The Role of Keyword Research in E-Commerce SEO

Ever since search engines became the window to the internet, the fate of several businesses has come to be hinged upon how discoverable their business is online.

Fundamentally, SEO keyword research aims to discover the vocabulary of your target audience and then use this insight to develop content that enhances your site’s ranking on search engines.

However, this must be a highly strategic process. You won’t succeed if you aim to generate a long list of keywords related to your business and products.

Instead, during the keyword research process, you must be able to decide which keywords to prioritize in order to maximize your investments. Therefore, understanding search demand and intent is critical to effective keyword research.

The Uniqueness of E-Commerce SEO Keyword Research

Keyword research for e-commerce businesses is quite unique and it is not enough to just follow general guidelines without discovering the peculiarities of e-commerce SEO.

For one, keyword research in e-commerce SEO places a huge focus on product-specific keywords because, in e-commerce, marketing is more tightly linked with sales than other kinds of SEO.

E-commerce businesses also typically pay the most attention to seasonal keywords as they try to capitalize on buying trends that vary throughout the year. This means that even though, generally, there must be a perception of keyword research as a continuous activity, in e-commerce SEO, this reality is particularly unavoidable.

A solid keyword research strategy for e-commerce SEO must be highly flexible in order to accommodate year-round tweaks and changes based on the behavior of your audience, composed of potential customers.

One more peculiarity of e-commerce SEO is the importance of long-tail keywords, especially because they come with high purchase intent. For example, if someone searches for “running shoes,” they are most likely still gathering information.

However, you can infer that searching for “running shoes for men size 43” indicates a more precise buying intent. So, it is not difficult to understand why long-tail keywords are so important for e-commerce marketers.

Another reason, though, is that the level of competition in e-commerce is so high that ranking for short-tail keywords unless you are a very popular and highly established brand, is almost likely a futile effort.

So, most small retail businesses focus on low-competition, long-tail keywords since they yield the most ROI.

Build a Keyword List

The first step to keyword research is to collect and dump keywords into a list. At this point, no organization is necessary. However, you still must ensure that the keywords in your list are relevant to your product, business, and target audience.

Typically, the way to do this is by starting with a seed keyword and then looking for terms related to that seed.

If you sell shoes, for instance, your seed keyword might be ‘shoes,’ and then you start to research all keywords about shoes, including the various shoes available. Unless your website is completely new, you might discover that you already rank for these keywords and don’t rank for most others.

That’s the idea behind the Eye10 Keyword Planner, an intuitive tool that lists the keywords you are ranking for before offering ideas and suggestions for improved ranking. Of course, you can export the results into a CSV or PDF file as your keyword list.

Prioritize Your Keywords

At this point, the organization is necessary. After all, not all keywords are created the same. Some keywords are more relevant to your goals than others, and some have a higher ROI potential.

So, you must identify which keywords are important now and which are not. This is done by evaluating various factors such as the search volume for each keyword, it’s level of difficulty, as well as the search intent behind various keywords.

On the Eye10 Keyword Planner, keywords are organized in descending order according to their search volumes. However, this should not necessarily be taken to mean that keywords with higher search volumes are inherently better.

The ideal search volume for a keyword you are trying to rank for would depend on your goals, business, and website. Do not forget to organize your keywords by the target audience’s intent: informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional.

Analyze Competitors’ Strategies

Keywords do not exist in silos. Unless you are targeting branded keywords specifically, you will find that other businesses, your competitors, are already ranking for most keywords you are targeting.

Therefore, it is important to determine what your competitors are doing, where they rank better than you, and how to surpass their results.

Even if your competitors are not as strong as your business, at least by analyzing their strategy, you can identify what works and then consider building your keyword optimization strategy along with those tactics.

So, using the Eye10 Competitor Research tool, you can compare your website with that of your competitors in terms of keyword similarity and differences to identify gaps and then use those insights to build a stronger keyword optimization strategy.

Conclusion

Despite all these, effective keyword research is only half the success; you must still optimize your product pages and website according to your priority keywords. So, it never stops.

However, when you use tools that give you real-time access to raw data, things get easier. And this is what Eye10 SEO tools do. Eye10 provides intuitive tools for various SEO activities for beginners and experts alike, all for a combined single subscription. You can try out all tools for only $3, so hurry now and sign up.