Mastering SEO: Unlocking the Potential of Keyword Research to Skyrocket Your E-Commerce Success

Dream of seeing your business skyrocket to the top of a search engine page?

When it comes to search engines, quality keywords are a crucial step to getting your site to the top of search queries. Today's episode dives headfirst into the world of Keyword Research and SEO.

Understanding your target audience, identifying their needs, and brainstorming seed keywords to create unique and specific keywords that will draw traffic to your website: this episode will help you use keywords to their fullest potential!

Tune in and prepare to take your e-commerce business to the next level, one keyword at a time.

Resources: 

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Chapters

• 0:45 Keyword Research and SEO Techniques
• 15:15 Effective Strategies for Keyword Optimization
• 20:29 E-Commerce Podcast

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:45

When helping clients with search engine optimization, or SEO for short one of the first things that we do is we work with them on keyword research. Having the right keywords and keyword phrases is crucial for being successful with search engine optimization. So, if you can grab a pen and paper and let's dive into this episode and brainstorm together. Welcome to the Ecommerce Made Easy podcast. I'm your host, kiri Saunders. When we started this business, all I had was a couch, a laptop and a nine-month-old. My main goal To help others. Now, with over 20 years in the e-commerce building industry and even more than that in web development, I have seen a lot. I love breaking down the hard tech and to easily understandable bits to help others be successful in their online business. Whether you're a seasoned e-commerce veteran or just starting out, you've come to the right place. So sit back, relax and let's dive into the world of e-commerce together. Welcome back to this week's episode of the Ecommerce Made Easy podcast. I'm your host, kiri Saunders. Today, we're diving into the world of keyword research and how it relates to search engine optimization, or SEO for short. Hopefully you are able to get a pen and paper out while listening to the intro, or, if you're driving a car, no worries, or can't write down things right now. Listen to the episode, absorb the information and then come back and re-listen to it with a pen and paper in mind so that we can brainstorm on this together. But you're going to glean a lot of it no matter where you have your pen and paper available today. I find having creative time to just really list out all the keyword possibilities, without judgment, can really help you be successful in when you're doing keyword research really. So, first off, what is a keyword? So a keyword definition is a specific word or phrase that describes the content of a web page. It helps search engines know what your page is about. And also keep in mind, when we're talking through this episode, that you're going to have some core keywords that are tried and true across most of your pages, but we really should be looking at specific keywords per page as well. So, as we're talking through the tactics here, keep that in mind. You're going to have some overall keywords that are going to be a theme across all your pages, very likely, and then you're going to have some more specific keywords for specific pages. All right, so let's jump into how do we find relevant keywords for our business.

Speaker 1: 3:11

So first off, as always in doing pretty much anything business wide, we need to understand our audience and their needs and what they're looking for. You want to identify your main products or services and your offerings of your business and then understand how's your target audience talking about these subjects. What words or phrases do they use when they're looking for your type of business? And I know a lot on this episode. We take the dog treat business. It's just something easily, I think, to conceptualize. Most of us have a pet or two or three. So let's think about it from the dog treat you know example. So say, you're a dog treat business. Obviously dog treats are going to be probably one of your keywords, but that's probably a very Competitive keyword. Lots of people are vying for the dog trait business. So also keep that in your mind too.

Speaker 1: 4:10

As we're talking about these specific techniques, we need to find some keywords that are also very unique to you, as well as some of the generic ones that are a little bit harder to optimize for. So when you're thinking about this, what certain phrases are your customers using when searching for, let's say, dog traits? Are they wanting specific types of dog traits? Do they want them only made in a specific country, or grain free, or all natural or organic, or maybe they want single ingredient dog traits. I know my dog loves to eat freeze dried minnows that look kind of freaky, but she loves it, and in my mind they're single ingredients. So it's probably better for you to better for her to paint bone how they process it. But that aside, what are your consumers talking about?

Speaker 1: 5:01

Like I said, for me I'm searching for green tree products. If you don't know me too well, I actually have celiac disease and on three of our kids have it as well, and so we can't have gluten in the house. So I need to find dog treats and cat treats that are green free so that we can make sure that our household is safe and we aren't getting cross contaminated from our animals with gluten from them licking us or play at you know us handling their food or their treats or things like that. So this might be not be something you might not think of if you're not in a situation like me, but there are people that are going to be specifically looking for that specific type of dog treat. So put yourself in those shoes of your customers. What services or products are you're offering, that they're really niched down and really specifically looking for. This is what's going to really get you head in.

Speaker 1: 5:57

Keyword optimization is not just thinking broad and generically but also thinking very specifically. So I want you to brainstorm some seed keywords and the seed keywords is a easier ones to think of, like dog treats. Or let's say, you sell running shoes, you know so running shoes would be a generic kind of seed keywords to think of. All those simple phrases that may not be super specific yet, but brainstorm those, put those down on a piece of paper and do it without filtering yourself. Just really get it down and then you can come back and rank the ones that you think are most important for your audience. But if we don't get that flow of creativity out, it's going to be harder to really come up with those really special keywords. That's really going to help people find you.

Speaker 1: 6:43

Now you can also use keyword research tools that are out there, and there are quite a few out there. There are some paid ones, there are some free ones. So you can even just search for keyword research tools and you're going to come up with quite a few, and I don't want to necessarily mention any on the podcast, because they're always, ever changing, but there are some very, very good ones out there. If you aren't wanting to pay for keyword research tool you may not be in the place in your business where you need or want to do that then that's perfectly fine too.

Speaker 1: 7:15

One of the things you can do is simply go to Google or Bing and start typing for your subject. So if you sell dog treats, we'll go back to that. Start typing dog treats, don't hit enter and see what shows up below your search. You're going to see some related searches that the search engine is going to suggest to you based upon what you started with, and they're going to be more specific. So look at that, see what those are, pick out the ones that you like that you think resonate with what you sell in your services, and write those down on your brainstorming piece of paper too. Make a different column for this, because this is a bit more of our specific sort of keywords. And then another thing you can do is actually search for some of those keywords. When you do that, you're going to see down at the bottom of the page at least in Google and I believe Bing does this as well Most search engines, related searches based upon what you just searched. So not only can you get extra suggestions by just starting to type the search, you're going to get even more specific suggestions when you actually do search and look below You're going to find. Some of them will be the same and some of the things you're going to find at the bottom are going to be different and might give you some great ideas to work from. And when you're doing this, what you're going to find and this is kind of our next point is you're going to find long tail keywords. So long tail keywords are what I've been alluding to when we get a bit more specific on our keywords.

Speaker 1: 8:44

So dog treats is pretty generic. It's pretty. You know, everybody could use the word dog treats if they're selling dog treats. But if you are selling a specific type of dog treat, like the green, free dog treats, that's a lot more specific. Now if you're selling organic, green, free dog treats, that's even more specific. That's even a longer tail keyword phrase, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's actually really good in many cases, especially if you have a specific page on your website that's dedicated to organic, green, free dog treats, and then you're also going to be one to look up synonyms. What are some other words that people use for dog treats? Maybe a dog snack, you know? Come up, try to find some other. Or canine you could maybe even use the word canine. I mean, most people probably aren't searching for the word canine at least that's not that I can think of but you could.

Speaker 1: 9:41

You want to look at synonyms for all your, your main keywords that you find? Because we want to create a natural language, as we talked about a lot on this podcast. When we're doing our long form content, our blog posts and things like that, we don't want to just say over and over and over again green free dog treats, green free dog treats, green free drug treats, right, that's. I mean, it's even hard for me to say quickly and nobody's going to want to just like read that over and over again on your website. So you're going to want to mix in variations of your main keyword per page, and so synonyms are really going to help you here. You can use some tools online to get synonyms. You can ask AI for some synonyms. This would actually be a good place to use AI to brainstorm. We obviously don't want to copy anything the AI gives us, because it's sometimes inaccurate, but it is a really good tool for brainstorming, especially for keywords. So use the tools that you have around you.

Speaker 1: 10:40

Now, if you are a local business, this is something even more important. You want to make sure you also use local keywords. So we are located in Athens Ohio. If we service the Athens Ohio businesses, we would want to use the words Athens Ohio on our website frequently enough that it's going to show up in search engines. Or if you're maybe not necessarily city specific, but your regional specific, we could say south southeastern Ohio on our website to grab that regional specific type of audience. So you can use local keywords to also really help you out. And this is especially true for, say, businesses that sell dog treats. Right, you might want to go to the store rather than ordering online your dog treats. Maybe you just ran out all of a sudden and you didn't expect to, and you want to go to the store and get some. So making sure that you have local keywords in there as well is super important if you do service people locally.

Speaker 1: 11:48

And you might want to also think about what is the intent of the user when they're searching for these phrases, that way that you can really tailor your keywords to what they're doing. Are they looking for information? Are they looking for products? Are they looking for services? Knowing that can help you also like add a different flavor to your keywords, because maybe you do nail trimming services and so you want to put up dog nail trimming services in the Athens Ohio area. That would be a perfect phrase to have on a pet store that's here in Athens Ohio for the. When somebody's searching for nail trimming services for dogs In this area, they're going to be more likely to find you. So right there we're kind of combining both the local keywords as well as user intent.

Speaker 1: 12:43

Now when we could also take local out of it and you might be looking for web developers in the United States or web developers in the United Kingdom. You know, have some of those words in there. Even if you might be very broad as far as who you service, you still might want to put some of those words in there. For us, we service clients worldwide. However, a lot of our clients are in the United States right now, so we might want to say something like that that we service actually. Probably I would want to put the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. That's kind of our common places. That we service people is those countries, so we might want to add that to our website actually. Ok, so hopefully you have a lot brainstormed on your paper. If you aren't doing this yet on paper, hopefully this has got your brain working and really thinking about what words and phrases would I use, would my customers use, to find my website and find my products or services?

Speaker 1: 13:43

Next we're going to dive briefly into some a bit more advanced techniques, and you do want to touch on these because I want you to see what else is possible as you get a little bit further into search engine optimization, and this might be something that you don't want to handle and you want to pass off to a service provider like us or a search engine optimization person otherwise to this. Maybe not us, but if you know about it, at least you can better monitor and help that person do a good job for you, because even if you hire a search engine optimization expert, they need your input and your information to do a good job. So understanding these advanced techniques, at least at the high level, will help you do that, and that's what we're here for is to help you have a great business, ok, so let's dive in. So first we want to be able to evaluate the search volume and competition. So basically what that means is if we were To do a query on simply dog traits, you're going to find a huge search volume for that and you're going to find a lot of competitors. And I know that without even trying it. Just because it's a very simple, generic keyword phrase, right, dog traits, very simple and very generic. Now grain free dog traits is going to be a bit more refined in less competition and a less of a lesser of a search volume. This still might still be a lot of search volume.

Speaker 1: 15:16

If you're brand new and just starting out on your website, you probably want to go even further into being more specific. So maybe grain free dog treats in the Athens Ohio area. I know it sounds kind of wordy and a lot of words for keyword phrase, but if you're just starting out, google's not going to give you quite as much a priority and other major search engines because your website's new. If your domain name's new and your website's new, you're going to be the lowest person on the totem pole. So really diving into the very, very specifically detailed keywords is going to be to your advantage because you're going to be found easier and then, as you get more well-known, you might want to just do grain free dog treats, for example, but this is something you're going to want to look at over time and we're going to talk about that towards the end of the episode. So just be aware that ranking high for specific keywords greatly depends upon the search of volume and the competition. If you can find that sweet spot where the search volume is decently high and the competition is decently low, you're going to have a really good chance of ranking high for that keyword pretty quickly. Otherwise it might take a bit more time if the competition's a little bit stronger.

Speaker 1: 16:29

Now we also want to potentially monitor our competitors. What search engine phrases are they doing well for? And then find the pages that are doing well, kind of analyze it. Why are they doing well? Do they put keywords in a specific way on their website? Are they really mixing up their phrasing? So it's very natural for the human to read what are they doing right and well there, and sometimes that takes a bit of experience to really see what's going on right there. But knowing your competitors is great and another thing you can do with your competitors. You can figure out what they're doing. The gap is was they not doing well for keyword optimization? What could you do better than them there? You might get a leg up by doing that.

Speaker 1: 17:13

And then you can also think about seasonal keywords. So this could be something that may not apply to you. It kind of depends on who you serve. But you may need seasonal keywords for summer things. Maybe you're a pool company and you service pools in the summer. In the winter you help service hot tubs. So you may want to change up your focus. You obviously don't want to rewrite your website, but you may want to focus on optimizing specific pages during specific times of the year so that those pages are ready from when that season happens. Because you have to make sure you're doing search engine optimization ahead of when you need it, because it can take some time to really nail it down and get it right. And then, if you do some of these more advanced techniques, you do want to refine and prioritize them.

Speaker 1: 18:04

No-transcript what? What really is relevant? What is your search volume versus your competition volume? Where do you think you really might have a chance to stand out? So don't just blindly Use keyword phrases. When you're doing the research with the competition and the search volume, make sure you're really looking at the data and picking out the ones that you think you're going to be able to succeed at pretty quickly, because it's going to give you a win. It's going to boost your website as you, as you Do a better job with keywords or specific keywords, you're going to have a better chance of doing a better job with other keywords. So use kind of like a snowball effect. Once you kind of get search engine optimization going and really working for you, the more layers you add to it You're going to get like a bigger, faster snowball going and you're going to get a lot better search engine rankings across all your pages Once you really start to hone in and analyze and get several of the pages working out really well in search engines.

Speaker 1: 19:03

Okay and last but not least, this is something I see time and time again with our clients is Search engine optimization is not a set it and forget it. You cannot. I mean you will get it. You would have an advantage if you do do some searches and optimization, but you're going to give it even better advantage if you're constantly monitoring and revising it and Making sure it's working for you, making sure you're keeping up with the trends. Are people using different words anymore to search for your product or service? You really need to keep up on this and I really recommend you monitoring this once a month or having somebody on your staff or Hiring hiring somebody like us to monitor this for you regularly, because it is just something that can just change so easily. You know this.

Speaker 1: 19:54

Major search engines do updates and optimizations on their end. That's going to change your search engine ranking. It's just something that needs to be attended to Regularly, otherwise you're going to fall behind and it's going to be like an uphill battle to catch back up again. But if you keep the ball moving, even if you're just putting a little bit of effort, doesn't have to be like a ton of effort. As long as you're putting a little bit of effort and really reviewing everything regularly I'm making a habit, like I said, at least once a month then you're gonna you're, you're gonna reap the benefits in the long run for all of this.

Speaker 1: 20:29

All right, so that's it for this week's episode of the e-commerce made easy podcast. What a jam packed information on search engine optimization and keyword research. I hope that was super helpful for you. You can visit the show notes at e-commerce. Made easy podcast. Comm forward, slash 33 and if you have any questions or suggestions for us of the podcast, drop us an email. Drop it to podcast at us engineering calm and we look forward to seeing you next week.