This article is part of an SEO series from WooRank. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.
Online sales topped $341 billion in the United States in 2015, more than a third of all retail sales that year, and a 14.6% increase from 2014. This makes it the sixth straight year of double-digit growth for eCommerce revenue. That’s a pretty substantial pie.
However, with at least 110,000 ecommerce companies in 2014, the competition can get pretty fierce. If you’re an eCommerce company either looking to boost your sales, or just getting started, you need to start by turning your attention to organic search traffic and SEO.
Why Does SEO Matter for eCommerce?
Optimizing your website for organic search traffic is vital for your sales. Here are some numbers laying out the role search engines play in the online sales process:
To put that in terms of dollars and cents, search engine traffic has a hand in about $150 billion in revenue and millions of unique users (82 million monthly users for Amazon alone). So if you want to compete you need to rank, and rank highly.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is a foundational step of on page SEO. If your goal is to rank highly in search results, you need to know what your potential customers are looking for and then build your site to include those keywords. For eCommerce sites, your keyword research will also influence how you build your site architecture and URLs. You really do need to take this step seriously.
The first step of keyword research is coming up with a seed list of keywords. When starting this step, look to your category and product pages. Think of them as landing pages for your visitors — generally speaking, the majority of your traffic and conversions will come through these pages. Then ask yourself, what search terms would you use to find products in those categories (or subcategories)? Don’t stick to just the basic one-word searches — think of long-tail keywords with up to four or five words to make sure you’re targeting in-market searchers.
After you’ve brainstormed a solid list of keywords, it’s time to expand it. There are lots of keyword research tools out there that will help you come up with an expanded list of keywords by appending every letter of the alphabet to your keyword and scraping Google’s suggested keywords. This will help you find keywords that more accurately reflect what your potential customers are searching for.
There are other tools you can use to find related keywords straight from the source: search engines.
Google Keyword Planner
Part of Google’s AdWords paid platform, Keyword Planner, was originally built to help advertisers do keyword research for their paid campaigns (don’t worry — it’s free to sign up and use). However, it’s also a great tool for organic keyword research. It can provide you with information regarding keywords’ popularity and competitiveness on Google.
Once you’ve got an AdWords account, Keyword Planner is available in the Tools tabs at the top of the page. You can use the search for new keywords to find a list of relevant keywords and identify monthly search volume.
If you’ve got a CSV of keywords from a tool like Ubersuggest, upload them under ‘Get search volume data and trends’ to find their average monthly searches, competition and suggested bid.
It’s worth noting that while Keyword Tool’s competitiveness and suggested bids are AdWords-specific metrics, you can still use them to extrapolate organic search data. Keywords are highly competitive and have high bids because they demonstrate searchers’ commercial intent — there’s money to be made from them. So you can usually correlate highly competitive keywords to suggested bids to keywords that in-market people are searching for. Be careful, though, to avoid targeting overly competitive keywords; if they’re too general you’ll struggle to rank against the big players in your industry and wind up with high bounce rates and low conversion rates.
The Keyword Planner tool is also a good opportunity to come up with some latent semantic index (LSI) keywords. LSI keywords are words or phrases that are synonyms or topically relevant to your keyword. For example if your keyword is [bedspreads], your LSI keywords could be [bedding] or [duvet cover]. Search Keyword Planner’s Keyword ideas and Ad group ideas to find inspiration for LSI keywords.
Bing Webmaster Tool’s Keyword Research feature works in much the same way as Google’s Keyword Planner. After you enter a keyword and select a region and language, Bing will come back with up to six months’ worth of search volume and historical trends. It will also generate a list of related keywords.
Use the Search Keywords section under Reports & Data to find which keywords are currently bringing traffic to your site. See how you’re performing for your targeted keywords, and maybe uncover any that you didn’t realize you were ranking for. This report includes clicks, impressions, click through rate (CTR), average position in Bing and average click position.
Google Search Console
Find your Search Analytics report in Google Search Console under Search Traffic. Like Bing Search Keywords, Search Analytics lets you find which keywords brought traffic to your site in the previous 90 days and includes clicks, impressions, CTR and average search position. Search Console, though, lets you slice and dice your data to make it even more useful. You can filter the report to see which keywords drive the most traffic to a category page or what your most popular mobile keywords are.
Filter by query to see performance for your branded keywords or keywords that include specific words like a category or product. Compare by dates to measure weekly or monthly progress and spot trends. This graph will help you answer important questions like “how are my branded keywords doing month-to-month?”, “what keywords are driving traffic to my product pages?” or “how are people finding me on mobile search?”
Continue reading %On-Page SEO for eCommerce%
by Greg Snow-Wasserman via SitePoint
