Alright, you’re probably drowning in keyword ideas now, but I have one more one for ya: The content gap tool. This nifty tool shows you all the keywords your competitors are ranking for but you aren’t. Type three (or more) competitors in the top three fields and your site in the bottom.
So now that you’re up to your eyeballs in key term ideas, how do you know which ones to actually use?Unless you used Ahrefs, you won’t have keyword data for the phrases you picked. You need to determine keyword difficulty, search volume and buyer intent to know which keywords to use.
However, it doesn’t give you keyword difficulty (don’t be confused by competition — that’s just competition for paid AdWords ads, not organic ranking). Let’s do a search for Dachshund gifts…The “Suggested bid” is the CPC. A high CPC indicates a high buyer intent, as we discussed. What you’re looking for here is a high CPC relative to other CPC — in some niches, $0.
In others (like Dachshund gifts), $0. 80 is a lot of money. Relativity is key. Take note of the volume and buyer intent in your sheet for all of your highly important keywords. Just eyeball it at “low,” “medium” or “high” based on its CPC in relation to the general CPC you see across most keywords in your niche.
But it’s not free after your trial, so this is the true bootstrap method. Pro TipYou can also find great keywords by spying on your competitors’ AdWords bids. Just perform some competitive PPC analysis and add those to your sheet!Once you’re done, just sort the results based on the best mix of traffic, KD and buyer intent.
However, if you REALLY want to get serious about your SEO and maximize your keyword spread, you should consider creating a keyword matrix. A keyword matrix is basically a way to dig through all your keywords and organize your spreadsheet to quickly determine the best possible keywords to use on each of your pages.
If that’s something you’re interested in, you can read more about it here or hire me to do it for you. Enough about finding keywords for your ecommerce website… let’s talk about how to use them!Once you know the right keywords to target, it’s time to put that information to action.
Ecommerce site architecture, or structure, is how you set up your navigation, category pages and product pages. At its core, it’s about getting the best, most relevant content in front of users and reducing the number of times they have to click to find it. There are two “golden rules” to great site structure:Make it simple and scalable.
Use keyword research to create highly relevant page URLs and subdirectories. More on that later — for now, let’s talk about what NOT to do. This is what poor site architecture looks like:It breaks both golden rules. It takes four clicks just to get to a category page, and if you want to add a product or category page, you have to hide it deep inside the bowels of your site.
Here’s why:Typically, your home page is the most authoritative page on your site. Internal links from one page on your site to another pass some of that “link juice” or “authority” from one page to another. This was formerly called PageRank, but Google no longer uses that term. Visually, it works like this:So your home page can pass the most authority to your category pages, which then pass authority to your product pages.
Your pages are the plants. Obviously, you want to give the most water to the highest producing plants — your major category and product pages. To do that, you need to send them the most internal links from your highest authority pages — which this bad example isn’t doing. This is also a good time to mention content marketing.
You can then funnel that link authority from your content to your product and category pages. Free water! (More on this in the “ecommerce content marketing” section.)Now let’s look how that’s done. Pro TipIf your site already has less-than-ideal structure, don’t go moving around pages until you’ve consulted with an SEO expert.
And remember the golden rules (simple and scalable, no more than 3 clicks)!(Pssst! Stores made with BigCommerce do this automatically.)A good site would look like this:Your home page should link to all your major category pages, and potentially even some of your best product pages as well. Proper navigation and internal linking ensures those pages get the most authority from your home page, and thus have a better chance of ranking highly in search.