Did you know that last year, worldwide retail ecommerce sales amounted to a whopping 3.53 trillion USD? And this number is only expected to increase rapidly. While, for ecommerce brands, this is extremely good news, it also signals an even more fierce competition.
So, how would you stand out from the crowd and thrive?
The clear answer is by implementing a robust SEO strategy. And as keyword is the foundation of any SEO strategy, you’ve to focus on it before anything else. In this guide, we’re going to discuss everything about ecommerce SEO keywords to help you succeed in your venture.
You might also be interested in the following articles:
Definitive Guide to Ecommerce SEO Audit
22 Best Ecommerce SEO Tools: Your Definitive Guide for 2020
10 eCommerce SEO Tips to Generate More Traffic
7 Ecommerce SEO Best Practices to Boost Your Sales in 2020
Ecommerce SEO Case Study: How Online Stores Can Drive Organic Traffic
8 Most Important Ecommerce SEO Ranking Factors to Rank High In 2020
Why is SEO is Important for your Ecommerce Store?
Before delving deeper, here’re the crucial benefits that SEO brings your way.
- It increases organic traffic
- It enhances visibility on SERPs
- It helps in customer acquisition
- It generates long-lasting, targeted, and measurable results
10 Ultimate SEO Tips to Boost your Ecommerce Site’s Ranking and Sales
1. Choose the right keywords
Performing SEO keyword research and ensuring that your web pages are properly targeting them, are the two most important SEO strategies for any ecommerce business. Why? Targeting the right keywords can boost your effort by generating high-quality traffic and high conversions.
Keep on reading, we’ve got an entire section on this coming up.
2. Optimize the content
Here, you need to focus particularly on two key areas – category pages and product descriptions. For the former, try to optimize the content based on the ecommerce SEO keywords you found in your SEO keyword research to improve your chances of ranking higher. And for the latter, focus on creating unique ones and put everything a prospective customer would want to learn in an organized manner.Here, you can also incorporate targeted keywords if that makes sense.
3. Create high-value, sharable blog content
If you can merge content marketing with your SEO strategy, your chances of driving traffic and conversions will naturally go up. However, it’s important to craft your blog content based on valuable product-related keywords. Ideally, whenever you publish an item, you should create informational content around it, which people can share with their audience.
4. Improve page load time
You’ve to ensure that your ecommerce website is running fast and smooth – this is absolutely essential for both its SEO perspective and user-friendliness. Remember that if your website is slow, it doesn’t make any sense to write high-quality content if a user closes the tab because the site is taking too much time to load. You can use Pingdom – a free tool to test your website speed. We’ve tested it to see how it works.
If you find that your website is taking over 3 seconds to load, you should try to increase its speed.
5. Focus on internal link building
Internal links, in a blog post, connect to a particular product page on the site. It’s important to create a good number of internal links to relevant ecommerce SEO keywordsand your corresponding product pages. But don’t pack all the pages with internal links. Instead, place them only where it seems natural.
6. Optimize website architecture
Great website architecture can heavily improve your site’s rankings, usability, and conversions. Try to create a design that needs as few clicks as possible to visit a product page from your homepage. It’d help the maximum amount of authority to pass from the homepage to the product page.
Now, base the architecture on your ecommerce SEO keywords in a manner that still offers the search engines and your customers a logical path to reach product pages from the homepage.
7. Keep the site clean
From an SEO perspective, it’s important to resolve site errors like errors in sitemap files, indexed 404 errors, or broken links, among others. Resolving these would help the search engines to index your site in a better manner. You can also use website monitoring tools like Montastic to stay updated on the status of your website. Here’s how the result looked like when we tested it.
8. Add breadcrumb trails
This help both the search engines and your customers to understand the particular parent-child relationships among products and product categories. It’s a tried-and-tested method that can help you improve your rankings in SERPs with minimal effort.
9. Include customer reviews
Customer reviews are treated by search engines as engagement and fresh website content – both of which influence SERP rankings. These also improve the user experience significantly by adding external credibility to your online business.
10. Add schema markup
When you add schema markup to your website, your users can view in the SERPs what your website is all about, what you do, where it is, and many other things. While it isn’t clear that whether schema markup has a direct impact on higher rankings in the SERPs, it does create rich snippets that make your web pages appear in search results more prominently. Take a look at the below image to understand rich snippets clearly.
This is one of the most effective yet often overlooked forms of SEO and can be found at Schema.org.
Though there’re some other ways to improve your site’s overall SEO, these are the fundamental ones and would help you to a great extent.
SEO Versus Keywords – The Difference
Put simply, SEO refers to the process of how you make your website search-engine-friendly in order to obtain higher rankings in SERPs and increase online traffic. And keywords are the words based on which search engines return with the most relevant information containing them. You can think of SEO as an umbrella term that encircles many different strategies among which keyword research belongs to the fundamental ones.
For instance, if you review the ecommerce SEO tips, we mentioned above, you’d see that a lot of them are directly based on ecommerce SEO keywords. So, it’d be safe to say that it’s extremely important to understand how to find keywords for SEO in order to boost your ecommerce site’s overall SEO.
Types of Keywords Used in SEO
When it comes to doing SEO keyword research, it’s important to understand what type of keywords you should choose.Though there’re many types of keywords used in the context of SEO, you should understand these three.
- Short-tail keywords: These are short keywords made up of a maximum of three words. Though these experience a massive amount of search volume, they’re highly competitive as well.
- Long-tail keywords: These contain more than three words and are much more targeted but experience a lower search volume.
Take a look at the below comparison chart of long-tail keywords and short-tail keywords to understand how they impact an ecommerce site’s SEO.
- LSI keywords: LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing keywords refer to phrases or words related to search terms. These are useful when you’re creating topics to cover a broad theme and looking to target the smaller branches based on one root keyword.
The “Searches related to …” section at the SERP is also a good place to get an idea of the keywords that are related by the search engine to a performed search query.
6 Insider Strategies to Find Out Ecommerce SEO Keywords for your Website
Finding out which ecommerce SEO keywords to focus on to boost your site’s SEO is a complete process of research. While you can always hire an external firm to do it for you, it could have two major constraints – it can be expensive and it doesn’t guarantee you results. Here, we’ve jotted down an actionable list of eleven strategies on how to find keywords for SEO.
1. Use KWFinder
You can use this SEO keyword generator to find effective ecommerce keywords. You need to start by entering the seed keyword (primary keyword) and it returns with results containing an accurate monthly search volume along with an approximate estimate of your keyword’s difficulty.
2. Leverage Amazon
Image: Amazon
This major marketplace offers search fields created to help buyers find products quickly. And these can also be used to research product-specific keywords. Simply type a specific keyword and it’ll offer suggestions of what the website thinks you’re searching for.
For instance, we entered “office table” as a keyword and it offered suggestions as shown in the below image.
Image: Amazon
These suggestions aren’t just blind guesses made by the system. Instead, each one is based on popular or trending searches from other users. You can use the keyword variations when crafting content for your website.
3. Pull insights from your competitors
While it might take a huge amount of effort and time to learn about the keywords that are helping your competitors to rank higher in SERPs, you can use SEMrush to get the job easily done apart from using it as an SEO keyword tool.
Simply, go to the “Features” tab and select “Domain vs. Domain” from the “Tools” dropdown menu. Take a look at the below image to get a clear understanding.
Image: Semrush
It’d not only let you know the common keywords used on your website and your competitors’ but also the unique keywords that they’re using. Once you’ve created your free account, analyze the results for building an effective list of ecommerce SEO keywords.
4. Search for trending keywords
When it comes to SEO keyword research, it’s important to analyze trending keywords because search volume can change based on seasonal purchases. You can check for search trends by using Google Trends.
For instance, take a look at this screenshot for “Santa cap” where search volume increased exponentially during the month of December.
Image: Googletrends
Just remember to check out a wider historical search volume if you see a low volume for a particular period. Once you’ve got the idea, you can craft the content around those keywords.
5. Check your keywords’ difficulty
Did you know that less than 25% of people go past the page one of the search engines?It means you might find a highly relevant keyword with high search volume but these won’t matter if you cannot secure a place on the first page of search engines. And here comes your keywords’ difficulty in the picture. Again you can use SEMrush to find it. Utilize the “Keyword Difficulty” tool available in the “Tools” dropdown menu.
Image: Semrush
It’ll return with a percentage between 1 and 100, 1% is the easiest. The higher the percentage of a keyword is, the more work it’ll take to rank for.
6. Keep user intent in mind
Every search query entered into search engines is a question and users look for answers depending on their intentions. When you’re researching ecommerce SEO keywords, you’ve to consider user intent in order to add keyword modifiers and optimize your content accordingly. See the below image to understand what are keyword modifiers (in bold).
Remember that ecommerce SEO is much more than only optimizing the product pages. If you can craft content based on user intent, it’d become easier to attract organic traffic to your ecommerce store and driver conversion.
Here’s a quick note on the types of intent and what the search queries usually contain with regard to them.
- Informational: Search queries generally contain “what is”, “how-to”, “tips”, etc.
- Navigational: Here, queries are usually based on specific names like “Facebook login”, “eBay”, etc.
- Transactional: People generally add words like “cheap”, “buy”, “price”, etc. in their queries.
Remember that if the users’ searches can lead them to your high-value content and they get the answers they were looking for, you’re more likely to win the sale.
Conclusion
It’s important to understand that evolving search engine algorithms have modified the purpose of ecommerce SEO keywords. Click To TweetThere’re now tools that can be used to refine a keyword list based on the accurate needs of your website. So, make sure to revisit your SEO keyword research regularly in order to keep the targeted keywords fresh and to find new ones for creating and optimizing your website content to improve your organic search traffic and, in turn, conversion.
