Use Shopify as a CMS: Increase Visibility, Sell More

Create products, choose a theme, go online. That's how Shopify promotes getting started in the e-commerce business. Among the shop systems, Shopify is becoming increasingly popular. According to Statista, the SaaS solution is now the second most used shop system worldwide. Shopify is also becoming increasingly popular in Germany.

Worldwide market shares of shop systems, Source: Statista

Shopify has always been primarily an e-commerce platform and secondly a Content Management System (CMS). Shopify makes it easy for you to manage products, variants, collections, and shipping models in a user-friendly interface.

In addition, Shopify offers you numerous CMS functions that can increase the organic visibility of your online shop and improve engagement with your customers. This guest article by James Kirby shows you which functions these are and how to use them.

Why should you use Shopify as a CMS?

If you have ever created a Shopify online shop or seen advertising for Shopify, you probably know the classic approach: You choose a suitable theme, add your products, configure a few settings, connect a domain, and you can take the online shop live.

In theory, setting up an online shop with Shopify is really that easy, but Shopify's CMS functions goes much further than that. If you use Shopify not only as an online shop builder, but as a full-fledged CMS for your web presence, you can significantly increase your organic reach through SEO and create content with which you can better engage your customers.

Recent developments and updates also suggest that Shopify is currently expanding its CMS area. Shopify is even trying to develop into a headless CMS for e-commerce in the long term through new distribution channels, the introduction of the Hydrogen framework, and the Storefront API. This approach means you can maintain your content and products in one backend and play them out in multiple frontends.

How can you use Shopify as a CMS?

Shopify has many well-known and hidden functions that make the platform a complete CMS. The largest and best known component is probably the visual theme editor.

This is how you adapt your online shop with the theme editor

With the theme editor you can adapt your installed theme to your design ideas and the CI of your brand using so-called sections per drag-and-drop. Sections are templates that come with the theme. This way you can structure and design your content in the online shop.

While all Shopify users should be aware that they can customize the homepage of the online shop with the theme editor, since the Shopify Online Shop 2.0 update, you can edit all pages of the online shop using the theme editor without having to program.

The Shopify Theme Editor

You can also use the theme editor to create your own templates (templates) for product pages, category pages, static pages, and blogs as well as blog articles. With these templates, you can display standardized content on each of these pages and share important content at several points with your customers.

For example, you could place a section in your blog article template that plays out your bestseller product to your customers when they read your blog articles.

Give your customers deeper information about your products with static pages

In addition to the functional pages of your online shop (for example, home page, catalog pages, product pages, shopping cart), you can also create static content. Like any content management system, static content in Shopify works as pages that can be accessed on your online shop. They offer you the opportunity to provide your customers with further information that is not directly related to purchasing your products.

For example, you can provide information about the manufacture or use of your products, to flank your products with additional content about your brand and themes within your industry. This significantly increases the findability in search engines.

For the creation of these contents, you can use a rich text editor in Shopify, like in other CMS, through which you can also use images and video material on the pages.

Win loyal site visitors with your own blog articles

In addition to the static pages that you can create for your online shop, Shopify also allows you to write and place your own blog. With blog articles, you can build a large content database that repeatedly brings new visitors looking for in-depth information to your online shop. If you use the template function mentioned above to place your products, you can convert many of these visitors into customers.

The blog function on your online shop goes even further. If you have to manage numerous blog articles on different topics, you can create several blogs. With the multi-blog function, you can divide and structure the individual articles both in the frontend and in the backend to categorize your content and display it to different visitors with different interests.

Increase findability in search engines with meta texts

Meta texts are essential for the SEO of each page. The meta title, the meta description, and the meta tags are the texts that are displayed in the search engine listing of the page. With these texts, you can instantly convey to visitors what content they expect on the page. You can also place the relevant keywords here that the page should also rank for.

Since these texts are so important for the findability of the page, every modern content management system offers the possibility to customize these texts. The CMS function is also included in Shopify.

You can edit these texts for all pages that Shopify creates in your online shop. Specifically, this applies to every product, every category, every static page, every blog, every blog article, and the homepage. In addition to the texts, you can also adjust the URL handle, i.e. the part of the URL that follows the main domain for e.g. a “/product” to access the product page.

Use Shopify's file manager to manage images, videos and documents

One of the most important components of any content management system is managing media elements like images and videos and managing documents. Here, Shopify was not particularly strong for a long time, the file manager was a non-searchable list of documents. This has fundamentally changed.

Meanwhile, the Shopify CMS offers an improved file manager where you can find and manage your media elements in one place. You can find the file manager somewhat hidden in the Shopify settings.

The file manager is a tabular overview of all uploaded media elements and documents that you have in your shop. You can either upload these elements here or insert them via the rich text editor when creating pages and blog articles, then they also appear in the file manager.

With these three tips you can use this CMS function in Shopify and simplify your daily work on the platform:

• Build a content database: If you regularly create blog articles and new pages in your online shop, you can first upload all marketing images and videos here. When writing your content, you can then quickly and easily insert elements from the file manager using the Rich-Text-Editor, without having to upload them from your PC every time. This way, you can create new content for your online shop much faster.
• Maintain ALT texts centrally: ALT texts are indispensable for the accessibility and therefore also for the SEO of your page. ALT texts describe your images for people who cannot recognize these images and, for example, use a screen reader. In addition, these descriptions are displayed instead of the images if they cannot be loaded in the browser. To edit the ALT text of an image, simply click on the corresponding image in the file manager.
• Provide additional documents for your customers: In many industries, it makes sense to provide your customers with additional documents before or after purchase that can improve their experience with the product. Examples of this are size charts, workout guides, instructions, and recipes. You can upload these documents using the file manager. Shopify then provides you with a link through which you and your customers can retrieve these documents. This way, you can link these documents, for example on the product page or in a order confirmation email, and make them available to your customers.

Work together on your online shops with user management

If you are not operating as a sole entrepreneur, you probably want to work on the online shop with several colleagues. Like the file manager, a robust user administration is one of the core functions of every good content management system. Shopify has also massively upgraded here in recent updates.

Via the user management in the settings of your Shopify admins, you can add your colleagues with their email address. While all employees previously had largely the same permissions in the online shop, rights can now be managed granularly.

Although Shopify still does not offer a division into read and write rights, you can determine which areas colleagues can access. For example, you can create content managers in Shopify who only have access to the blog area and the static pages.

You can also use this CMS function in Shopify to enable access to your online shop for agencies and external partners and edit their rights.

Indispensable for every CMS – The user and rights management in Shopify.

Here is another tip for creating blog articles: If you want to highlight the authors of your blog articles, you can create a bio for the respective employees in user management. They can also upload a profile picture.

You can then use this information in your blog article template to show your readers more about the authors of your blog, without having to manually insert this content every time.

Internationalize your content with Shopify Markets

If you want to scale your online shop, you will sooner or later have to expand to other countries. For this, you need to translate your content and also adapt the shop components to the respective country. Shopify Markets is a new feature in Shopify that allows you to adapt your content for different countries from one area.

As with other CMS systems, you still need an external plugin for the translation of your content, but you can configure and sort the different translations in this interface.

In addition to managing your translations, Shopify Markets also allows you to configure your currencies and domains. This ensures that your content is properly and appropriately displayed in every country.

Attention: Shopify Markets has just been launched and is still in its infancy. It is quite possible that you will encounter some errors during configuration.

3 tips you can use immediately to increase the reach and sales of your online shop with the CMS functions of Shopify

After we have discussed the different functions above that transform Shopify into a content management system, you can implement these three tips immediately to increase the reach of your online shop and sell more using the CMS functions.

Fill out ALL meta texts for your online shop pages

As discussed above, you can maintain the meta texts for each page in Shopify to increase the findability of your online shop in search engines. Make sure that the title, description, and handle are as meaningful as possible.

To maintain the meta texts for your content, access the respective page in the Shopify backend. At the bottom of the page, you will find the “Search engine preview” section. Here you can click on “Edit web page SEO” to edit the meta texts. You can modify the title, the description, and the URL handle. Shopify shows you the maximum length of the entry under the respective field as a tooltip.

You can customize the meta texts for the following content:

• Products
• Categories
• Blogs
• Blog articles
• Static pages

One special feature is the home page. You can also adjust the meta texts here, but you do it via the navigation “Online shop > Configurations” in the backend.

Use the file manager to fill in the ALT texts of your pictures

To increase the accessibility of your website, you can maintain the ALT texts of your images as described above. To do this, go to “Settings” and then “Files” in the backend, which opens the file manager. Under “More filters > File type > Images” you can display only the uploaded images and you can work on them one after the other.

Images, videos and documents management – The file manager in the Shopify CMS

Tip: If you have uploaded your product images directly when creating your products on the respective page, you can't find them in the file manager. However, you can still maintain ALT texts for these images. To do this, go to the respective product and click on the image. A new window opens where you can maintain the ALT text of the image.

Use sections on your static pages and blog articles to convert information-oriented traffic into customers

At the beginning of the article, we talked about the Shopify Online Shop 2.0 update and the possibility of being able to use sections on every page now using the theme editor.

With this function, you can use your content targeted and effective to convert visitors to customers. For example, you can create templates for your pages and blog articles in which you present a product or category that readers of this content might find interesting. Alternatively, you can also play out your newsletter sign-up at the end of your blog articles, for example, to convert readers to newsletter subscribers.

To create a template for static pages or blog articles, you have to go to the theme editor. You can reach this from the backend by clicking on “Online shop > Themes > Customize”.

In the theme editor, you find a dropdown bar at the top. Here you now either choose “Blog posts” or “Pages” and then take the standard template or create a new one. You can now customize this template as usual using the visual drag-and-drop editor, for example by placing products or a newsletter sign-up on the page.

Convert visitors into customers – showcase products on the blog article template

Conclusion: Use Shopify as a CMS, not as an online shop builder

In the article we have only shed light on some of the deeper CMS functions of Shopify. If you use these approaches and delve even deeper, you can organically increase the reach and thereby also the sales of your online shop.

Exploiting all of Shopify's features in depth, you can turn your online shop into an attractive brand experience that brings you new customers over and over again.

OMR Reviews also compares Shopify with other shop systems to support you in choosing the right e-commerce platform.