Why are keywords important for eCommerce?

Keyword Research is one of the first tasks which someone considering setting up an online store (as well as many other online businesses) should carry out. The result of this research will provide the master list of keywords on which your SEO and SEM actions will focus.

However, not everyone does their homework, often because they are unaware of the importance of this task, and other times because they aren’t familiar with the tools in the market (many of which are free, so using them shouldn’t be a problem) which can be of great help in this research.

If you are not clear about these keywords, your investment in terms of time and effort (SEO )as well as materials (SEM) will in all likelihood be wasted. After all, this is not very different from what happens in the offline channel: when you set up a physical store you want it to be associated with a number of concepts/terms that define it as a store – some of which are based on the service provided, and many of which are based on the product selection.

Keyword Research

For many people, keyword research when setting up an online store is merely a matter of deciding which products to sell and using the most generic searches. For example, they might use very basic and ill-chosen keywords for a pet shop: pets, dogs, cats, pet shop, pet accessories, kibble, etc.

Obviously you want positioning in these keywords, but you should also consider some important factors:

• Do these keywords have an adequate search level? We often think that people look for things in a specific way, when they actually use very different search terms. In addition, even if those terms are used, given that you will only be able (at least at first) to attract a very small percentage of the users looking for them to your website, if you don’t have a sufficiently large potential market, you will not achieve a sufficient traffic level for the sales you need to make.
• Are competition levels too high? Very often you will come across search terms for which many websites are positioned (not only online stores, but also content sites), and you will find it very hard and/or expensive to position yourself for those search terms.
• Will the conversion rates of those keywords be enough? Even if there are keywords with a low competition level and a good search volume, they may be too generic and thus you will attract people who are not willing to buy to your website. This will yield low conversion rates, which in turn will involve a high cost of user capture.

Let us take a look at these search variables:

 There are a couple of keywords (cats and dogs) with a low competition level (few people are bidding for them on adwords) and with a good level of monthly searches, both globally (all over the world) and in Spain. This might make you think that you should invest in these keywords to obtain many sales. But let’s be sensible and consider to main issues:

• If two search terms that are so obvious for stores in your industry have such a low competition level, there must be something wrong with them, right?
• Perhaps these terms are too generic?

To be honest, if I google “dogs”, I’m probably looking for information about how to take care of a dog or something like that, but it’s not a keyword that makes you think that a user googling it wants to buy something.

There’s also “kibble” and “pet accessories”, with low search levels and high competition. This should lead you to think that these keywords aren’t the most suitable ones, as it will be expensive to attract visits to your site and the potential market is relatively small. However, conversion rates may be high, as these keywords are highly sale-oriented. It’s worth giving them a try, analyze CPC and conversion rates, and, on the basis of that data and your average margin per order, determine whether they are worth it or not.

Then there is “pet shop”, with a medium competition level and a rather low but acceptable search level. This seems to be the best keywords of all those considered.

But this mere exercise is only the start of keyword research. We have covered he basics, discarding some terms, examining others, and assuming that, if the keywords chosen worked, you would be targeting a very small market. So it’s clear that more and better keywords are needed.

Using the right tools, you can considerably increase your keyword list. So you should basically target two issues:

• Study the keywords used by your competitors to find opportunities where you can compete against them, as well as keywords which you might have missed.
• Make your keywords more specific, aiming for a long-tail model, where instead of “kibble” you use more specific keywords, such as “Royal Canin kibble for large dogs”. A good list of more specific keywords will enable you to reach a larger, less competitive potential audience where conversion rates are much higher.

There are plenty of good tools to do this (and don’t forget your imagination and the desire to test things). In our following posts we will discussing some of the tools and methodologies to maximize your results.