Welcome to the Art Storefronts Success Coaching Video Series. In this video, we’ll be focusing on SEO, or search engine optimization, and we’ll be coaching Art Storefront’s artist Bill Stidham.

So as every great marketer does, we always start by analyzing data first and then we figure out what the next highest priorities are for your business.

So the first thing I am doing here is visiting your statistics section within your site manager, which you can find right here in this drop-down menu and I want to see what your data tells us.

So as you can see here, I’m just taking a 30-day period here starting with November 15th, 2015 and I know that your site launched about that day, somewhere around that time.

I believe you got your first order on November 19th, and just first off what I want to say, I noticed that you’ve done around $7200 worth of revenue during that period. That’s a fantastic start. So that’s really good, it shows that you’ve got demand for your art, you’ve got a captive audience and that’s a really good sign right off the bat.

So I’m going to scroll down here and I’m going to look at your traffic sources, that’s what I want to look at. So I see that your direct traffic here, you’ve got 535 sessions during that period. Direct means anybody who went to their browser and just typed in ‘williamkstidham.com’, that came directly to your website.

In other words, they didn’t search Google or have any other way of getting to your website and so these are people who have probably heard about you, know about you, maybe you did some other type of advertising offline that caused them to just open up their browser and type in your domain name.

Either way, it’s a really, really good sign, as I was saying before, that you’ve got a captive audience, you have people who already know your brand or there’s word of mouth. That’s obviously a very good sign. And then when I scroll over here, I’m looking at your conversion rights, alright? You’ve got a checkout conversion rate of 4.11%– that’s fantastic. I’m not sure if you’re aware, but any marketing expert will tell you that a 2% conversion rate is good.

Obviously this is why you buy Art Storefronts, this is why people are on Art Storefronts, it’s because our conversion rates are extremely high. So you can see you’ve got an even higher percentage of people adding items to their cart. If this is usually about half the amount of maybe a little bit more than that who actually completely checkout.

But you do have some opportunity here, something that we’ll probably address a little bit later, but for now, the one thing that stands out for me is your Google organic traffic.

If you have this many direct sessions in a 30-day period of people just typing in your domain and coming to your site, I would expect your SEO to be driving a lot more traffic than it is.

I see Google organic here, I look down and I see Yahoo organic, I see Bing organic and when I look at Bing I see a 10% conversion rate, when I look at Google I see a 5.69% conversion rate. This is just fantastic and it’s– looks to be amongst your higher percentages of conversion.

I can see you’ve got an email blast you sent off here with a 7.5% conversion and so– oh, and you’ve got another email blast here with a 9.09% conversion. So email marketing is absolutely working for you; you’re driving people back to the site and they’re buying, so that’s a really, really, good thing. Keep doing that. But getting back to the organic Google search here, you’ve got a great conversion rate so it stands to reason that if you can lift this organic traffic, you’re going to be putting them into a funnel that already converts.

So first thing I’m going to look at here is my curiosity of why your organic traffic is so low, consider you have such high direct traffic. So what I want to do is I’m going to look at your homepage here. I’m just going to right-click and view the source and when I look here, I noticed you don’t have a title. Your title’s the store, your keywords and description are empty.

Now these are critical SEO fields, this is the way that you tell Google what your site is about and what they’re going to find on your site. It’s basically your way to tell Google how you want to appear in the search engines and right now this is your homepage and you have no SEO.

You’re basically telling Google nothing about who you are. So this is the reason why you’re not getting a lot of SEO traffic. I’ve looked at other pages on your site and rather than go through them now, I noticed that you basically have no SEO tags anywhere on your site. Now, to edit these SEO options within the SEO Art Storefront manager, you just edit that page, which I’m doing here, and you go to the SEO options tab and you can see the title, the meta description and the keywords and even a smart URL.

Now, I’m not going to advise on exactly what these should be, but your SEO title should be something like ‘Rockstar Art by William K. Stidham’ and you should have keywords and description that are similar to that, but something that describes what your site is all about and the reason I’m not going to go into it all is because we’ve got articles that go into this specifically in the success plan. So if I click over here to the success plan and I look, I can see you actually haven’t had a chance to start completing the success plan. So this is some serious low-hanging fruit here, but specifically completing a basic SEO setup is where you’re going to want to go.

You’re going to want to read all of these articles, especially this case study right here and learn about how you should enter in your information. And now I’m going back to your live site on your homepage and I can see you’ve got some categories here, your images– your Sacred Heart series is first. I’m assuming these are your best-sellers because you’re listing them first and I’m assuming that this Willie Nelson is your best-selling image because you’re choosing to display it here. If not, make sure that you actually have your best-selling images showing on the categories here on this page.

Now if I click into this here, I’m now in the Sacred Heart series. Again, if I right-click and I click and see view source, I can see, again, you have no title or keywords or description on this. This page could be, you know, Rockstar Art, Sacred Heart series or something, that’s what the SEO title could be. And so if I click through to this Willie Nelson piece and I, again, right-click and view the page source, I can see, again, that there is no title, keywords and description.

So on this one, you would probably want to do Willie Nelson art or something like that. Now after seeing that, it’s obvious that you don’t have any SEO titles for any of these rockstars and celebrities here and that is some serious SEO low-hanging fruit. If you do that for every one of these and every image on your entire site, then you’re going to give yourself a huge opportunity to grab some more organic SEO traffic. So let’s validate what we’re talking about here a little bit.

We’ll go to Google and type in ‘Rockstar art’ and we can type in ‘celebrity art’ or something like that, but as you can see, I don’t see you anywhere around here.

I’ve clicked through several pages and I still don’t see your site and that’s not surprising because we haven’t told Google what the site is all about. And at the same time, I’ll search for ‘Willie Nelson Art’ and again, as I scroll down, I don’t see the William K. Stidham site at all. I’ve also clicked through a few pages and I don’t see it. The thing is is that this is just all low-hanging fruit that’s going to get you more free traffic to your site and I emphasize free.

So when you put the work into this SEO and you’re going to appear in the search engine rankings for years and years and it will continue to produce for you. Now, you may have heard from marketing experts that doing well with SEO is really hard. The truth is in many cases, it is.

If your business operates in a highly competitive niche, SEO is not easy. But if you have a more defined niche, which you do, it’s much, much easier and I can’t tell you how difficult or easy your niche would be, but it seems like you at least fall right in the middle. But as we always say here at Art Storefronts as an artist, you can’t afford not to have free SEO traffic working for you. So right now this is just about you putting in probably a day or two of effort to read the articles in the success plan and update all of your SEO information site-wide for every page and every product you have.

Once this is done, we can then track the results over a period of time in the Art Storefronts statistics section, which we were looking at right here in the beginning.

Now, the one great thing about SEO is that if you can prove that SEO is paying for you and you get more traffic and it becomes a really viable channel, then it might make sense to buy ads with Google Adwords. Adwords is the Google advertising platform that shows ads to people when they do Google searches.

So if we go back to Google and we look at Willie Nelson art search that we did, we can see there’s only one ad here for a piece of art and it’s only $14.99 and looks like some kind of a poster. This is serious low-hanging fruit; again, nobody is even putting ads up to sell Willie Nelson art. This is pretty shocking and I would imagine that this person here is not paying very much money– maybe ten cents per click, maybe twenty cents per click to even show this ad.

So just to dive into this a little deeper, we have a Google Adwords account and we went in and typed in ‘Willie Nelson art’ just to see, and it gives you some data which is roughly accurate, but we can see that with the Willie Nelson art keyword, there’s about fifty monthly searches for it. It says the competition is high, but there’s only one person buying ads for it, so we’ve kind of disproven that and the suggested bid is $1.30.

I would actually bid somewhere around ten cents or whatever the lowest bid they’ll let you do because there’s nobody bidding on it right now.

And so what this means is that you can immediately show up at the top of the search engine, it’ll show up here sometimes, it’ll show up on the right. I think in this case it shows up on the right because nobody’s buying the ads and you could be the first person that people see when they type in ‘Willie Nelson art’ and you’ll pay almost nothing to be there. So that is a pretty good opportunity.

One thing I do want to caution you on before you go ahead and do this, and this goes to anyone listening to this video as well, it is not often that we recommend running a Google Adwords campaign as an artist. It’s only when we see opportunities like this do we recommend trying it and then testing it.

The great part is Google will let you spend only twenty or thirty dollars to test something like this out. So if you want to give it a test, throw twenty dollars at it and see how many clicks you get, see how many orders you get, see what happens and the great part is if you go back to your site manager, and you look in your statistics section, you’re going to see the traffic here and just to give you an example, this is one of our other customers who is buying Google Adwords and you can see right here instead of ‘Google organic’ it says ‘Google CPC’ right here.

That means cost-per-click. So if you end up buying Google Ads, it will show up in this way and you’ll have a separate line item to track your conversion rates and to see who well that is performing for you.

If the conversion rates and the orders and everything looks good, I would say it’s a good idea to keep it; if it’s not, I would shut it off. OK, so to wrap this up, let’s review the key takeaways. First, your conversion rates are amazing across the board. This means don’t mess with changing any options on your site, such as media types or styles and don’t spend any time optimizing your site in any way; don’t change your design, don’t change anything. Any change will affect those conversion rates. Just focus on marketing.

At some point here, we will have some advice for optimizing on your site, but since your conversion rates are great, this is a very, very low priority or not priority at all.

Right now, it’s all about marketing and getting more traffic. When you have a funnel that is converting at this click, all you want to do is get more people to come to your site, get them into the funnel because it’s going to translate into sales. Second, SEO is major low-hanging fruit to get you that traffic and you can do that right now and it’ll allow you to get a lot more traffic for free without spending another dollar. Therefore, you want to complete that item on the success plan, educate yourself about SEO and get all the SEO work done on your site as soon as possible.

Try to get it done within the next couple of days. Now, one final thing you might be asking is that how does Google find out when you’ve changed your site or do how do you update google to let them know that you’ve updated the SEO on your site? Well, one of the great things about Art Storefronts is that we automatically create a site map for your site and we update it every single week on Sunday AND we send it to all the search engines. All of this is done for you without any extra work required on your part.

So we’ll send it to Google, Yahoo, Bing and all the other major search engines that are out there so that they know to come back to your site and re-index your site based on what you’ve updated, whether that’s your SEO information or maybe new products that you’ve added.

And that way all of the search engines are up to speed at all times about your site and you don’t have to put in any extra effort. So all you need to do is just get the work done and then you just get back to your business and all of the other heavy lifting will be done for you. And that concludes this Art Storefront Success Coaching video.

We hope it helps you, Bill, and all the rest of our viewers as well. We’ll see you next time.