Acquiring Traffic For Dummies: SEO

Published in

RetargetApp

5 min readSep 6, 2017

Want to run a retargeting campaign, but don’t have enough traffic? — This article is here to help you out. You may have an awesome website and an amazing ad message, offer wonderful products or service, however, your traffic doesn’t fill the bill. There are Shopify blogs and a bunch of Shopify forums where you can search for the possible drawbacks your online store may have, but do you really have the time to dip into it? If you value your time and look for simple and trasparent guidelines to make your traffic go through the roof, this article is a must-read for you.

Here is what we will touch upon:

Get your website evaluated.
Make your URL short, readable and keyword-rich.
Polish up your title tags and meta descriptions.
Improve the images.

First off, let’s look behind the scene of a Google search engine workflow. Each second Google sends out a ‘spider’(a special program which collects information about the web pages) to ‘crawl’(search) the web, going from link to link, ‘indexing’ the information (sorting it into the database so this information could be found when needed). So, what SEO channel does is help you make your site more visible for Google search engine.

89% of customers begin their buying process with a search engine(Source: business2community)
Search is the number 1 channel of acquiring traffic to the sites, beating social media by more than 300%(Source: e-commerce-seo blog)
18% of local smartphone searches led to a purchase within a day (Source: Google)
Conversion rates from search are 10% higher than they are from social networks (Source: zerogravitymarketing.com)

1.Get your website evaluated.

Evaluate your website with HubSpot’s Website Grader to see how well it performs and what needs to be improved to make sure it is easy for users to discover your Shopify-based store.

2.Make your product URL short, readable and keyword-rich.

Google Keyword Planner will assist in finding the best keywords(words or phrases that describe your product or service). Fill in the information about your Shopify store & service/product and click Get Ideas to see the list of related “most wanted” keywords.

After you get a long list of the top searched keywords, you can use them in your URL. This way you can also look for the most suitable keywords for your website product descriptions, meta descriptions, page titles, etc.

Not sure if your URL is good to go? Check it with SEO friendly URL test.

Here are a few examples of “ugly” and “pretty” URLs:

“Ugly”: https://example.myshopify.com/online.store/products/77650/, http://www.example.com/buy?id=2f5e2

“Pretty”: https://example.myshopify.com/collections/clubbing-dresses/toxic, http://www.example.myshopify.com/dvds/spiderman/.

How to edit your Shopify URL?

In the Shopify admin area, go to the Products tab and scroll down to the “Edit website SEO” section of the page. Here you can edit the URLs as needed.

3. Polish up your title tags and meta descriptions.

The search engines rely on the title tag to evaluate the page content. Title tag is the name of the web page which should include around 60 characters, contain the keywords(Google Keyword Planner may come in handy here), attract attention and briefly describe the web page content.
Meta description is a short description of the page which includes keywords and compels the users to click(includes call-to-action: Learn! Buy! Check out!) thus helping you improve the click-through rate. The recommended length of the description is 150–160 characters. .

How to edit meta description and title tags of your Shopify store’s products?

Enter your Shopify account >Products > Product List
Select a product
Click on “Edit website SEO” (look at the bottom of the screenshot)
Enter a page title and meta description

4.Improve the images.

Content with relevant images gets 94% more views(source: Quicksprout). Furthermore, 78% of SEO issues are connected with images(source:Raven Tools). It’s time to stop losing precious traffic!

Alt tag adds extra keywords to your images, which increases your ranking. Besides, alt text will show up if your image is not displayed.

How to make your images rank well in Google?

Add an appropriate title and description which will contain keywords to your images:

Go to Products tab in your Shopify store and click on the product from the list. Then you can add and edit Title and Description of the image.

Add alt text to your images:

Scroll down the page with image Title and Description and in Images section hover over an image and click the ALT button at the bottom. Enter a short description of the image in Imagealt text block and click Done.