How to apply keyword research to an ecommerce website?

Any help? Thanks.

Every site has the same process...same keyword research way, tools...same seo techniques, but the efforts matter...

Hi Adrian
You are asking some good questions. First of all, yes you do want a keyword phrase that with high search volume and low competition. But how do you identify this?

Search volume from any source is merely a guess. Nobody actually knows what search volume is, in fact. Competition is even more elusive, in fact I'd say is best to ignore competition figures completely. They are mainly misleading and often bullshit.

You also refer to long tail keywords. When yes, you should try and ranks for these, but only secondarily to your main keywords.

First you research some keywords that you think you may be able to rank for. Then you check to see whether you actually can rank for them. I do this using 2 Google searches which I describe here in this post:

http://heymalc.com/the-best-how-to-keyword-research-tool-and-its-free

Finally, when you have identified the terms you can actually rank for because there is little Google competition (I describe it fully in the post referred to above) then you create your content optimised for those keyword phrases. And you add in some "modifiers" - a couple for each post or article - this is what captures the longtail traffic.

So, if you're keyword phrase is "pop-up tents", then you might try and optimise your post for that and throw in a few mentions of "best pop-up tents", and " lightest pop-up tents", "best" and "lightest" being your modifiers.

Now, about structuring your e-commerce site. It is a good basic approach that for each of your keyword phrases which you are going to rank for, you create two article pages.

These could be two articles, or it could be one article and one category page.

So, let's say one of your categories is pop-up tents. That category page lists all the pop-up tents on your site. Now, instead of doing what most e-commerce sites do and just listing your products on that page you also stick up 200 or 300 words of copy optimised for "pop-up tents".

You just need to structure this on your site so that it doesn't push all your products below the fold.

Now, you have 2 pages on your site optimised for that one keyword phrase each of which could get ranked in Google.

I hope that clarifies a little for you.

Malc