Self SEO, commerce confusion...

Ranking for any keywords is very difficult. I think that you are not going in the right direction with this. What ever your goal with ranking is, 100's of others are thinking the same thing which really saturates things for everyone else.

Maybe you should look into paid ads.

Hi rachjohn

My advice would be to start with your categories.

Do proper keyword research for them using a tool like UberSuggest that's free (you can Google it).

Then focus on your brands.

And then product names.

Writing 1500+ word blog posts focusing on helping people in your niche and getting traffic for your business could work better that actually ranking product pages since generally product pages hold less valuable content in terms of Google. unless your products are unique and not found anywhere else.

Mozie

Then

Hi rachjohn
I know that the high number of pages can confuse you, but just go through the basic SEO steps, and have patience.

I am going to guess you are in a tough spot. I am presuming the 3000 items are a little of this and a little of that... and there is probably really no theme as such.

By all means color me wrong and say that is not the case. IF say for example the 3000 items pertained to "Hardwood Flooring" you would need to step back and look at the process of buying flooring products. The buying process consists of 5 steps as it were.

1. Discovery
2. Information
3. Comparison
4. Purchase
5. After sales support

So using the example "Hardwood flooring" Discovery is people looking up "Hardwood flooring" meaning they basically have an idea thatthey want hardwood flooring but dont know much else... So you develop content around that INTENT in the buying process... there are many kinds pre finished, click, floating, engineered etc etc etc

Next step is information... and they have narrowed down the search a whole lot by this point. they are now searching for "Oak hardwood flooring" So again with the INTENT being "Oak" you would then set a series of pages with the species be it red oak white oak etc etc etc.. you would also include things like width of the boards etc.

The comparison stage gets interesting. part of this obviously is going to be price driven... but also taking that step back to information and even discovery you can compare engineered to floating to click. Red vs white vs royal or what ever.. you can compare finished to unfinished etc etc.

Going to skip one here and goto After sales support... how to clean your floors what products to use to maintain etc etc... as much as this is at the end of the cycle I think many buyers look at this type of material to determine if the product is a right fit for them. Even things that are NOT hardwood floors would ue this.. TV's how to do this and that when there is a red blinking light and no picture. when your phone is locked up how to take better photos with a camera. how to clean a dslr and on and on and on.

The THEORY here is if you can keep them on your site and walk them thru this process your chance of a sale obviously increases. IF you can create a fair amount of content that the user is finding your site over and over in search as they traverse thru the steps of buying you are basically BRANDING your store and developing trust along the journey

And all of this and we have YET to even discuss your product pages...

And you are thinking this is a Commerce site.. and that is true. but you cant compete with the lumber liquidaters or Lowes or home depots of the world for terms like "Hardwood flooring" but you stand a chance with other terms like "how to clean a click floor"

CONTENT in CONTEXT is your way to sales of the 3000 items you have in your store.. and again if the 3000 items are similar, your job is hard but made a bunch easier.

What if my store has 3000 non related items? the answer is pretty simple PICK ONE and build out a funnel that sells just that one item. and once you have any amount of success with that... start replicating your efforts 2999 more times

Hope that Helps!