House of Salma
A Calgary boutique selling abayas, hijabs, dresses and modest wear for women and kids. The old WordPress site was slow and awkward to shop on a phone, so we moved the store to Shopify, rebuilt it around the collections and did the SEO, AEO and GEO work that now gets it found on Google and recommended by ChatGPT.
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The previous WordPress site, captured by the Wayback Machine in January 2024.
The challenge
Modest fashion sells on detail. Fabric, drape, length, how a colour looks in daylight. The old WordPress site hid all of that behind a heavy theme that took several seconds to load on a phone, and most of House of Salma's customers shop on a phone. Product pages had one photo and a short description. The checkout asked for too much and lost people at the last step. Search was the other problem: the site still had the generic titles its theme shipped with, no structured data and collection pages with no text on them, so Google had little reason to rank it for "Islamic clothing Calgary" and AI assistants had nothing to quote.
What we did
We moved the store from WordPress to Shopify and rebuilt it around the collections. This is what that involved, roughly in the order we did it.
Why Shopify, and how we moved without losing rankings
For a boutique of this size, Shopify wins on the unglamorous things: hosting, security, a checkout that is already tuned for phones, and apps for reviews and email that work without a developer on call. We exported products, customers and order history from WordPress, cleaned up the product data (sizes, colours, fabric) and mapped every old URL to its new address with a 301 redirect. Nothing Google had already indexed went to a 404, which is the part most migrations get wrong.
A design built around the clothes
Large photography, one product per screen on mobile, and the details a modest-fashion shopper checks before buying: fabric, length, sleeve, whether it is sheer, how it fits. Collection pages filter by size, colour and occasion. We kept the brand's gold and black identity but dropped the dark, heavy backgrounds of the old site, which is a big part of why the new one feels faster even before you measure it.
Checkout, shipping and payments for Canada and beyond
Canadian taxes by province, free-shipping thresholds for Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, and Shop Pay so returning customers check out in one tap. Fewer fields, fewer steps. That change alone explains a good share of the 62% jump in mobile conversion.
SEO for Calgary and the rest of Canada
Every collection got a real title, a written description and one search phrase it is meant to rank for: "Islamic clothing Calgary", "abayas Canada", "hijabs Calgary", "modest dresses". Products carry Product structured data with price and availability, images have descriptive alt text, and the store's Calgary details appear consistently across the site and its business listings so local searches connect the two. Core Web Vitals pass on mobile, which is the minimum for ranking a store in 2026. The store now sits second on Google for "Islamic clothing Calgary".
AEO and GEO: getting recommended, not just ranked
More people ask ChatGPT or Google's AI where to buy something than a year ago. To end up in that answer, a store needs plain, factual text an assistant can quote: who you are, where you are, what you sell, how shipping and returns work. We wrote answer-first descriptions for the home page and the main collections, added an FAQ with FAQPage schema (shipping, sizing, returns, where to find the shop) and Organization plus LocalBusiness data that ties the website, the brand and the city together.
Ask ChatGPT where to buy Islamic clothing online in Calgary and House of Salma is the third store it names. Google got the store found. This got it recommended.
Email that keeps the store ticking
A welcome series for new subscribers, an abandoned-cart flow and back-in-stock alerts, all in Klaviyo. For a fashion store with seasonal drops this is where a lot of the repeat revenue comes from, and it runs without anyone touching it.
"The old site made her customers work for it. Now the phone does the selling. More than four times the orders with the same products tells you exactly where the problem was."
- Moving a fashion store from WordPress to Shopify is mostly a data and redirects job. Get those right and the rankings survive the move.
- Most modest-fashion shopping happens on a phone. Mobile conversion went up 62% once product pages and checkout were rebuilt for it.
- Answer-first copy, FAQ schema and consistent business details are what get a store cited by ChatGPT and AI Overviews. Rankings alone do not.
- Online orders went up 4.3× with the same products. The gain came from removing friction, not from adding features.
Questions about this project
Why did House of Salma move from WordPress to Shopify?
The WordPress site was slow on mobile, hard to maintain and awkward at checkout. Shopify handles hosting, security and payments, so the owner can focus on products, and its checkout is already optimized for phones, where most of the store's customers shop.
Did the store lose Google rankings when it moved to Shopify?
No. Every old URL was redirected (301) to its new address, product names were kept and titles and descriptions were rewritten around the searches customers actually make. The store now ranks second on Google for "Islamic clothing Calgary".
Does House of Salma ship outside Calgary?
Yes. The store ships across Canada and to the United States and the United Kingdom, with free shipping above a minimum order value.
How much does a Shopify store like this cost in Calgary?
Our Store Launch package starts at $4,490 CAD for up to 25 products, and Store Growth starts at $7,490 CAD for larger catalogues with local SEO included. A migration from WordPress or WooCommerce is quoted separately, based on how much data has to move.
What do AEO and GEO mean for an online store?
Answer engine optimization (AEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO) make a store easy for ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews to quote: clear factual copy, FAQ and product structured data, and business details that match everywhere. For House of Salma it means being one of the three stores ChatGPT names when someone asks where to buy Islamic clothing online in Calgary.