Going Way Beyond Simple Site SEO Stuff

Keyword research is normally associated with SEO (Search engine optimization), the process of improving ranking in search results. We are tasked with the importance of making sure we have keyword rich titles, tags and descriptions in our text body. But keywords are the very basis of your entire online marketing strategy and should not just be limited to your store titles and descriptions.

When putting the actual structure of your ecommerce site together, you need to be thinking about your category structures. Which keyword is best to use for that? Doing due diligence in these areas pay off in huge traffic gains long term for ecommerce sites.

Let’s say you posses a shoe site and sell athletic shoes.  How would you name the category? You might have to choose between “athletic shoes,” “runners,” “running shoes,” “trainers” and “sneakers.” Which term works best? Let’s take a look on Google Trends 

At first glance you would assume that "Trainers" was the best term BUT that word has multiple meaning. Trainer could be the guy at the gym or any other person that trains in a field (i.e. dog trainer), so you must account for these types of dual use words.

But overall, let’s say you were thinking of going with "Athletic Shoes" for your preferred category name. After looking at this comparative data, we now see that "athletic shoes" is not as popular as "running shoes" and both running and athletic are MUCH less popular that the common term "Sneakers".

Using the consumers-preferred term "SNEAKERS" for your category label would possible yield more views in search for you and your store. You want to have the terms that customers search for the most to increase mass traffic.

You get the bump in traffic, but you also get a more "customer friendly" usability bump as well. If the customer is looking for sneakers and does NOT see that term, they have to reset their brain to the other words of "athletic shoe" or "running shoe" to find the SNEAKERS they were actually looking for.

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