Hi guys, welcome to further video on Shopify x SEO training. This will be essentially the last video in the initial setup of our Shopify store ready for optimization in the next chapters, we'll get into the meat of the course actually optimizing the stores themselves. So just a word on. So we're going to obviously talk about apps, just a word on apps, they're obviously really handy. And you can add a lot of really cool features to your store. But the more apps you have, the slower your store will be.

So you just need to take into consideration the requirement for your apps or do you absolutely need them to, you know, have your store functioning correctly. Going back to the previous video, that's why I like to find themes that have a lot of the actual features built into them. And that gives us the best opportunity there. So and then also with apps from an optimum point of view, there's a lot of SEO apps out there. But to my mind, the way I like to do things, actually, you lose a little bit of control. And not all apps are created equal.

So there's features that these apps provide that I wouldn't use and vice versa so that I do some of the things I'd like to. So I like to, when optimizing a store, manually actually optimize them the best we can. And then some of the apps can can help you with that. And we'll work through a few of them now. So initially, really the only apps we want to look at Firstly, is apps that are available for image optimization. So the reason we want to have an image optimization app is not for alt tags, which if you don't know what alt tags are, you'll learn about those in a later video.

There are a set Well, firstly, essentially what an alt tag is, it is a bit of code that are added To an image on a website that allows Google and when the other search engines to understand to understand what the image is, rather than the Googlebot coming to your store and viewing the image, as the technology stands at the moment, although they are getting a lot better at it, they can't read image and understand what it is without an alt tag. So alt tags really important. And it's actually one of those aspects that is overlooked with a lot of sites that we see. So we want to have our alt tags in there. My point was that there are apps out there that do that. But most of them that I've found, they'll pull the alt tag from the title so you end up with, especially if you got more than one picture on your product page, you end up with a lot of multiple alt tags all the way through your site.

And that's not a good thing from an optimization point of view. So really, the only reason we want to add an image optimization app used to compress images for speed and we just looked at it Couple of them now that I use regularly. So if we just head on over to the Shopify App Store, if you don't know how to do I'm sure you do but if you don't know how to do that, just within your store itself, you go to apps and then you go, you can go visit Shopify App Store. And the first one we're going to look at is called crush pics. So you can just type in crush pics in the search bar to find it just take out pics probably cuz I spelt it wrong. Okay, so here it is here.

Crush pics, you can just click on it and then we're going to install to the store. So with with ques pics, you get a certain amount of images you can compress per month for free. So we're just going to get it and install on the store. Install it just like any other normal app. Okay, and now it's, it's set up ready to go. Now, I'm not going to actually go through and show you how to compress the images because it's like provide very good tutorials on that.

But with the, the free app, you get the lossless compression ability, and you just want to do it, you can just press Next step, and it'll give you the option whether you want to do it on an individual plan or automatic plan. Now generally, what I'll do in a new sort store is just compress images individually first to make sure it doesn't cause any problems with them. And then you can come back and do your batch process later on. And so just compressing images will certainly really improve the spirit of the site, as good as it can be. From an image point of view, now obviously brings you through to the options. So just start with a free plan, and you get five megabytes of images per month.

And you can see how that works. And then if you've got more, you need more per month, then you can just obviously increase your plan, but it's still pretty cheap. But again, really simple, but a good app to start with to compress your images. The other image optimization app have included is called image optimizer. This one is not completely free. I think the lowest version is $5 per month, but it gives you a little more control over the amount of images you get.

We'll just go through and have a look. So you can see you get 1000 images per month, which you know for most you know startup type stores. That's probably going to suffice. And then it's three cents per additional image and in the bigger pond plans here, so just keeping the same that I'm trying to provide you with both free and paid options for any extra features you need on your stores, and the other two that we've used in the past and still use, and they do a good job for us without image optimization and improving the speed of our site. The next step jilt abandoned cart or some sort of abandoned cart app. Well, not technically an optimization feature, it's certainly a conversion feature.

And it's a pretty well standard no brainer for any Shopify store, especially when you can use a an app like gilt where you can have a free, free version up to a certain amount of abandoned cart per month. And that's this is one we use all the time it works really well. And you can customize the emails that go out. So for those who don't understand how abandoned carts work, it's pretty simple. Essentially what happens, they integrate with your Shopify store, then when a customer comes through to your store, they maybe browse and put an item in their cart, then actually fill out the cart and the and the checkout. So their email goes in, and then I get distracted or find another website or don't really want to pull their credit card out.

And they leave. And so that's just a missed opportunity. So what the abandoned carts setups will do, and there's loads of them available to us, is it will it can then be set up to email does evil ones now that you can use the Facebook app as well, we can Facebook mission message them and we might get into that later on. As we update the course. You can email them say Hey, your we noticed you had a item in your cart and you left and maybe you want to consider purchasing it now and then you can send a second email out maybe a day later and say hey, we see you've still got the product in your cart. Maybe you We're feeling pretty generous today.

So we'll give you a 10% discount or something like that. So you just start to increase the lifetime value of your customer and, and also pick up those opportunities that are missed. This will become important later on when we do start to discuss email funnels as some of the bonuses we're going to provide in this course. And it'll make a lot more sense. Most of you probably already doing this by default, but if you're not, this is a good good place to start. So we'll go and have a look at the jewel abandoned cart.

And just quickly install on one of the stores right in the App Store, just type in jilt it'll come up the first one he had jewel abandoned cart and you can install it on your store and we get it for free for up to a certain amount of abandoned carts per month. Okay, so we've installed jilt. But I'm just going to show you that that actually really works quite well. The abandoned cart system here, this is one of our smaller clients tools. And you can see here that they had close to $6,000 in abandoned revenue last month. And they recovered 1500 of that simply by installing this abandoned cart app that took about five minutes to set up.

And to be honest, it's probably not even set up the best it could just get, the client needs to go in there and change some things. But essentially, then just send out and you can set your campaigns and you can send out the emails with a certain title, and you can customize them how often they get sent out, and whether you add a discount, etc, etc. And it does roll in the back end automatically, and you just don't have to worry about it. So, and it's working hard for you while you're focusing on other parts of your business. So as I mentioned, not a technically an SEO or optimization, but certainly just a standard default app you should have on every store you have. Okay.

And obviously, the third app we highly recommend is opt in. When you sign up for this course, you would have been given access to the download section four design, which is this URL here, it'll be in the show notes. Also, I'm not going to go into too much detail here about what optimization does. But essentially, you would have probably got some information when you signed up, but it isn't an app that actually provides the ability to add extra content under your product read on your collection pages. And as we work through the course you'll understand the collection pages are really important to us as hubs for your organic positioning and optimization of your store. And the more relevant and quality content we can have on those collection pages.

The better charge your store is going to be having Grabbing the net and pulling in that organic traffic. So this is a proprietary app that we have developed. And it's free to all members of this course. So if you haven't got it yet and install it, head on over to the URL up top here, and you'll be able to download it and there's also training on how to install it and how to use it. So that's it for the initial setup. Now in our next chapters we're going to work through and get into the meat of the course of optimizing your particular pages of your site.

Thanks. We'll see in the next video.