Keyword Research and Ecommerce SEO: Building Your Keyword Strategy

Step 2. Select which topics to focus on

Have you ever heard the saying jack of all trades, master of none? Well, this applies to SEO too. Although there might be a lot of topics you’d like to rank for, the reality is that this is really, really hard. Even the most authoritative sites out there can’t rank for everything, so Igor suggests being smart about what you are trying to achieve, especially when there’s limited resources or budget to play with.

Topics vs keywords

You also need to be ‘worthy’ of ranking in Google’s eyes, and the best way to do this is to build some focus within your broader niche. Google’s algorithms now place higher importance on topic clusters as opposed to keywords, which means you should aim to cover a few topics really well rather than scratching the surface of lots of areas by just targeting ad hoc keywords.

Choosing topics

To choose your focus topics, first identify which products, categories and content you as a business want to be known for. Then look at your sales data—usually, you’ll have a few product lines that sell really well or that you already rank reasonably well for (which you will have found using Google Search Console in Step 1). Areas that you are already performing well in are a good starting point for your topics as you will already have some authority.

Step 3. Keyword research

Once you have selected your topics and target products, categories or pages you want to rank, the next step is to do keyword research to build a 'seed list' of keywords: the search queries or terms most relevant to your business. From there you’ll determine which keywords are worth targeting based on an array of factors, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

To generate your list of seed keywords you can tap into the following resources:

1. Your knowledge of terms directly relating to your products and industry - it’s a good idea to brainstorm this with people from different areas of the business.
2. Phrases and terms that your customers use - your chat and support records will be helpful here as customers may refer to something differently to what you do.
3. Google Search Console to find keywords and queries that your pages are already ranking for.
4. Keyword tools to find ideas for keywords you might not have thought of.
5. Competitive Analysis to find the terms your competitors are ranking for.
6. Google Autosuggest to find related queries.

There are thousands of SEO and keyword research tools you can use for Step 4, 5 and 6 of your keyword research, but I’ll just briefly touch on a few of our favorites - most of which are free or cheap.

SEMrush

SEMrush is a powerful SEO, content marketing and PPC tool, and can be used to generate keyword ideas, find gaps and conduct competitor research. Although it’s great at finding short tail keywords like ‘linen sheets’ it’s not so good at finding long tail keywords.

To find the organic keywords your competitors are ranking for in SEMrush, navigate to the ‘Competitive Research Toolkit’ in the left hand toolbar and then click on ‘organic research’, ‘competitors’ and type one of your competitor’s URLs into the search bar.

As an example, we’ll use brooklinen.com.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is another powerful SEO tool which will give you lots of keyword ideas and metrics that show the difficulty, search volume, and clicks for a particular keyword to help you measure how frequently the keyword is being used and in which countries.

Google Suggest

You know when you start typing your search into the Google search-box and a drop down box appears suggesting similar searches? This is known as Google Autosuggest or Autocomplete and these phrases are absolute gold for your keyword strategy as they show you exactly what other people are searching for around your topic.

Play around by adding different words to the beginning and end of your keyword to get different permutations of your phrase. For example if your topic is bedding and your keyword is ‘linen sheets’, you could append ‘how’, ‘are’ and ‘where’ to the head term.

Keywordtool.io

As great as Google Autosuggest is It would be pretty time-consuming to follow this process for all of your topics and keywords and manually copy each of them across into a spreadsheet. Luckily, other people had this same thought and have created tools to solve this problem. Keywordtool.io scrapes Google suggest to generate keyword ideas that are appended and prepended with various letters and numbers, generating hundreds of keywords for a single search term in seconds that you can copy and paste into your spreadsheet for free.

Answer the Public

Answer the Public is another tool that provides keyword suggestions using the Google autosuggest engine, but it aggregates your results to make it really easy to see the different ways people are searching including:

• Prepositions
• Comparisons
• Who, what, when, where, how, why, which, can, are, will
• Appended words in alphabetical order

Download the lot into a .csv and you’ll have thousands of keywords to work with.

Selecting your keywords

Don’t be alarmed if after following each of those steps you’ve got a pretty long list of keywords—that’s what we want. The next step is to narrow down the keywords by looking at:

• Their closeness to your target niche
• Your current rankings
• Their overall potential in terms of search volume
• Their estimated competitiveness
• Their intent

To get the monthly search volume and competitiveness of each keyword you can use the Google Adwords Keyword Planner tool (note that you need to have a current campaign running).

Navigate to 'tools' and then ‘Keyword planner’ and click on ‘get search volumes and forecasts’.

Typically, keywords with higher volume will be more difficult to rank for than those with low volume, but they will also be more valuable as they have the capacity to bring more website traffic to your store. The competition score will also indicate how difficult the keywords are to rank, based on how many other sites are also targeting them.

Newer sites have better opportunities with longer-tail keywords with less competition. But you also need to consider something called intent.

Intent

High intent keywords are those where the searcher is highly likely to follow through and make a purchase — keywords with terms like ‘buy’, ‘now’, ‘cheapest’ attached. These are also known as ‘transactional’ keywords.

Informational keywords, on the other hand, are low-intent because searchers are usually only after an answer to a question - a definition, or in our bed sheets example they might be wondering ‘how linen is made'.

Ideally, you want to target keywords with enough search volume and that are high intent (although these are also likely to be the ones with greater competition). Longer tail informational keywords are well suited to blog content and will help you build authority on your topic.

How many keywords should I target?

The number of keywords you choose will depend on your niche and your target page, typically to start with, anywhere between 1 and 15 keywords can be chosen and you can build on it from there. However, Igor suggests keeping it on the smaller side for each page and generally choosing no more than 5 keywords, including your main keyword.

Now you have a list of keywords to work with let’s talk about what you’re going to do with them.

Step 4. Develop your landing page strategy

Write out a strategy for each landing page based on the keywords that fit those pages—you’ll have your primary or main keyword, secondary keywords, and LSI keywords.

You should also plan out how you will use other existing content on the site for inbound and outbound links. This is because linking content to other content, categories or products on your website is good for SEO. This is known as interlinking or cross linking and tells Google which pages are the most important.