Keyword Research for e-commerce websites – Tutorial
What people are searching for to find your product? If you have a solid answer to this question, then you are on your way to get a very high conversion rate (provided you have the right landing pages).
Keyword Research Tools is not the Answer
Many traditional keyword tool like Google Keyword tool generally reports traffic only for fat head keywords i.e. the keywords which seem to be getting high search volume. Though in realty its search volume data is highly inaccurate. Google is notorious for showing inflated numbers and this can be due to its vested interest to keep keywords competitive for possible high bidding by Adwords advertisers. It also fails to report all those keywords which have low or very low search volume. Every seo campaign i have worked on gets majority of its organic search traffic through such low volume keywords (also known as the long tail keywords). Hitwise.com conducted a research on ‘long tail of search’ few years ago and came out with this fantastic results:
if you had a monopoly over the top 1,000 search terms across all search engines (which is impossible), you’d still be missing out on 89.4% of all search traffic. There’s so much traffic in the tail it is hard to even comprehend. To illustrate, if search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one-inch head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles.
Source: Sizing Up the Long Tail of Search
Note: Hitwise has removed this research report now but you can see it via archive.org
E-commerce Website Keyword Research Begins………..
In e-commerce keyword research you will be concerned about:
- What people search to find your products/services?
- How people describe your products both online and offline?
- How sales and marketing people describe and sell your products?
- How people naturally link out to you (i.e. anchor text of the incoming links)?
- How competitors describe their products?
- Understand searchers’ intent and capture them in the early stage of the buying cycle.
What people search for to find your products/services
This is something which you can easily find out through your ‘keywords’ report and internal site search report in Google Analytics, ‘search queries report’ in Google Webmaster tools and ‘Traffic Summary’ report in Bing webmaster tools. Target all those keywords which are relevant to your products/services, for which you are getting at least one conversion (micro or macro doesn’t matter) or transaction but for whom your pages are not currently in top 5 of Google and Bing. This data mining alone can significantly improve your traffic and conversions and keep you busy for months.
How people describe your products both online and offline
If you can find this, then you will get a valuable insight in your keyword research. People not always use the search terms you think they use (or as Google Keyword Tool suggest) to find your products. For e.g. you may be struggling hard to rank for the keyword ‘car insurance Southampton’ and your client is in fact searching for ‘car insurance for young drivers Southampton’. The former is competitive keyword and may not always produce best results in terms of sales or conversion as it can fail to meet the intent of a searcher who is looking for specific type of car insurance. Whereas the latter keyword is easier to rank for and can result in higher conversions or sales. Therefore it is very important that you understand how people describe your products and what they are looking for or are interested in. You can get this insight by scanning:
- Product reviews on industry review sites
- Reviews on product pages of your site
- Comments on industry news sites, journals and magazines.
- Product reviews on popular retail sites like ebay.com, amazon.com etc.
- Comments on industry blogs and youtube videos
- Customers feedback (you can get it through surveys or your customer support team)
How sales and marketing people describe and sell your products
Sales and marketing people are in constant touch with existing and potential clients and can provide a great deal of insight. The way they describe and sell their products is probably the way people talk about your products. You can get this valuable insight by scanning;
- Product Catalogs
- Product Brochures
- User guides
- Marketing Material (flyers, posters, print ads)
- Sales pitch used by sales and marketing people
- Sales pitch used in Radio ads, TV ads or banner ads
- Slides used in sales presentation
- Sales pitch used in Company’s newsletter or magazine
How people naturally link out to you
The way people naturally link out to you can tell a great deal about what they think of your product/brand. For e.g. if lot of people link out to your product as ‘cheap interactive whiteboard’ instead of ‘ 78 inch Gin interactive power board’, then you should seriously think of optimizing your product page for that keyword. You can determine the anchor text of your incoming links through ‘Anchor text distribution’ tab in open site explorer.
How competitors describe their products
Competitive analysis helps in all aspects of internet marketing and keyword research is no exception. Here by competitors i mean key industry players. The way they describe their products, choose keywords to target and the way people talk about their products can give you a good insight of ‘what to target’. Again you can get this valuable insight by scanning:
- Reviews on product pages of their site and review sites
- There product catalogs, brochures and user guides
- Sales pitch used by them in their marketing material and radio/tv/banner ads
- Use SEM Rush tool to quickly determine which organic and paid keywords are actually driving traffic to your competitors’ website.
Understand Searchers’ Intent & Capture them in the early stage of the buying cycle.
In keyword research the most important thing to consider is your searchers’ intent. What is their state of mind while they are performing a search. Are they searching to buy a product or are they searching to make a purchase decision. When it comes to determining searchers’ intent, the search data shows highest indicator of intent followed by demographic data and behavioral data.
As a SEO it a wise to capture your prospects in the early stage of the buying cycle when they are making a purchase decision through keywords like ‘which is the best ….’ or ‘where to ……’. This is because these keywords are easier to rank for and you have less competition to face. But once your prospect is in the full buying mode, he will search for keywords which you may find very difficult to rank for, expensive to bid on and are predominantly captured by big brands like Amazon.
This post is very much a work in progress. If you have more cool tips about e-commerce keyword research then please share in the comments below. If you like this post then you should subscribe to my blog and follow me on twitter.
Other Posts you may find useful:
- Excel for SEO – Powerful Cheat Sheet to Boost Productivity
- How to do Site Speed Optimisation
- Ultimate Data Visualization Guide for SEO
- How to write a SEO Contract?
- How to Automate Event Tracking in Google Analytics
- Social interactions tracking through Google Analytics
- Google Analytics Account Setup Checklist
- SEO Contract | Sample SEO Contract Template
- Event Tracking – Google Analytics (Simplified Version)
- Practical Tips to develop user engagement for e-commerce site
- 6 Cool Link Building Tips for E-Commerce Site
Tweet
What people are searching for to find your product? If you have a solid answer to this question, then you are on your way to get a very high conversion rate (provided you have the right landing pages).
Keyword Research Tools is not the Answer
Many traditional keyword tool like Google Keyword tool generally reports traffic only for fat head keywords i.e. the keywords which seem to be getting high search volume. Though in realty its search volume data is highly inaccurate. Google is notorious for showing inflated numbers and this can be due to its vested interest to keep keywords competitive for possible high bidding by Adwords advertisers. It also fails to report all those keywords which have low or very low search volume. Every seo campaign i have worked on gets majority of its organic search traffic through such low volume keywords (also known as the long tail keywords). Hitwise.com conducted a research on ‘long tail of search’ few years ago and came out with this fantastic results:
if you had a monopoly over the top 1,000 search terms across all search engines (which is impossible), you’d still be missing out on 89.4% of all search traffic. There’s so much traffic in the tail it is hard to even comprehend. To illustrate, if search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one-inch head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles.
Source: Sizing Up the Long Tail of Search
Note: Hitwise has removed this research report now but you can see it via archive.org
E-commerce Website Keyword Research Begins………..
In e-commerce keyword research you will be concerned about:
- What people search to find your products/services?
- How people describe your products both online and offline?
- How sales and marketing people describe and sell your products?
- How people naturally link out to you (i.e. anchor text of the incoming links)?
- How competitors describe their products?
- Understand searchers’ intent and capture them in the early stage of the buying cycle.
What people search for to find your products/services
This is something which you can easily find out through your ‘keywords’ report and internal site search report in Google Analytics, ‘search queries report’ in Google Webmaster tools and ‘Traffic Summary’ report in Bing webmaster tools. Target all those keywords which are relevant to your products/services, for which you are getting at least one conversion (micro or macro doesn’t matter) or transaction but for whom your pages are not currently in top 5 of Google and Bing. This data mining alone can significantly improve your traffic and conversions and keep you busy for months.
How people describe your products both online and offline
If you can find this, then you will get a valuable insight in your keyword research. People not always use the search terms you think they use (or as Google Keyword Tool suggest) to find your products. For e.g. you may be struggling hard to rank for the keyword ‘car insurance Southampton’ and your client is in fact searching for ‘car insurance for young drivers Southampton’. The former is competitive keyword and may not always produce best results in terms of sales or conversion as it can fail to meet the intent of a searcher who is looking for specific type of car insurance. Whereas the latter keyword is easier to rank for and can result in higher conversions or sales. Therefore it is very important that you understand how people describe your products and what they are looking for or are interested in. You can get this insight by scanning:
- Product reviews on industry review sites
- Reviews on product pages of your site
- Comments on industry news sites, journals and magazines.
- Product reviews on popular retail sites like ebay.com, amazon.com etc.
- Comments on industry blogs and youtube videos
- Customers feedback (you can get it through surveys or your customer support team)
How sales and marketing people describe and sell your products
Sales and marketing people are in constant touch with existing and potential clients and can provide a great deal of insight. The way they describe and sell their products is probably the way people talk about your products. You can get this valuable insight by scanning;
- Product Catalogs
- Product Brochures
- User guides
- Marketing Material (flyers, posters, print ads)
- Sales pitch used by sales and marketing people
- Sales pitch used in Radio ads, TV ads or banner ads
- Slides used in sales presentation
- Sales pitch used in Company’s newsletter or magazine
How people naturally link out to you
The way people naturally link out to you can tell a great deal about what they think of your product/brand. For e.g. if lot of people link out to your product as ‘cheap interactive whiteboard’ instead of ‘ 78 inch Gin interactive power board’, then you should seriously think of optimizing your product page for that keyword. You can determine the anchor text of your incoming links through ‘Anchor text distribution’ tab in open site explorer.
How competitors describe their products
Competitive analysis helps in all aspects of internet marketing and keyword research is no exception. Here by competitors i mean key industry players. The way they describe their products, choose keywords to target and the way people talk about their products can give you a good insight of ‘what to target’. Again you can get this valuable insight by scanning:
- Reviews on product pages of their site and review sites
- There product catalogs, brochures and user guides
- Sales pitch used by them in their marketing material and radio/tv/banner ads
- Use SEM Rush tool to quickly determine which organic and paid keywords are actually driving traffic to your competitors’ website.
Understand Searchers’ Intent & Capture them in the early stage of the buying cycle.
In keyword research the most important thing to consider is your searchers’ intent. What is their state of mind while they are performing a search. Are they searching to buy a product or are they searching to make a purchase decision. When it comes to determining searchers’ intent, the search data shows highest indicator of intent followed by demographic data and behavioral data.
As a SEO it a wise to capture your prospects in the early stage of the buying cycle when they are making a purchase decision through keywords like ‘which is the best ….’ or ‘where to ……’. This is because these keywords are easier to rank for and you have less competition to face. But once your prospect is in the full buying mode, he will search for keywords which you may find very difficult to rank for, expensive to bid on and are predominantly captured by big brands like Amazon.
This post is very much a work in progress. If you have more cool tips about e-commerce keyword research then please share in the comments below. If you like this post then you should subscribe to my blog and follow me on twitter.
Other Posts you may find useful:
- Excel for SEO – Powerful Cheat Sheet to Boost Productivity
- How to do Site Speed Optimisation
- Ultimate Data Visualization Guide for SEO
- How to write a SEO Contract?
- How to Automate Event Tracking in Google Analytics
- Social interactions tracking through Google Analytics
- Google Analytics Account Setup Checklist
- SEO Contract | Sample SEO Contract Template
- Event Tracking – Google Analytics (Simplified Version)
- Practical Tips to develop user engagement for e-commerce site
- 6 Cool Link Building Tips for E-Commerce Site
About the Author: Himanshu Sharma is the founder of seotakeaways.com which provides SEO Consulting, PPC Management and Analytics Consulting services to medium and large size businesses. He holds a bachelors degree in ‘Internet Science’, is a member of 'Digital Analytics Association', a Google Analytics Certified Individual and a Certified Web Analyst. He is also the founder of EventEducation.com and EventPlanningForum.net.
My business thrives on referrals, so I really appreciate recommendations to people who would benefit from my help. Please feel free to endorse/forward my LinkedIn Profile to your clients, colleagues, friends and others you feel would benefit from SEO, PPC or Web Analytics.
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