My Shopify store needs more exposure, what should I do?

Shopify Discussion

Topic summary

Store owner without in-house developers asks how to optimize a Shopify storefront and whether hiring a developer is necessary to increase exposure.

  • Hire a developer: Several recommend a dedicated Shopify developer for theme customization, speed, conversions, app integrations, and technical SEO. The latest reply shares direct contact details for a developer.

  • Ads and social: Suggestions include running Facebook and Google ad campaigns via Shopify’s built-in integrations and taking Shopify Learn courses. Build a presence on Instagram/TikTok, leverage trends/memes, and use partnerships or sponsorships with creators.

  • Community and content: Ensure a professional-looking site (can be done via tutorials and basic tools) and build community through Facebook groups and local events. Produce unique, high-quality content (videos, tutorials, blogs) and encourage sharing; developers help technical tasks but not marketing strategy.

  • SEO focus: Emphasizes on-page (content, keywords, structure, alt text, internal links, clean URLs), off-page (link building, testimonials, digital PR), and technical SEO (crawl errors, speed, sitemaps, 404s, robots.txt, duplicate content, redirects), noting technical areas typically require a developer.

Status: No consensus; actionable paths are outlined. Thread appears open.

Summarized with AI on December 11. AI used: gpt-5.
1

Since we don’t have any experienced developers on personnel, how can I best optimize my Shopify storefront? Should I hire dedicated Shopify developer for optimal efficiency?

2

Hi @annie1231

Yes have to hire a developer.

3

Hello, @annie1231 !

Hiring a developer is always an option, however there are many other ways and methods that you can explore if you’re looking to get more exposure for your business.

Paid advertisements

At Shopify, we have integrations with Facebook and Google ads, which allow you to create campaigns directly from your Shopify admin. Here are some links to help you get started:

Content creation

Approach this from a creative side - make sure to have a social media presence on all relevant platforms, such as Instagram and TikTok, and dedicate the accounts to your store and products. For example, any trends that you’re noticing on those platforms, such as meme formats can be worked into your niche and be made relevant for your products.

Exploiting these trends is a great idea as it makes you more likely to get exposure in the form of a viral video, and that way potential customers can get to know your store.

Partnerships/Sponsorships

If creating content isn’t enough, another way to boost this is through collaborations with already established content creators. This can be done via offering either payment for exposure, or the product itself for free - and the creators can connect with their audience and talk about your business.

Work with an Expert

At our Shopify Experts Marketplace**,** you will find many talented individuals skilled in areas of marketing and boosting your stores, exposure for a fee/s. If you are interested in this, you can go ahead and have a look at the hiring and expert through the listings here.

4

The first step is to ensure that you have a professional looking website. That does not mean that you have to spend thousands of dollars in design, you can do it yourself by watching many tutorials and ensure that you have customer service tools available on your store. Working with developers, however, will save you a lot of time on that part.

Then you need to focus on creating a community around your products. Try building facebook groups for your store or attend local events. Just do things that will gain you the most exposure “offline”. For online exposure you need to create “quality content”, which could be creating videos, creating tutorials, blog articles. Things that people cannot easily find anywhere else. And once you start creating content, share them and ask people to share those for you as well.

So it does not happen a single day. This is a process. It all depends how much you are commited to it and your marketing skills.

Developers can help you technical aspects of the business, but not marketing. Developers can also help you make decisions when it comes to managing your store and creating online ads and optimize the site for SEO. But those alone will not bring traffic to your store.

5

Hi Annie1231,

Thanks for reaching out!

Well, you can enhance the exposure of your website with the help of SEO. There are various processes associated with SEO, which are categorized under On-Page SEO, Technical SEO, and Off-Page SEO.

So, for the on-page and off-page SEO processes, you shall not need a developer but an SEO expert or you can do it yourself with the assistance of the right SEO tools. However, for technical SEO, you are required to hire a developer.

Some of the important on-page SEO processes include:

  1. Create High-quality Content: High-quality content is preferred by users and search engine crawlers, which helps in increasing the traffic on the website, improving its rank over time, and also getting backlinks from credible sources.
  2. Keyword Research: Keyword research is the process associated with the identification of words and phrases used by the searchers for carrying out their research on the search engine, as the incorporation of these keywords helps the website to rank better on SERP whenever these keywords are used for search. You can add keywords to title tags, meta descriptions, URLs, product descriptions, and blogs.
  3. Optimize Site Structure: Organize the content on the website in a systematic format to make it readable for the web users and help the visitors easily scan through the content of the web page.
  4. Optimize Images: Optimize the images by adding alt text, which helps the search engine crawlers to understand the context of the image, as they cannot see the images. So, based on the alt text, the crawlers index the images on SERP. Additionally, adding alt text allows users to understand the context of the images too, if the images take too long to load.
  5. Internal Linking and Anchor Text: Internal linking is the process of linking different pages on the website with one another. You must ensure to optimize the anchor text (the part of text with the hyperlink) for the links, in other words, the anchor text shall explain the context of the link.
  6. URL Structure: The URL should have a keyword to rank better on SERP and its length should be reduced to allow the users to easily share the URL on social media platforms.

Some of the important off-page SEO processes include:

  1. Link Building: The best way of getting the backlinks is by creating high-quality shareable content. Additionally, you can check your competitors’ strategies and identify link-building opportunities using SEO tools to increase the number of backlinks for the website.
  2. Content Marketing: Strategic marketing approach of creating consistent content to attract and retain the web users on the website. It is associated with creating and sharing relevant articles, blogs, videos, podcasts, etc. for marketing businesses.
  3. Guest Posting: Guest posting on blog-posting websites can help in developing the backlinks for the website and directing the traffic of other websites to your website.
  4. Optimizing the Use of Social Media: Enhance the engagement of web users and consumers on social media, which can help with the link-building process via social media platforms.
  5. Get Links in Local Directories: Carry out local SEO, which means customizing the website structure to meet the expectations of local audiences and adding the keywords ranking high in local territorial regions. This can help in getting links in the local directories. However, ensure the consistency of NAP (Name, Address, and Phone) to enhance the effectiveness of these backlinks.
  6. Contact Suppliers/Partners/Distributors: You can contact them and request the backlinks from their websites.
  7. Encourage Customers to Post their Testimonials: Encourage the loyal customers of your store to post their testimonials and positive reviews about the website/business on different digital platforms.
  8. Digital PRs: Participate in digital PRs and conferences, and also get featured in them that can help in enhancing the digital presence of the website.

Some technical SEO processes for which a developer shall be required, include:

  1. Fix crawling errors: Sometimes Google or other search engines face difficulties in crawling the website or certain pages of the website, which can be an SEO disaster. Here, the developer can identify the issues and perform debugging.
  2. Optimize page speed: Page speed can be optimized by compressing the images, removing unused JavaScript and CSS, using GZIP for textual compression, implementing AMP, and implementing lazy loading.
  3. Optimize images: Optimize images by compressing their file size to reduce their loading time.
  4. XML sitemap: ‘XML’ sitemap helps the search engine crawlers to easily navigate the website, and crawl and index every page of the website. This sitemap needs to be submitted to the Google Search Console, which optimizes the website for the indexing process.
  5. Fix broken links: Broken links or links giving ‘Error 404 Not Found’ hamper users’ experience and increase the bounce rate of the website; thus, it is important to identify and fix these links by redirecting the traffic to the right location.
  6. Design 404 page: Some web pages are permanently removed from the internet; thus, the users are expected to get the Error 404 page. However, making the page informative and interactive can help the users to easily navigate through the website and stay on it.
  7. Check the Robots.txt file: The robots.txt file is used to block the search engine crawlers from indexing certain parts or pages of the website. It is important to check it to ensure that the right pages are blocked from indexing.
  8. Fix issues related to duplicate content: Some Shopify stores use CMS (Content Management System) for creating content, so there can be issues of duplicate content. Additionally, some Shopify themes may duplicate the content, which is an SEO nightmare, as due to duplicate content, search engines shall rank the wrong web page (with the same content) higher than the original web page.
  9. 301 Redirects: There are two types of redirects, namely 301 redirects and 302 redirects. 301 redirects are permanent ones, while 302 ones are temporary ones. The developer shall ensure that all the redirects on the website are 301, as these redirects ensure to transfer of the value to a new URL.
  10. Multilingual setting with HREFLANG tag: Some websites have the same content in different versions of the languages, like US English, UK English, and Australian English, in such cases the crawlers may detect duplicate content on the website that can hamper its ranking. However, using the ‘HREFLANG’ tag, this issue can be addressed.
  11. SSL Certificate: SSL Certificate helps in ensuring that the website is secured for the users, as the website starts operating on ‘HTTPS’ rather than ‘HTTP’. Thus, the users stop getting errors related to security issues on the website.
  12. Ensure Mobile Responsiveness: It is important that the website is mobile-friendly, as more than half of the web users are mobile users, and mobile servers are different from desktops. Thus, to target the audience on mobile servers, the websites shall make optimum use of ‘viewport’ tag.

Hope it helped!

Leesha

SEOKart

6

If you don’t have experienced developers on your team, hiring a dedicated Shopify developer is definitely the best way to optimize your storefront for efficiency, speed, and conversions. A professional can help with theme customization, app integration, SEO, and overall store performance, saving you time and avoiding common pitfalls.

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You can reach a reliable Shopify developer at +234 594 47277 who can help set up, optimize, and maintain your store for the best results.