So welcome to a brand new section where we're now going to start talking about low cost traffic techniques.
Now, of course, this is going to involve us spending some money.
But as I just said at the end of the last lecture, ideally that money should be coming from sales that
you've already made with the free traffic techniques.
In other words, we are reinvesting money from your business to send more and more traffic to your store,
to really start growing your sales.
And then just to give you some idea of what I actually mean by low cost, what I'm generally talking
about, and this is just a rule of thumb, is investing approximately $30 a month per method.
And the key word there, of course, is investing.
Because for every $30 that we spend, our goal is to bring far more than that in sales, because of
course, that's how you grow a successful business.
Okay, so let's kick things off by looking at the very first low cost traffic technique, which is going
to be search engine optimization or more commonly referred to simply as SEO.
So what is SEO?
Well, quite simply, it's making sure that when somebody searches for our store on a search engine
such as Google, that our store and products will show up in the results.
And as I'm sure you can imagine, if done correctly, that can be an enormous source of extremely high
quality traffic.
Now, make no mistake, SEO is an enormous subject and it can be incredibly time consuming.
And so for us, in order to get the results that we're looking for, we want to spend our time and money
as wisely as possible.
And that's exactly what I'm going to be showing you in both this lecture and the next.
But even before we get into the SEO technique, I've got some good news for you because we've already
done some SEO.
And if that sounds a little bit surprising, let me remind you.
So first of all, coming down here to the online store and then preferences, you will of course remember
that we completed the title and meta description.
And you can see here that it says the title and meta description help define how your store shows up
on search engines.
So that's already a great start.
But let me also remind you what we did for the pages.
So going over to pages and then taking for example, the contact us page down the bottom here, Shopify
prepares for us automatically a search engine listing preview or in other words, how our page is going
to show up in the Google rankings.
And now that I've reminded you about that, you'll probably also remember that there's a very similar
feature for the products.
So just to be sure, let's go over to the products and I'll take anything at random.
So my incredibly comfortable dog jacket for example.
And then scroll to the bottom, you can see straight away how this product or indeed any of my products
are going to be automatically listed in the search engines.
So all of that is undoubtedly a great start.
But by investing just a little bit of money, we can make enormous improvements to SEO and therefore
greatly increase our sales.
And in order to make that happen, it's no surprise that we are going to be using an app.
So coming down to apps in the search bar, I'd like you to write booster SEO, which brings up this
app, booster SEO and Image Optimizer.
And of course, clicking on it takes me to the App Store where once again we have a fantastic rating,
thousands of reviews, and this app has been around for an extremely long time.
It is, as ever, with everything that I recommend, a very well respected product.
And the other thing that's great about this is that there is in fact, a completely free plan, which
is going to be enough to get you started.
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
what that has to offer, so you can decide for yourself whether you want to go ahead and actually buy
it.
Now, the price of this is a little more than my $30 a month, but I hope you would agree it's still
very much in the same ballpark.
After all, I'm not talking about spending hundreds of dollars a month and then just scrolling up to
the description.
You can see here that it says booster SEO is all you need to improve SEO scores easily.
And to see what that really means, let's now go ahead and actually install this.
So clicking on install and then on install.
Once again it brings me to the dashboard.
And you'll also notice down here on the left hand side that there's a submenu for this app within Shopify
Admin itself, which is a really nice feature.
So now let's get started using this app.
But before we do, you will have noticed that I've talked a bit about what SEO actually is, but I haven't
taught you anything about how to actually do SEO itself.
And that is totally intentional, because if I were to actually sit here and teach you about SEO, I
could easily do.
And I'm not exaggerating a ten hour course on what would be required.
And I'm pretty sure you don't want to sit listening to me for yet another ten hours, but also and most.
Importantly, it wouldn't be a good use of your time because you want to be spending your time building
your business and growing your sales.
And so of course, that's where this app comes in.
Rather than spending hours and hours, days and days learning about the intricacies of SEO.
The app gives us a very simple point and click guide, and then the app itself is going to do all of
the heavy lifting and ensure that our store is properly ranked within the search engines.
And you can see here that it says, follow the steps below to set your store up for SEO success.
And so that's exactly what we're going to do.
And so let's kick things off by clicking on the Getting Started button, where you can see that the
first step we want to take is to sync our images, meaning that we want to get our product images ranked
in the Google image search, which actually accounts for around about 10% of all Google searches and
is something that's often overlooked.
And also at the same time as you're about to see, it's a very easy win.
So let's go down to the button here.
Go to the optimize Images page and you can see that it says here.
How will this free feature help your SEO where it repeats pretty much what I just said, where 10% of
all Google traffic actually comes through the image search.
So we definitely want to take advantage of this.
Now, in order to do this, what we're going to do is add in alt text.
So what is alt text?
Well, at this point in time, at least, Google doesn't have the ability to interpret an actual image.
And so the alt text is going to simply describe the image so that Google can then understand what it's
about and then rank it within the search engine.
And then just for completeness, if I go over to the files, where of course you can see all of my images
if I click on one of these, this one, for example, here is the image.
And if I scroll down, it's here that you see the alt text.
And you'll also notice that it's completely blank.
And that is a missed opportunity for SEO and something that SEO booster is going to solve for us very
easily, because all we need to do is, of course, go back to the app page and then come down here
to the continue button.
And just before I do, you can see here it says instead of spending hours doing this manually, and
you could probably imagine if you did have to do that manually, it really would take hours.
We're going to do this for you automatically in a couple of clicks, and it's 100% free because of course
this part is included in the free version.
So let's go ahead and click on continue where the first thing we need to do is to set the template.
But you can also see that it says we highly recommend leaving the default that we have set for you.
So there's nothing to do there.
So I'll just click on save template.
And now I'm ready for the app to add all of the alt text for me.
And to make that actually happen, all I have to do is to click on Sync Images.
And that's it.
All of the alt text has now been added to my images, but just to check and to see what it's actually
done, let's go back to that image that we were looking at before.
So heading back to the files, here is the image we were looking at previously.
And now when I click on it and scroll down before you remember that the alt text was blank, but now
it reads luxurious quick drying bath towel.
Best bark bargains.
And that means that this image has now been optimized for SEO.
In other words, when somebody goes to Google images and types in luxurious, quick drying bath towel
or something similar, my image is very likely to show.
And then if you just think about that scenario, because it really does demonstrate the power of SEO,
if somebody has gone to Google and they are typing in quick drying bath towel, it's very likely that
they're actually looking to buy something like that.
It's what we call strong buyer intent.
And so when they click on the image in the results, that then sends them to your store, where of course
they're going to land directly on the product, the chances of them converting and actually buying this
product are extremely high.
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.
Now if you click here to view the autopilot settings, you can see that it says this is where the magic
of booster SEO happens.
Turning on all of the following autopilot switches will enable your store for SEO success.
So of course, the first thing we want to do is to switch that on for our image alt text.
You can see at the moment the status is off.
So let's switch this on.
We'll leave the rules as letting the app decide and then click on save.
And so with that done, let's now head back to the autopilot settings.
Because as you may have noticed already, although there are many other settings, they are in fact
part of the paid plan.
Now, of course, I said earlier on in the lecture that I was going to take the paid plan just so that
you're able to see what the advantages are and then you can decide for yourself if you wanted to go
ahead and actually make the payment.
And so that's exactly what I'm going to do right now.
I'm going to come up here to the paid plans, where I'm going to take the pro plan, where you can see
at the moment they're offering me a discount.
So clicking on Choose Pro Plan, all I then need to do is to click on approve.
And now I'm ready to show you the additional features.
But because this lecture is getting a bit long, I'm going to split it into two.
So I'll see you in part two.