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:

  1. What people search to find your products/services?
  2. How people describe your products both online and offline?
  3. How sales and marketing people describe and sell your products?
  4. How people naturally link out to you (i.e. anchor text of the incoming links)?
  5. How competitors describe their products?
  6. 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.

 

 

Himanshu Sharma About the Author: 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.

 

 

  • http://Website Alex

    Excellent and very original post. I never though of doing keyword research this way.

  • http://Website Rohit

    Excellent article Himanshu. I too don’t rely on keyword research tools and look for ways to determine keywords people actually use. Hittail.com is a good tool to target long tail keywords. Though you have not mentioned it.

    • seo himanshu

      Glad hittail.com works for you. But i am still need to be convinced to spend $100 a year on it.

  • http://Website Douglas SEO

    Great post about discovering what people really search for to find our products.

  • http://Website Irwin

    Your keyword research strategies are so obvious but yet it never crossed my mind. What about wordtracker. Don’t you recommend it?

    • seo himanshu

      I don’t recommend using wordtracker. It gets its data from dogpile and metacrawler search database. Both have less than 1% search market share.

      • Fernando

        I’ve read this subject numerous times on numerous different posts, but never quite as succinctly at this post. I don’t think you could make it any easier than that. Thanks.

  • http://Website Darren

    I appreciate the way you do keyword research. Very creative and very original. I am going to work on your ideas straight away. I think for medical industry this type of keyword research is a boon as we non-medical people often face problem in understanding how patients describe a particular symptom or disorder. I also like your other posts on link building and user engagement for e-commerce site. Will check them out soon. Once again, great work seohimanshu.

    • seo himanshu

      Thanks Darren. Thanks for stopping by.

  • http://google.com.au Marry

    Hi Himanshu. It is my first comment on your blog. Sorry if it sound naive. Can you tell me how to determine the competitiveness of keywords?

  • http://Website Steve

    Interesting post. I never thought of using product catalogs and user guides for keyword research. I think it can be a good way to determine money keywords. But i wonder how we can determine the keyword effectiveness index of long tail keywords. Would you Care to elaborate on that??

    • seo himanshu

      Hi Steve! I don’t use the Keyword effectiveness index metrix. This is because it is not accurate as it is based on the number of search results returned by Google which is highly inaccurate.

  • http://Website christopher Jones

    Thank you seohimanshu for this alternative keyword research. But i think Google keyword Tool is still the best tool among all other keyword tools esp. the wordtracker. Is there any tool which can be used to determine the percentage of keyword relevance? Thanks.

    • seo himanshu

      Hi Christopher! I determine the percentage of keyword relevance manually.

  • http://Website Jitender

    Another awesome post. I am waiting for you to write a full fleshed post on keyword research.

  • http://www.ruwebd.com.au Web design Melbourne

    Yeah, very good insight on your article. it was really helpful

  • http://www.ruwebd.com.au Web design Melbourne

    Just through to share my experience with you. I used google analytics and our internal web analytics system to see actual customers keywords. and if any particular keyword is repeating few times, may be different way. I tend to optimize it. really encouraging results, per month more than 100 visits come through those long tail keywords. however when i search those keywords on google keyword tool, those are not listed and no demand as well. But actual results is not that way. Your way is great.

    • seo himanshu

      I am glad that you find the post useful. Thanks for stopping by the blog.

  • http://clientsforyourbiz.com Damon

    Great article. Reach>Relevance>ROI= Success!!! Assuming your are in fact, trying to make money from your efforts. Himanshu, do you use AdWords Editor to manage your keywords?

    • seo himanshu

      No. I haven’t used Adwords Editor Yet. Is it good for managing keywords?

  • http://www.keywordsoftwareguide.com/keyword-select-keyword-selection-to-increase-conversion-rates keyword tips

    Here is a MAJOR keyword research tip that everyone needs to pay attention to when looking for keywords and keyword phrases that they want to try and get a web page, post or website ranked for:

    1) DO NOT Mistake the amount of search results returned by a google search as your competiton! Here is a real example:

    The search term “Black without the quotes in Google returns 28,300,000 results.

    BUT YOU ARE NOT competing against 28,300,000 articles.

    For the term “Black Dogs” there are only 10 competitors.

    THAT IS RIGHT! You are competing against 10. The first 10 in the google search results!

    The first 10 results are all that count because your goal is to get on the first page of Google and in order to do that you have to get ahead of 1 or moreof the top 10.

    SO DO NOT look at the total results as your competition and let it scare you!

    OK one more tip:
    Do not listen to the “Guru’s” who will tell you to do an allintitle and allinurl search and gauge your competition by that number.

    If you want to do it right, do the allintitle search (in the google search bar enter allintitle:”black dogs”) and right down the first 10 results then cross reference those against which ones are in the regular google search. Same with the allinurl google search (in google enter allinurl:”Black Dogs”).

    By cross referencing these two with the first ten returned using googles basic search you can get a feel for how much competition there is for you if you give your article page or website the added juice of having the exact match keyword phrase in the url and title!

    There is more but that can be saved for another time, this is a great place for you to start!

    Mark

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  • http://www.adamant.com.au Adamant Solutions

    You have provided an incredible resource.

  • http://www.futureprofilez.com/ future profilez

    Sure thing, thanks I really appreciate this post – I think people will find it useful!

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