Overview

Many people searching for something on the internet begin with a search engine like Google or Bing. These search engines are designed to use a variety of information from websites to create a ranked list of results for a particular search query. Search engines determine which websites are most likely to be relevant to the search query, and then show the results in order of their relevance.

There are many factors that can make your online store appear higher in search results:

• the number of natural (not paid or social media) links pointing to your store from other websites

• the authority of the website based on engagement and other factors

• the age of your domain name

• website structure and content that is optimized for search engines

When you are new to selling online, it can be difficult to do much about the first three factors. It takes time to build a reputation for your brand and get other sites to link to yours. You can plan for the long term in your content strategy.

In the short term, the easiest way to get more traffic to your online store is to optimize your content so that a search engine recognizes it as relevant to queries related to your products. This is what we mean by SEO.

You can analyze your online store’s search engine optimization using apps in the Shopify App store.