SEO To Grow your Dropshipping empire. There is a huge interest in dropshipping these days. You cannot scroll down Facebook without seeing an ad for a Shopify dropshipping course or someone selling pre-made dropshipping stores.

The barrier of entry is low, so many people are launching dropshipping stores, but most approach it wrong. You cannot just open a Shopify account and import hundreds of products and expect sales to roll in. Competition is too high and without branding, you are just one of a million websites all selling the same products from AliExpress.

The best way to take advantage of dropshipping — the low cost to start and the large opportunity to make money — is to create a single product store and make a brand. You also have to look beyond just Shopify, as there is a huge opportunity to also sell your product on eBay, Walmart, and Amazon.

The great thing about using Shopify is that you can easily also sell on those other channels simply by enabling those channels from your dashboard. You can then manage and fulfill all of your orders through the single dashboard.

Shopify is notoriously horrible for SEO though, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the far superior e-commerce platform, so it’s the best to use, and as you will see, the SEO we do for this method isn’t even on your Shopify store. This is a long-term business approach, as you will see.

Before we dive into the using SEO to grow aspect, let’s quickly touch on all of the outlets you are going to sell your product on.

 

Set Up the Main Selling Channels for Your Dropshipping Product

As you will see, you aren’t going to be applying this SEO strategy to your online store — so you will want to sell your product on as many platforms as possible. This type of strategy gets your brand and product in front of a huge audience organically, and you also give your potential customer several platforms to select from when it comes time to buy. Some may prefer to buy on eBay or Amazon, rather than from your online store.

Shopify

This is going to be your main e-commerce store, and it’s very simple to set up. Since you are going to only be selling a single product you want to get up and running as quickly as possible. There are several single-product free themes you can use and customize.

You can “pretty it up” later — but for the time being, you want to be live and activate Shopify payments as this will allow you to start generating sales quickly. You will want to use a dropshipping app that works best with your supplier.

If you sourced a product from AliExpress, there are multiple apps to select from. Get the core features working and be sure to enable the additional payment options, like Amazon Pay, PayPal, Apple Pay, and Shop Pay. The more options the better. Then, connect the additional three sales channels I’m going to touch on below.

 

eBay

Some people forget that eBay is one of the oldest online marketplaces, and it’s not just a palace to sell junk you are trying to get rid of. Many people shop on eBay for all kinds of products, and with Shopify’s option to sell on there all you have to do is open an eBay account and sync the two, allowing you to manage all orders from your Shopify dashboard.

 

Walmart

Walmart is one of the biggest retails, right behind Amazon, so you’d be crazy not to sell on here as well. While the SEO effort I’m going to outline below will push traffic to your Shopify store, there is a high number of shoppers on Walmart that can be introduced to your product if you optimize your listing. Just like with eBay you can manage and fulfill all Walmart orders from your Shopify dashboard.

 

Amazon

Amazon is the largest online marketplace, and if you open an Amazon Sellers account you can be found by millions of consumers. Optimize the listing and fulfill the orders through your Shopify account. It’s simple, and since you are dropshipping there is no additional work. All fulfillment is the same, regardless of where the sale originates from. If you are not on Amazon you are missing a huge opportunity. There are some dropshippers selling thousands of a single item on Amazon daily.

 

 

5 Steps to Drive Traffic to Your Offer Using SEO

As I already mentioned, you aren’t going to be doing the SEO work on your Shopify store. It’s not the most SEO-friendly, as its blog is horrible for organic search, but it’s the best e-commerce for all other aspects. If you want to rank your e-commerce store, WooCommerce is a better choice, but read below and you will see why this strategy is much better.

 

1. Build a Review Blog (Using WordPress) to Post Advertorial Style Content

You are going to need to build a blog for this strategy, and I suggest you purchase a brand new domain so you know it is clean. You want to think of a generic name that works for your product while not screaming “this blog is owned by this product.”

For example, I just went to GoDaddy and my very first search was available as of writing this blog post:

  • The Consumer Review Journal
  • theconsumerreviewjournal.com

It has a nice ring to it, sounds like a real blog, and will work for a wide range of products and brands, which is essential, especially when you get to the final step below. You want to make this look like a regular news and information blog. Use a nice free theme and you can even put AdSense code in the sidebar to make it look natural.

Think long-term and build this into a money-making asset. That is why I suggest running AdSense on it. If you can make additional income from it, do it. This can help you cover hosting and some expenses at the very least.

Also, build an email list from day one, so incorporate a newsletter or special offer CTA in the sidebar, below posts, and even as an exit-popup. Then, also install the plugins you would on a regular blog, like one for related posts, one for social sharing, etc.

Build it just like you would a real blog because doing it right will pay off long-term.

 

2. Secure High-Quality Links and Expired Domains (301 Redirects) to Boost Your Authority

Just like with any new website, your starting at ground zero when it comes to authority. You need to build high-quality links to increase this number. This would be the case even if you were attempting to rank your Shopify store, so it’s not an additional step — it’s just an alternative one.

Another strategy that works well to boost your domain’s authority quickly is to use expired domains and 301-redirect them to your domain. Several tools can help you identify solid domains set to expire, and several marketplaces sell expired domains with strong link profiles you can purchase for an immediate transfer.

You always want to do a thorough investigation when it comes to buying expired domains. Many of them have been spammed to death and contain Chinese anchors. Clean domains that work well when 301’d aren’t cheap, but if you have the budget they can help your new blog rank much faster.

Even if you only do link building and skip the 301 option, make sure it’s done correctly. Don’t look for a link shortcut — one doesn’t exist. You can either publish some initial content and perform outreach in hopes of scoring some links, or you can allocate a budget towards buying links. A mix of both strategies is best.

Also, don’t ignore the low hanging fruit — social media profile links, directory links, etc. These do contribute to authority, so build all of the easy “free” links you can.

 

3. Create an Advertorial Template Designed to Drive Traffic to Your Shopify Store

Rather than just create a standard blog post and rank it, we want to create what is referred to as an advertorial. It’s a full-fledged ad for your product but in more of an information and review format, rather than a straight-up ad.

If you visit any of the big websites and see the ads blended into the content to appear to look like native articles, titled along the lines of, “This person used to weight 400 lbs but took this pill to lose an incredible 220 lbs!”

You want the reader to read the advertorial and not suspect it’s coming directly from you, the owner of the product it’s promoting. It needs to appear to be a third-party write-up, and include multiple calls-to-action that direct the individual to your Shopify store where they can purchase the product.

Now, it’s important to know that the FTC has certain disclaimers you need to add to any advertorial to remain compliant with current advertising guidelines. This is something you can discuss with a local attorney in your country or region, as well as research by looking at examples of advertorials.

You will be served ads based on your location, so search some of the following websites and look for sponsored content made to appear to be native: TMZ, ESPN, Barstool Sports, AOL, and other mega websites. You can also use these as a sample template so you see all of the key points a successful advertorial consists of. Here is an example that is live as of this blog being published (they are often removed, changed, deleted, etc.)

 

 

4. Recreate the Advertorial Page for Each Keyword Your Want to Rank For

Now, the point is to rank these blog pages for the keywords you want to target for your product. You will want to use the template you created above, but change the URL slug, alt-image tags, headings, content, etc. so it’s optimized for each page’s target keyword.

Once you have a winning advertorial template you can create multiple variations of it, each being 100% unique and optimized specifically for each keyword you want to rank for. Then with some external link building as well as internal link building you can start to increase your traffic numbers.

This is why the second step is so important. When you have a strong authority base to begin with, ranking your inner pages become much easier. If you look at some of the most successful products that use this strategy you will see that they have hundreds of variations of their advertorial, each one optimized for a different keyword.

By getting the visitor interested in the offer and then directing them off the blog, and to your Shopify store, they are already sold and ready to buy. If you look at your Google Analytics conversion goals you will see that a high percentage of traffic from your blog’s domain will convert into sales. There is a reason many one-product Shopify stores use this strategy — it works very well and it eliminates the “Shopify is not SEO-friendly” problem.

 

5. Continue to Build Your Blog’s Authority While Introducing Additional Single Product Dropshipping Offers (Rinse and Repeat)

As you know, SEO is an ongoing process, and once you start you cannot stop. You are going to want to continue to build links to your blog and increase its authority. This will help your product be more successful and generate more sales, but it also will open the door for more opportunities.

When I advised you to select a fairly generic blog name and domain, I did that for a reason. Once you successfully do this once what is stopping you from introducing another single-product Shopify store? And then another. And another. There is no limit as to how many single-product brands you can scale this way.

Since you are using the same blog as the hub for all marketing, as you age it and increase its authority your content becomes easier to rank. This can mean new products gain traction much faster and turn an ROI sooner than they would if you were starting a new e-commerce store and attempting to rank it.

And if a product fails you didn’t waste money on SEO — it’s still benefiting your blog. In this case, you just clip the poorly performing product and test a new one. This limits your exposure risk-wise and gives you a massive potential down the line to run multiple brands from one blog.

 

 

Conclusion

This is a strategy that you can easily start with very little money. If you have the time to invest, you can take advantage of the potential in the e-commerce world, and create a branded product that you can sell for a long period.

Also, you will see that this SEO strategy offers the opportunity to scale and continue to add single product brands. After you do it once the process to repeat is the same — and you can grow your e-commerce empire into as many brands as you can manage.

There isn’t a ceiling to the opportunity here. The best part of creating one “hub” blog that you build all the authority to is that you can add more brands, but also remove/replace brands at any time, and when you do add another product you have a strong SEO base — helping you to rank for the best keywords and drive traffic to each sales platform — your Shopify store, Amazon, eBay, and Walmart.

This is a little twist on the whole dropshipping strategy, and it solves the problem of how unfriendly Shopify is when it comes to SEO, while also allowing you to scale to several single-product stores.

What do you think? Is this something you are going to try in 2021? Let me know in the comments below!


Tommy McDonald

Tommy is an SEO professional with years of experience running highly successful SEO companies, founded SerpLogic after noticing there was a major void when it came to options for SEO agencies needing a reliable and professional one-stop outsource solution.You can read all about me in the “About” page here on our blog!


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