Conversion Rate Woes

One of the things I love about this job is that I get to review a heap of Shopify sites. It's great - because I'll get the story of what has been tried, what worked and what hasn't from the business owner and I'll get full access to all the figures. I've become pretty streamlined at reviewing sites and seeing if they have potential.

Every now and again I get one that really surprises me.

So - most stores I see are practically invisible. They have often been created by passionate entrepreneurs, who get really into the idea of having a different kind of life, and they find a product that they fall in love with. Or perhaps 1200 products that they fall in love with and launch a Shopify store that no-one ever sees.

However, this site was different. It was getting a lot of free traffic.

Many Shopify store owners would love 200 sessions a day of traffic for free.

The problem is - their Shopify store conversion rate. Very little of this traffic was actually buying anything.

I've never seen a store become profitable with a conversion rate of under 1%. But obviously - if they're getting heaps of organic traffic something must be going right.

Why is the conversion rate so low?

Was the site bad? Where the products not great? No. That wasn't the main problem. It main problem in this case was that the SEO company that the owner had hired, at great expense, was targetting the wrong type of traffic by targetting the wrong keywords.

This SEO company optimised the site, built links and did a great job. The issue is that it acheived great rankings for search terms that were interesting to people who are researching a topic, not looking to buya product. In other words - it was ice cold traffic. They targetted low intent traffic.

What could they have done differently?

This is one of the reasons we often go with paid channels - like Google Ads and Facebook Ads for Shopify - first. We can shift audiences, keywords and creatives really quickly and learn what actually works to drive high intent traffic. Once we've found the sweet spot then we'll work on tackling the organic traffic (SEO) based on which keywords are driving the highest intent traffic first.

What are we doing to fix it?

1. We'll review the front end of the site and see if there are any obvious conversion killers.
2. We'll launch some paid ads and start testing audiences and creatives.
3. We'll do keyword research and use Google Ads to test which keywords drive the best high intent traffic
4. We'll launch google shopping campaigns
5. And a bunch of other stuff.

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