Near where I live is a street full of high-rent retail.
There is a ton of foot traffic in the area so the rents are probably justified, but not every business can make it work.
The high-quality bakery? Absolutely. Line out the door and around the block.
The artisanal tea shop? Packed.
The kids toy store? Crazy busy.
But it's extreme specialty stores or concept stores that struggle. Over a years it's almost like a revolving door of businesses starting and closing.
I'm sure there are plenty of reasons why but the main one is customers. Or the lack of them.
Sure having a ton of foot traffic is great but if only a tiny percentage of that traffic is interested in your store and could become a customer, you're paying extra for the location.
The specialty stores that thrive here are doing so in-spite of the foot traffic. They're using their marketing to bring people into the store, even from across town.
This might sound like common sense but like much of common sense, it's not that common.
Your Shopify store might be in a similar situation.
You might be paying too much just to be around shoppers, but there's so few actual customers that show up and buy. Like a friend of mine says, "that's a nice money pit you have there".
This could be true if you run Facebook or Google Ads, but it can also be true if you're trying to make social media work or blogging.
Remember, even "free" tactics have a cost. Your time, energy, and attention are valuable and limited resources too.
Just because other people have make something work, doesn't mean you have to also.
The bakery works in this high-traffic, high-rent location. The 14th antique store probably won't.
But it could work elsewhere. Or if it did something else with it's marketing other than "old, nice stuff for sale".
Before the holiday season starts and everyone is giving you advice to market more, sell more, and everything else more... it might worthwhile to take some time and consider if there are any high-rent activities you're doing that aren't paying off.
Cut them if you can, or at least pause them.
Even if you don't focus on SEO, you can do a few things to benefit from it.
One of those is getting into Google's Rich Results program.
It can bring you better search results, traffic, and better qualified customers.
With my app JSON-LD for SEO, it's even easy to do. The app will automatically add the data Google requires for Rich Results so you don't have to do very much with it. Just install and wait.
Admittedly the waiting is the hard part because it can take weeks for Google but everyone has to do that. Even your competitors.
Eric Davis