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Hi @hanzvella,
You're on the right steps - keyword research is the very foundation of SEO success. However, keyword research is, well, not really easy. First you need to categorize the keywords you want to aim for.
Let's say you're selling Dog Chew Toys - which will be the keywords you're going to target?
- How to keep my dog happy?
- Dog toys near me
- Buy dog chew toys online
Now you want to target the last one right, but should you?
Hold off your horse - Before jumping right into it, let take a step back - these three options are three types of keyword:
- Informational keyword - this type of keyword matches the first stage of the online buyer journey - Awareness. Buyers use informational keywords to help them learn more about a topic, problem, product.
- Navigational keyword - this type of keyword matches the second stage of the online buyer journey - Consideration. Buyers use Navigation keywords to learn about a specific offering (dog toys) - these keywords often include brand-specific terms and navigational phrases like Near me, Features of, Reviews, Prices.
- Transactional keyword - this type of keyword matches the 3rd stage of the online buyer journey - Conversion. Buyers are ready to buy, and they are using transactional keyword (or product-focused keywords) to take action. Hence, these keywords often include phrases like: Discount, Buy, For Sale, Where to buy, etc.
Simply put, you use Informational keywords and Navigational keywords for creating content (blog posts, video, tutorials) to lead potential buyers to your store, and get them to be familiar with your brand.
At the same time, You use Transactional keywords for your Product Pages, to tailor the product pages and match it with the conversion step of the buyer's purchase process.
Now, let’s go over the keyword research process
Step 1: Keyword research tools 1. Aliexpress
Head-to-head with Amazon, Aliexpress is one of the biggest eCommerce sites, and also a goldmine of keywords. To tap into its potential, first head over to Aliexpress, enter a keyword that describes your products and check the suggestions.
The suggested keywords are often long-tail keywords, which tends to have a clearer buying intent, convert better and have lower competition.
This tactic can be easily replicated on Amazon as well!
2. Answerthepublic
Answer the public is a great tool to explore long-tail keyword ideas. Head over to Answerthepublic.com, enter your broad keyword (dog toys).
Wait for a for minutes, and get access to a bountiful of long-tailed keywords that can be used for your blog pages, or for your product pages.
3. Keywordtool.io
Similar to Answerthepublic, Keywordtool.io helps you explore long-tail keyword ideas. Free plan is available, but you'd need to upgrade to see more details, like search volume and keyword difficulty.
Step 2: Keyword selection tools
The above approaches should help you get plenty of keyword ideas for your Shopify store - the next question is What keyword should you select?
To decide it, use these 02 main criteria: Search Volume and Keyword Difficulty.
- Search volume tells you how many people have used a specific search query.
- Keyword difficulty tells you how competitive that keyword is.
So the ideal approach is that we'd want to target keywords having medium to large search volume, and medium to low competition. We'll introduce how you can get access to these data
1. Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is a built-in tool in Google Ads, you’d need to create a Google Ads account to get access to it - which should take you just a few minutes, plus, it's a free tool - so why not?
After logging in, you have two options: You can explore more keyword ideas (whose functions are similar to those of Keywordtool.io) or to get search volume data of your selected keyword.
Since we’re talking about how to select a keyword, head to option 2:
You can either enter your keywords, or put all of your keywords in a CSV file and upload it onto the search box.
After that, select Historical Metrics tab, you'll see Search volume and Competition information. Top of the page bid indicates how much money you'll need to spend to get Ads about Dog Toys to the top of the page. A high CPC indicates buyer intent - however, “high” is relative, for some niches, $3.73 is a bargain, but with Dog Toys, $3.73 is considerable.
As you can see, dog toys has an attractive Avg. Monthly searches, but high competition. So you might want to try out other long-tail keywords.
2. Ahrefs Keyword Explorer
Ahrefs is an SEO software suite that provides tools for keyword research, link building, rank tracking and many more. The pricing can be a bit too high for new Shopify store owners, but I can tell it's worth every cent!
Let see how we can use Ahrefs Keyword Explorer to determine which keywords can help you grow sales?
First, head over to Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, enter your keywords or upload a CSV file containing all keywords.
You'll get a detailed report including Keyword difficulty, Search volume, and a list of your direct competitors who are also ranking for that keyword.
Scroll down to see whom you're competing with - this helps you estimate how much efforts, SEO-wise, you need to make to get to Top 10 of search results. For example, the #1 result (Chewy.com) has strong Domain Rating (the strength) of a domain, over 1000 backlinks - can you compete with that? If you're a new Shopify merchant building your store, taking a long-tail keyword route might be a better idea.
Or if you're on budget, you can use Ahrefs's free tools like Keyword Difficulty checker to check more details about the competitiveness of a keyword, or Keyword generator to get more keyword ideas. We'll come back to Ahrefs' free tool later in Step 5 and 6.
If you want to get really technical about keyword research, check out this tutorial from Ahrefs themselves: Keyword Research guide for beginner.
I hope that my answer is helpful to you. Let me know if it is with a like and thumb up.
