Building a productive and successful online marketplace is a prime goal for many businesses and brands. Whether you are a traditional retailer seeking to expand your offerings into the digital realm or a small-scale blog seeking to sell a bit of merchandise, having a reliable online store that can easily drive traffic to your website while generating some cash just makes sense.

Many people are now using Shopify to simplify the e-commerce process. Often considered the WordPress of online marketplaces, Shopify offers a number of benefits to those who know how to use it properly.

Yet many want to know how their Shopify stores can be improved – namely in generating more traffic (and therefore sales). Let’s look at what you can do to achieve this outcome.

Structure Your Site Intelligently

The structure of your Shopify store’s pages is a critical component for improving both traffic and sales. How does this impact performance? Not only do users need an e-commerce store with a site structure that reflects common-sense navigational practices, but search engines can also more effectively index and crawl pages when they’re organized properly.

Whether it’s users or search engines pinging your website, you want to make sure you’re neatly organizing pages into categories and subcategories, with each product easily accessible within each subcategory, and each subcategory accessible within each relevant category.

Research Proper Keywords and Categories

Maximizing your Shopify store’s appearance in targeted SERPs is only possible if you’re using the right keywords and categories. By targeting search engines with an effective keyword research strategy, you’ll generate a greater number of clicks (and therefore – hopefully – sales) than you would otherwise.

Uncovering just how popular and contested a particular keyword or broader category is before utilizing it is important. For instance, you might find meaningful differences in performance between “men’s white shoes” and “men’s white sneakers”: by optimizing your SEO campaigns to reflect these subtleties, you can drive more relevant traffic to your Shopify store.

Optimize Your On-Site Elements

Upon creating your new Shopify store, the technical elements won’t be optimized for ideal performance. You will undoubtedly be required to tweak with a variety of elements – and maybe you already have on some fronts.

To maximize the effect of each product page in search results, you’ll want to focus on key on-site elements. This includes but is not limited to product titles, descriptions, meta data and even each page’s URL structure.

Focus on Store Speed

A huge element in boosting both the number of people who visit your site and the number who stay to make a purchase is site performance. In particular, speed: people pinging your website who find it to be clunky and slow will often simply leave and look elsewhere. Search engines also tend not to rank websites that have slow loading speeds.

The simplest ways to optimize your Shopify store are to compress images to reduce their file sizes, use as few apps and plug-ins as possible with your storefront and use a highly-efficient theme that loads quickly.

If you follow these tips and make the most of them, you can gradually build up an increased flow of traffic to your product pages. Shopify makes it easy to launch an online store, but it’s not easy to attract audiences without a variety of optimizations after the fact: use this information to improve your performance!