Keyword research is about finding opportunities for your website to provide content that satisfies the needs of common searches in your market. In general, the more specific a keyword search is, the easier it will be to target and effectively bring in organic traffic to your site with SEO. These sought-after keywords are called “long-tail keywords.”
Below are 3 ways in which you can generate keywords with ease & which result in website traffic:
Gather Relevant Data
First, you want to know what your audience is looking for:
- Which keywords and phrases are users typing into Google to search for your business or your products?
- What is their intent while searching?
- Is it to place an order right away?
- To learn more about the product?
- To compare your product against others?
Your initial goal is to come up with the top 40 most popular keywords and phrases that have high search volume and for which pages on your website are generating revenue. Jot down these terms in one column of a spreadsheet.
For big e-commerce stores that sell a wide range of products, there will be many top level categories, with complex URL hierarchies leading to sub-categories and smaller sub-divisions, each loaded with a range of products and brands. In this case, you’ll want to write up a top 40 list of keywords for each category.
Use Tools Mentioned Below To Generate Keyword Ideas
- Google Analytics: Go to the report page which lists top keywords and phrases that have sent search traffic to your website over the years. Export the list of keywords into your spreadsheet. Look at data from as far back as you can. It’s particularly helpful if you can access keyword data from before September 2013, when Google moved to 100% secure search (thus taking away keyword referrer data for Google searches)
- Google Webmaster Tools: Append all keyword data from your Google Webmaster Tools (or Bing, or Yandex) account to the same spreadsheet. You’ll now have a large collection of search terms, along with some general ranking data.
- Google Keyword Planner: Type your web store URL and Google Keyword Planner will throw up keyword suggestions it thinks are relevant to your site. Add these terms to your growing collection.
- Keywordtool.io: This long-tail keyword research tool can provide thousands of keyword suggestions from real user queries. I recommend running it on all product category and sub-category names e.g. shoes, running shoes, and brand names (like “Nike running shoes”).
You’ll get plenty of long-tail keyword suggestions, which are often the most under-estimated assets for many of my ecommerce store clients.
While it’s true that general keywords like [shoes] and [running shoes] have higher search volume than a search phrase like [Nike running shoes red], the latter converts very well into sales because the visitor is almost ready to buy.
Take Action
From here, you can act on your data. The preparatory steps ensure that your actions will focus on the areas of highest ROI.
There are several steps in the action plan to dominate SERPs in each category, including:
- Content Marketing
- Topic marketing
- Positioning as an typical expert/authority
- Personalization
- Retargeting
- Niche specialization (e.g. by Weather, Season or Trends)
- And when you take action on your priority areas, you’ll see results very fast.
- Focusing on high search volume keywords will naturally bring in more visitors as your rankings improve.
- Improving page titles and meta descriptions for keywords that you’re already ranking for will lead to a higher click-through rate. By your research and planning, you know these are keywords that serious prospects are already clicking on to buy — from your competitors. Direct that traffic to your store instead.
- Focusing on long-tail keywords will deliver prospects to sections of your site designed to maximize sales and profit, where a few simple tweaks and techniques will ensure that your pages outrank the weak competition on SERPs.
- I’m constantly surprised at how difficult most e-commerce web store owners and search marketing consultants make this process. With proper keyword research, analysis and targeting, you can enjoy traffic and revenue boosts, too.