Ruth Even Haim
ReConvert Co-Founder
You’ve probably heard all about SEO before- one of the best ways to drive consistent free traffic to your app is by optimizing your landing pages for search.
The problem is that with around 370M results on Google just for the term ‘Shopify’, your chances of making it to the first page (not to mention the first spot) in search results are slim.
SEO is its own form of art, but in a nutshell: to rank high, it’s not enough that your page content is optimized for a specific keyword, you also have to have a high domain rating (DR) and URL rating (UR).
These are scores that Google uses to determine whether a page is trustworthy and relevant. They are affected by factors such as: backlinks from other reputable sites, time users spend on the page and site before leaving, and more.
As you’ve guessed, these things take time to curate.
So what do you do if you want to leverage organic, free, traffic to generate leads and installs immediately, without taking months to build your website’s DR?
When talking about your Shopify app SEO, you need to focus on 2 main search engines:
- Shopify App Store
it’s not enough that your page content is optimized for a specific keyword, you also have to have a high domain rating (DR) and URL rating (UR)
App Store Listing SEO (ASO)
While the Shopify app store is becoming more competitive by the day, it’s still a huge SEO opportunity- it is a smaller market, and as such, so much easier to rank in than Google.
When optimizing your app store listing, you want to focus on 2-4 main keywords to rank for at the beginning.
Make sure they appear a few times in your app store listing- description, titles, etc. Make sure your main keyword is in your app name.
After a few weeks, you can start finding new keyword opportunities based on search terms users find you through.
Go into Google Analytics and look for your position in different search terms:
- Surface details- the search term
- Surface inter position- the results page
- Surface intra position- your position in the page
If you find keywords that convert well into installs, that you are not in the first page for- bingo! Adjust your app store listing to rank better for them.
If you find keywords that convert well into installs, that you are not in the first page for- bingo!
External SEO (for Google)
When optimizing for Google, you can go the long route of writing good content for your website, building backlinks, growing your DR, and eventually rating high on Google- but this will likely take months.
The good news is- there are some things you can do to get results and traffic immediately, even if your website and domain currently have a DR. Here are 2 of them:
1. YouTube
YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. It is also much easier to rank there than it is on Google, and a high-ranking video might even show up on Google search results.
So if you create a few simple YouTube videos targeting your main keywords and add a link to your app store listing/website, you could get free traffic from these videos for years.
The easiest way to do that would be to create ‘how to’ videos for your app, using a screen recording tool, and aiming each video for a specific keyword.
Once the videos are ready, you can use a tool like Canva to design a quick thumbnail and do some SEO for YouTube for your title and description- make sure they contain your keyword, add the keyword to your tags, and publish.
2. Guest Posting
Another way to get exposure for your app is by reaching out to reputable blogs in the eCommerce and Shopify industry and pitching your blog post to be published on them.
The blog post would have to fit the blog guidelines, as well as be informative and not promotional.
That being said, you can still mention your app, link to it, and focus your post on a topic related to your app.
If you get published, you borrow the bigger blog’s audience and DR power for your purposes.
One word of advice- no matter what you are optimizing for search, aim for the low hanging fruit- the easy keywords with low competition and high search volume.
You can use tools like VidIQ (for YouTube) and SEMrush (for Google).
Lastly, remember that organic traffic has a compound effect- at first, this effort might generate 1-3 visitors a day, but as time goes on and your app appears in more places, your number of visitors will increase.
Take a look at the ReConvert graph since 2018 as an example:
The good news is- there are some things you can do to get results and traffic immediately
Learn more
You can learn more ways of marketing your SaaS with no money, and specifically about SEO, in the following video:
