Keywords are one of the most essential parts about good ecommerce, and as important to the industry as a whole, as flyers are to brick-and-mortar stores. They’re like little digital maps that instruct a buyer on how to find you, the third-party seller or FBA merchant. Give them wrong directions — bad keywords — and they could very well end up at your competitors listings instead of yours. But fill out the treasure map with excellent, spot-on keywords, and you’ll be providing a crystal clear trail right to your inventory line. RepricerExpress points you in the right direction to essential tips for finding awesome keywords.
1. Understand How Keyword Research Works
To be a pro at anything, you first have to understand exactly how each little part of the machine works. For example, you don’t have to know what’s under the hood of a car to drive it, but you do if you’re going to call yourself a mechanic. And if you’re going to call yourself an ecommerce retailer, then understanding keywords is one of the first steps to undertake.
Google Adwords, or Google Keyword Planner, is what you need to cosy up to right away. It gives you numbers on the most popular search terms, and helps you narrow down the scope of what people are looking for. If you sell clothing, then you’ll quickly realise that the keyword “t-shirt” is going to bring back so many more hits than “caramel-coloured scoop neck t-shirt”.
2. Know What the Different Types of Keywords Do
If you’re new to the keywords game, you may be thinking that keywords are just that — keywords. Why would there be more than one type of keyword out there? There are, though, with each type performing a slightly different function. Let’s take a look.
- Keywords: These are your most basic words or phrases that sum up what your page is about. Let’s say you sell grandfather clocks: Some of the keywords you might employ would be “grandfather clock”, “clock”, and “antique clock”. These keywords are the most elemental way a person uses a search engine to match up with your page.
- Longtail keywords: Just the same as keywords, except longtail keywords contain three or more words. Say you’re still selling grandfather clocks: Your longtail keywords would now be something along the lines of “mahogany wood grandfather clock” or “oak living room grandfather clock”.
So far so good, right? Hang on, there’s a bit more because you have to understand how keywords and longtail keywords affect…
Average Monthly Search Volume
It’s not good enough to just know what keywords are — you have to also understand how to properly analyse them. What’s also important is knowing what they mean specifically for you and your business, because keywords that have the highest search volume in general aren’t always going to be right for you, such as if you deal with niche products. As a rule of thumb, though, higher search volumes tend to mean more traffic, and more traffic tends to mean a higher conversion rate.
Lastly, you should understand what “competition” means in reference to keywords. It means how easy or hard it is to get a particular keyword ranked higher than others, with your best-case scenario being a highly searched-for keyword with low competition. But like so many other best-case scenarios, this is usually something that happens fairly rarely, and definitely not something to base your entire strategy around. And don’t forget that paid advertising competitiveness is the main way Google Keyword Planner works, even if it sometimes overlaps with organic search competitiveness.
3. Understand Your Amazon Marketplace Search
Amazon’s marketplace works a little different to Google’s but in essence, they are focused on the same goal—return the most relevant search results for your search terms, but you can super charge your listings’ visibility by optimising them precisely for Amazon. We cover this in more detail in our series about Getting Your Amazon Products in Front of Buyers, but essentially you’ve got to ensure your listings’ titles and descriptions (as well as price) are better than your competitors’ and correctly categorise them according to Amazon’s criteria. When that’s done, you can go on to optimise your product page so it ranks prominently by following our quick 10 Commandments for Product Search Optimisation.
We’ve talked about regular keywords, longtail keywords, search competitiveness and search volume, but here’s another keyword for you: repricing. It’s the practice of continually adjusting your prices to reflect the competitive nature of the ecommerce industry, and ensuring you always reach the widest net of buyers possible. At RepricerExpress, we’re super excited to bring you the best repricing software available, and even more excited to give you a 15-day free trial to check it out for yourself.
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