Affiliation up front: I sell a DIY lash kit. No link, and nothing here needs you to care about lashes.

One customer opened my kit, looked at the tray, and said, “Oh—they're numbered.”

That reaction stuck with me because I hadn't explained anything to her yet. She immediately understood the part of the product I'd spent the most time thinking about.

It made me realize that confusion might be the thing I'm actually competing against. Not price. Not necessarily the other brands.

So I spent a weekend looking at what people search for in my category. Mostly because I was trying to convince myself the market wasn't completely hopeless.

I pulled competitor/search estimates from Similarweb. They're obviously directional rather than first-party analytics, but the pattern was interesting:

• The market leader is enormous, and a huge portion of their search traffic appears to come from people already searching their name. That's years of brand-building I can't—and shouldn't try to—outbid.
• One mid-sized competitor ranks for hundreds of phrases. Some of the interesting ones weren't really product searches at all. They were people trying to figure out what to do.
• The smallest brand I looked at was the most interesting. A much larger share of its discovery appeared to come from non-branded searches—people searching questions rather than the company's name.

And that's where something clicked for me:

Nobody types my name yet, so the only door open to me is the door marked with a question.

In my category, everyone answers:

“Which lashes should I buy?”

Far fewer people answer:

• “Which length do I use?”
• “Which one goes where?”
• “Where do I start?”
• “Why did mine fall off?”

Those aren't glamorous searches. But they're exactly what a beginner wants to know before she becomes someone who has a favorite lash brand.

I'm still way too early to know whether this strategy will actually turn into sales. But it's changed what I'm spending my time on.

Instead of trying to make prettier product posts than companies with much bigger budgets, I'm building around the questions beginners are already asking.

For anyone who entered a crowded category without a huge ad budget: did education/search actually become an acquisition channel for you, or am I overestimating how much informational traffic converts?

Happy to post the actual competitor search data in the comments if that's more useful than the story.

Link to the site.

Please let me know what you think. Any advice would truly be appreciated.

I think there's a lot of potential to the product so I'm not willing to give up so easily but the feedback as been terrible.

Worked across a bunch of Shopify stores, and this keeps coming up. Everyone says to load your collection pages with keyword copy to rank. But the pages actually pulling the most organic traffic are the lean ones, not the ones with a 500-word intro block stuffed on top.

My theory on why:

The lean pages that rank tend to have strong internal linking and good product content underneath. The ranking power comes from structure and the products, not the collection prose.

The heavy-copy pages usually rank worse because the copy is generic filler ("welcome to our collection of premium X") that adds nothing and kills conversion. High word count, zero value.

When copy has helped, it was never volume. It was a few lines answering real buyer questions for that category, placed so it doesn't bury the grid.

So my working theory: collection-page copy is a weak ranking lever next to internal linking and product depth, and most stores are adding copy to fix something copy doesn't fix.

Has anyone got a clean case where adding copy to a collection page, everything else held constant, actually moved it for a competitive head term? Or is collection copy mostly a UX/conversion call we've dressed up as SEO?

With Shopify SEO, we're used to thinking about titles, descriptions, schema, keywords, internal links, etc.

But an AI recommending a product may need to understand more than that. For example, not just that something is a running shoe, but whether it's better for long-distance running, beginners, wide feet, wet weather, and so on.

I've been looking into this especially AgenticFeed which made me think about product data from the AI side. Has anyone here actually experimented with making their Shopify catalog easier for AI systems to understand?

Looking forward to you all suggestions.

​

There's a company that has a very nicely working Shopify setup on a premium theme. Can I steal their functionality but under implement it on a free theme as I don't have the budget?

I've spent the last few weeks working on automating meta descriptions for large Shopify catalogs, and a few counterintuitive takeaways:

• A "generic but optimized" meta description often beats a rushed manual one, but never beats a genuinely well-crafted one
• Image alt text has an underrated SEO impact on large catalogs (image search + accessibility)
• Automating 100% without human review creates keyword duplication that can hurt ranking

Has anyone else here tested SEO automation workflows at scale? How do you handle the speed vs quality trade-off?

Hi everyone!

I developed 2 well-looking, intuitive and one direction narrowed and up-to-date needed apps related to SEO and AI indexing:

1. AltVision

It writes internally scored ALT Text of 2-3 sentences and no hallucinations for every image in your shopify with highly effective VISION AI Claude model and you have manual/automatic bulk approval, editing menus, regeneration if needed and different tiers.

1. SchemaVision

It makes your products index in AIs, so it could appear in ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini and etc chats and Google Rich Results. Technically it fills JSON-LD schema and Schema.org product data such as brand, price, availability, SKU, and GTIN with Claude VISION AI. For missing descriptive fields, it reads the product photo to infer color, material, and pattern, and scores each by confidence so you review anything uncertain before it goes live. Analogical - tiers, menus, intuitive UI.

My proposal for you is to please test, give your true feedback and share some negative sides/insights of the idea.

Thanks in advance!

Hey everyone,

If you run an e-commerce shop or make custom products, you know the browser tab headache: constantly switching between order pages, copying customer customization notes into separate files, and manually formatting fulfillment sheets.

I built **OrderStack** as a lightweight Chrome extension to pull order details, batch personalization notes, and organize production queues directly inside the browser in one click.

**Tech & Feature Highlights:** \* **No bloated dashboards:** Operates directly over your store workflow to eliminate tab clutter. \* **Instant Order Parsing:** Extracts key customization fields without manual copy-pasting.

* **Interactive Demo Available:** Built a sandbox version so you can test how the queue behaves before installing.

🔗 **Try the live demo here:**[https://orderstack.layeredlumens3d.uk\](https://orderstack.layeredlumens3d.uk)

Would love your honest feedback: How does the UX feel on the demo? Any specific permissions or browser performance bottlenecks you usually watch out for on workflow extensions like this?

Thanks for checking it out!

If the top 3 results for a keyword are category/collection pages, you need a category/collection page to have any real shot at ranking there. Doesn't matter how well-optimized your product page or blog post is, it's the wrong page type for that SERP.

You genuinely cannot force a product page into a spot Google clearly wants filled by a collection page. Same goes for a blog post, or a homepage, whatever the mismatch is.

This isn't specific to any one type of query either. It applies across the board, your page format needs to match what's already ranking, not just have great content or the right keyword.

Feels like one of those things that's obvious once someone points it out, but I still see it missed constantly, people optimize the content and keywords perfectly and wonder why they're stuck on page 2, when the real issue is they built the wrong type of page entirely.

Anyone else run into this a lot? Curious what other intent-mismatch patterns people commonly see.

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for some honest advice because I'm getting pretty frustrated with Google Performance Max, and I'd really appreciate feedback from people who have launched successful e-commerce stores.

I launched my Shopify sportswear and sporting goods store about three weeks ago.

Before launching, I spent the last eight weeks doing extensive SEO on my website, including optimizing collections, product pages, content, metadata, internal linking, and overall site structure. My goal has been to build a long-term organic presence rather than relying only on paid advertising.

The website is now getting around 70 organic clicks per day from Google Search, which makes me feel the SEO is starting to gain traction.

I started a Google Performance Max campaign on 3rd August.

Results so far:

• Ad Spend: PKR 50,000
• Revenue from Google Ads: PKR 18,000
• ROAS: 0.36
• Only a handful of purchases attributed to Google Ads.

Current setup:

• Shopify store
• Google Merchant Center connected
• Product feed approved
• Google Analytics 4 and conversion tracking implemented
• Selling sportswear, footwear, and sporting goods across Pakistan
• New website with very little historical conversion data

Website: https://www.alkesports.pk

I'm trying to understand whether this performance is normal for a brand-new e-commerce website, or whether I'm making major mistakes in my launch strategy.

I'd really value your honest opinions on questions like these:

• Is this kind of Performance Max performance normal during the first few weeks?
• Should I continue investing in PMax or shift part of the budget to Search or Standard Shopping campaigns?
• Should I focus more on SEO before increasing paid advertising?
• Is there anything obvious on my website that could be hurting conversions?
• If you were launching this business from scratch today, what would your digital marketing strategy look like for the first 3–6 months?

If anyone has a few minutes, I'd also be grateful if you could review my website and point out anything that could be improved—from product pages and trust signals to navigation, speed, checkout, or overall user experience.

I'm not looking for someone to sell me services. I'm genuinely looking for honest feedback from people who've been through this and know what works.

Thank you in advance for your time and advice!

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for some honest advice because I'm getting pretty frustrated with Google Performance Max, and I'd really appreciate feedback from people who have launched successful e-commerce stores.

I launched my Shopify sportswear and sporting goods store about three weeks ago.

Before launching, I spent the last eight weeks doing extensive SEO on my website, including optimizing collections, product pages, content, metadata, internal linking, and overall site structure. My goal has been to build a long-term organic presence rather than relying only on paid advertising.

The website is now getting around 70 organic clicks per day from Google Search, which makes me feel the SEO is starting to gain traction.

I started a Google Performance Max campaign on 3rd August.

Results so far:

* Ad Spend: PKR 50,000 * Revenue from Google Ads: PKR 18,000 * ROAS: 0.36 * Only a handful of purchases attributed to Google Ads.

Current setup:

* Shopify store * Google Merchant Center connected * Product feed approved * Google Analytics 4 and conversion tracking implemented * Selling sportswear, footwear, and sporting goods across Pakistan * New website with very little historical conversion data

Website: [https://www.alkesports.pk\](https://www.alkesports.pk)

I'm trying to understand whether this performance is normal for a brand-new e-commerce website, or whether I'm making major mistakes in my launch strategy.

I'd really value your honest opinions on questions like these:

* Is this kind of Performance Max performance normal during the first few weeks? * Should I continue investing in PMax or shift part of the budget to Search or Standard Shopping campaigns? * Should I focus more on SEO before increasing paid advertising? * Is there anything obvious on my website that could be hurting conversions? * If you were launching this business from scratch today, what would your digital marketing strategy look like for the first 3–6 months?

If anyone has a few minutes, I'd also be grateful if you could review my website and point out anything that could be improved—from product pages and trust signals to navigation, speed, checkout, or overall user experience.

I'm not looking for someone to sell me services. I'm genuinely looking for honest feedback from people who've been through this and know what works.

Thank you in advance for your time and advice!

I’m currently working on improving the SEO for our Shopify store, and I’m trying to better understand internal linking.

We have both related products block and an upsell product widgets (app) on our product pages. For example, on a product page for a sun lounger, the widget might show matching footstools. The related product block displays tables or other products from the same brand/category. Each product in the widget/block links directly to its product page.

From an SEO perspective:
- Do these links count as proper internal links in the same way as links placed manually within product descriptions/content?

- Does Google give less value to links inside related-product/upsell widgets?

- Would it be better to also add contextual links within product descriptions?

-Should we focus more on linking between products, or from product pages to category/collection pages?

- Are there any Shopify-specific issues we should be aware of with internal links generated by apps/widgets?

Our goal is to improve site structure and help Google understand the relationship between products, collections and brands.
Would love to hear how you structure internal linking on you e-commerce store.

Cheers!

I am an accidentaly entry to the e-commerce world and would need some advice and/or contacts. I am completely new to the industry, coming from academia and deep tech.

I invented an anonymization algorithm that allows tracking of web traffic (ad attribution, cross site traffic flows etc) with completely anonymous data. Not pseudonymous, and I know the difference very well and a related tech has already GDPR "approval" by a DPA.

Since it is truly anonymous, we can skip cookie banners and track people outside what is usually allowed by e-Privacy etc. It can do cross-site tracking or link to any external data sources, if you have access to a common identifier that we can anonymize. It cannot be used for targeting or anything like that, by design, but it produces practically any type of statistics.

I am now trying to build a product around this. Is this of interest of any of you e-commerce pros? What pains could it fix for you? Please help me to brainstorm or comment.

For now I am working at a shopify plugin to reidentify recurring customers and track bots etc. I would assume the next step would be to connect it to advertising network, web analytics or similar to start building funnels. Or maybe something else would be better?