The second thing that you should do after setting up Your pre-built Shopify store is to start improving your search engine optimization.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

SEO, or search engine optimisation means optimising your website for Google search so that your customers will be able to find your website just through a Google search, without you having to spend money on ads.

Purchase Intent

SEO is especially great, because most people who search for a product on Google will already have a purchase intent, so the conversion rate is naturally going to be a lot higher than it would with paid advertising, or paid media. SEO basically consists of three things - technical SEO or on page optimization, link building and content writing.

Keyword Research

First off, however, You will need to do some keyword research. You will need to find low-hanging keywords with high search volume and low keyword difficulty that are relevant to your niche and to the products You are selling. To determine the keywords You want to rank for, you can use tools such as Ahrefs for example.

How to do Keyword Research using Ahrefs

For example, if You are selling cat beds, You can use AHrefs to find the best keywords to rank with. In Ahrefs, type in “cat sofa” into the keywords explorer, and then You can see a list of all the keywords that people are searching for.

You need keywords with high search volume, but with little keyword difficulty. For example, as of writing this article, "Cat Sofa Bed" is a great one since it has 0 keyword difficulty while also having a search volume of 250. These are the types of keywords that we are going to want to look for. Typically, the more specific your keyword is, the easier it will be to rank with it on Google Search. These keywords are usually referred to as long tail keywords.

SEO mainly consists of three factors.

• Technical SEO
• Link Building
• Content Writing

SEO = Long Term Growth

SEO is more tailored for businesses who are focused on long-term growth as opposed to short-term, because it will take many months for Google to crawl your website, and for the SEO optimization to gain fruition, however, it's a crucial aspect of every online business, as having good SEO optimization will allow you to make money in 10 years without ever having to spend money on paid advertising. 

Stand Out From Your Competitors with Good SEO

I would even go on to say that SEO is the most crucial factor to building a profitable online business nowadays. In my opinion, it's also the easiest way you can differentiate yourself from competitors and build a profitable sales Channel just using Google search. SEO is also the one aspect of ecommerce that is most commonly overlooked by beginners in dropshipping.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO, also known as on-page SEO is how Google indexes your website. On page SEO mainly consists of having relevant keywords on Your website, correct meta titles, correct meta descriptions and also image optimisation.

Content Optimization

You should make sure that the content on your website includes keywords relevant to Your products, for which You want to rank with on Google Search. You also need to have correct meta descriptions and meta titles on your product, collection and home pages.

Image Optimization

You need to make sure that that each picture that you upload to your website, such as product images and collection images are all under 100 KB, and have the proper correct, relevant name and alt text, otherwise it's going to negatively affect your websites loading speed and decrease your ranking on Google search

Link Building

Link building is another important cornerstone of SEO. Link Building means having backlinks on other high authority websites. For example, if you are selling pet products, you would want to acquire back links or link insertion on other pet and animal related websites.

Do-Follow Links & Non-Follow Links

You should always make sure to have a balance of around 60 and 40 percent between do-follow links and non-follow links.

Do follow links are the ones which will increase your ranking on Google Search. non follow links are going to be the ones which are not going to increase your ranking on Google search, however, if you only have do-follow links, Google might recognise your website as spam and penalise your ranking on Google search because of it.

High Authority Backlinks

You should also try to only acquire backlinks on websites with good domain ranking, as those will be the most beneficial. Link insertion usually goes for around $100-$1500 per link.

HVC Strategy

For example, You might want to get a backlink for a pet product, such as a cat bed sofa. You would then find articles on websites with high domain authority, and send them an email offering to purchase link insertion from them. You could try to find an article which compares the top 10 cat bets to buy and then purchase a backlink for Your "Cat Beds & Sofas" collection page with the anchor text “cat bed sofa”. 

Content Writing

And finally, another big aspect of SEO is content writing. Your website should have a lot of blog posts and articles which are relevant to your target audience. Each article should include keywords for which you want to rank with on Google search.

Correct Blog Structure

Now it is very important to have that correct structure on each blog post and a healthy amount of words in every article. To determine the correct structure, word count, and the keywords You should include, you can use tools such as SurferSEO, AHrefs, or other SEO related tools.

You should also make sure that each of your blog posts include a table of contents, frequently asked questions and pictures with alt text and correct file names. Again you need to make sure that each picture that you upload to your website is under 100 KB otherwise it's going to negatively affect your website speed and decrease your ranking on Google search. 

If you are unsure on what to write about, then again, you can use SEO tools such as Ahrefs to define the most commonly searched for questions on Google search regarding your niche.

For example, if you are selling cat sofas or cat beds, you can use Ahrefs to find some relevant questions. For example, “how to clean cat pee from sofa”. This is a great topic for which you can write a blog post about. “Will cat scratch leather sofa”, “how to stop cat scratching sofa”, “how to get cat pee smell out of sofa”, these are all great examples as they have high search volume but low keyword difficulty. By writing articles around these topics, You are going to rank on Google Search and You will be able to drive traffic to your website just using Google Search.

To determine which topics are the best ones to write about, You need to look for questions with a good balance between search volume and keyword difficulty, as those are going to be the easiest ones to rank with.