Best Shopify Marketing Tips To Outrank Your Competitors

By Sammie Brown
Best Shopify Marketing Tips To Outrank Your Competitors

As a marketer or online business owner who uses Shopify, you will probably have many other Shopify competitors that will be aiming for the first spaces in search results. There are many strategies most marketers use to beat these Google competitors (e.g. using a target inventory checker to see prices and stocks in other stores or using a Shopify domain search before creating the store), but they can only do so much.

A much better route to take is reinventing your strategy and focusing on long-term results that can help you stay afloat longer. In other words, it’s not just about promoting your best-selling products online but also making sure that your website ranks higher thanks to the unusual practices you use. Hence, here are the best Shopify marketing tips to outrank your competitors.

#1 Start with Conventional SEO Practices

Before you start getting into more advanced marketing practices, you first need to make sure that all the conventional SEO techniques have been applied to your Shopify store. For example, proper keyword research is the foundation of any successful marketing campaign, so you need to make sure to determine the keywords you will be using and include them on the site already.

Make your online store navigation easy with a user-friendly design and numerous internal links. Build your backlink profile with guest blogging to improve your store’s authority and improve its rankings this way. Work on the SEO for your visuals such as alt tags for your images. And, of course, write the metadata for your web pages.

#2 Enhance Your Customer Experience

Once all the conventional SEO is in place, you need to think about your user experience. Enhancing the customer experience will improve your customer satisfaction rate which can indirectly lead to more positive reviews and more new customers.

To improve your user-customer experience, start using email marketing to create personalized offers for existing and potential customers. Send out bonuses and gift cards, notify subscribers about sales, and so on. In addition to that, make the checkout process on your website easier by simplifying the steps your customer needs to go through. Also, offer multiple payment, shipping, and delivery options to reduce your cart abandonment rate.

#3 Host Giveaways and Contests

Even though hosting giveaways and contests will always have a very positive effect on your marketing campaigns, there are some situations when using them can be particularly helpful. If you are just starting out with marketing or if your brand visibility and awareness have gone down, hosting a giveaway or contest will help you get the exposure you are looking for.

To put it simply, everyone likes getting free (or almost free) stuff. This is why giveaways and contests work so well. At the same time, you get an opportunity to promote your products both to the audience participating in the giveaway or contest and to the winners who might become your returning customers.

#4 Promote Your Site on Social Media

Some marketers believe that generating traffic on your website that comes from social media will not actually do much for the performance of your site. But even if the traffic from various social media platforms doesn’t benefit your website the same way traffic from searches does, social media marketing can still help you a lot.

Having social media accounts for your business will allow you to grow a dedicated follower base with potential and returning customers. In addition to that, it can help you increase your brand awareness and get more exposure, especially if you decide to host giveaways and contests on social media.

#5 Curate User-Generated Content

UGC or user-generated content is the content created by your audience such as customer reviews. Most businesses will interact with their followers in some way (e.g. by replying to comments or complaints), but curating UGC and publishing it on your website can help you present more social proof and persuade more potential customers to become your clients.

As Harry Pemberton from the custom writing reviews site Best Writers Online puts it, “User-generated content can be a great way to connect with your customers and get them to recommend your shop to others. It can also help you reduce your workload by providing part of all the content you put out.”

#6 Use Upselling in Your Strategy

Upselling is probably one of the best ways to sell more of your products and increase your revenue. But at the same time, it can be a great way to grow your business and attract more attention to your brand. Here’s the kind of customer journey your client can have when you are upselling:

  • A customer makes a purchase from your store buying a hand sanitizer, a moisturizing product for dry skin, and a hypoallergenic bar of soap.
  • You automatically recommend similar products to your customer either during the checkout process or later on via email.
  • The customer considers your recommendations and purchases another moisturizing product for dry skin.
  • The customer tries out the products. If they are satisfied, they might post their product reviews online, especially if they find your recommended product particularly helpful.
  • Your website gets more traction because more people find out about your brand thanks to the review.

#7 Remember About Mobile Compatibility

Nowadays, most people own some kind of mobile device that they carry around and use to access emails, make quick searches, and visit sites on-the-go. This means that the sites these users visit will be getting a lot of mobile traffic, and so, they needed to be able to provide a good mobile experience.

Similarly, you need to make sure that your website has a mobile version that will show up ideally on smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices. You can also consider getting a separate mobile app for your store, but this solution does not mean that you shouldn’t optimize your website for mobile first.

#8 Experiment with Different Content

One thing many marketers and business owners tend to forget is that variety in content is the best solution for long-term results. Focusing on a particular type of content (e.g. how-to articles or guides) can lead to great short-term results, but if you want to have a steady stream of traffic on your website, you will need to add more variety.

Moreover, you shouldn’t be afraid of experimenting with different content. For example, try launching a podcast where you discuss the latest fashion trends and how you sell the kind of clothes that fit these trends. If the podcast doesn’t take off, you can always switch to a different type of content.

#9 Regularly Update Your FAQ Page

Updating the FAQ page may seem like a second thought, but it can actually help you keep potential customers on your website, bring more traffic to your online store, and help your site rank higher in search results.

Most of the time, your customers will have questions about your brand, products, delivery, shipping, payment, and so on. All of these questions need to be answered on your FAQ page which should be updated regularly to add the right keywords and information.

#10 Learn from Online Resources

Last but not least, learning from online resources can help you improve your strategy and market your business better. There are millions of articles, guides, and instructional videos created constantly explaining how you market your Shopify website better.

But even as you learn from those, there is something else you can do. Discussion forums and websites like Reddit can help you find other business owners and marketers like yourself who share their marketing practices and advice.

Final Thoughts

All in all, improving your overall Shopify marketing strategy to make your website rank higher is the best choice you can make for staying afloat in the long term. Instead of looking for short-term results, change your strategy and find the approach that will make your website consistently outrank your competitors even after months or years of its operating.

By Sammie Brown