Keyword analysis for an effective ecommerce SEO campaign

E commerce is one of the best places where the effectiveness of your keywords can literally mean a saving of thousands. The main reason being that you aren't using the internet to build your brand or accumulate leads. You have a website from which people can pay and buy things right away. If you rank well for your top keywords, you can minimize on your ad spend and gain from organic traffic. Given the amount of competition and rising bid prices on ads, your SEO can be a game changer. This is why you need to ensure you follow the right keyword strategy for your e commerce website. Here are a few tips

1. Research before you leap

If you are selling in a general category like apparel or jewelry, you will know that it can be extremely competitive. Unless your niche is very specific, you are in for the Game of Thrones style battle for SERP dominance. From keyword tools to MOZ, several free tools in the market help you determine the most important keywords that should feature on your website. While your homepage will be optimized with the most common 'industry' or 'category' keyword, your individual product pages can be optimized with your product keywords and brand names. Your keywords need to be a combination of short and long tail keywords to be effective.

2. Position yourself with the right keywords

When there are hundreds of websites selling products in a similar category, it is an uphill task to see your website rank well and can take months to get anywhere in the first few pages. That is, unless you differentiate your brand by creating a proper positioning. Use your USP to your advantage to create this differentiator. For a jeweler brand, it can be about the pricing, the occasion, or simply the target audience it is gunning for. A 16-something young woman would have a different taste in jewelry from that of a 30-year old professional. It is but natural that they will be searching differently too. Use long tail keywords to pitch your brand's position.

3. You will be battling the giants with (unlimited) budgets

Even if you are an ecommerce website selling just trendy T-shirts, you will not be competing just with others in the same category. You will have the big players like Amazon also playing in the same field. These are companies with a much bigger SEO and AdWords strategy with an army for assistance and a substantial budget to back them. While your site may have only a few hundred pages, they may have thousands making them more potent from Google's view. To counter this, your keywords need to be slightly different from the way the biggies use it so that you can count on the variations and long tail to work better for you

Last but not the least, ensure that your content team is aligned with your keyword strategy and is creating cornerstone pieces of content that can be a traffic driver in the long run.