Are you a Shopify store owner struggling to drive traffic to your website? In this article, we explore 5 ways to get free organic traffic to your Shopify store, without paid ads. On the long run, organic traffic will help your website grow consistently and it will drive more and more sales. So let’s make it happen!

First of all, let’s talk about SEO…

Before we tackle the 5 ways to get free organic traffic to your Shopify store, let’s talk about SEO. Make sure to read this before moving on to our 5 tips.

What is SEO?

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is essentially a process of improving your website, in order for it to get better rankings in Google search, as well as in other search engines.

One of the most important SEO techniques for e-commerce stores is using the right keywords to describe your products. By doing that, when your potential customer runs a search for a product like yours on Google, one of your Shopify product pages will appear in the first results.

What is organic traffic?

Organic traffic is exactly what we have explained above. By using the right SEO techniques and relevant keywords, your Shopify store and product pages will get better rankings for those specific keywords on Google and other search engines.

In this way, when a user searches for a product like yours, your Shopify product page will get featured in the first results. If they like what they see, they will visit your website!

Let’s take a basic example, and say that you’re selling handmade gold-plated earrings.

By using these specific keywords – “handmade gold-plated earrings” in your product title, description, and meta description, you are optimizing your product page. As soon as Google notices these keywords and how well your page is optimized, your product will rank higher and higher in searches for this specific key-phrase “handmade gold-plated earrings”.

You need to remember that there is a lot competition out there. So the better the SEO optimization, the more chances you have to be in the top pages that show up in Google search.

Now let us show you some cool SEO techniques that can help improve your Google rankings…

5 Ways to Get Free Organic Traffic to Your Shopify Store

1. Optimize your product titles

Organic traffic is all about search engine optimization. Most of your organic traffic is made up of people who will find your website on search engines like Google, Bing, etc. And the rest of your organic traffic you will probably get from social media and other backlinks that lead to your website.

Search engine optimization is crucial for your Shopify store to do well in searches. And for you to increase your free, organic traffic.

Since Shopify is an e-commerce platform, one of the first and most important steps is optimizing your product titles.

In order to show you how to do a basic SEO-optimization, we will use a product example. Let’s say you are producing and selling 100% natural essential oils.

Let’s optimize the title of this tiny bottle of Lavender essential oil.

In order for your product to get found in Google search, ideally, you will need to include in the title the following information: [what the product is] [the brand – if it’s a renowned name] [the most important attributes of the product] [*other important information that would make a good keyword].

For our Lavender oil, here’s an example of good SEO-optimized title:

Lavender Essential Oil by Young Living 100% Pure 15ml Bottle

As a general rule, remember to mention exactly what the product is at the beginning of the title. This will do wonders for your organic traffic. And afterwards, include relevant information that people will search for.

To create a good SEO-optimized title, think about the words you would use to find your products on Google. Ask your friends as well, to see what keywords they would use. Make a list of the most relevant attributes your products have, and use them in titles and descriptions!

Want to create the perfect product title? Check out our tutorial on how to create a great SEO-optimized Shopify product title. We include positive and negative examples, give you some tips & show you some common mistakes to avoid!

2. Optimize your product description

Now let’s move on to your product description. This is definitely something you can use to drive free, organic traffic to your website. Your product description allows you to use a multitude of keywords that describe and differentiate your product from all others out there.

Here are some tips to make your Shopify product description stand out:

1. use SEO-optimized paragraph headings
2. use as many keywords and key-phrases that describe your product
3. include useful and transparent information about your product (where it’s produced, colors, sizes, materials, anything that would be relevant for your potential customer)
4. proofread your description – no one trusts a website with a lot of grammar and vocabulary mistakes, not even Google

If you want to know more about how to create a successful SEO-optimized product description, check out our example and our tips.

3. Optimize your product meta-description

Your product meta-description is the search engine listing preview that you can see in the Shopify product page editor. You can find it at the bottom of the page, and it looks like this:

We have created an example of optimized meta description for our Lavender oil product mentioned above. For the page title, we used the exact product title.

For the meta-description, we wrote a small text that contains some of the most exciting attributes of our product. Also, we made sure it contains the main keywords from the product title.

As you can see, you have a character limit: 70 characters for the title, and 320 characters for the meta description. These two fields are extremely important for the SEO-optimization of your product pages, because this is how your product page preview will appear in Google search.

For example, below you can see the title and meta-description Young Living have actually created for this product:

4. Minimize the loading speed of your product pages

Titles and descriptions aside, let’s now look at your website’s loading speed.

A fast loading speed and a mobile-responsive theme can help you get better Google rankings. The faster your website loads, the more it will be favored by the Google algorithm. The same is true for mobile-responsiveness. Most people do their online shopping on their phones, so make sure your store is mobile-friendly.

You can use the PageSpeed Insights to run a simulation for your website, and for each of your product pages. This way, you can assess their approximate loading speed.

Here are a few tips that we can give you to increase your website and product page speed.

For this, you won’t need to make changes to the code of your website:

• use small product images (you can easily adjust your photos’ dimensions in Adobe Photoshop)
• make sure you use a Shopify theme with fast loading speed (do a quick search on Google to discover the fastest Shopify themes out there)
• don’t include photos or videos in your product descriptions (though you have the option to include media files in your product descriptions, we do not recommend it)
• don’t create a very comprehensive website menu with a lot of sub-menus (the less ramifications you have, the faster your website pages will load)
• try to steer clear of video content (large video files will greatly impact your page loading speed)
• avoid installing too many Shopify applications (each of these applications has a code that runs whenever a user accesses a page on your website, and sometimes this code takes a lot of time to load completely)

If you’ve done all of the things above right and your page loading speeds are still low, get help. Consider contacting someone that can help you with some more advanced techniques.

5. Use social media

Finally, we move on to the last tip on how to get free organic traffic to your Shopify store.

As you may know, Google is not the only source of organic traffic for your website. A great way to drive free traffic to your Shopify store is social media. That is why, being present on social media platforms is quite important.

Create a Facebook page, an Instagram account, use Pinterest to drive traffic to your Shopify products. And any other social media platform you love and use. Don’t be afraid to experiment with other platforms as well.

Youtube is a great source of traffic. And you don’t need to post videos of yourself necessarily. If you have expertise in a specific niche, film some tutorials. Give people some useful information, and they may be more willing to check out your website and make a purchase.

Let’s look at our product example – the essential oil. It’s quite easy to integrate this product in all of the social media platforms we have mentioned above.

Take some beautiful photos that you can use on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. And create a short video about the 5 benefits and uses of lavender oil, while showcasing the product to your Youtube audience.

It’s a bit of work, but if you are consistent, your creative content will generate traffic to your Shopify store. You just need to find the platforms that perform the best for your niche and product type.

By following these 5 tips, your organic traffic will definitely grow over time.

But it’s important to remember that Google rankings take time. Your traffic may not increase over night. So, make sure to stay consistent – optimize as many of your website pages as possible, post regularly on social media, and create quality content for your visitors. We guarantee, it will be worth it!