I’ve expressed the importance of keyword research in some of my other blog posts. We all know it’s the foundation to practically every SEO strategy out there, and there is a reason for that. When done properly, good keyword research will provide direction for what type of content you should be optimizing for.
Keyword Research for SEO
When doing keyword research for e-commerce websites, there are two major ways to go about doing it:
Before going any further in this post, you should properly understand the various factors that go into choosing good keywords. Here are a few important things to consider:
Search Volume – There are several different keyword research tools available, but my favorite is the MOZ Keyword Explorer. Use whichever tool you’re familiar with and determine the search volume. High exact match search volume means there are a lot of users searching for that given term. However, with high search volume can also come heavy competition for ranking. That means you’ll want to be realistic when comparing search volume to ranking difficulty in terms of your sites domain authority. A basic rule of thumb when choosing new keywords is that anything over 20 monthly searches is at least worth considering.
Ranking Difficulty – A high ranking difficulty score means that it can be hard for your website to compete and rank high in the existing search results. Ultimately, it comes down to several different factors such as your domain authority and niche. Ahrefs provides a useful tool for determining domain authority based on your existing backlinks. In general, if your website is still new then it’s best to target keywords with low difficulty.
Which Ecommerce Pages to Optimize
For e-commerce stores, your homepage and product pages are the highest priority for SEO optimization but certainly not the only pages this should be done on. Don’t miss the opportunity to optimize category pages, blog posts, about us pages, and even images files for your target keyphrases.
Determining Where You Rank
Before you can truly make an informed decision with regards to your keyword strategy, you must first establish your current rankings and progress. Doing this can be an extremely helpful guide to your efforts around creating new content versus updating older content.
Use Keyword Rank Tracking Tools – Take your e-commerce website and plug it into sites like SimilarWeb or Rank Tracker. These can both give you some ideas about where your website currently ranks for certain keyphrases. Regularly checking on your rankings will provide you with a trigger for improving content that starts dropping in rankings.
Conclussion
Running e-commerce websites can be an extremely profitable journey. Combining proper keyword research with good products and some effective SEO can result in lots of organic traffic with a steady stream of sales as well. Remember to build domain authority while also constantly checking current rankings so you know when content might need some improvement. Don’t hesitate to spy on your competition and see which type of terms they might be targeting as well!
