If you’ve ever spent money on ads without getting any sales to show for it, you know what it’s like to set cash on fire. Even worse is if your organic traffic game is non-existent, taking your chances of seeing improvements in the future down to zero.
There’s no need to live like this in Q1, Q2, Q3, and certainly not in Q4. You need to diversify your traffic sources with a consistent stream of organic traffic and increased chances of making a purchase once traffic reaches your store. You need a combined Shopify conversion rate optimization strategy + SEO strategy.
In this post, you’ll learn a better way to operate with an SEO-led Shopify conversion rate optimization strategy that doesn’t keep you at the mercy of the ad gods. But first, the basics.
Why Does Your Conversion Rate Matter?
Imagine your Shopify store gets 10,000 average monthly visitors with an average conversion rate of 0.8% and an average order value (AOV) of $37. You can comfortably predict that you’ll likely earn around $2,960 per month if these rates remain stable (0.8% x 10,000 x $37).
Now, watch what happens if you keep two of these the same, and change one. Keep your traffic volume the same (no extra ad spend), as well as your product price (no price hikes!), but boost conversions to 5.4% from 0.8%. You automatically have new monthly revenue of $19,980. That’s 6.75x more revenue, just for changing one thing!
And this, dear friends, is why your conversion rate matters. If you take anything at all away from this post, let it be this equation.
So why add search engine optimization?
Okay, so we know now that conversion rate drastically affects your revenue — but what about the impact of monthly visitors and order value? Improving each of these would affect your monthly revenue too.
To demonstrate this, let’s also assume you made the right decision 6 months ago to improve your store’s SEO and those efforts are now paying off.
So you’ve managed to double your monthly traffic (without increasing your ad spend) on top of your new 5.4% conversion rate.
[20,000 visitors x 5.4% conversion rate x $37 AOV = $39,960 in monthly revenue].
1350% increase in sales, anyone?
So, why add search engine optimization?
We already know now that conversion rate drastically affects your revenue — but what about the impact of monthly visitors and order value? Improving each of these would affect your monthly revenue too.
To demonstrate this, let’s also assume you made the right decision 6 months ago to improve your store’s SEO and those efforts are now paying off.
So you’ve managed to double your monthly traffic (without increasing your ad spend) on top of your new 5.4% conversion rate.
[20,000 visitors x 5.4% conversion rate x $37 AOV = $39,960 in monthly revenue].
1350% increase in sales, anyone?
How to implement an SEO-led Shopify conversion rate optimization strategy
From these figures, you can agree that combining your SEO and CRO strategies in one makes for a powerful value proposition, with outsized returns. You just have to put in the work. Now, here’s exactly how to put in the work:
Audit: Find out what’s wrong
To figure out what exactly needs optimizing in your store, you would have to find out what’s not working in your current strategy.
First, you’ll need to carry out an SEO audit as well as a CRO audit. An SEO audit analyzes your store to figure out what prevents it from showing up in search engine rankings. A CRO audit, on the other hand, evaluates your product pages to figure out what prevents potential customers from reaching the checkout page or completing the checkout process.
You can hire a Shopify expert to help you conduct an SEO audit (in days), or you can just install Plug In SEO and get it done in minutes. For a CRO audit, I would recommend hiring an expert over a tool, as while search engine optimization is relatively straightforward, conversion rate optimization requires a lot of testing.
You want a conversion rate optimization expert who evaluates your entire customer journey and user behavior on various pages throughout your online store. They should evaluate your homepage, product pages, product images, website speed, checkout process among others to create a priority list of changes to test.
For example, you’ll offer free shipping and monitor user behavior and resulting changes in conversion rates over a month. Then you’ll do the same with a guest checkout option, better web page quality, and so on. These combined benefits of small incremental improvements should lead to sustainable growth in the long term.
In tandem, these exercises expose your areas of weakness and provide guidance on what items you need to prioritize to start seeing results.
Implement Fixes
SEO
Now you know where your problems are, you can start fixing them and start measuring your progress. Because search engines are predictable to an extent, any SEO fixes you implement are almost guaranteed to work, but you’ll likely not find out immediately. SEO needs time, small consistent actions, and patience to work, so it’s best to keep things moving even if you don’t get results immediately.
If you’re time-rich/cash-poor, you can save costs by implementing the fixes yourself and asking for help when you need it.
Luckily, following a website audit, Plug In SEO offers in-depth guidance on what exactly you need to fix to increase the number of website visitors you get organically. This includes simple actions like adding file names to your images, adding meta descriptions to your product pages and keywords to your product descriptions, etc.
CRO
Implementing CRO fixes is a different matter. Doing it yourself involves small tweaks, letting them run and then measuring their impact after, say, a month.
As it’s difficult to recommend an app to do this automatically, here are some CRO fixes you can implement and test immediately.
Add a phone number: Adding a phone number to your store’s homepage shows that you’re a real person, which can increase your perceived trust.
Add social proof: Asking for customer testimonials is one great way of increasing social proof because people feel more comfortable buying from stores with third-party validation.
Multiple payment options: A complicated checkout process is one way to lose sales easily. Add multiple payment methods so customers don’t bounce because you don’t accept PayPal.
Loyalty programs: Test a loyalty program to keep your customers coming back and ultimately increase your customer lifetime value
Free shipping: Offering free shipping over a price threshold is a great way to increase conversions
Mobile-friendliness: While you might need a developer for this one, a mobile-friendly website is one way to increase your online sales and reduce your cart abandonment rates.
Search bar: This is often overlooked, but chances are that your entire product catalog doesn’t fit on your front page. Why lose out on potential customers who want to search for particular products
Theres is an endless list of Shopify conversion rate optimization hacks you can test. It includes customer testimonial popups like Lunchskins did, enabling guest checkout, offering free gifts, and more.
So, how does Shopify conversion rate optimization work IRL?
Conversion rate optimization involves a lot of testing. Essentially, you’ll want to start by making one change at a time, let it run for a defined time period, then measure results.
Say you’re testing each optimization action for a month, at the end of each month, every action that increases your average conversion rate stays. Any action that worsens it or keeps it the same is scrapped. Over time, you will slowly convert net positive actions to turn your Shopify store into a converting machine. Which brings us to the second story we wanted to share with you all.
How To Improve Your Shopify Conversion Rate (Like Other Shopify Owners)
To illustrate this better, here’s how a Shopify store in the craft/hobby niche managed to boost conversions from 2% to 4%.
For context, Alison, the store owner makes around $40,000 a month. Her store started out with an average Shopify conversion rate of 2%, with most of their traffic coming in directly from Facebook ads.
Over a nine-month period, she almost doubled this rate through the series of changes we go through below.
Changed Shopify theme
Alison’s first port of call was changing her Shopify store theme. Initially, she started with the Minimal theme to keep things clean and simple. However, minimalist conversion themes often lack the additional in-built features on their product pages and checkout page to boost conversions. After some research into highest-converting Shopify themes, Alison switched over to a high-converting Shopify theme and saw a pretty immediate increase in Shopify conversion rate.
Result: New conversion rate: 2.4% Conversion rate change: +0.4%
Ironically, this increased conversion rate happened during the busy holiday season. As soon as the new year was in full effect, Alison’s conversion rate dropped to 1.8%, making it difficult to determine which was responsible for the positive change – holiday readiness or the new theme.
Removed Shop Pay express checkout
With customer feedback signaling that Shop Pay pop-ups complicated the checkout process, Alison removed the feature. This improved the conversion rate for a couple of months.
New conversion rate: 2.2% Conversion rate change: + 0.4%
Add exit popups
Next, Alison added popups to win back potential customers just as they were trying to leave without purchasing. She was hesitant at first, thinking that popups might annoy store visitors. Eventually, she made peace with the notion that there was nothing to lose if these visitors were exiting anyway.
New conversion rate: 2.7% Conversion rate change: + 0.5%
Optimize checkout and popups
After reviewing her stats, Alison noticed something that may have influenced the results from the previous round of changes – a new product launch.
She continued optimizing her exit popup strategy, triggering it for only visitors who had been inactive for 60 seconds. This was aimed at reaching a potentially distracted target audience with a typical shopping habit of sharing gift ideas pre-purchase.
New conversion rate: Almost 4% Conversion rate change: > +1%
Room for improvement
In addition to these changes, Alison, (and other Shopify store owners) can test a multitude of other proven conversion rate optimization tactics including:-
- Adding customer testimonials
- Adding social proof to product pages
- Using natural product images that show the products in use, where possible
- Enabling a guest checkout option
Don’t neglect SEO and the power of compounding efforts
Improving your conversion rate takes two things — experimentation and attention. If you’re willing to shake things up a little bit at a time and really hone in on how every little change impacts conversion, then you can harness the power of CRO and get more sales, without increasing your advertising spend.
While CRO is important, every optimization you can make to your Shopify site matters. In your quest to create a revenue-optimized customer journey, don’t neglect the power of SEO to multiply your CRO efforts in the long run.
As you optimize your ecommerce store, use Plug In SEO to make small, affordable investments in SEO that multiply your organic traffic and conversion rates.
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