How to choose the keywords to target

How to choose the keywords to target

Start talking to people in the business of search engine optimisation (SEO) and they’ll start talking about keywords. Start reading about online marketing anywhere and it won’t be long before you start hearing about keywords. What are keywords, how do you choose them, and what do you do with them when you’ve chosen them?

Keywords are the words or phrases that customers will use to find your website, and in the context of an online shop more specifically the words or phrases of the customers who will buy your products. It’s important to understand your customers well as the choice of what words and phrases to target and how is part-science but part-intuition as well. Here are some important considerations for choosing the right search engine phrases to target for your online shop.

Understanding your customers must come first

If you don’t understand the kind of customer who will actually buy your products, then you might be optmising your website for traffic that will not result in sales. This will make you feel good that so many people want to visit your website, but as an online shop traffic is usless if it doesn’t convert visitors to buyers.

It’s important to understand that in a competitive market customers will be shopping around for the best deal online, and this shopping around mindeset is growing not declining. This means that not all of the visitors will convert into buyers. You need to understand how to get the buyers when they’re actually in the buying mindset so that you don’t over-optimise yourself for tyre-kickers and window-shoppers. But if you’re too focussed on the buying side and don’t sell the benefits of buying your products from you to begin with, then you will not succeed either.

We recommend doing some customer profiling at the very start of developing your marketing strategy as you understand the type of person who will eventually go through checkout on your site, visualise who they are and understand what will motivate them to buy. What need are they fulfilling buying from you? Why will they buy this product rather than just browse for it? What information do they need to buy the product? Why will they buy it from you?

Mindset: what your customers will search for

Once you understand who you are selling to, you’re ready to start deciding what search phrases to “optimise” your website for. This must be done by thinking of those customers you have defined from their perspective. Ignore the way you describe your products when talking with your suppliers, think about what people will search for when they look for your products online. Here are some ways people think about products:

  • By brand (e.g. Electrolux)
  • By location (e.g. vacuum cleaners Sydney)
  • By what it does (e.g. bagless vacuum cleaners)
  • By generic category (e.g. vacuum cleaners)
  • By problem (e.g. clean up pepsi stains)

and so on. Unless you’re taking about a product that is sold by name or by size (e.g. Applie iPhone 5, Womens Clothing size 10, Subaru Forester Accessories, Core i7 CPU), generic problems may be more highly searched than the product names or your company name so you have to take that into account when deciding on your search phrases.

Working out what is best

Ultimately, you will have to go with your instinct on what to optimise your site on, based on your understanding of your customers, but you can look at competitiveness and traffic figures published by advertising sources like Google Adwords to get an idea of how many people search for the phrases that you wold like to optimise on.

One word of warning is not to go after too many words on one page. Optimising a page for one word/phrase may de-optimise that page for other words and phrases, and the more words you try to optimise a page for (especially the home page), the worse you will be in the long run as you may end up optimised for nothing.

We suggest you look for specific phrases rather than competitive words, and really understand the customer and where they are at in the purchase cycle when choosing the keywords to target.

Links are votes

Whatever your search phrases that you decide on are, start building links using those words as linking phrases (called “anchor text” in search engine speak). This means when you get a link to your site, get the link created using  the word or phrase in a prominent place in the sentence. Don’t make all links the same, and don’t just put your company name in the link unless you are the leader in your industry and your company name is synonomous with your products and brand.

Make sure your shopping cart gives you the tools to build links: like Facebook like buttons, and Google+1 buttons for example on your product paes.

One way you can find good words to target is to use advertising – advertise on a number of words and phrases and see which ones are generating you clicks. This is as good a place to start as any in determining words and phrases to target for your online store.

You will find that you need to experiment to get the mix of words right, and the pages you target right. Tools like Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics will help you there, as well as the statistics tools like Visitor Tracking in the admin of your Ozcart store.

Ozcart Ecommerce

Ozcart has been in business since 2006 and is an online, hosted shopping cart that you can use for your current or new online store. We offer so many features for the same low price. In fact, we are addicted to adding new ones to ensure that we remain one of the best choices for a shopping cart. https://ozcart.com

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