Dropshipping SEO: The Biggest Growth Lever in Your Store

When done right, SEO for dropshipping can give you a consistent stream of free traffic.

Search engine optimization targets potential customers right when they’re looking for your products, so you tap into existing demand. That can bring you great sales results – and it’s the most effective marketing strategy or high ticket dropshipping.

SEO can be intimidating, particularly if you’re new to Ecommerce. But it’s not rocket science if you focus on the basics in this article. Let’s get started on the path to receiving tons of cost-effective website traffic for your dropshipping online store.

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The Most Critical Elements of Dropshipping Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

When dropshippers climb the ranks of search results, it’s no accident. The foundational practices of SEO fall into three categories (in order of importance): technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO.

In the next sections, I’ll give you the details on how to implement tactics from each of these practices, as a high ticket dropshipping business owner.

Dropshipping Keyword Research

Keyword research is a crucial aspect of any Ecommerce business. The right research will shed light on the search intent of potential customers and tell you exactly what people are typing into Google when they’re looking for the items you sell.

There are plenty of paid keyword research tools, but you can get pretty far with the free ones – so use them before signing up for an expensive platform.

Answer the Public

Also Asked

Keywords Everywhere Chrome Extension

Google Keyword Planner: It’s a free tool offered by Google Ads and provides great information on search volume, competition, and other keyword data.
Google Search Console: If you’ve already launched your site, you can use this tool to identify the queries driving traffic to your site. This will give you an idea of what keywords currently work for you.

And honestly, Google’s search results are where the real gold is. You don’t really need any tools.

Pro Tip: For keyword planner, the data is inaccurate on accounts with zero info. Only use these kinds of tools if you’re also running paid advertising in the same account.

Focus on long-tail keywords – specific, multi-word search phrases that are more targeted than broader keywords. While they generally have lower search volumes, they often result in higher conversion rates because they cater to a more precise user intent.

It’s also easier to rank on page 1 of the search engine results pages (SERPs) for long-tail keywords.

You’re unlikely to rank for a broad term like “air purifier,” for instance. There’s just too much competition out there.

But you could rank for more specific keyword phrases like “best air purifier for viruses.”

And here’s a pro tip: Before moving on to optimizing your pages, search for your chosen target keyword in Google and see what appears.

The type of results you see indicate the type of information people are looking for when they search that term (that’s called search intent) – and it will tell you the type of page you should create.

Depending on the search intent, you might need to create an informative blog post, a product page, or something else altogether.

Do the SERPs show a bunch of collection pages for that term? Great! Build a strong collection page that will outrank those! The idea is to give Google what it wants.

Check out our free training for more keyword research strategies!

Improve Your Search Engine Ranking With Keywords

Once you’ve identified your “money” keywords (the ones that will draw lots of potential customers to your site), it’s time to do a little on-page SEO. That’s the process of adding keywords to critical places in the content of your pages.

The golden rule for an effective on-page SEO strategy is: “One keyword — one page.” Don’t stuff your pages with keywords (or their variations!). Map keywords to your pages, then optimize them (sparingly!).

For example, “glucosamine for cats” and “cat glucosamine” are the same keyword in Google’s eyes – they return the same results when searched.

However, on that product page, you can use the more trafficked term as an H1 and the less trafficked one as an H2.

But you shouldn’t, for instance, use “best glucosamine for cats” on that page as that has an entirely different search intent and doesn’t provide the same results when searched.

Follow these steps to optimize pages for keywords:

Add your keywords to your content headers on your product pages. These are your H1s, H2s, H3s, and so on in your text. The main title (H1) should be super simple – it should just be the product’s name. For example, “Austin Air Healthmate Plus Air Purifier.”
Your H2 should support the H1, and include the second most commonly-searched keyword in your keyword family. We often recommend formulating the H2 as a question, so it gets the attention of the reader.
Add keywords to your page’s metadata (also known as meta tags). The title tag is the headline users see on SERPs and is arguably the most important meta tag for SEO.
Write compelling meta descriptions. These brief summaries of your page’s content appear under your page title in search results. If you write these well, you’ll make people want to click on your pages over your competitors, earning you more organic traffic. Here are a few tips for writing effective meta descriptions:

Let people know what they’ll find when they arrive on your page (so they don’t bounce when they get there).
Tell them to click on your CTA.
Include the keyword you’re trying to rank for (it gets bolded in the SERPs).

Tell a story with your copy to reel in your prospects and entice them to keep reading. It’s always a balancing act between optimizing your content and writing compelling copy for your customers. And no matter what, write for humans first and search engines second!

Few dropshippers are using these on-page SEO tips for their product pages. So if you implement these techniques, you’ll be ahead of most of your competitors.

Make Your Site SEO-Friendly

Nothing you do with keywords and optimizing pages will get results if search engines (and users) view your site as confusing or low-quality.

For example, these are mistakes we see all the time that might be causing issues with your site structure or user experience:

Not using canonical tags for similar pages: Remember the golden rule “one keyword – one page?” Your site will start breaking this rule when you have collections or variations of similar products, each with their own page. Google doesn’t know which one is the most important, so you may wind up not ranking with any of them. To tackle this, add a canonical tag to your site’s code. A canonical tag is like a little note you can put on the main page of a product collection, so the search engines know to pick that one (even if there are similar pages).
Not following a logical URL structure: Instead of having multiple URLs based on your collections, configure your site to use a consistent format like /product/product-name. This ensures search engines clearly understand and rank your product pages correctly.

Ignoring page speed: How fast your pages load significantly impacts user experience and page rankings, so it’s a big consideration for SEO. Shopify offers website speed tests, but we don’t recommend them. Instead, use Pingdom to check your site speed and ensure it’s optimized for search. If your pages load slowly, you may need to compress images or take other steps to speed things up.

The issues listed above, and others, are why it’s best to use a platform and theme that makes it easy to optimize your SEO. You don’t need a bunch of overpriced SEO apps to make your site SEO-friendly (there’s only one app we recommend, and we’ll get to that in just a sec).

In our high ticket dropshipping course, we give you your own licensed copy of Superstore, a premium Shopify theme from Out of the Sandbox.

Not only do we give you a premium theme, but we fix bugs that no one else is fixing in premium themes, setting you up to win on day 1 in SEO!

But even great themes need help to hit our SEO optimization standards.

That’s why we also teach you how to customize your Shopify store with advanced tweaks, like:

Human-readable sitemaps
Customized breadcrumbs
Remedies for duplicate content hiccups

Other dropshipping courses don’t teach this stuff. We’re handing you the secret to ranking for keywords that can get thousands of free visitors to your store.

Content Marketing Strategies for Dropshippers

Collections and products are no-brainers on Shopify, and you must get your on-page SEO right there for anything to rank, but your best chance at ranking is with content.

Content like product guides, blog posts comparing products, or educational content with keywords related to your niche can boost your SEO.

If you need a place to start, return to your list of potential keyword ideas from the research phase and choose some long-tail phrases to focus on in your content marketing strategy.

And don’t underestimate the power of comparison! “Brand vs. Brand” or “Product vs. Product” articles can be SEO campaign goldmines.

Wanna find one right now?

Go to Google and search your biggest brand’s name, then wait for the page with the search results to load.

Now, go back to the search bar on that page and click right after the name, hit space, and type vs.

Did it fill in just the last word? Then that’s not a search term you should care about.

Or did it suggest full search terms? If so, this is where you’ll win early on in your journey!

Create a Sitemap as Part of Your Dropshipping SEO Strategy

Sitemaps are crucial for dropshipping websites because they help search engines easily navigate and index all of your site’s pages. Think of a sitemap like a roadmap for search engines – it shows them the structure of your site and helps them discover pages that might be hidden or harder to find.

When you submit a sitemap, you’re giving Google and other search engines the tools they need to crawl your site more efficiently. This is especially important for dropshipping sites that have a large number of product pages.

So if you haven’t created a sitemap for your dropshipping site yet, now’s the time.

Remember that Shopify theme I mentioned, which you get free when you sign up for our dropshipping course? Our course also includes 12 modules about improving the technical SEO of the Superstore theme, and there’s a lot of detail there about creating an XML sitemap for Google.

How Pagination Can Boost Your Rankings

Pagination is a technical SEO technique used to divide large amounts of content across multiple pages. It’s commonly used for things like product category pages or blog archives. Pagination helps improve site usability and page load times by not cramming too much content onto a single page.

From an SEO perspective, pagination helps search engines understand the relationship between pages and index them properly. You want search engines to understand that paginated pages are part of a series and not just a bunch of thin, low-value content.

There are a few different ways to handle pagination for SEO, but one common method is using rel=”next” and rel=”prev” tags. These tags indicate the relationship between the pages in the series, so search engines know which page comes next and which page comes before the current one.

One place where paginating isn’t a good idea is the “blog” section of your site. Make sure your visitors can see all your posts in one click when they land in the blog area.

Link Building for Dropshipping

Link building is vital for dropshipping SEO. Every time another site links to you, it’s like a “thumbs up” in the eyes of the search engines. So, the more backlinks (also called incoming links) you have, the more search engine traffic you’ll attract.

Building external links is an art and a science, but here are a few quick tips for getting started:

Focus on publishing high-quality content: First and foremost, create consistently great content. This is the stuff that naturally attracts backlinks. Publish content people want to share and link to.
Build real relationships: Network with bloggers and influencers in your industry. Engage, comment, and collaborate. Relationships lead to natural links.
Avoid buying backlinks from disreputable sources: Don’t buy cheap backlinks from platforms like Fiverr. These links are often low-quality and can hurt your reputation. Get links from related, quality sites, not random, irrelevant ones, to your high ticket dropshipping niche.

Link building is about quality, not quantity. Build good content, make real connections, and avoid shortcuts.

For more tips on effective SEO elements you can apply to your dropshipping site, check out our free training!

How to Overcome SEO Challenges in Dropshipping

Dropshipping SEO is simple but not easy. Challenges will crop up. Let’s examine some of the more common problems we encounter and provide tools, resources, and strategies that can help.

Not Knowing How to Implement Code Schema

Schema is a form of structured data markup that helps search engines understand the content of your website better.

For high ticket dropshipping, implementing code schema can highlight product details, prices, and reviews directly in search results. This added clarity increases click-through rates (CTRs) and conversions, too.

For instance, a dropshipper selling high-end drones might use schema to display star ratings and prices directly in the search snippet. This kind of content is like catnip for users.

Take a look at this example from a Google search result.

Adding schema manually can be difficult, and a potential problem for business owners trying to do it on their own. But we’ve got another shortcut for you.

We recommend using the JSON-LD for SEO Shopify app for code schema. It’s one of the more expensive apps for dropshipping on Shopify, but the ROI you get from boosting your search engine rankings makes it worth it. We recommend it for all high ticket dropshippers. In fact, it’s the only SEO app we recommend!

Addressing Duplicate Content in Product Descriptions

Many dropshippers just copy and paste the product descriptions they get from suppliers, which means there is a lot of duplicate content all over the web. And Google hates duplicate content—a lot.

Heck, just doing the on-page SEO we talked about above already puts you light years ahead of the competition.

Now rewrite the description to talk directly to your ideal customer, and you’ll be in great shape.

Also, Google is now acknowledging pages but not indexing them when they’re just copy pasta. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot out of the gates.

You can also tell Google not to index certain pages on your site using a “noindex” directive in the HTTP header of those pages. This prevents search engines from indexing low-value pages that might dilute your site’s overall quality.

For example, you might want to tell Google to ignore your privacy policy page, or the page you created for a Black Friday sale three years ago. You can also tell Google to ignore duplicate pages.

Keep in mind that you also want to avoid bloat. Having too many low-quality or duplicate pages can actually hurt your SEO. Make sure each page on your site serves a clear purpose and provides value to your visitors.

Optimizing Dropshipping Images for SEO

Optimized images do more than just look good. They work behind the scenes to boost your site’s rankings and provide a richer user experience.

But you’ve got to know how to make the most of your images. Whatever you do, don’t use apps! They simply apply the same alt to every image.

Here are some guidelines to keep in mind when optimizing images for SEO:

Size consistently: Stick to square images. They ensure consistency and look good on both mobile and desktop.
Compress images: Large image files can bog down page load times. Use tools like Compressjpeg.com to reduce file size without compromising on quality.
Optimize your image filenames: Instead of generic filenames like “IMG1234.jpg”, rename them to include keywords like “blue-leather-bag.jpg”.
Always use alt tags. Alt tags help search engines understand the image content. Use keywords, but make sure to describe the image accurately. For instance, “Side view of blue leather handbag with gold buckle” is descriptive and keyword-rich.
Integrate images into your content: Integrate relevant images into all your product descriptions. This enhances readability and allows you to address more supporting keywords via the file names and alt tags. If done right, you’ll also start getting traffic from Google image search.

Frequently Asked Questions About Dropshipping SEO

What is dropshipping SEO?

Dropshipping SEO is the practice of optimizing your online store for search engines so you can attract organic traffic.

Why is SEO important for dropshipping?

In the end, if you’re trying to solve your customers’ problems, content built around all the questions your customers have is a no-brainer from a CRO perspective, let alone the massive traffic benefits it will ultimately bring.

How do I choose the right keywords for my store?

Use keyword tools like the Keywords Everywhere Chrome extension. Focus on relevant, high-volume, low-competition terms. We’re also big fans of using Answer the Public and Also Asked to do dropshipping keyword research.

Should I use the product descriptions provided by suppliers?

Google can punish you for duplicate content, so write your own product descriptions. Optimize your headings and product descriptions with relevant keywords, and also use your copywriting skills to make them appealing to visitors so they want to stay on the page and keep reading.

Can images affect my store’s SEO?

Yes. Use optimized images with keyword-rich file names and alt tags for better search performance.

Is Shopify good for dropshipping SEO performance?

Going from products to collections is already a natural “silo.” Shopify is built to rank with a few tweaks to the code (which we provide in our course).

What is “black hat” SEO?

These are spammy or manipulative SEO methods. Avoid them because they could result in penalties or bans from search engines.

When should I start doing SEO for my dropshipping business?

Right away! As soon as you start building your store, you can optimize your content and ensure your site is as friendly as possible for search engines. It may take a while to see results, but the sooner you get started, the sooner you’ll see that free traffic rolling in.

An Inspirational Dropshipping SEO Case Study

Just in case you’re not convinced of the power of SEO for dropshipping (yet), let us share this quick story.

I started working with a dropshipping business in 2018 to help them with their SEO efforts. Before I came in, the business was only getting 7% of its visitors from organic traffic, and was making $0 in sales from those users.

The first year after I joined, the company doubled down on SEO and implemented the tips you’ve learned above. That year, the business attracted 27% of its users via organic search, translating to 76,000 visitors and a revenue of $854,000.

By the second year, the numbers climbed further: 43% of the total users (243,000 visitors) came from search, which generated an impressive $2.3 million in sales.

This wasn’t luck – it resulted from a targeted approach to dropshipping SEO. And this is possible for you too. All you need to do is put in the time and effort.

Want to be our next dropshipping SEO success story? Sign up for our free training to build, launch, and grow a profitable high ticket dropshipping business.

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Article by Ben Knegendorf

Ben Knegendorf realized at 29 he needed to find another career path. Since then, he’s:

Successfully exited a high-ticket drop shipping business that he helped take from $1 to $11M annual revenue in just 2.5 years
Eliminated $40,000+ of personal debt
Joined Dropship Breakthru as co-owner in 2021