How to get site visitors to stay a whopping 3:55 longer.

Posted on February 20, 2024 by Stylaquin1

Adding almost 4 mins in time on site does magical things to SEO

I didn’t pick 3 mins and 55 seconds out of a hat. That’s how much additional time on site one of the larger newly Stylaquin enabled stores saw Stylaquin shoppers spend. This is something we see consistently with Stylaquin shoppers. Once we get some more data, I’ll ask the owner if I can share more info.

What does adding 3 minutes and 55 seconds do for SEO?

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.

I asked ChatGPT to act as an SEO expert and explain what adding 3 minutes and 55 seconds would do to a site’s SEO ranking. (Seemed only fair to ask an AI what another AI would think.)

Here’s what it said:

As an SEO expert, analyzing the impact of visitors staying longer on a site due to the use of an app like Stylaquin involves understanding several key factors related to user engagement, site performance metrics, and ultimately, search engine rankings. Here’s a breakdown of the potential impacts:

Increased Session Duration: When visitors stay on a site longer, the session duration increases. This is a positive signal to search engines, suggesting that the content is relevant and engaging to users. A longer session duration can contribute to better search engine rankings because it indicates that the website provides value, keeping users interested for more time.
Improved User Engagement: Stylaquin likely enhances the shopping experience, making it more interactive and personalized. This increased engagement can lead to higher user satisfaction, more pages visited per session, and potentially, a higher conversion rate. Engaged users are more likely to return, recommend the site to others, and convert into customers.
Positive Impact on Bounce Rate: If users find Stylaquin useful and it keeps them on the site longer, they’re less likely to leave the site quickly (bounce). A lower bounce rate is another positive signal to search engines, suggesting that the site meets users’ expectations and needs. This can positively affect the site’s search engine ranking.
Content Discovery and Indexing: The longer visitors stay on the site, the more likely they are to explore and interact with content. This increased interaction can lead to better content discovery by search engines, as it encourages the crawling of more pages. Moreover, engaging and interactive content, such as that provided by Stylaquin, can lead to more internal linking opportunities and improved site structure.

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.

Social Signals and Backlinks: Highly engaged users are more likely to share content on social media or link back to it from their own websites or blogs. Although social signals are not a direct ranking factor for most search engines, they can lead to increased visibility and more organic traffic. Similarly, backlinks from reputable sites can significantly boost SEO efforts by increasing the site’s authority.
Enhanced Mobile Experience: Assuming Stylaquin is mobile-friendly, (Yup, it’s mobile awesome!) this increased time spent can also signify a positive mobile user experience. With mobile-first indexing, search engines prioritize the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. A seamless mobile shopping experience can thus further enhance SEO performance.

In summary, the use of Stylaquin and the resulting longer session durations can significantly impact a site’s SEO positively. By improving user engagement, decreasing bounce rates, and encouraging content discovery, it helps create a more favorable view of the site from the perspective of search engines. Consequently, this can lead to better rankings, more organic traffic, and increased conversions, which are critical objectives for any SEO strategy.

Thanks ChatGPT! I couldn’t have said it better myself. I wouldn’t have minded a touch more personality, but to be fair, I didn’t ask for sassy. Maybe next time.

How to Bust Out Your Google Engagement Score!

Posted on January 22, 2024 by Stylaquin1

Transforming Online Shopping

Using engagement to improve your Shopify site's Google rank

Last week’s post was about how to get more traffic to your Shopify site. Once you get some traffic coming in you need to engage it. Google’s key metric for Google is happy searchers. (If you want to understand how Google really works, download our free e-book “How to Outsmart Google”.) Google determines how happy searchers are by measuring engagement. In this post I’ll take you through how Google measures engagement and how to dial that in. Google fields 8.5 billion searches a day. They can’t send all their traffic on any one search to just one site. It would crash the site. So, moving up in the ranks is like starting a bike in tenth gear. It’s really hard and slow at first, but once you have momentum it gets easier and it goes faster.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

CTR is a bit of the snake eating it’s own tail. Click-through rate is the percentage of people who click on your website’s link in search results after seeing it. Yup, you need to have created ads or high ranking content for this to come into play. It’s mostly for ads, and yes, Google rewards you when you buy ads. Adding CTR to the engagement score is Google putting a big fat finger on the scale for ads. Google believes that a high CTR suggests that your content is compelling and relevant to users. It can also mean that you have a knack for creating good ad copy. Read on, because there’s more to the story.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate measures the percentage of users who leave your site shortly after visiting a single page. This is why having a compelling home page is so important. A lower bounce rate indicates that visitors are finding what they’re looking for and engaging with your content. Getting visitors to view a second page is the only way to reduce bounce rate. There are three questions you need to help visitors can answer quickly when they visit your home page.

What are you selling?
Why should your customer care? (What’s in it for them?)
What should they do next?

Go ahead and take a moment to visit your site’s home page and see if it answers those three questions. It’s harder than it looks, and crazy important. I’ll wait.

Dwell Time (Time on site)

Dwell time is the amount of time users spend on your site. Longer dwell times suggest that visitors are finding valuable content, which tells Google that your site provides a good user experience. This is a simple time measurement metric. You can’t fake it and even a few seconds longer will move you up in the ranking. Getting shoppers to stay longer is not easy. You are competing against life for their attention. Lots of moving, flashing, things probably won’t help. Who is your target customer? What matters to them? Putting together tight collections and having compelling photography really helps with this. If your customer is cheap, offer lots of discounts. If your customer is chic, offer a sophisticated design. Here’s a post on leveraging cheap and chic as a differentiator.

Pageviews and Events per Session

This metric measures how many pages a user views during a single visit to your site. The more pages visitors view, the more it shows Google that visitors are engaging with your content. Pageviews are part of what Google counts as events. Events are the sum of all the things visitors do when they engagement with your site. Clicking a link, visiting a page, adding to cart all count as events. Getting visitors to view more pages and do more things that cause events to be counted is a big deal. It’s hard to get visitors to view even one more page, so getting lots of page views is gold. Shopify sites can add recommendation apps to their site. But I think it’s easier to make shopping faster and more fun. (Biased toward Stylaquin for this one.) You can’t increase the amount of time visitors have to shop, but you can make it faster to shop, so they have time to see more items.

Does Your Site Do This?

Add a Styling Board and a Wishlist!

Comments and Engagement on Site

User-generated content, such as comments on blog posts or discussions in forums, count as engagement. Meaningful interactions on your site will signal to Google that your content is valuable and fosters a sense of community. Blogging about your products and linking to them is a good way to do that. Making it easy for customers to leave reviews is another way.

Instagram and Facebook are online fashion’s best friends when it comes to social engagement. Creating a real community of people you connect with, and offer valuable content to, takes time and focus. This is just another example of why having a very targeted audience is key to creating connection. Here’s a link to our free e-book on creating personas so you can focus your brand on your target customer. I don’t want to knock blogs and content. This is after all a blog post that you’re reading. But if you are a Shopify Store, you’re selling products. You don’t want them to go to your blog, you want them to go to your store. In the time it takes to create a blog post that will rank, you could created a boat load of instagram and Facebook posts that just show what you sell. Make them interesting, uplifting, pretty, funny and so on to get followers as well as click throughs.

Social media takes time to learn and master. Don’t try to get every channel going. You need a team for that. Pick the one that is most important to your customers and just do that one to start. If you already have a channel or two working, then branch out. Any channel can work, but it takes months to get it going and years to make it big. The TV show “Emily in Paris” is actually a good example of clever social marketing. It took our fictional hero a while to get the ball rolling even though she’s adorable, has a FABULOUS wardrobe, is a social media professional, and she lives in Paris. Work with what works best for your personal style and privacy needs.

Repeat Visitors

Returning visitors may be the ultimate signal to Google that users find your site valuable and are coming back for more. How do you get more repeat visitors? You have to create a compelling experience, and you have to have products that customers want. Wish lists can help. Setting up a good email program is another great way to get the same customers to come back. New items, sales, interesting info about the products all work. If you want to see a great example of how a family owned business can create quality email about their products, sign up for the emails at Cross Jewelers. Every email tells a story about a product, and they rarely are offer any sales, so they aren’t giving up any margin. It isn’t flashy, but it’s consistent and they’ve grown quite a bit over the years, so something is working.

Is there an easier way to improve your engagement score

Honestly, this is where Stylaquin is head and shoulders above anything else out there. It makes shopping fun AND it has an idea board that let’s shoppers save all the things they liked but didn’t buy. We’ve seen Dwell time go up 70%. We’ve seen product views go up over 180% when visitors shop with Stylaquin. We aren’t sure if visitors come back because it was just more fun, or if they wanted to see if what they left on their idea board was still there, but Stylaquin shoppers come back up to 28% more often, and they buy more when they do. Stylaquin is the total package for increasing engagement. Check it out.

11 ways to get more free organic traffic

Posted on January 17, 2024 by Stylaquin1

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.

Download your copy today!

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?

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.

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

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.

How to get customers to stay on your site longer

Posted on June 2, 2023 by Stylaquin1

How to get customers to stay on your site longer

Time on site is the term used to measure how long a visitor stays on a website. 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.

Time on site does a lot of good things for your site. 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 Hump Day Bar Hop 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.
Okay, you’re sold, but how do you get customers to stay longer? Here are some thing to consider:

Does Your Site Do This?

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 the Stylaquin video.

If you’d like to watch this as a video here’s the link.

What does keeping your content fresh actually mean?

Posted on May 22, 2023 by Stylaquin1

How to keep your content fresh

What does “Fresh” even mean?

When you ask experts how to get more organic traffic, one of the things that always makes the list is keeping your site fresh. Fresh is a pretty vague term. Fresh like lettuce, or fresh like potatoes? It turns out that there are different measures of fresh and they are measured differently.

The most basic measure is fresh content like new blog posts, articles, and videos. No real news flashes there. If you are a Shopify site that doesn’t add lots of new products then adding a blog and posting often will help, we’ll get to how often later.

Social media is another thing that search engines look at. Your instagram posts, TikTok videos, and Facebook updates all count. Google, which owns YouTube, not surprisingly favors video and YouTube channels. You can see where it starts to look like a racket.

So what tools do Search Engines use to determine what’s new?

Search engines use web crawlers to visit websites and index their content. When a web crawler visits a website, it looks for new content that has been added since the last time the website was crawled. Google’s web crawler, Googlebot, typically crawls popular websites several times a day, while it may only crawl less popular websites once a week or even less often.

There are things that admins and website owners can do to encourage web crawlers to crawl their websites more frequently. One is to make sure that their websites are well-indexed and that they use the right keywords and phrases throughout their content. If you are not sure how to do that there are apps that will streamline the process. Shopify has over 500 in their app store.

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

Crawler-friendly web design

Your website’s design can make a big difference in how often it is crawled by web crawlers. Make sure your website is designed in a way that is easy for web crawlers to navigate. Important safety tip: none of that has anything to do with what you can see or even if it looks good. You can have a visually stunning website that is simply awful for web crawlers. Remember, web crawlers are machines, they don’t have taste, they aren’t cool, hip or even alive. They only understand what you tell them with words. So what does a website that’s beautiful to web crawlers look like? It looks the same as one that is ugly to web crawlers until you get into nitty gritty. Web crawlers want images that are named for what they show with alt tags and meta descriptions. They like URLs that are all short, concise and help describe where they lead. Don’t use URL shortening services like Bitly unless necessary. Web crawlers may have difficulty crawling and indexing shortened links, because shortened links often contain no information about the destination page, making it difficult for web crawlers to understand what the page is about.

Avoid using Javascript and Flash, and be sure to provide alt text for all images and videos. Using an SEO app that scores your content is a good idea. It’s easy to miss things and having a machine point out what the machines are looking for just makes sense. It is literally the blind showing you how to lead the blind.

Submit your website to search engines

If you are a new site, or if you don’t think your site is being crawled, you should submit your website to search engines through Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Submitting to these two will tell all the search engines that your website exists and that you want it to be indexed. You only have to do this once. If you want to see if your site has already been indexed you can check in any browser by using the site: operator. Simply type site: followed by the URL of your website into the Google and Bing search bars. If your website appears, you are being indexed.

So what is the right amount of freshness?

The sweet spot for most sites is posting two to three times per week. This gives you enough time to produce high-quality content while still keeping your audience engaged. If you can’t afford a content creator, and you have other time pressures, do your best. Freshness is important, but not the only thing that search engines look at. It’s better to have high quality content on a regular basis than crap every day. If you are a Shopify store and want an easy way to boost your engagement stats check out Stylaquin.

If you’d like to see this content in video form click here or visit our Hump Day Bar Hopping page where you’ll find all the fun and informative Hump Day Bar Hopping with Stylaquin videos.

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.

Innovation that increases online sales? Really?

Posted on September 2, 2022 by Stylaquin1

There is a Shopify App that will Increase sales!

Are you a Shopify website owner with great products but not enough site traffic and sales? Are you frustrated and confused about how to get more traffic and increase conversions?
Would you like your site to show a growth curve that even vaguely resembles a hockey stick? Before you say it’s impossible, or too much work, or crazy expensive, take a look at the results from three years of beta testing Stylaquin on a small gift and clothing site. The pink indicates when Stylaquin was active on the site.

For two years before the site started beta testing, their sales and conversion rate was flat and not showing even the slightest sign of traction. The owner did her research and learned that content was king so she hired a blogger, but nothing much changed. She tried a loyalty program, and still nothing. Then the store joined the first Stylaquin beta program. In the first few months things started heading up, and up, and by the end of the first year, sales had increased a whopping 486%. That was just the beginning. Click here to see the data from three years of testing, or check out the 2-minute video below that shows how Stylaquin is re-imagining the online shopping experience.

If you’ve tried other apps that didn’t deliver, it’s probably hard to imagine another app will really move the needle, but Stylaquin is different. Most apps that say they increase sales don’t really get you past the problem of Google’s algorithm. Some are gimmicky, and most are covering things you’ve already done. Of course, Stylaquin isn’t a magic bullet, it does take time to work and the results build over time. That’s why we offer a month free, so you can experience the increases in time on site, items viewed, and return customer visits for yourself.

Stop trying to discount your way to success, and start delighting the shoppers who love to shop. Discount shoppers who just want everything for 50% off with free shipping should not be who you focus on. They are fickle and kill your ROI. Stylaquin helps you focus on power-shoppers, the folks who love to shop. They are more brand loyal, more likely to buy, and more likely to come back and buy more when they do. Power-shoppers are looking for a great online shopping experience, something engaging and fun. That’s exactly what Stylaquin gives them, a beautiful, unique and engaging online shopping experience. Give Stylaquin a try! It’s available in the Shopify App Store.