In my last post, I talked about how many Shopify stores are low on content, and need to beef up their product descriptions and pages, and most of all - start blogging.
The easiest way to do this is simply answering questions about your products or niche. These answers could go into product descriptions, FAQs, or other places across your site.
Most (successful) Shopify merchants I know, have a deep knowledge of their product and are passionate about it. They could talk for days, but when it comes to writing, they don’t know what to write!
If that’s you, you just need a prompt - a trigger.
For me, the best triggers are emails or comments on my videos, or when someone is wrong on the internet.
But before I had a channel and an audience, I used a few different tools to find what people are searching.
Where to find questions about your niche
You don’t need fancy SEO tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush. There are some quick ways to get this information for free or cheaply.
People Also Ask (PAA)
You’ve seen this before. Whenever you search, Google displays some dropdowns with related questions.
You can write content to answer these exact questions, and if your answer is concise and direct, you could be featured in the PAA with your website listed as a source.
Here you can see my blog post was featured in the PAA, but what’s cool is that it also appears below that as a regular search result. So I’m appearing twice on the search results page, increasing my chances of getting clicks.
Google Search Console
How often do you check Search Console? I know a lot of stores that have set it up but don’t use it. (In case you don’t have it connected, watch this tutorial.)
Search Console is easy to use. In the sidebar, under Performance, open up the ‘Search Results’ tab. This is the main view.
Here you mostly see clicks and impressions. Tick the box to enable “average position” too.
‘Clicks’ to double down
Clicks show you what’s already working, which is useful. You could double down on this type of content.
However, they won’t give you many new ideas for something different.
‘Impressions’ to find potential
Impressions are terms that people searched and your site came up in the search results, but they didn’t click. Your site might have been low on the search results page, or not what they wanted.
These are usually terms that you haven’t really targeted or thought about.
It’s useful because if you order by impressions you can quickly see the popularity of certain topics.
These are all terms where you have potential, and you could rank higher for these if your content was stronger.
For example, in this screenshot you can see lots of people are searching for “freelance shopify developer”, and that I’m in position 29, meaning the 3rd page of Google for this search term.
I haven’t targeted this phrase at all (because I’m not looking for work), but the fact that I’m getting this many impressions without even meaning to, tells me that I could be on the first page if I tried.
It’s funny that I’m on the first page (8th position) for “stolen laptop” - I only wrote one blog post about it. This means it’s an easy term to rank for, and if I was selling some security or travel gadgets, I could write more to dominate this niche.
Try this out yourself, you might be surprised with the random terms you are ranking for, and find some easy wins.
‘Position’ for random ideas
Order by position and you’ll probably see things you’re already getting clicks for, boring. But scroll down to position 10 to 20 and this is where you find the gold.
These are often really interesting terms that you’ve never even thought of. For me, it’s a bunch of questions about Shopify that I haven’t ever covered.
If they also have lots of impressions, it might be a popular question and worth addressing (although keep in mind impressions does not mean search volume).
Answer the Public
This is a fun tool that shows you various related terms, and the approximate search volume for each. It’s perfect for this SEO strategy of answering questions.
Let’s imagine I’m selling green tea, and I want to add more content to my store. Here I’m looking for things I can answer while promoting my products.
I would also Google each of these terms to see if my competitors have answered anything poorly, with a weak, short article that I could easily beat. See also: Skyscraper technique.
However, my favourite feature isn’t the questions - it’s the comparison words, like “versus”, “vs”, “or”, “like”.
I find “versus” easy to write about, especially if you already have a strong opinion on the topic and don’t need to do any research because you’ve personally experienced both.
Bonus points if you sell both of the products that you are comparing. It’s a win-win for you whichever they choose. I’ve done this by comparing Shopify pagebuilder apps and using affiliate links to all of them.
Answer the Public has a free version but the paid one is only $5 a month and you only need it once. So get your list of keywords and ideas, and then cancel your subscription. That’s what I do.
In the next post, I’ll show you how to format these answers in your articles, pages, or products.