With Search Everywhere Optimization, people are often not sure what it looks like in practice until you break it down for a particular case. In this article we are going to look at it specifically for Shopify brands, as Shopify is the e-commerce platform market leader.
Whether you are a Shopify brand, a SaaS company, or a consultant, you should still be following the pyramid framework for Search Everywhere Optimization. Let's walk through each layer and what it means for a Shopify store.
Table of Contents
Layer 1: Audience Research
From working with many seven-figure, eight-figure, and some nine-figure Shopify brands, I know that in order to run really good ads, you need to have a really good understanding of your target audience. So very often, what we do at SEO Leverage is complement what already exists in terms of audience knowledge. In many cases, the foundational work is already partially done.
This is the base of the pyramid, and for Shopify brands it tends to move faster because the audience data from paid campaigns already provides a solid starting point.
On-Page Optimization for Your Shopify Store
If you are a Shopify brand, you really want to make sure that your website acts as an information database about your products, their collections, and the particular use cases those products and collections serve.
It is going to be impossible for even smart machines to calculate all possible use cases for a particular product. It is much easier for them to surface content that actually communicates the use cases well and connects the brand to specific challenges a particular audience has.
For example, if you are selling umbrellas, you want to make sure that you actually talk about rain and the problem the umbrella solves on your product page. The product page should not just list features. It should frame the product within the context of the buyer's situation.
It can get tricky with smaller, more technical parts. If you are selling screws or specific hand tools, there is only so much you can say about a single product. But then you go one level up and make sure that you describe the collection page well, tying it together with other content that provides enough context for both users and algorithms.
Although Shopify has gone a long way in making sure there is a decent technical foundation, there is still a lot that can be improved when it comes to schema markup, the code that the theme produces, and specific canonical definitions. These technical details matter for how search engines and AI platforms interpret your pages.
Layer 2: Setting Up Alerts
Setting up alerts means getting a notification when someone somewhere is talking about your product, your brand, your competitor brands, or the challenge that your product solves.
Why do you need alerts? Because they give you the chance to participate in conversations. But not just participate. Alerts also give you the chance to learn more about your target audience, because every time someone talks about a challenge they want to solve, a problem they have, it is a moment where you can get to know your ideal client better.
Setting up alerts does not mean just tracking a couple of brand names and a product name. If you want to do alerts right, you set them up in a way that allows you to jump in where the decision-making process happens.
Think about a brand like Apple's iPhone. There are going to be a lot of conversations out there about iPhones. But you are not necessarily interested in the ones asking about the newest feature. What you are actually interested in as a Shopify brand is comparisons: which model to choose, which model has the best price for the value, which model people have the best experience with. You are interested in conversations where people describe their challenges, their problem, and where somebody could jump in and say, hey, you should actually get this product because it is going to solve your problem.
You are interested in questions that clearly indicate someone is very close to buying, very close to making a decision. Because this is not going to get you just one sale from that particular person. Those questions are going to rank. Those questions and answers are going to be read by large language models like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google's Gemini, and this way they feed back into the algorithm.
Imagine what happens when 5 out of 10 relevant questions show a clear connection to your brand or your product. You are going to start popping up in AI answers naturally. If you can orchestrate being present consistently over time in those conversations, you simply become part of the landscape. And this only works with a proper alert system and the proper configuration of that system.
Layer 3: Industry Publications
This is something a lot of people miss in the Shopify space. Shopify brands typically run enormous ad budgets to grow quickly, but they neglect very obvious organic ways to get in front of their audience.
For example, if you are selling furniture, there might be interior design magazines, blogs about passive houses, or tiny house publications if you have space-saving furniture. Industry publications exist in every niche, and it is definitely worth pursuing getting featured in them. It serves as a credibility signal and a signal to algorithms that you are playing in the same league as other major players in your space.
The advantage is significant: you count on the distribution channel that the publication already has. They might send your article through their newsletter to thousands of readers. Others might pick it up and feature it in their own newsletters. They might run ads to some of their articles and bring people to the site. They get decent organic traffic and people might simply discover your article while browsing. This means you do not rely so heavily on your own distribution to get results from that content.
Layer 4: Distribution
For Shopify brands, distribution is usually ads plus email newsletters. But there is a lot more that can be done.
For an Australian client, for example, our outreach team handles influencer outreach, searching specifically for vertical blogs and offering free samples of the product. Distribution can also mean running ads on non-typical spaces like particular subreddits where you can get really attractive CPMs. We test this regularly and are consistently impressed by how cheaply you can get in front of your target audience there.
You can actually run ads based on audience research that tells you which other websites, blogs, and podcasts your audience is already following. This makes the targeting far more precise than broad demographic targeting.
Distribution can extend to other newsletters, Facebook groups, Quora, Reddit, and Threads on X. But it is always critical to remain focused on where the highest impact can be achieved. Certain subreddits, for instance, can get you in front of an audience directly, but also in front of a Google audience that is researching on Google. That might not be your first thought, but it is a powerful option.
Layer 5: Your Own Content
If you publish on your blog, how are people supposed to know about it? A no-brainer is to run a small budget on Meta ads to the article in order to give it visibility among your target audience or within your geographical area, depending on how your business operates.
Another no-brainer is to create a video about the article and run ads to that. Banner ads, Google Display ads — all of those can be part of a standard distribution package. When you publish your own content, you want to create many different formats that give you chances to appear across different channels and in different formats.
In addition, when you have a Shopify brand, manufacturers can be part of your distribution. If you sell someone else's product that they manufacture, they might already have an audience. They might be able to tell people that you are selling this product, that you have created content about their product on your website. They might already have a following on social media they can leverage to help you make more sales of their product. It is about being a little more creative and leveraging the assets that are actually available to you.
Putting It All Together
If you are a Shopify brand and are ready to tackle Search Everywhere Optimization as part of your marketing mix, you might already have quite a few things in place from the different levels of the pyramid. But you still want to go step by step and make sure that you complete whatever is missing, from the foundational audience research level up through distribution and into your own content.
Only this way are you going to be able to make sure that whatever you put out has a real chance to be noticed and trigger action among your target audience.
Book a diagnostic call today to confirm if Search Everywhere Optimization is a good fit for your Shopify brand and define the next steps.