While the exact weightings that ranking algorithms assign to different factors are always changing, one thing is certain — keywords matter.
That’s why any eCommerce brand must have a solid grasp of what your audience is searching for. Keywords hold the most opportunity within their vertical and product range.
Defining the keywords you want to optimize your store will help with other important SEO factors, including your site structure and on-page SEO.
To get started, you’ll need to understand exactly how your target audience searches for the items they’re hoping to find. Let’s take the example of an online clothing brand. Their goal is to understand the keywords they should be focusing on to improve their store’s SEO.
1. Examine the Search Engines
The first step would be to look at the search engines themselves. Put yourself in the mindset of your typical target audience. What kind of words might you enter if you were looking for the types of products your store sold? In the case of our clothing brand example, let’s say it was “midi length black dresses”.
As you enter the search terms, pay attention to the autocomplete suggestions that appear. These give great insight into the types of keywords that people are using. It can also show the combination with the phrases you are inputting.
Are people searching for fabric, price or material in relation to the keywords you’re typing in? Use this research to start to build out a broad web of keywords that you feel may have potential.
2. Dig Into Search Volume, User Intent, & Difficulty
The next step is to learn how many people are searching for the keywords you’ve identified and how many other brands are aiming to rank for them too. This is all about finding the sweet spot between a healthy level of interest (monthly search volume, MSV) and the likelihood of actually ranking for the keywords in question (difficulty — how many others are optimizing for these keywords too).
You’ll also want to think carefully about user intent. Search engines want to serve up content that is relevant to the people looking for it. Examine the kind of results that your selected keywords bring up. Is there a correlation between these pages and the kind of results you’re hoping to produce?
There’s no point trying to “trick” a search engine into including your content in search results that bear no relevance. If the people conducting those searches aren’t actively looking for your products, simply getting a page in front of their eyes is unlikely to lead to conversion.
The very popular, high MSV keywords may seem tempting. But they’re going to be difficult to gain traction with, especially if your store is younger. Ultimately, you’re looking for keyword phrases that have a decent amount of interest, but that aren’t yet showing a high level of ranking difficulty.
There are many great tools that can help you to perform this kind of keyword research, from paid options like Semrush through to a humble color-coded spreadsheet “traffic light system”.
3. Check Out the Competition
Once you’ve selected a few likely keywords, look closely at the first page of results that they bring up. If the quality is generally poor, you can maximize your chances of climbing higher on these pages — simply by producing higher quality content.
If you’re interested to see what keywords your closest competitors might be targeting in their pages, click on their store and navigate View>Source within your browser to see the metadata they’ve included. You can quickly locate this by looking at the top of the document inside the <head> element or simply by searching the term “meta” using the “Find on Page” function.
