Creating a keyword list is all about putting yourself in the customer’s shoes
When planning, developing and marketing your website, every element should be carefully planned, from the design, structure and layout to the content. This is where you need a carefully thought-out keyword campaign to optimise your site.
By Tim Pritchard, SEO specialist for ecommerce software supplier, SellerDeck
According to research from ‘Netcraft’, throughout 2012 there was an average of nearly 140,000 new websites every day; competition is tough! If you’re a small to medium sized ecommerce trader, you can either go head-to-head with ‘the big boys’ or find your niche and grow from there.
In this article, we will explain:
1. Why it’s becoming harder than ever for successful SEO
2. The importance of finding your niche and thinking outside the box
3. Ways to incorporate ‘outside the box’ keywords
SEO is not dead, it’s just hard
SEO is more alive than ever, but with the competition around it’s becoming harder to compete. Popular brands have huge SEO influence due to heavy traffic and lots of inbound links so they will always be very hard to beat in the rankings.
It’s often said that SEO is an art form and I believe this to be true. True artists will always push the envelope and think outside the box. You might not be able to rank first for some of the more popular keywords, but you certainly can for the less popular words (which in relative terms can still drive plenty of visitors).
As an example, imagine you start selling wine online. A Google search for “Red wine” shows us that there are 577,000,000 results (give or take a few!) and apart from the wikipedia entry, it’s no surprise that Tesco, Majestic, Waitrose and Marks and Spencers sit atop the rankings.
Google’s keyword tool tells us that “Red wine” receives roughly 165,000 searches per month; however, Wordtracker tells us that over 5 million pages are optimised for “Red wine” in anchor and title – that’s big competition.
Get specific
Well, put yourself in your target customers’ shoes, what are they searching for? Searches will generally be more specific, so you could optimise for a certain type of wine, the location of your store or warehouse or other terms related to your industry.
A good tool is worth its weight in gold for discovering keywords and setting expectations. For example Wordtracker tells us “Red wine calories” has only 1714 optimised pages, whilst “Beef stew red wine” has only 120!
Granted, these terms will come with less searches, but they will be easier to rank well and then grow your site from there.
Putting your keywords to work
Once you have your keyword campaign, start optimising your pages in accordance with them. Be careful with your keyword usage; the advice directly from Matt Cutts (who’s part of the Search Quality team for Google) is to ignore SEO when optimising your site.
Don’t write your keywords for the robots, but instead for your audience. Your content should make sense and be easy to read for your human customers.
Of course, the idea of your site is to sell, so how do you optimise your page for “Red wine calories” or “Beef stew red wine”? For me, of the solution is a regular blog.
Google loves fresh content and a blog gives you exactly that, filled with lots of relevant keywords.
People turn to the internet for information and ideas and if you can supply them this information and give them those ideas (e.g. recipes, top 10 wines for under £7 etc…) then you can point to the relevant pages of your site where people can find those products.
They may not buy now, but they’ll know you exist. Keep your blogs fun, fresh and informative and they will come back.
So to recap, everything takes planning:
• Invest in a licence for a keyword tool and make use of it
• Plan your keywords and think outside the box
• Make sure your content is keyword-friendly, but also reads fluently
• Write a regular blog, including advice and information that’s fun and informative.
Let me know how you get on via
And click on the link for more information about SellerDeck
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