Using keyword research to boost sales

Keyword research is one of the most important tools in the battle to master SEO. They are what search engines are based-on and what helps your customers to find you.

Getting your keyword strategy right isn’t something that will happen over night and it will evolve as you and your site change, as the market changes and as your customer base grows. But working to get it right could be the difference between success and failure for any ecommerce business.

It’s important to remember that keyword usage isn’t just about getting traffic to your site, it’s about getting the right customers to your site. This will only happen when you focus on the keywords that are most relevant to your products or services.

Starting your keyword research

You should begin this process by making a list of all of the words and phrases that you imagine people would search for when looking to buy your products or services. Go over this a number of times and think of variant words and phrases and write these down too.

“Good keyword optimisation is vital for SEO,” says Tim Pritchard, SEO specialist at ecommerce software supplier, SellerDeck. “The problem is that vague keywords in popular industries don’t work because all your competitors will be trying to do the same thing! You can use Google’s keyword tools to find other suggestions for low competition keywords.”

Finding out what the competition is like for these words and phrases will determine which ones you eventually focus on. If your site is a relatively new one, you will have trouble ranking highly for the most popular search terms. The terms that will be most valuable to you are those with low competition but relatively high searches – it’s a real balancing act.

Find out what your competition is ranking for

When it comes to getting the best possible rankings it’s important to understand how your competition is doing. Are they focusing on the same keywords as you? If so – perhaps you should try and aim for some slightly different variations.

Joel Williamson, a strategy manager at leading search engine optimisation company, SEONext gives us his inside tips:

“We look at competitor rankings through a tool call SEM Rush. The programme analyses vast amounts of SERP (search engine results page) data: keywords, domains, Google AdWords, URLs, search volumes, CPC (cost per click), competition and so on.

“We then analyse current backlinks and anchor text data (the clickable text in a hyperlink) via a link indexing tool called Majestic SEO. Once we have that data, we look for corresponding keywords across all of the client’s competitors.

One you have your list of terms which you believe people would use to find your products, you need to use one of the many keyword tools to find the most valuable ones for your site. There are many of these tools out there – Google Keyword Tool is part of AdWords and is probably the most popular and free service.

How to use Google Keyword Tool

This tool has two basic functions, it can give you a list of alternative keywords which relate to your existing list and it can then give you the performance statistics for these words – like how competitive it is and how often people use the search term.

The tool can also be used to search your existing site for keywords that are used often which you might not have thought about.

You should use this tool to come up with a shortened list of keywords which you can focus on and hopefully perform well with.

“It’s important to remember that although heavily optimised for your chosen keywords, your website needs to read like you have ignored SEO altogether,” says Pritchard.

“In other words, don’t insert keywords into your content willy-nilly (called keyword stuffing) and don’t use un-natural phrases. Try to think like your end user; what would they search for?

“Use Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics and find out what they are searching for and make sure they are well-used throughout your Title Tags, Heading Tags and Body Text, as well as other elements such as Meta Tags and Image Alt Attributes.”