Ecommerce Keyword Research: The Ultimate Guide to Knowing your Customer

In this guide, you are going to learn exactly why keyword research should be focused on the user, not the search engine, along with a specific keyword research strategy to help generate higher rankings with a mapped out user journey.

Is keyword research still a valid undertaking? According to Forrester, 49% of people rely on search to inform purchase decisions. Yes, keyword research is relevant and important not only for rankings, but also assisting the user in making a purchase.

Some SEO evangelists will say that Technical SEO is the most important fundamental. Others will say content is the most important aspect of SEO. For ecommerce and enterprise level sites, keyword research is the single most important SEO fundamental element for organic success.

Keyword research is at the heart of all things ecommerce.

Intent: Without an understanding of the intent behind the search, how could you create a landing page that can rank and convert? Where does the searcher lie in the sales funnel? Really, how do you even know what the searcher wants? And if you don’t know what they want, how do you direct them to what they need?

Content Strategy: In order to rank for the keywords your target audience is searching for, you must have pages that target those keywords. This is crucial in ecommerce because there are many different ways people search.

Keyword research would show whether you need a brand hierarchy, multiple subcategory depth, products with variations versus single products. Research will further show you if you need to break a level 1 category into multiple level 1 categories. And what about the informational needs of your audience?

Site Architecture: A secret to ecommerce success is that the more efficiently you can get a visitor from point A to point Z, the better your conversion rate. This means creating a content architecture designed to engage the visitor at any stage of the funnel and assist them to continue down the path to conversion. Without keyword research, you will likely not know what pages to create to match the intent of the user and get them to the exact product they need.

Relevancy: This is a big one with ecommerce sites. Ecommerce sites are often very large with a lot of working parts. The larger and more granular a site becomes, the more opportunity for cannibalization exists. Cannibalization refers to two or more pages being optimized and ranking for the same keywords. Each page needs to be relevant to a subset or bucket of keywords, but multiple pages should not be relevant to the same subset of keywords as other pages.

An Important Note

SEO is about ranking in Google, right? You may have noticed that the discussion thus far has revolved around the searcher, not the search engine.

One of the secrets to ecommerce SEO is to optimize for the visitor. Optimizing for a search engine can help you rank in the search engine. Optimizing for the user will help you to rank for that user’s query with a page that matches their needs and a flow that directs them to the product they need.

Proper SEO whether it be keyword research, technical SEO, on page SEO, or any other SEO fundamental, should be user focused. Not only is it your goal to please the visitor, it is also Google’s goal to please the user. And when your ecommerce site and Google are aligned with the same goals, great rankings naturally come.

The Different Types of Keywords

Keywords come in all shapes and sizes. Understanding the different types of keywords in your target market can help you in creating a well ranking, converting website.

Short Tail Keywords

We call the keywords the “Head” of search. These are the most general keywords in your niche. For example, a website that sells women’s clothing would likely have these Head “short tail” keywords:

• Shoes
• Dresses
• Leggings
• Skirts

If you notice, those keywords would be the main categories of the site. Short tail phrases do not have to be one word. We can break the examples above into further short tail keywords.

• Shoes
  • Running Shoes
  • High Heels
• Dresses
  • Prom Dresses
  • Wedding Dresses
• Leggings
  • High Waist Leggings
  • Yoga Leggings
• Skirts
  • Mini Skirts
  • A Line Skirts

A picture should begin to form with these examples. Not only are we looking at head phrases, we see how knowing these phrases help us to determine the level 1, level 2, and so on category structure of the site.

Short tail keywords generate a lot of search volume. At the same time, conversions are lower. If some one is looking for a prom dress, do you know which prom dress they want? What if they want an off the shoulder prom dress? How about a traditional prom dress? Are they looking for a white or blue prom dress?

The questions above demonstrate the need to know the intent of the searcher, capture them where they currently are in the funnel, then direct them to the dress they want. If someone searching for a prom dress landed on a product page, what are the odds they want that exact dress? The odds are probably ZERO. That searcher needs to land on a Prom Dress category/subcategory.

Long Tail Keywords

Where short tail keywords are at the head of search and generate a lot of potential traffic, long tail keywords generate fewer searches. However, the longer tailed a keyword is, the better it converts (assuming you have the right page targeting that keyword).

Using the example above, we can add long tail keywords.

• Shoes
  • Running Shoes
    • Nike Running Shoes
• Dresses
  • Prom Dresses
    • Over the Shoulder Prom Dress
      • Blue Over the Shoulder Prom Dress
• Leggings
  • High Waist Leggings
    • Plus Size High Waist Leggings
      • Plus Size High Waist Leggings in Camouflage

The above example shows how long tail keywords can help us to build out the subcategory structure of our ecommerce sites. As the keywords get longer tail, they turn into product page keywords. “Over the Shoulder Prom Dress” is a great subcategory. “Blue Over the Shoulder Prom Dress” is very specific and would likely be suitable for a product page.

There are also classifications of keywords.

Commercial Intent: These keywords carry the intent and motivation to carry out a purchase. “Red jumper skirt” is a search where the user is likely looking to buy a red jumper skirt.

Navigational intent: The motivation behind a navigational keyword is to get to a certain website. This could be someone going to Google and searching “Macys”. That person is looking to get to Macys.

Investigational Intent: This is a sub-branch of commercial intent keywords where the user is performing a search comparing different products. Example: “Keurig vs Nespresso” or “Best Fax Machine.”

Informational Intent: The motivation behind an informational search is to help the user find a solution to a problem. This is where most ecommerce companies miss out.

People in your target market are not only looking to buy products, they are looking for information to help them make a buying decision. An example would be, “What type of jumper skirt best fits my body type.” Answer that person’s question and you likely have a customer for life.

When someone asks a question and a storefront has the answer, that ecom actually engages the user with helpful content. This builds a bond and trust between the store and the visitor. When this person is ready to buy, they buy from the ecommerce store that helped them along the way.

Understanding Keywords for Ecommerce

In defining our keyword research, we want to determine the following:

Search Volume: In the discussion of long tail and short tail keywords, it isn’t necessarily the length of the keyword that makes it head or tail, it’s really the amount of searches the keyword receives.

Competition: Competition is a bit overrated for ecommerce keyword research. What I mean by that is, are you not going to create a “wedding dress: category page because it is too difficult to rank for the keyword “wedding dress?” Of course not!

Going back to the theme of this ecommerce keyword research guide, user intent and user experience are the key basis for our optimization efforts. At Squeaky Dino, we optimize based off the target market’s needs, not based off what is easy or hard to rank for in Google. Keyword research drives the site architecture, which drives the conversion path, which drives higher conversions…PERIOD.

Keyword Mapping: Mapping the site based on keywords, search volume and user intent (user needs). This should be the goal with any keyword research.

Performing Ecommerce Keyword Research

In designing this keyword research guide, I decided to go with a simple method, using free tools. There are a lot of guides out there that would list a whole bunch of tools right about now. But by the time you look through the list, you have no idea what you are going to do.

Information overload is not going to help. It would make us here at Squeaky Dino look good, but it isn’t useful for you. So, we are going to use some methods and two free tools to help us get our juices flowing and keyword research running in high gear.

Developing a Seed Keyword list

Seed keywords are the basis of your keyword research. These are a list of keywords that you want to analyze further to get a better understanding of their traffic and variations. Whether you are performing keyword research for an entire site, a specific category or product, you need some sort of starting point.

Brainstorming

This actually does work. Open up Notepad on your computer and start typing words that you know or believe to be related to your niche/category/product.

Competitive Research

Wait…”You said competition is overrated.” In terms of difficulty, yes. But in terms of research, your competition has done a lot of the work for you. You just have to take advantage of it.

This doesn’t mean to simply copy their strategy. Instead, use their site structure to help build your “seed keyword” list.

For ecommerce sites, you might think that Amazon would be the best model, but their hierarchy is clunky and not conducive to research in your specific ecommerce niche. In every niche, there are one or two main websites (competitors). These niche competitors are better suited for getting a list of seed keywords.

In our example of dresses, we could look at Asos. Asos sells many types of clothing, but have a dress category. From the dress category, we can see the keywords, styles, and types of dresses they are optimizing for.

Using Asos, we can get a large list of seed keywords. We have keywords by type, style and body fit.

Between your own knowledge of your niche and competitive research, you will have more than enough seed keywords to get started. The point of seed keywords is just to get a list of keywords to start your research. Again, this can be for an entire site, category, subcategory or product strategy.

Ecommerce Keyword and Search Volume Discovery

With the seed keyword list in hand, it is time to uncover keywords in your niche. Our process is twofold here. We want to discover search volume of our seed keywords, as well as discover new keywords and keyword variations to help understand intent and keyword mapping possibilities.

Our main tool of choice for this guide is the free Google Keyword Planner.

When 1^st loading the tool, we want to select the “Discover new keywords” tile since we are in strict discovery and research mode at this point.

I like to start my keyword research with the main head phrase. In this example, Im using “dresses” as the head keyword since I am doing research for the entire dress category. If I were looking at adding a new style of dress, I would perform the research on a longer tail keyword. For example, I might be looking to add a new line of A Line skirts to my dress category. In that case, I would use “A line dress” as my seed keyword.

Enter your keyword and click “Get Results.”

At this point, we get a nice list of keywords by volume. The first thing I do is sort by Avg. Monthly Searches. I do this because I usually get a list of related keywords by category level 1. Level 2 and so on. This is important for later refinement.

At the onset of our keyword research with the keyword planner tool, we get a list valid dress categories along with their monthly search volume.

At this point, I would export the list and begin to look at each one of the high search keywords individually. Doing this manually will make you a keyword research rock star in no time.

Let’s look at bridesmaid dresses.

Google has now shown us the most popular types of bridesmaid dresses. Depending on your strategy, you could group your bridesmaid dresses into a color category now that you know there is a lot of search volume around colors of this dress type.

There are several paid keyword grouping tools, but to stay on track with an actual method, we will look at one free keyword grouping tool. That tool is Keyword Grouper Pro.

Here is what we are going to do.

Enter your most head phrase into the Google Keyword Planner Tool. In our example “dresses,” then click Download Keyword Ideas.

Take your raw list of keywords and copy them

Enter that list into the Keyword Grouper. Add a minimum Depth Length of 5 and click Process Keywords.

You will get an output similar to this:

We now have a list of groupings to help create categories, subcategories or products. To narrow down further, you could repeat the process researching a longer tail keyword in the Keyword Planner, such as “prom dresses,” exporting those and running the keywords through the grouping tool. This would give you more granular category to subcategory to product hierarchy ideas.

You can take this a step further and export the results from the Grouping tool.

Then, use VLOOKUP to pull in search volume from the Keyword Planner Tool.

The Power of Aligning Keyword Research, Intent and Hierarchy

It’s easy to see why keyword research is so important for not only Google rankings, but for the overall user experience and conversion rate. In the keyword research example above, we have basically mapped out the customer journey. Positioning the site structure to search intent will drive the customer to the products most likely need.