Picking Keywords for Your eCommerce Sites
Selecting keywords for an eCommerce site can be a challenging endeavor. Knowing how to properly research, select and evaluate keywords for your business can mean the difference between generating revenue and wasting financial resources.
Keyword selection is a science that web marketers attempt to employ by building keyword lists, thoroughly studying keyword statistics, restructuring current keywords and monitoring campaign results. In order to improve your own eCommerce campaigns take advantage of the following keyword selection tips.
Look at Your Store
Considering that you want your keywords to be relevant to your industry and specific business, your own website is a great place to find keyword ideas according to White Shark Media. They suggest starting with the names of your company’s products in order to build a profitable keyword list.
For instance, if your company sells vitamins, relevant keywords could be derived from your top selling healthy products. Phrases such as “nutraceutical fulfillment” and “vitamin supplements” are examples of keywords that might be popular in your industry. Not only would your website appear in search results for these keywords, your sales for these specific items will likely increase as well.
Consider Keyword Competition
Once you’ve chosen the products or industry related terms you would like to include on your keyword list, developing the actual phrases that will serve as the keywords is the next step. While you certainly want to utilize your product names as keywords, you may need to modify the way in which you present them due to competition.
In sticking with the previous example regarding pest-control products, the keyword “bed bug kits” may have a lot of competition and be considered a generic industry term. In order to avoid generic terms with a high level of competition, rephrase your keywords and turn them into long tail keywords. These are keywords that are highly specific, beefed-up versions of generic search terms.
For the bed bug kit example, “shopping for bed bug kits” is the long tailed version of your original product name. Rather than competing with every other pesticide company on the web for the generic term, your website will rank highly for this low competition phrase.
Incorporate Specified Product Terms
As you continue to build your keyword list from the information and products available on your website, you can break product categories down into product names that reflect specific makes and models. An excellent strategy for creating these specific keywords is to add color names, specific model names, individual sizes and brand names to the original product name.
For example, a product sold by Gap named “retro graphic tee shirt” could lead to the creation of the keywords “red retro graphic tee shirt”, “large retro graphic tee shirt” or “Gap retro graphic tee shirt”. Adding these specific product categories from your site will create keywords for which your site ranks very well.
Research
While you’re brainstorming ideas for keywords, utilizing keyword research tools can help you to elaborate upon your product names and other industry terms. In terms of choosing which tool to use, Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool is one of the most popular and useful. This tool generates keyword ideas based upon brand names, product names and other relevant phrases that you enter as search criteria.
AdWords also displays the number of monthly searches that this term receives, the competition for each keyword and its approximate CPC. This information is invaluable in choosing your keywords as you want terms with low competition while simultaneously producing a high number of monthly searches.
Analytics
Incorporating AdWord’s analytics into your eCommerce keyword campaign will allow you to determine where your site traffic is coming from. These analytics display the keywords people have used to arrive at your site. This includes comparing your paid keyword efforts with organic search results. Armed with this information you can make decisions about choosing keywords for further paid search efforts.
The aforementioned tips and tools serve as guidelines for beginning or re-positioning your eCommerce campaigns. Through keyword research, keyword trial and error and analytic monitoring you can improve the profitability of your company’s campaign.
