Increase Your Shopify Store’s Traffic by Optimizing Your Images

Irene Wanja | Nov 29, 2021

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Hey, everybody! Jeremy Friedland here, with Build Grow Scale. And in today’s video, we are going to be talking about how to further SEO-optimize your website so that you can start ranking in the organic listings and getting more free traffic for your store. So, if free traffic is something that interests you, which it should, because the cost of ads is going up, up, up … Then please check out this video and watch what I have to say.

Today we’re talking about how to SEO-optimize the images and videos on your store. If you’ve heard before, Shopify is pretty limited in how much you can SEO-optimize the actual store itself, basically just meta tags, title tag descriptions. You can name your pictures a certain name, etc., and you can add a blog post to the store, and link those back to your products, which we’ll talk about in another video. But basically, that’s it; there’s not a whole lot of content that is on the actual store because it is a product-driven store, and you don’t want to have gigantically long descriptions in your store because no one’s going to read them. So, with that in mind, I’m going to show you a cool little tool that you can completely optimize your videos and pictures with, and do it in batch sequences as well, so you’re not doing it all individually. 

So, as an example, if you look into an image on your store, you click into an image here to edit it … You can see here that the edit text is “Be The Light.” 

And most people don’t even optimize this, but you can optimize this title and alt text, if you’d like to, so it’s keyword-optimized. You can optimize the title of the actual file name of the video as well, and you can do that in the settings here. And that’s pretty much all that you can do. It looks like my settings list isn’t available right now … Oh, there it is. OK.

So, here are the files, and you can go in here and either delete the file, or you can click into it, etc., see the preview, close … There’s not a whole lot that you can do with the actual video. You can change the file name; you can see here … This is what most people do: the filename is “cc_banner_girls_d754b5 …” That is not an optimized image. 

You want to optimize all of the images on your store for keywords that are in your niche. So, in order to do that, I like to use a tool called Exif Edit. Exifedit.com is the website, and you can download this for Windows or Mac; it’s $4.99, so forgo your Starbucks for the day and download this photo editor tool.

Let me just show you a little bit about what it can do. We’re going to go ahead and dive into this tool here, and I’ll go ahead and expand this a little bit.

And what you want to do is edit everything you can about all of your pictures, OK? You can upload a whole bunch of pictures on here if you’d like to so that if there are a bunch of modifications you want to make to all of the pictures, you can do it all at once versus one at a time.

I’m just going to show you with one picture at this particular moment. You can see here all the information that you can add. So, under “General,” you can add “Clover and Cloth” … You can add “Clover and Cloth 2021” in the “Copyright” field … You can fill in “Image Description” here as well. And in “User Comments,” you can actually add as much text as you want. 

One of the hacks that I like to do is have blog articles written—not super long ones, like 500 to 1000 words—that are keyword-optimized, and throw the articles inside of the image. Now, you guys, all of this is embedded into the actual image. So, when Google is searching your site, when they’re scanning your site with their little robots, they see this image … And instead of just saying the image name and maybe some alt text, they’re scanning all the information that we’re going to be inputting into the image, and they’re saying, “Oh, that’s pretty cool, since this image is optimized, we’re gonna start optimizing this website as well for these keywords.” 

So, it’s a really great way to optimize, and you can drop as much content in there as you want. If you don’t want to have an article written, you can just write some key-word-optimized paragraphs inside of there. Now, there’s the “Camera” information, there’s the “Date” that the picture was taken, as well as “Camera Settings,” “Advanced Camera Settings,” etc. I usually skip all that.

There’s also “GPS Location,” you guys. OK … this is really cool because it’s going to associate this image with your business location. And what you do is just click on the “Show Map” button, and then type in your address and the address of your business.

And once that’s done, close the window, and it will put the information of the “GPS Location” inside of that image. OK?

You can also add the author, which can be your business name again there, if you’d like to, as well as some headline information. So you can write a headline about that particular shirt, or if you want it to be across all the shirts, you can. “Object name,” “Category,” (e.g., t-shirts, ladies’ t-shirts, men’s t-shirts, kids’ t-shirts, etc.), “Supplemental Categories” (e.g., kids’ apparel, etc.), and then you can put in keywords here as well. So, “Christian apparel,” “Apparel for kids,” “Women’s apparel,” “Women’s Christian apparel,” etc.” So you can enter those keywords, separated by a comma. And then again, you can put in your sub location, which would be the physical address of your business, once again, just further optimizing that for a location. And that’s pretty much all you want to optimize inside of there, but all of that is now embedded into the image. 

You also want to change the image title so that it’s keyword-optimized. Then, all you do is hit “Start Process” … And if you have a lot of images, it’ll batch edit all those images. Of course, if you want to edit individually, like the keywords for a particular product, you can do that as well. All those images are saved, and you can re-upload them to the proper product descriptions, or to the homepage, etc.

Once all your images are SEO-optimized, you’ll start:

• Seeing your site rank organically in the search engines for some popular keywords
• Getting a bunch of free organic traffic to your store

… which everybody loves!

In addition to the benefit of “free sales” that free traffic brings … If you ever think about selling your store, having SEO traffic to your store is key to getting a much higher valuation for your business. So, if that’s ever something you’re considering, know that having SEO traffic is going to be key to getting a higher valuation for your business sale. Alright?

I hope you found this video helpful and that you’ll go spend the $4.99 to download this photo editor, start editing all your photos, re-upload them to your site, and start seeing your organic rankings increase dramatically.

If you enjoyed this video, please comment, like, subscribe, etc. And if you need help with your store, we’d love to help you. Just go to workwithbgs.com to find out all the ways we can help you build, grow, or scale your ecommerce store. Talk to you later.