Step 0: SEO Research

Introduction

This guide takes in account the SEO guidance on the bestseller book 3monthstono1, and applies it to ecommerce.

It is crucial from an Acquisition point of view to set up right SEO, since organic traffic will become the most sustainable and profitable source of traffic on the long run.

Also, this guide will help to set up right the Information Architecture. Which impacts UX and therefore will help conversions.

Sprintgrowth is built on top of Wordpress and Woocommerce.

Why Wordpress? WP is powering 30% of the internet sites, it's open source and best prepared for SEO from the get go. Also, the open source WP plugin Woocommerce powers 28.24% of the ecommerce stores. Well ahead from Shopify 10%. Therefore Wordpress and Woocommerce it is a save bet with plenty of support and resources.

In this SEO research we will follow the following principle: When attempting any improvement to organic traffic, try to answer two questions:

  • If I was a Google engineer would I like, punish or be indifferent to this change?

  • If I was a potential customer will this change make me more likely to purchase or not?

Why SEO?

According to Semrush research on the leading ecommerce in the US. After direct traffic which counts for nearly 50%, the Search traffic is the leading source of traffic and its 4x larger than following one.

Search traffic and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) it's a strategy that takes months in getting traction, hence is worth setting it up from the beginning.

Search engine optimization starts with keyword research. We want to answer the question:

What is my ideal customer typing on the search box when trying to buy the product I want to sell?

We need to find keywords that share 3 characteristics:

  • Large monthly search volume. So the reward of ranking no.1 is a lot of traffic. As a rule of thumb ranking first will give you 50% of the traffic, while ranking second will give you 12%. 3 and beyond, while on the first page, will be 7% of traffic or less. So as a rule of thumb, ranking on first page will give you ~10% of traffic, and normal conversion rate will be 2%. If you know your average order value (AOV). Then you can work out the revenue expected when ranking on the first page. This way you can prioritize keywords easily.

  • Commerciality. We need searches with commercial intent such as “best ukulele UK” as opposed to “ukulele lyrics”.

  • Competition is low. Otherwise, will take long time and effort to rank first.

Hands on keyword research

There are few ways to find keywords:

  1. Common sense

Surely you can try yourself to search online for a guitar and come up with a few keywords. For example if I want to buy a guitar, I would type: “buy guitar”, “best guitar for beginner”, “cheapest guitar”, “uk guitar store”.

On the Google search result page you can see variations of the keywords and also suggestions.

  1. Check keyword variations on tools like SEMrush and Ubersuggest.

To use SEMrush we need to create an account, with the following link you have 14 day free trial on SEMrush, you can cancel at the beginning of the period.

On the SEMrush “Keyword Magic Tool” we can check related keywords. Also, we can see in order by search volume. If we are starting we will be interested in anything above 50 searches per month, and with a some purchase intent. Keyword difficulty below 70% would be feasible to rank on first page in a short time period, few months.

  1. Check competitors keywords.

On Keyword overview you can check who ranks first for the keyword. In this case Bananafingers.

  1. Check what keywords you already rank for

Same as you did with the competitor, check on SEMrush “Organic Research” your own domain. Note keywords you already rank for, and you want to improve.

  1. Check trendy keywords

In the example below we can see “Climbing hold” as a trending topic.

When we check on SEMrush, it has a very large search volume and keyword difficulty less than 60%. There is an opportunity to rank a page in few months, and sell this product as well as attracting our potential customer.

As an outcome create a table with the Topics its main keyword and the keyword variations

As you see on the above table we want to group keywords into topics, and each topic shall match a webpage we want to rank on the first page of Google Search results.

The above table will guide us on the creation of page URLs, Titles, H1 headers, Breadcrumbs, Category names, and content on each page.

Last updated