We mentioned in an earlier blog , Top Five Seo Tips for Yahoo Ecommerce Storefront Owners, that developing a keyword portfolio is crucial for Yahoo store SEO success. This blog will offer additional details on why and how to do it.
First, remember that many new ecommerce store owners might know their business well, but the keywords or key phrases that are actually being searched on the internet might not be as apparent as they think. Most new store owners immediately think small business SEO keywords can be gleaned from mission statements, service  statements, customer feedback, product descriptions etc., but this is not entirely true.
Let’s look at FastPivot.com as a quick example: If we pulled SEO keywords from our own service description: “Fastpivot.com offers complete ecommerce website development and strategic marketing for companies of all sizes – from start-up ventures to established entities,” it might be difficult to determine which exact words or phrases customers are likely to search. Actually some of our top keyword phrases aren’t even included in that service statement!
The same challenges would be present if FastPivot.com tried to net keywords from customer interactions and regular inquiries like: “Do you build Yahoo stores?, Do you do custom yahoo store development?, Do your developers know RTML programming?” etc. Sure FastPivot.com is a thought-leader is in these areas, but it’s important to isolate keywords that are proven search terms. Just because customers inquire with these questions via email and on the phone, it doesn’t mean they’re using those same phrases to search for answers using a search engine.
In short, if FastPivot.com had to extract keywords from such service descriptions, general customer interaction or were to just brainstorm on all the possible keywords potential customers are likely to type in and then re-insert them back into our content, a lot of time and effort would be wasted.
Some business owners may still wonder: “What if I just run a online store that sells a single and fairly simple item, like socks…shouldn’t it be a no-brainer to just use ‘socks’ as a keyword? Well, if you owned the only store on the internet that sold socks, the answer would be yes, but since you’re not, it’s better to get a little more specific than you may have thought you would have needed to initially. Try adding SEO modifiers to the generic term and you might come up with: blue socks, argyle socks, men’s blue socks etc. The more specific you get, the less competition and the easier it is to get SEO positioning.
However, you want to make sure the keywords are competitive and relevant enough to populate in a search and attract the right consumers to your site. Of course, some people try employing SEO techniques like using popular keywords in weird, little used phrases. This SEO strategy might cull traffic, but you’ll be attracting consumers who probably are at all interested in your particular product and this usually yields a high bounce rate.
There are a variety of online SEO resources and SEO tools that can be used to pinpoint the most popular and competitively used keywords.¬† SEOBook.com Keyword search, WordTracker, RapidKeyword.com, Google Keyword Tool, are some of the most popular and effective keyword generators. Although there are free options with some of these tools, the fee based ones may yield more valuable or useful information, depending on the extent of service you need and the level you’ll be working at.
A couple of pointers to remember while using these aforementioned tools:
- If you’re selling different products, you’ll need to go through this process and create a keyword portfolio for each one of them.
- These tools will generate extremely useful results like keyword competitiveness versus keyword popularity. This is particularly important to remember because as we stated before, you don’t want words that are too popular because those keyword searches always bring visitors to the more established internet storefronts. The key for new online store owners is to pick keywords that are popular enough to be searched, but not quite as competitive as most general search terms are.
Once you’ve built a solid list of about 30-50 catchy keywords, dump that master list into an Excel sheet to create an interactive form displaying relevant SEO relationship statistics to help with future decision making.
Now that you have the right set of keywords to direct visitors your way, make sure not to force too many keywords onto each page; three or four are sufficient, otherwise you’ll lose literary integrity and your content will read like it’s been stuffed.
Contact the FastPivot.com SEO experts for SEO training or hands-on implementation assistance.
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