Optimizing your site to show up in search engines is a critical part of growing your business. If done right, it can result in thousands of people visiting your site each month, bringing in sales that are not dependent on advertising dollars.

SEO is complicated. It also takes time—it won’t result in overnight traffic to your site, but it’s important to build the foundation for your site’s success and then work a little bit each week and each month to make improvements.

This guide has been especially written for online stores using Shopify. However, the principles apply no matter what platform you’re using.

There are two parts to SEO—onsite and offsite SEO.

This article will explain the basics of both onsite and offsite SEO, and I'll show you the exact strategies and tools I use to increase organic traffic to my sites and my clients' sites.

Sometimes you need to let your customers customize a product before checkout on your Shopify store. Maybe you offer monograms, or you need to let customers upload a file, or you want to let them choose from other custom options.

There are plenty of apps that can do this, but apps are expensive and they bloat your store by adding extra scripts and slowing down your site.

Fortunately, there's a lot you can do to offer customized products without paying for an app or hiring a developer. Plus, these methods only require a tiny amount of code (no JavaScript), so your site doesn't get unnecessarily slowed down.

Video tutorial (full written tutorial with all code below)

In this tutorial, I'll show how you offer extensive customizations to your products on Shopify. Check out the example below to see what's possible.

Adding a wholesale area to your Shopify store is easy, and it doesn't require an expensive app. Just copy and paste a bit of code and you're all set!

This tutorial will help you set up a wholesale section in your Shopify store. This means that you'll be able to make certain products, collections, and pages locked down so that only customers that you've approved as wholesalers will have access to them.

This method uses Shopify's existing customer accounts feature--just tag the customer accounts who you've approved and they'll be able to access your wholesale products, collections, and pages.

Watch the video below to see how to install this wholesale feature. All of the code you'll need is in the tutorial below.

Most people are not going to subscribe to your email list by using the little form in your site's footer or sidebar. This is especially true if you don't offer an incentive for people to subscribe. The fastest way to quickly build up your email list is to drive quality traffic to a landing page that offers a good reason for the visitor to subscribe (like a newsletter, free email course, or discount code), and features a big signup form that they simply can't ignore.

An "accordion" is a great way to display the FAQ to your ecommerce store, since it allows the user to quickly and easily browse your FAQ without much scrolling. And luckily, it's simple and easy to add one to your store!

If you are using the Minimal theme and want to add tabs to your product pages, I'll show you exactly how in this tutorial. A few months ago, I published a tutorial on how to add tabs to your product pages in Shopify, and I've had a number of people comment on that post saying that they were having problems adding the tabs to the Minimal theme. After doing some research, I found that the Minimal theme already has the support for tabs built in, so in this tutorial I'll show you how to take advantage of that feature in Minimal and add tabs to your own product pages.

Adding tabs to your product pages is not difficult--all you have to do is copy and paste a little code here and there. There are two different ways of adding tabs, depending on how you want them to function, so continue reading about the two methods below.

Video Walkthrough

Creating two columns of text on a page in your Shopify store is not difficult. You'll need to edit a bit of code, but no coding experience is necessary--I'll walk you through each step.