WEBVTT 00:00.080 --> 00:05.900 So welcome to a brand new section where we're now going to start talking about low cost traffic techniques. 00:05.930 --> 00:09.680 Now, of course, this is going to involve us spending some money. 00:09.680 --> 00:15.410 But as I just said at the end of the last lecture, ideally that money should be coming from sales that 00:15.410 --> 00:18.260 you've already made with the free traffic techniques. 00:18.260 --> 00:24.410 In other words, we are reinvesting money from your business to send more and more traffic to your store, 00:24.410 --> 00:26.690 to really start growing your sales. 00:26.690 --> 00:32.780 And then just to give you some idea of what I actually mean by low cost, what I'm generally talking 00:32.780 --> 00:38.810 about, and this is just a rule of thumb, is investing approximately $30 a month per method. 00:38.810 --> 00:41.300 And the key word there, of course, is investing. 00:41.300 --> 00:47.990 Because for every $30 that we spend, our goal is to bring far more than that in sales, because of 00:47.990 --> 00:51.140 course, that's how you grow a successful business. 00:51.410 --> 00:56.720 Okay, so let's kick things off by looking at the very first low cost traffic technique, which is going 00:56.720 --> 01:02.600 to be search engine optimization or more commonly referred to simply as SEO. 01:02.600 --> 01:04.100 So what is SEO? 01:04.130 --> 01:09.530 Well, quite simply, it's making sure that when somebody searches for our store on a search engine 01:09.530 --> 01:14.090 such as Google, that our store and products will show up in the results. 01:14.090 --> 01:19.880 And as I'm sure you can imagine, if done correctly, that can be an enormous source of extremely high 01:19.880 --> 01:21.110 quality traffic. 01:21.260 --> 01:28.220 Now, make no mistake, SEO is an enormous subject and it can be incredibly time consuming. 01:28.220 --> 01:33.890 And so for us, in order to get the results that we're looking for, we want to spend our time and money 01:33.890 --> 01:35.720 as wisely as possible. 01:35.720 --> 01:40.460 And that's exactly what I'm going to be showing you in both this lecture and the next. 01:40.460 --> 01:46.520 But even before we get into the SEO technique, I've got some good news for you because we've already 01:46.520 --> 01:48.050 done some SEO. 01:48.050 --> 01:51.290 And if that sounds a little bit surprising, let me remind you. 01:51.290 --> 01:57.590 So first of all, coming down here to the online store and then preferences, you will of course remember 01:57.590 --> 02:00.410 that we completed the title and meta description. 02:00.410 --> 02:06.260 And you can see here that it says the title and meta description help define how your store shows up 02:06.260 --> 02:07.910 on search engines. 02:07.910 --> 02:10.070 So that's already a great start. 02:10.070 --> 02:12.920 But let me also remind you what we did for the pages. 02:12.920 --> 02:19.430 So going over to pages and then taking for example, the contact us page down the bottom here, Shopify 02:19.430 --> 02:25.700 prepares for us automatically a search engine listing preview or in other words, how our page is going 02:25.700 --> 02:27.710 to show up in the Google rankings. 02:27.710 --> 02:32.300 And now that I've reminded you about that, you'll probably also remember that there's a very similar 02:32.300 --> 02:33.890 feature for the products. 02:33.890 --> 02:38.480 So just to be sure, let's go over to the products and I'll take anything at random. 02:38.480 --> 02:41.750 So my incredibly comfortable dog jacket for example. 02:41.750 --> 02:47.780 And then scroll to the bottom, you can see straight away how this product or indeed any of my products 02:47.780 --> 02:50.870 are going to be automatically listed in the search engines. 02:50.870 --> 02:54.590 So all of that is undoubtedly a great start. 02:54.590 --> 03:02.120 But by investing just a little bit of money, we can make enormous improvements to SEO and therefore 03:02.120 --> 03:04.130 greatly increase our sales. 03:04.130 --> 03:08.750 And in order to make that happen, it's no surprise that we are going to be using an app. 03:08.750 --> 03:16.010 So coming down to apps in the search bar, I'd like you to write booster SEO, which brings up this 03:16.010 --> 03:19.190 app, booster SEO and Image Optimizer. 03:19.280 --> 03:25.010 And of course, clicking on it takes me to the App Store where once again we have a fantastic rating, 03:25.010 --> 03:29.750 thousands of reviews, and this app has been around for an extremely long time. 03:29.750 --> 03:34.640 It is, as ever, with everything that I recommend, a very well respected product. 03:34.640 --> 03:39.980 And the other thing that's great about this is that there is in fact, a completely free plan, which 03:39.980 --> 03:42.230 is going to be enough to get you started. 03:42.230 --> 03:47.990 But also as part of this lecture, I'm going to sign up for the Pro plan so that you'll be able to see 03:47.990 --> 03:52.520 what that has to offer, so you can decide for yourself whether you want to go ahead and actually buy 03:52.520 --> 03:52.790 it. 03:52.790 --> 03:57.800 Now, the price of this is a little more than my $30 a month, but I hope you would agree it's still 03:57.800 --> 03:59.450 very much in the same ballpark. 03:59.450 --> 04:04.880 After all, I'm not talking about spending hundreds of dollars a month and then just scrolling up to 04:04.880 --> 04:05.900 the description. 04:05.900 --> 04:11.690 You can see here that it says booster SEO is all you need to improve SEO scores easily. 04:11.690 --> 04:16.190 And to see what that really means, let's now go ahead and actually install this. 04:16.190 --> 04:19.850 So clicking on install and then on install. 04:19.850 --> 04:23.060 Once again it brings me to the dashboard. 04:23.060 --> 04:28.640 And you'll also notice down here on the left hand side that there's a submenu for this app within Shopify 04:28.640 --> 04:31.010 Admin itself, which is a really nice feature. 04:31.010 --> 04:33.770 So now let's get started using this app. 04:33.770 --> 04:39.080 But before we do, you will have noticed that I've talked a bit about what SEO actually is, but I haven't 04:39.080 --> 04:42.650 taught you anything about how to actually do SEO itself. 04:42.650 --> 04:48.620 And that is totally intentional, because if I were to actually sit here and teach you about SEO, I 04:48.620 --> 04:49.820 could easily do. 04:49.820 --> 04:53.810 And I'm not exaggerating a ten hour course on what would be required. 04:53.810 --> 04:59.690 And I'm pretty sure you don't want to sit listening to me for yet another ten hours, but also and most. 04:59.820 --> 05:04.770 Importantly, it wouldn't be a good use of your time because you want to be spending your time building 05:04.770 --> 05:06.990 your business and growing your sales. 05:06.990 --> 05:09.690 And so of course, that's where this app comes in. 05:09.690 --> 05:15.090 Rather than spending hours and hours, days and days learning about the intricacies of SEO. 05:15.120 --> 05:21.060 The app gives us a very simple point and click guide, and then the app itself is going to do all of 05:21.060 --> 05:25.680 the heavy lifting and ensure that our store is properly ranked within the search engines. 05:25.680 --> 05:31.290 And you can see here that it says, follow the steps below to set your store up for SEO success. 05:31.290 --> 05:33.480 And so that's exactly what we're going to do. 05:33.480 --> 05:38.010 And so let's kick things off by clicking on the Getting Started button, where you can see that the 05:38.010 --> 05:44.760 first step we want to take is to sync our images, meaning that we want to get our product images ranked 05:44.760 --> 05:51.510 in the Google image search, which actually accounts for around about 10% of all Google searches and 05:51.540 --> 05:53.250 is something that's often overlooked. 05:53.250 --> 05:57.030 And also at the same time as you're about to see, it's a very easy win. 05:57.030 --> 05:58.500 So let's go down to the button here. 05:58.500 --> 06:01.830 Go to the optimize Images page and you can see that it says here. 06:01.830 --> 06:07.980 How will this free feature help your SEO where it repeats pretty much what I just said, where 10% of 06:07.980 --> 06:11.100 all Google traffic actually comes through the image search. 06:11.100 --> 06:13.440 So we definitely want to take advantage of this. 06:13.440 --> 06:18.480 Now, in order to do this, what we're going to do is add in alt text. 06:18.480 --> 06:20.400 So what is alt text? 06:20.400 --> 06:26.220 Well, at this point in time, at least, Google doesn't have the ability to interpret an actual image. 06:26.220 --> 06:31.860 And so the alt text is going to simply describe the image so that Google can then understand what it's 06:31.860 --> 06:34.200 about and then rank it within the search engine. 06:34.200 --> 06:40.260 And then just for completeness, if I go over to the files, where of course you can see all of my images 06:40.260 --> 06:44.130 if I click on one of these, this one, for example, here is the image. 06:44.130 --> 06:47.370 And if I scroll down, it's here that you see the alt text. 06:47.370 --> 06:49.590 And you'll also notice that it's completely blank. 06:49.590 --> 06:55.590 And that is a missed opportunity for SEO and something that SEO booster is going to solve for us very 06:55.590 --> 07:01.530 easily, because all we need to do is, of course, go back to the app page and then come down here 07:01.530 --> 07:02.940 to the continue button. 07:02.940 --> 07:07.950 And just before I do, you can see here it says instead of spending hours doing this manually, and 07:07.950 --> 07:11.910 you could probably imagine if you did have to do that manually, it really would take hours. 07:11.910 --> 07:18.000 We're going to do this for you automatically in a couple of clicks, and it's 100% free because of course 07:18.000 --> 07:20.250 this part is included in the free version. 07:20.250 --> 07:25.980 So let's go ahead and click on continue where the first thing we need to do is to set the template. 07:25.980 --> 07:31.170 But you can also see that it says we highly recommend leaving the default that we have set for you. 07:31.170 --> 07:32.520 So there's nothing to do there. 07:32.520 --> 07:34.650 So I'll just click on save template. 07:34.650 --> 07:38.430 And now I'm ready for the app to add all of the alt text for me. 07:38.430 --> 07:42.600 And to make that actually happen, all I have to do is to click on Sync Images. 07:45.270 --> 07:46.200 And that's it. 07:46.200 --> 07:50.970 All of the alt text has now been added to my images, but just to check and to see what it's actually 07:50.970 --> 07:53.850 done, let's go back to that image that we were looking at before. 07:53.850 --> 07:58.170 So heading back to the files, here is the image we were looking at previously. 07:58.170 --> 08:04.170 And now when I click on it and scroll down before you remember that the alt text was blank, but now 08:04.170 --> 08:07.020 it reads luxurious quick drying bath towel. 08:07.020 --> 08:08.550 Best bark bargains. 08:08.550 --> 08:12.180 And that means that this image has now been optimized for SEO. 08:12.210 --> 08:17.340 In other words, when somebody goes to Google images and types in luxurious, quick drying bath towel 08:17.340 --> 08:21.180 or something similar, my image is very likely to show. 08:21.180 --> 08:26.550 And then if you just think about that scenario, because it really does demonstrate the power of SEO, 08:26.550 --> 08:32.790 if somebody has gone to Google and they are typing in quick drying bath towel, it's very likely that 08:32.790 --> 08:35.130 they're actually looking to buy something like that. 08:35.130 --> 08:37.830 It's what we call strong buyer intent. 08:37.830 --> 08:42.630 And so when they click on the image in the results, that then sends them to your store, where of course 08:42.630 --> 08:47.670 they're going to land directly on the product, the chances of them converting and actually buying this 08:47.670 --> 08:49.800 product are extremely high. 08:50.040 --> 08:56.970 So now let's go back to the app to look at the next step, which you can see is set your SEO on autopilot. 08:57.120 --> 09:02.640 Now if you click here to view the autopilot settings, you can see that it says this is where the magic 09:02.640 --> 09:04.110 of booster SEO happens. 09:04.110 --> 09:09.840 Turning on all of the following autopilot switches will enable your store for SEO success. 09:09.840 --> 09:14.520 So of course, the first thing we want to do is to switch that on for our image alt text. 09:14.520 --> 09:16.770 You can see at the moment the status is off. 09:16.770 --> 09:18.360 So let's switch this on. 09:18.360 --> 09:22.740 We'll leave the rules as letting the app decide and then click on save. 09:22.740 --> 09:26.520 And so with that done, let's now head back to the autopilot settings. 09:26.520 --> 09:32.100 Because as you may have noticed already, although there are many other settings, they are in fact 09:32.100 --> 09:33.960 part of the paid plan. 09:33.960 --> 09:38.610 Now, of course, I said earlier on in the lecture that I was going to take the paid plan just so that 09:38.610 --> 09:43.710 you're able to see what the advantages are and then you can decide for yourself if you wanted to go 09:43.710 --> 09:45.510 ahead and actually make the payment. 09:45.510 --> 09:47.880 And so that's exactly what I'm going to do right now. 09:47.880 --> 09:52.800 I'm going to come up here to the paid plans, where I'm going to take the pro plan, where you can see 09:52.800 --> 09:55.200 at the moment they're offering me a discount. 09:55.200 --> 10:00.360 So clicking on Choose Pro Plan, all I then need to do is to click on approve. 10:00.920 --> 10:03.980 And now I'm ready to show you the additional features. 10:03.980 --> 10:07.940 But because this lecture is getting a bit long, I'm going to split it into two. 10:07.970 --> 10:10.040 So I'll see you in part two.