the search engines sift through all the churn and clutter to determine where to send searchers?

Does Your Site Do This?

Searchers not bots

Remember, Google’s #1 success metric is how happy searchers are with the results provided. Google’s job is to make people happy by finding the best website, or information, to answer the searcher’s query. Without reliable keywords and unique content, how will the search engines determine which sites to send searchers to if there are umpteen million of them all looking remarkably the same? More importantly to you—how will you get the search engines to send searchers to your website?

What about ads?

You can, and probably will, spend a ton more money on advertising. But even ad spend is directly linked to your site’s SEO rank. So how do you outsmart AI and also make nice with the search engines?

Change is coming!

That’s where my bold prediction comes in. I think the most likely answer is going to be a huge shift in the importance of customer engagement as a key SEO metric. Customer engagement may well become the most important metric used by search engines to rank websites. Think about it for a minute. Customer engagement is the hardest metric to fake. Engagement tracks events, the things shoppers do on your site. Getting shoppers to engage with your website, look at more products, click on more things, play with more things, and return to your site more often is the only way to improve your engagement score. AI can’t help with that. You can’t fake real people having fun and participating in an experience of discovery. But you can make a website more fun to shop, more interesting, more memorable, and more likely to get return visitors. The easiest way to increase engagement is simply by adding Stylaquin to your website. If you’re a Shopify store and haven’t taken a few minutes to check out how Stylaquin get’s shoppers to view 180% more products, stay 70% longer, and come back 25% more often, now might be a good time watch the video below and visit the Shopify App Store. If you’re not on Shopify, give us a call, or join our waiting list.

Whatever strategy you use to create more customer engagement on your site, be creative, have fun, and don’t lose sight of the simple truth that you can’t out-iterate AI, but you can be way more fun to spend time with. As humans, we all seek out fun things, and happily go back to the things we enjoyed doing. The best engagement strategy is to be the website that’s the most fun to shop!

P.S. If you’d like to learn more about increasing engagement here’s a blog post on How to Increase Engagement Without Spending a Fortune.

6 ways to improve your Shopify site’s speed

Posted on June 16, 2023 by Stylaquin1

Is your Shopify site slower than you'd like? Here are 6 ways to speed it up!

Why is site speed important?

Site speed is important on two fronts. First, it affects the user experience. A slow-loading website will frustrate users and make them more likely to leave. We’ve all been there, the spinning wheel is a super buzzkill and it sends the wrong message about your brand. Second, site speed can impact your search engine ranking. Google and other search engines take site speed into account when ranking websites, so faster sites rank higher in search results. Remember the higher your site’s rank, the less you pay for ads, that’s a nice benefit all by itself.

Before you add any app to your site you should check your site speed. If it’s slow, fix that first. Many of the top websites around the world have surprisingly bad site speed scores, but if you’re a big fish you can get away more than if you’re a little fish. Regardless of what size fish you are there are compelling reasons to make site speed a priority.

How to check your site’s speed

So first things first, here’s how you check your site speed. Open a web browser and go to https://pagespeed.web.dev/. Type in your site’s URL and hit the Analyze button. Go ahead and do that right now, I’ll wait.

So now you know your site’s speed and if you are over 80, well done! If you are between 50 and 80, you can improve it with these tips, but it doesn’t have to be the first thing you do right now. If you are between 25 and 50, make it a top priority. If you are under 25—stop, drop, and roll!

Does Your Site Do This?

Optimize your images

Images are one of the biggest contributors to slow loading times. The goal is to optimize your images by reducing their file size without sacrificing quality. The biggest gains are made by choosing the right image format. Jpeg files are significantly smaller than png files. I asked my adorable dog Pudge to give me a hand with this. The jpg of this handsome fellow at 1200×1600 with high quality output is a mere 748 KB. The same size png is a brutal is 4 MB.

If we dumb them down to low quality, the jpg is only 260 KB while the png is still a whopping 1.2 MB.

But before you start hating on jpgs we need to look at the difference between a photo and an illustration. When it comes to illustrations and type, the png has a slight edge coming in a 2KB rather than the 9 KB of the jpg.

So how do you choose? The first thing to ask is do you need a transparent background? If the answer is yes, you can only use a png. Jpegs do not support transparency. If you don’t need transparency, go with a jpg for photos. When it comes to Illustrations pngs are a better choice, not just because they are a tiny bit smaller, but they’ll have sharper, crisper edges. So image files for typography, symbols, or illustrations are better as pngs.

You can use tools like Adobe Photoshop, TinyPNG.com or Kraken.io to compress your images. If you are working in Canva the default is Png so be sure to change the output settings before you download.

Delay popups

Popups are a great way to collect visitor emails and promote products with special savings and offers, they can also be a significant drag on your load time. When search engines measure your site speed, there is something called time to first paint, which is just a fancy way of saying how long it takes before a visitor can see the site. Some things are super quick to load, like Stylaquin, but apps that have to call and display large amounts of data, can take seconds, which is way too long in online time. The easy way around this is just to have the popup load after the site speed has been measured. A short delay of 15 seconds should do it.

Lazy load your images

Lazy load tells browsers not to load images that are not going to be visible until they’re needed. Remember how I said that search engines are measuring time to first paint? If you have lots of images below the fold the browser is going to load all of them before it tells the search engine that it’s done. Lazy load tells the browser to stop loading the images that aren’t being shown, so the time to first paint is much faster. There is a bit of a delay when visitors scroll down but it’s usually imperceptible. Lazy load is a feature of most Shopify themes so check with your theme provider about where that setting is.

Remove unused apps

Apps can slow down your store, so remove any apps that you’re not using. Apps like Stylaquin are super lightweight. Some apps are not so well behaved. If you’re concerned that an app is slowing down your site, the first thing to do is measure your site speed with the app on, and then again with the app off. Be sure to measure 4 to 6 times with the app on and the same number of times with it off. Site speed tests are affected by internet traffic, server speed and the vagaries of the web. It’s likely that you will get a range of results and testing multiple times keeps you from jumping to conclusions. I’ve seen results that make it look like an app is speeding up a site, but the next test showed it slowing down the site. To be confident you need to run the same test multiple times and preferably at different times. You can check your admin panel to see which apps are installed on your store.

Update your theme

This one is something that often gets filed under “Things to do when I have time”. Because of all the good things that come from having a fast site, you may want to move it up in the to-do list. Older themes may not be as optimized for speed as newer themes. It’s always a good idea to keep your theme up to date for security reasons as well.

Make sure your theme uses a CDN

This one is for nerds and developers. A CDN (content delivery network) can help to improve the speed of your store by caching your website’s content on servers that are closer to your customers. That way a customer from France gets the same load time as one from the US. All the free Shopify themes use the Shopify CDN by default, so you’re all set if you are using a free Shopify theme. If you paid for your theme, and you have done all the easy things we already covered, it’s worth checking. Using a CDN is especially important for stores that sell worldwide or across a wide geographic area.

The easiest way to determine if your non-Shopify theme is using a CDN is to email your theme developer and ask.

If you’d like to see this content as a video Click here. If you’d like to see a lightning fast Shopify app that increases the number of items viewed by 180%, increases time on site by 70% and just makes online shopping more fun and engaging, click here for quick demo of Stylaquin.

What Metrics Matter to Search Engines?

Posted on May 8, 2023 by Stylaquin1

SEO rank is determined by these 4 basic metrics

For those of you who are trying to tackle SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, the first thing to remember is that search engines are just machines that use an algorithm to determine your site’s SEO rank. There are no real live people involved, and search engines are basically blind unless you explain what an image is.

So what is this blind machine, that determines how much organic traffic you get, measuring when it crawls your Shopify site? There are four factors that determine site rank: Relevance, Authority, User experience, and Freshness.

Relevance

Relevance is the first sort search engines do when they try to match the user’s query with sites that might be a good fit. If you search for great family cars, you won’t be directed to a site that sells fishing lures. (Hopefully.) There are lots of additional factors that go into relevance like keywords, overall content match, geography, and the age of the relevant content.

Authority

Authority measures the quality of a site’s content, the number and quality of backlinks, how long a website has been around, and how much traffic it gets. If you are smaller site It is easier for you become an authority on a very narrow topic than it is for you to rank for a broad category. That’s why you often hear SEO experts talking about niche-ing down on one narrow market.

Does Your Site Do This?

User Experience

User Experience measures how much, and how often, visitors engage with a website. Things like time on site, total events (events are things like clicks, swipes and drags) and return visits are all part of user experience. Stylaquin really shines with this factor. It really boosts your engagement stats. here’s a link to the Stylaquin video.

Freshness

Freshness is how old your content is. Freshness is also a metric in your Authority score. If you google a keyword you want to rank for, pay attention to the age of the post. If you see a lot of older posts that shows you there’s an opportunity to rank higher for those keywords by covering the same topics in a newer post. It’s also a good idea to periodically update your top posts to keep them on top.

To recap: in order to improve your site’s search engine ranking you will need to dial in your site’s Relevance, Authority, User experience, and freshness.

Watch the Hump Day Bar Hopping video on SEO Metrics.

What improves Shopify conversion rates?

Posted on April 7, 2023 by Stylaquin1

What improves your Shopify site's conversion rate?

So you have a Shopify website, and you have great products, and everything looks good, but you don’t have a great conversion rate. What improves the conversion rate and how hard is it to do? Let’s start with what changes can improve your conversion rate.

Discounting: Discounting and regular sales will improve the conversion rate, it’s a tried and true method, but it also hurts the bottom line. If you are already swimming upstream, discounting may not be the best answer. Discounting means you have to sell even more to make ends meet. It’s really hard to win a race to the bottom. That said making sales a part of your overall strategy is smart. It can help move older inventory and bring in prospects if tied to other channels like social media and advertising.

Exclusive Products: Having exclusive products is a fabulous way to improve conversion rates. If you are the only one who has a special item, then customers can only buy it from you. Ask your vendors if there are any products you can have as an exclusive, even for a period of time. You may be able to get exclusives on a particular color or for a particular design. It never hurts to ask. Finding smaller, unique vendors who will work with you on shipping and minimums is worth the effort.

Does Your Site Do This?

Trust: When customers trust you, and trust your site, they’re more likely to buy from you. Make sure you have an “About” page that shares your story and your values. Be sure to share your story on social media as well. Most importantly live your values. We all like to buy from brands we like and trust. You can’t build trust overnight so make sharing what you are doing to help others, and what you do to generally make life better, whatever that may be.

Are there Shopify Apps that can increase conversion rates? Yes, though many are tied to discounting. To get the most bang for your buck, look at apps that increase engagement as well. Adding Stylaquin to your site is a great way to increase time-on-site, the number of items viewed and the number of return visits. All of that will help increase your site’s conversion rate.
If you would like to learn more about Stylaquin and see how it increased Sales, Orders, online sessions AND conversion rates, visit: https://www.stylaquin.com/white-paper-for-beta-test/.

Why is return website traffic important?

Posted on September 28, 2022 by Stylaquin1

Why is return website traffic important?

There are several great reasons why return traffic is important. The percentage of return visitors vs new visitors affects your Google rank. New visitors costs more to acquire than return visitors. Return visitors are already interested so they are more likely to buy. That’s all good, but does it really matter that you get a good percentage of return visitors, if you are generating a lot of visitors?

Google is watching

Think of return visits as a thumbs up signal to Google. Google wants to find the best sites to send searchers. The first three spots are auctioned off, but the rest are the ones Google thinks are most likely to take the searcher to a sight that will give them what they want and make Google look like the best search engine in town. Once Google has filtered out all the sites that don’t match the search criteria, it’s probably left with hundreds, if not thousands, of sites that do match the search criteria. So how does Google pick? We don’t know exactly, but these three things are a big part of the equation:

Return visits
Time on site
Events per session

We’ll get into time on site and events per session in other posts and we’ll just focus on return visits in this post. Let’s say you go to a store, and don’t see anything that interests you, chances are you won’t come back. Simple logic right? Google uses this same logic for websites. If they send searchers to a website, and the searchers stay a while, and click on things while they are there, Google gives that site high marks. But if they come back again, well that’s as good as it gets. Three points for Gryffindor! Fun trivia: When SEO experts talk about sites with lots of return traffic, they call them sticky. Sticky websites get customers stuck on them.

Does Your Site Do This?

Return visitors tend to buy more

There are several time honored ways to get customers to come back. Sending out engaging emails to your existing customers is a good way to entice them to come back. Sales and special events also create interest that leads to return visits. It’s worth making a real effort to get return website traffic, not just because it increases your Google ranking, return customers typically buy more. Makes sense, they saw something that intrigued them and they come back to see it again. If you are a Shopify site, check out Stylaquin. Stylaquin shoppers come back 28% more often.

Cost is also a factor

If you are paying for your visitors through ads and promotions, then return visitors are a gift from the money gods. You didn’t have to pay again, they just came back. Let’s say you have 1000 visitors, and you increase your return customer rate to just 10%; if each visitor costs you $1, and you only have to pay for 900—you will save $100. Think of return visitors like money that returns to your wallet.

Stylaquin increases return customers and more

If you are an innovative Shopify website, you might consider adding Stylaquin to your site. Stylaquin is easy to add and prices start at less than a movie ticket. (Plus you get a month free.) Stylaquin shoppers stay 70% longer, view 180% more items, come back 28% more often and buy more when they do. Here’s a 90 second video that explains what it is and how it will help your Shopify website.

Why time on site is a key to outsmarting Google

Posted on September 22, 2022 by Stylaquin1

Wondering why time on site is so important?

Time on Site is one of Google’s most important data points

If Google sends a searcher to a site and they leave quickly clearly it wasn’t a good fit for the searcher. That‘s bad for Google. The longer a searcher stays on a site, the more Google ranks it as a good site to send searchers to. Pretty simple math for an algorithm to understand. Good design, best sellers, engaging copy are all great ways to get visitors to spend more time on site. Your home page needs to be really compelling and what to click needs to be clear and easy to find; but most searchers won’t come to your site through your home page, they come through a Google link or an ad.

P.S. It’s free and we will never share your name. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Marketing to a targeted customer profile will help you create a site that appeals to a specific demographic, which is also something Google’s algorithm can understand and leverage.

Spin-to-win apps that seemed to be everywhere for a while added time on site but gave out 5% -20% discounts that killed margin. Fun once or twice, but not for everyone, and they may actually turn off some visitors since not all shoppers are motivated by price.

The Stylaquin Shopify app increases time on site by offering a new way to shop that is more visually interesting, faster, and fun to use. As shoppers flip through a site, like they flip through a magazine, they view more items and stay longer. Not all shoppers use Stylaquin when they shop, but those who do move the needle significantly, about 70% more time on site, and Stylaquin isn’t giving up margin by offering discounts.

To learn more about how Google sees your site so you can learn to outsmart it, grab a copy of “How to Outsmart Google”. It demystifies the process and even comes with a handy planner to get you started.

How to Outsmart Google

Getting your site to rank for Google is vital to your success. Google is just an algorithm and you can outsmart it! This guide will help you see your online Shopify store the way Google sees it and give you the secrets to getting Google to pick your site instead of your competition.

What Humans See

What Google sees

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SEO isn’t pretty and bots don’t care

It seems cruel after you have spent so much time making sure that your site is compelling, visually interesting, and represents your brand in a meaningful way, that none of it means anything to the bots that crawl the web. While great design and beauty pay off when customers get to your site, they won’t increase your page rank. Google determines page rank by how well you speak bot (tags, descriptions, hierarchy, internal and external links), and it uses other metrics like time on site, events and return visits to determine engagement, and engagement is the key to outsmarting Google, but first you’ll need to understand how Google sees your site.

Your company is not Google’s primary customer

Companies mistakenly think that they are Google’s primary customers, but it is actually the person searching who is Google’s primary customer. If Google doesn’t serve up relevant results, then searchers will go to another search engine and Google will lose market dominance. Google’s key performance metrics are all bout how happy searchers are—not ads, not keywords, not ad spend. I’m not saying they don’t care deeply about those things, they do. Google makes it’s money on ads, but they live or die by giving their primary customer, searchers, results that they like and that they engage with.

The more you help Google determine what is relevant, the more Google will serve up your products in search results, without making you pay for ads. Pro tip: Google ads cost less if your SEO is dialed in as well. That’s why SEO is so very important. We’ll cover that first, but engagement is where the real magic happens. If you’re already an SEO expert, turn to page 7 to learn the ingredients for creating engagement.

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How to Speak Bot—Names

Product names

Once a product is popular and well known, i.e. Bean Boots, iPhone, Levis; the name is the keyword. For most products though, the product name is an easy opportunity to get keywords into the most important tag for Google, the H1tag.

Example: Essential Cashmere Sweater

What would a customer type into Google if they were looking for this sweater? In this example, the manufacturer named the sweater “Essential Cashmere Sweater” so we’ll use that as the starting point. The more you can drill down on what sets a product apart, the more likely it is that you’ll find a connection.

What sets this sweater apart from the competition is that it is made from more expensive, but cruelty-free, methods of wool-gathering. Cruelty-free is a good keyword for this product and we’ll add it to the title. So now we have Cruelty-free Essential Cashmere Sweater.

Are there any other things that customers would type into Google if they were looking for this sweater? The (fictitious) company that makes the sweater has created content on their site that supports their mission. They also have a large following on social media, so the brand name, Karma Isles, may be something customers would search for. Women’s is another keyword that could help Google determine if it is a good fit for what their customers searched for.

Women’s Karma Isles Cruelty-free Essential Cashmere Sweater is a mouthful, but it is also a goldmine of searchable terms. You could also call it, Karma Isles Women’s Essential Cashmere Sweater—Cruelty-free, or The Essential Women’s Cashmere Sweater, a Cruelty-free classic from Karma Isles. If you’re thinking “Oh hell no!” don’t panic, just make sure it all goes in the product description. Google ranks H1 text tags higher than Paragraph text tags, but your brand may not want long wordy names, so work on other ways to outsmart Google.

Image names

When manufacturers share product images, the image name is often something like 0893-98_RE.jpg. Manufacturers are not worried about your SEO issues, they speak in SKUs. In order to make that image rank in Google, you’ll need to change the name to something more bot-friendly. First take the product name and concatenate it. (Concatenate is just an SAT word that means: string it all together using underscores or hyphens.)

The concatenated image name for this image becomes Karma_Isles_Cruelty-free_Essential_Cashmere_Sweater.jpg. There are two more things we can add that will help Google understand what the image is, the color and the gender served. The color “Robin’s egg” is a bit vague for most customers who aren’t already familiar with the product. They are more likely to search for “Blue” or “Light Blue”. Add those terms in and we end up with Karma_Isles_Cruelty-free_Essential_Cashmere_Sweater_Womens_Robins_Egg_Light_Blue.jpg, and now all of your keywords are front and center.

This matters more than you think because images always appear at the top of Google searches. Google can’t glean any information from 0893-98_RE.jpg, but it understands Karma_Isles_Cruelty-free_Essential_Cashmere_Sweater_Womens_Robins_Egg_Light_Blue.jpg. Having your beautiful cashmere sweater appear in the images above a search for “Cruelty-free cashmere sweaters” vastly increases the chances of your product being clicked.

How to Speak Bot—Links

Internal links

One of the most underused weapons in the SEO arsenal is linking. Google is trying to serve up the best results to any search, and to do that, it needs to determine what things are important and what things aren’t. You may have a better, prettier, or more socially beneficial product, but Google won’t know any of that unless you tell it. When a customer types “Cashmere Sweater” into Google there may be 140,765 cashmere sweaters to choose from, so Google has to narrow down the search to find the top answers. Links are Google’s window to what matters. Internal links aren’t ranked as highly as external links, but they are easy and they add up. Remember you are trying to get a nose up on your competition—it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be relevant.

Pages count more than posts

Adding pages to your site that focus on your key attributes is a great way to add links that can be used on multiple products. For our example adding pages like “Why Tibetan goat herders comb their herds” or “Cashmere shouldn’t be cruel” where the copy talks about the subject and shows why your cashmere sweaters a better choice, would work well. These content pieces can be long or short, and they can also contain links to other resources. This tells Google that there is more to your store than just products. Google looks at the web of connections and ranks them. They won’t tell you exactly how. Good relevant content is also something that other sites may link to, which is SEO gold.

External links

Linking to content outside your site tells Google that there is more to the story. Google doesn’t really care what the story is, just who is telling it and how relevant the content is to the search terms it’s looking for. For our example of cruelty-free cashmere, a link to PETA.org is not just appropriate, but also highly relevant to the customer looking for that product. Not every product will have an easy link opportunity like that, but there are always link opportunities. Say you are selling a teeshirt with sunflowers; you can link to a fan site for sunflower lovers, organic sunflower seeds, or the Van Gogh painting of sunflowers. Have fun with it. Want to know what Google thinks is relevant to sunflowers? Yup, just search “Sunflowers.” Don’t add links that will confuse Google. Keep it simple and targeted.

Inbound links

Google loves inbound links from trusted sources. How do you get links from trusted sources? Pages full of interesting, relevant content are the best way to make that happen. In our sweater example, people who care about cruelty-free wool are very likely to link to a page about what it is and why it matters. Leverage social media, and don’t be afraid to ask for links from vendors, suppliers, sites you have connections to, pretty much anyone. Directories are a good source of links though they don’t have as much juice as a link in an article or post. Guest blogging is another way to get good links.

How to Speak Bot—Tags

Alt tags

Alt tags tell Google what an image is and helps people with disabilities navigate and understand the page. Adding alt tags to images shows Google that you care about others who may be less fortunate and that you. When Google has multiple sites that could be a good fit for a search term, they will serve the one that is properly tagged first. Alt tags aren’t tricky and you shouldn’t try to be tricky when writing them. Just describe the picture, and if possible, use a keyword or three. So from our example, the alt tag would be “Picture of a women’s Karma Isles Essential Cashmere cruelty-free sweater in Robins egg blue.” When a person listens to the page being read out loud, they will understand what the image shows. Alt tags are becoming more important as voice-activated devices grow in popularity.

Post tags

Post tags are just another way to get keywords into your site so Google knows what is going on. Don’t sweat post tags, just use your keywords. If it seems like you are adding the same words over and over and over again, you are. Google is not smart, it doesn’t think less of you if you repeat yourself, it just crawls and indexes. The algorithm ranks different attributes and serves up the best result.

Geotags

If you are selling to a specific geographic audience then make sure your store’s location is on your website. You can also geotag images of local interest. Getting tricky with geotags can be a double-edged sword. Let’s say we geotag an image of the Karma Isles Essential Cashmere Sweater with the village in Tibet where the wool is gathered; though that may increase the total views, those views may be in Tibet rather than where your store is located.

Hashtags

Social media loves a good hashtag. For our example #cruelty-free, #cruelty-free-cashmere, #PETA would all work. Google has started indexing hashtags and now you can use them in search. The jury is out about how effective they are without being tied to social media, but they aren’t hard to add.

Tag stuffing

It may seem like a good idea to stuff as many tags as possible everywhere you can. Nefarious characters have used this trick so much that it now works against your Google rank. Use as many tags as seems natural but more than five will probably hurt you more than it helps you.

Engagement is the Secret to Outsmarting Google

Google’s first priority is to send searchers to the site where they are most likely to find what they are looking for. If a searcher is searching for red ladybug slippers, they need to find red ladybug slippers when they click the Google link. Remember, the searcher is Google’s primary customer. Google’s algorithm can’t know if a site is “beautiful” because one person’s “beautiful” may be another person’s “hideous”. It can’t know if a site is hip, or cool, or anything that brings up a human emotion or preference, because it’s just an algorithm.

Google must narrow the possible sites from the infinite possibilities that are online to a list of good possibilities. It does this first by relevance. Does the site have the item the searcher is looking for? (Names and keywords) Does it have credibility? (Links) Is it accessible to everyone? (Alt text, Tags, Properly named images) Does it have expertise? (Links, Relevant content) Is location important? (Store location, Geo tags) But which site should they put in the top spots and which should go into the pages farther back? Google makes companies bid for the first three slots, but when it has 50,000 sites that sell white men’s shirts, or flip flops, or jeans, or diamond earrings, and 10,000 are doing a good job with SEO, how do they decide which will give their primary customer, the searcher, the best experience?

Google is limited in what information it has access to, and there are privacy laws that have forced it to be strategic in what it collects. What Google tracks isn’t a secret, you can see it in any Google Analytics dashboard. When you look at all the data Google can access you start to see it as a fseries of filters. First Google determines which site best meets the relevant search criteria and then which check all the SEO boxes. With all the sites left Google has only a few data points to figure out which is going to please searchers the most. There are three that stand out:

Time on site
Events
Return visits

Time on Site

Marketing to a targeted customer profile will help you create a site that appeals to a specific demographic, which is also something Google’s algorithm can understand and leverage.

Events

Google keeps track of every click, swipe, open, close and tap. These are all counted as events, things that the user does while on a website. Switch pages—that’s an event. Click on a product—that’s an event. Pick a color—that’s an event. You get the idea. Each event is counted and the algorithm can easily see which site gets the most engagement by which site creates the most events for its users. Turns out fun has a real place in good site design. You’ve probably heard web experts talk about how gamification, or making things into games, can really increase engagement. Sales, collections, videos, and apps that suggest complementary items, can all increase events.

The Stylaquin Shopify app also increases events significantly. While not all shoppers use Stylaquin when they shop (typically between12% and 30% of shoppers) those who do create about 125% more events than shoppers who don’t use Stylaquin. Stylaquin shoppers view about 180% more items when they shop and each item viewed is not just an event, it’s also the first step to a sale.

Return Visits

Having shoppers come back to your site is the absolutely best way to tell Google that your site is an awesome site to send searchers to. Nothing says “I like this site!” as clearly as a visitor coming back again. It is also another easy data point for Google’s algorithm to measure. Interesting and exciting products, new products, sales, and special events are all great ways to get customers to come back. Email marketing excels at this—if you can get their email.

Apps that stalk visitors over the web, known as retargeting apps, can be creepy, but they work by reminding visitors what they were interested in, and by giving companies a larger online presence. Retargeting apps typically charge per click and though prices vary based on multiple factors and targeting options, they seem to be around $0.70 to $1 per click. The ads take time and manpower to create and manage but the ROI can be excellent. There are some privacy concerns and the Federal Trade Commission has called for more transparency and meaningful customer control, so be sure that retargeting is in line with your store’s privacy policies.

The Stylaquin Shopify app does a great job of increasing return visits. Stylaquin has an idea board where shoppers can collect and curate all the things that interest them. They can change colors and sizes, and even move things around so they can see items together. This adds a fun, playful element to the website. Items remain on the Idea Board as long as the tracking cookie remains. When shoppers return, all the items they were interested in are right there waiting for them on their Idea Board. Since shoppers aren’t being tracked outside the website, there aren’t any privacy concerns. Stylaquin shoppers return 28% more often than shoppers who don’t use Stylaquin and they buy more when they do.

We all live in Google’s world

It would be nice to think that another search engine will make it easy to dial in engagement, but most searchers use Google and that’s unlikely to change any time soon. Start with the basics. Here is a link to our handy planner that will get you started. We hope you consider adding Stylaquin to your Shopify site as well, Stylaquin is easy to add and doesn’t require any work to maintain!

How to Promote the right products on your Shopify store's home page

Understanding Your Target Audience

Does Your Site Do This?

Start with Bestsellers

Let Shopify do the heavy lifting

Use color

Sort your table by date

Add a Styling Board and a Wishlist!

But wait! What about new products?

A/B testing is easy in Shopify

There's a Privacy App called Permission Slip that's Coming for Your Customers

What is Permission Slip?

So why are customers resorting to apps?

Does Your Site Do This?

Shopping is either a chore or entertainment

Add a Styling Board and a Wishlist!

And then there’s the confusion factor

Who are these strange people?

Enticing customers to stay longer can have a big impact on your SEO rank

Let’s break that down into 4 components.

Does Your Site Do This?

Okay, you’re sold, but how do you get customers to stay longer?

AI built websites are going to destroy keyword SEO

So what’s the pushback?

Does Your Site Do This?

Searchers not bots

What about ads?

Change is coming!

Is your Shopify site slower than you'd like? Here are 6 ways to speed it up!

Why is site speed important?

How to check your site’s speed

Does Your Site Do This?

Optimize your images

Delay popups

Lazy load your images

Remove unused apps

Update your theme

Make sure your theme uses a CDN

SEO rank is determined by these 4 basic metrics

Relevance

Authority

Does Your Site Do This?

User Experience

Freshness

What improves your Shopify site's conversion rate?

Does Your Site Do This?

Why is return website traffic important?

Google is watching

Does Your Site Do This?

Return visitors tend to buy more

Cost is also a factor

Stylaquin increases return customers and more

Wondering why time on site is so important?

Time on Site is one of Google’s most important data points

How to Outsmart Google

What Humans See

What Google sees

SEO isn’t pretty and bots don’t care

Your company is not Google’s primary customer

How to Speak Bot—Names

Product names

Image names

How to Speak Bot—Links

Internal links

Pages count more than posts

External links

Inbound links

How to Speak Bot—Tags

Alt tags

Post tags

Geotags

Hashtags

Tag stuffing

Engagement is the Secret to Outsmarting Google

Time on Site

Events

Return Visits

We all live in Google’s world

Book a Quick Demo!