Shopify SEO Help

The following is the transcript of the video by Jeff Finkelstein, founder of Customer Paradigm:

Hi, I’m Jeff Finkelstein. Founder of Customer Paradigm. If you need help with search engine optimization for your Shopify site, we’re here to help. I’d love to talk to you on the phone, and see what we can do to get more people to visit your site though natural, organic search results.

I’ve been working to optimize sites for SEO since 2002.

I love it. I’ve seen great SEO connect people from across the world. It helps match someone at the time of a need – searching for something specific. And displays an organic search result that leads to – in your case, a customer on your Shopify site.

So, let me let you in on a couple of secrets.

First, there is no secret. Anyone who tells you that they’ve cracked the code and have an inside line to Google is just not trustworthy.

All there is for SEO is to do good work and create great content and a great experience for your end users. If you create great content (or let us help you do that), and do outreach to get other influencers to share your content with their visitors, that’s really the secret.

At my company, we’re all about transparency. We’re transparent with what we do and how we do it. We work collaboratively with you, to make sure that we’re working together to achieve good results.

I’ve been doing this for a long time. Black hat tricks might work for a short period of time, but the folks at Google are pretty good at identifying people trying to scam them. And then those sites usually get blacklisted and banned. And that sucks. I’ve helped people get out of that kind of a hole. Not easy, but it can be done.

Second, your ability to rank for specific keywords is based on how many other people are also creating good quality content in this space.

If your Shopify site is in a space where there is not a lot of competition for organic traffic, then a moderate amount of work will likely net top search results.

If you’re in a highly competitive space, and your Shopify site is pretty new, and you’re up against entrenched competitors who have had great content for years and years, ranking for specific highly competitive keywords is going to take a great deal of effort.

What we can do is help you understand the space. And how competitive your keywords are, what content you need, and what type of strategies and tactics will result in you getting top search results.

What I love about SEO and digital marketing is that a small, nimble company with a great user experience and content can achieve great search results.

I’d love to connect with you and see how we can help you drive more paying customers to your Shopify site using PPC marketing.

My favorite part of the day is talking to Shopify site owners like you to discuss your digital marketing goals, and see if there’s anything I can recommend that may make your Shopify site or your brand more successful.

When it comes to SEO, there’s no ambiguity. At the end of the day, it all comes down to how much inbound traffic your site is generating, based on the quality of content on your site.

Unfortunately, SEO is pretty intangible. In many cases, stuff that you do today isn’t likely to pay off for several months.

But we can help you measure, track and keep on track with a solid marketing strategy.

My passion is helping businesses leverage the power of the Web to aggregate customers according to interest, and not geography. 12,600 projects later, I still love what we’re doing, and I love that the premise of the company – customer-centric thinking – is still just as valid and relevant today as it was back in 2002.

Back then (before Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, the iPhone, Amazon Prime, Gmail or Shopify), I saw that the companies that were succeeding online were the ones that were focused on the end customer experience.

The name of the company, Customer Paradigm, was based on the assumption that end customers increasingly have control over their purchasing experience. Buying online, interacting with people based on interest instead of geography – all of this was made possible by the Web.

In 2002, we helped businesses with three things: Acquiring new customers, retaining existing ones, and interacting with them online.

In 2019, the underlying goals are the same, but strategies and tactics are in many cases radically different.

But basically, we do three things for our customers. Help you acquire new customers, retain existing ones, and interact via the Web.

For Acquiring New Customers – we help through search engine optimization, paid advertising, social media and more, we can help you reach your customer in an efficient way. We can help you reach people when they are searching for a solution to their problem, as well as use demographic and psychographic targeted to get your site’s products in front of your ideal customers.

Retaining Existing Customers. We can help you keep your existing customers engaged with your Shopify store, products and brand, using social media marketing, retention email and PPC retargeting advertising. The goal: you’ve spent a ton of time, money, blood sweat and tears getting people to your site. Let us help you stay in touch, and amortize the investment you made in customer acquisition and get these people back to your site as paying customers.

Finally – Interact via your Shopify Site. We can help you increase the level of engagement for your Shopify site, including adding new design elements, more content, and producing compelling video and images for your Shopify store. Need a new design? Need help with product photography or an API integration? Our team of front end and back end developers can help.

Everything we do is transparent. We’re happy to tell you exactly what we’re doing to help boost site traffic to your site, and help engage them when they arrive. We’re happy to train you, too, if you’d like to learn how to do ongoing digital marketing for your Shopify site. There’s no secrets here. Just a lot of experience, propriety tools and a lot of knowledge based on past successes and past mistakes.

For a successful SEO marketing, there’s a few things to keep in mind:
– How competitive your space is. For example, personal injury lawyers have one of the most competitive spaces out there. Some of them are spending tens of thousands of dollars a month, or more, to write content and solicit inbound links. On the other hand, a successful case could net them hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. So from a cost per customer acquisition, it’s expensive, but the ROI is there.

Depending on how competitive your space is, we can help you find long tail keywords that are a lot more attainable, so that we can keep your customer acquisition rate as low as possible.

When it comes to SEO, small, tiny things can add up. I’ve run eCommerce sites in the past, as have many people on my team. I’ve helped hundreds of clients over the years optimize their sites to increase conversions.

Something as simple as duplicate page titles, or meta description tags can affect your rankings.
Here’s a quick tip: your meta description tag is really only used to display search results. One of the most common mistakes on Shopify sites is to stuff a bunch of keyword content into the meta description. Instead, it should read more as a call to action, to entice the end user to click on the organic search result.

Did you know that an increase in 1-2 spots of ranking for a keyword can often dramatically increase your inbound traffic to your Shopify site?

There’s a ton of tips, tricks and strategies that I’ve seen over the years that make a big difference.

I can also help you identify common mistakes to avoid. I know. I’ve probably made them, or worked with clients in the past that have made them.

For example, are you using canonical tags properly on your product pages to prevent duplicate content issues? Are you using the rel next/previous canonical tags on your category pages to make sure that Google and other search engines index all of your products, and not just the first page of products on a category page?

That’s where we can help. Sometimes it’s small things, like how content is organized on a page.

Sometimes it comes down to page load times, confusing content, or even the messaging around how fast you ship products out after someone places an order.

And then, if you’d like, we can use your pay per click marketing data – those golden keywords that we know actually convert into purchase, and help you identify places to bolster your SEO content. So that eventually, you can wean yourself off of PPC and have a more balanced mix between organic SEO and pay per click.

So, let’s talk on the phone. We charge on an hourly or project basis, and we’re pretty affordable. In some cases, we can work with you on a performance basis, or on a percentage of ad spend or revenue. We won’t lock you into a long-term contracts, and we don’t mark up your ad spends.

Let me know – I can meet with you here in our office here in Boulder, Colorado, or over the phone – 303.473.4400.
Thanks! – Jeff

Not ready to talk yet? Not a problem. Here’s a little bit more about our process.

We relentlessly test our assumptions and overlay our customer-centric process to gain critical insight into your target customers.

Over the years, we’ve refined our Six Step Process for Pay Per Click for Shopify Merchants:

1. Customer Discovery / Brand Alignment & Competitive Research.

We’ll meet (on the phone or in person in Boulder, CO) to discuss your Shopify site, target audience, and customer profile.

We’ll want to know why your customers like buying from your Shopify storefront. We’ll explore what matters to them, including pricing, customization, eco-friendly matters, or if they love working with you because of your customer support, shipping.

We’ll delve into your backstory – why your company is in business to serve your customers. And use that positioning to help guide our digital marketing efforts.

Our goal is to explore why your customers buy from you, as well as evaluate your competitors in the marketplace. We’ll look at other sites, and examine how others in your space market and position themselves.

2. Site Audit & Recommendations for Your Shopify Site.

Before we spend time and money building content to send prospective customers to your site, we want to make sure that your site can best convert them.

We’ll conduct an internal and external site audit to find any show-stopping issues that a search engine might have when indexing your site.

Search engines like Google crawls the pages of your Shopify website, checks for broken links, meta data, content issues, image and links issues, semantic structure and more.

Our site audit us insight to actionable areas where we can improve the performance and quality of your Shopify site.

And before we help you spend time and energy (and money) driving new and existing customers to your Shopify site, we want to make sure that the site is ready to catch them.

We can identify any of the following SEO issues for your Shopify site, and fix them quickly:

Search visibility, indexing, crawling, errors resolution; sitemap, robot.txt configuration.

Links – internal links missing anchors, titles, alt text tags

Images – non-optimized images, missing images, pixelated or large images that are missing alt and title tags.

Meta data – including reviewing the site for appropriate page titles and meta description tags for pages, addressing duplicate content issues, or issues with meta data length, quality or errors.

Content and display issues, including areas of the site with confusing content, dense content, or missing content.
– Social media integration, including multiple channels, such as Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram can be tied together in a cohesive social strategy that drives traffic to the site.

Content / Catalog optimization – page by page treatment to optimize products, categories; CMS pages; content structure, readability, topical focus, keyword utilization, low word count, duplicate content.

Identifying areas for content development, management, and marketing for your Shopify site, including blog writing and site optimization.

Analyze your site speed and solutions for improvement – including optimizing images and/or video for your Shopify site.

Ensuring that tracking and measurement technology is present on the site and working, including Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel tracking, etc.

At Customer Paradigm, we strongly feel that any successful, long term search marketing strategy for your Shopify site begins with a thorough and effective optimization.

That said, digital marketing optimization is not a one-time event. Just as you add new products to your Shopify site each month, it’s important to keep the content and structure of your site up to date.

That’s why an ongoing, long-term SEO strategy for your Shopify site is critical. A good Shopify eCommerce website is never “done” or completed. It’s instead carefully curated and cultivated each day, month and year.

3. Shopify Site Changes / Design Updates.

Once we identify areas for improvement we’ll work with you and your team to update the site so that it’s ready to drive traffic and convert people into paying customers.

Again, our digital marketing process for Shopify store owners is transparent. We’ll tell you what needs to be done, and we’re happy to do some (or all) of the work for you and/or train you and your team on best practices for digital marketing.

We have a full team of front end designers, content writers and backend programmers that can help take your Shopify site to the next level.

4. Demand Generation for your Shopify Site, including Pay Per Click Advertising

Once the Shopify site is ready to “catch” visitors, our team can also work with you to drive more targeted traffic to the site.

This is often a combination of PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing and Social Media adverting and outreach.

This is optional – but I want to let you know we can help with PPC as well as SEO.

Why PPC? It’s a great way to test keywords. Not based on guesswork. But based on these are the keywords that people are clicking on, and converting to purchase. We can use these keywords to better assist with SEO.
And again, we’re transparent.
We’ll tell you what we’re going to do, and you’ll have full access to the Google pay per click metrics and dashboard. As well as other PPC systems, too, like Bing, Facebook, and others. We’re happy to work with you collaboratively on your Shopify site, so that we can help you achieve success.
If you have an existing PPC account for your Shopify site, we can evaluate and advise on what is working, how to improve, and what next steps to take to optimize your PPC campaigns. Once you’re ready to move forward, we can help manage some, all or none the elements of your PPC campaigns in conjunction with your SEO strategy.

There’s three ways we can work with you to help drive targeted customers via PPC:

First, when people are searching for a specific need, we can make sure your ads are right there. One of our clients in a auto-repair / transmission repair company. If an end user is on their phone, and searching for “transmission repair near me” that’s a keyword that is worth quite a bit of money to our client. We’re matching the client with the ad, right at their key moment of need.

Second, you can use PPC campaigns as more of a branding platform. So if people are searching for your company name, for example, you can make sure that your site shows up… especially if there are other similar players out there. We have a client that is a law firm, with the name of the firm based on the two last names of the partners. Unfortunately, there’s also a plumbing company in another part of the US that has those two same last names, but reversed. In case someone in the Denver geographic area searches, we can make sure that our client’s law firm shows up properly.

Third, you can use PPC campaigns as a way to get your message in front of the right demographic / psychographic audience. For example, if you’re selling spots at a youth summer campaign focused on theatre, we can help you create a series of PPC campaigns that will put your company in front of the right target audience. We can use existing customers as a guideline, and test our assumptions. For the camp audience, it’s likely to be moms between the age of 35-50, who are married, own their own home, in a middle to higher income bracket, have kids and show an interest in theatre.

As crazy as that seems, we can help you get your message in front of that group of people. Getting back to that Broncos game example, instead of blasting out a message to all 75,000 fans in the stadium – which is probably way too expensive anyway. And will annoy most of the 75,000, we can help you get in front of them at a fraction of the cost.

Which reminds me. PPC is amazing, but it can be expensive. Long-term, you need to also create good content for your site, so that you can rank organically for your search terms.

And in this case, a good PPC campaign can be an amazing place to start.

Continuous Search Marketing Strategy:
Do you want your Shopify storefront to be found? A long-term commitment to continuous optimization for the best user search experience is important to ensure effective search presence and traffic to your site for the life of your business.

Your Shopify website is never finally fully optimized because your competitors are constantly improving their sites and trying to get ahead. Your competition is constant – the only way to stay ahead is through continual effort.

5. Retention Marketing for Shopify Sites.

Once you’ve spent blood, sweat and tears to get great clients to make a purchase from your Shopify site, we can help you reach back out to past customers and prospects to get them to purchase again.

We have a tremendous amount of experience with permission-based email campaigns, and can help you bring people back with relevant, anticipated content.

We can also help with abandoned cart emails, and work with you to help market free samples / trials for your Shopify site.

We can also help you develop and execute strategies for using social media as a means to reach back out to past customers and get them to spread the word about your Shopify site, or come back and make a repeat purchase.

We’ve helped major household brands reshape their retention marketing tactics – let us help you guide your customers back to your site.

6. Measurement, Tracking and Results.

You can only control what you measure. We will work with you to review what’s working, what’s not, and what changes we need to make to better drive more sales via organic SEO to your Shopify site.

You’ll work with a dedicated project manager, who will be able to answer any questions about your account.

We’re transparent. So what we see, you see. We won’t hide behind secret formulas. The only formula that works for your Shopify site is the one that best engages with your customers.

For more information, or a free Web marketing strategy review, please call us at 303.473.4400

Okay… I think I’ve talked now for quite a while. I hope the passion that I have for helping Shopify owners with SEO and digital marketing has come through. I’d love to help. Let’s talk! My phone # is 303.473.4400 or contact us through our site – www.CustomerParadigm.com.

Thanks for watching. I’m Jeff Finkelstein, founder of Customer Paradigm. I do love this stuff. Thanks!