So after months (hopefully not too many) of waiting your eCommerce store is finally live. You have uploaded all of your inventory, your category and product pages are setup and your credit card processing and payment gateway is all set to go.
Let the floodgate of new business come in!!
Wait?! Where are the customers….. Hmmm…. Could be waiting a while.
Most online store owners give great thought to their website but little thought to their marketing strategy. Wrong approach!
Marketing is ultimately the #1 reason why your online storefront will succeed or fail.
However marketing for eCommerce is a HUGE topic.
You will want to start with the marketing channels which produce the biggest return on your dollar first. You are not likely going to be able to find anything better than eCommerce SEO when it comes getting qualified traffic.
SEO means optimising your eCommerce store in order to be found on Google by customers searching online.
The foundation of any Search strategy should be doing your keyword research then selecting your list of keywords. This is where any beginner should invest most of their time upfront.
Finding Keywords For Your eCommerce Store
A keyword is another word for search term. It is what people type into Google.
For your own store the most obvious keywords you are going to initially think of will be the names of your products or the categories of them.
Don’t get me wrong, this is a good starting point. Depending on your industry though this has become very competitive.
The solution is to go deeper with your SEO keywords and look at the “long tail”. According to the gents at Moz long tail searches make up more than 70% of all searches.
However there is also less competition.
And…
There Is Often Stronger Buying Intent.
Someone searching for “buy white patio furniture online” is highly likely to have a higher intent to purchase than someone searching for “furniture store online”.
Creating Your Long Tail Keyword List
The best way to create a list of long tail keywords is to create a kind of mind map.
This allows you to work your way down from the general to the more specific.
The team at SEMrush have a killer guide to read to keyword mapping, but I will outline enough to get you going here.
You start with a core or general idea and work your way down to more narrow. The follow example starts with “office chairs”.
From this map we can come up with long tail searches:
- Adjustable ergonomic office chairs
- Black designer guest office chairs
- White conference style office chairs
- …. (this is only the start of what could be a long list if we mapped this out in full)
How To Choose The Right Keywords For Your Online Store
Once you have finished you will have a large list of keywords. Hopefully in the hundreds.
We now need to determine which ones we are going to use and focus the website on.
Google Adwords Keyword Planner is going to be your best friend for this.
This free tool from Google is going to allow you to:
- Get additional ideas for search terms
- Find the number of people in a location which perform that search
- Assess the level of competition
What you are looking for is to balance high search volume with the perceived intent for the searcher to purchase and the least amount of competition.
You can see in the above image we are doing a search for “buy ergonomic office chair”.
You can see there are a very large number of related searches and in this instance the competition is quite high too.
So between the mind map for your long tail searches and the keyword planning tool, you be able to create the basis of an SEO strategy for keywords which will translate to results in Google and sales on your store.