One of the most important (and difficult) parts of owning an e-commerce website is getting quality, targeted traffic to your website – and lots of it. The industry standard conversion rate for e-commerce is only 1% - 2%. That means that more than 98% of the people you send to your website are NOT going to purchase anything. Everyday more and more store owners are looking to gain that competitive advantage and one big area of focus is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO is very important part of generating free traffic from the search engines. A first page ranking for a competitive keyword can be the difference between your website making $50,000 a year and your website making $500,000 a year. Most likely the success of your website will depend on your search engine rankings and how much traffic your site can generate from those rankings. SEO is very important.

If you want a great place to start your SEO efforts, I recommend you read, “The Ultimate SEO Guide for Miva Merchant.” It contains 7 simple strategies which will give your Miva Merchant website a head start in the search engines. Also, I highly recommend you pick up a copy of Aaron Wall’s SEO Book. It is hands down the best reference for Search Engine Optimization online today.

Before you can really optimize your website for the internet, it is essential you are targeting the correct keywords. Say for example you have a website which sells dog toys. You probably want to be targeting keywords like, “dog toys”, “pet toys” or “buy dog toys online”, however using general keywords such as “dog”, or “toys” definitely will not bring in the target traffic you need.

The first step in any SEO campaign is keyword research. You want to find a wide variety of keywords which all relate to the products you sell. You have put yourself in the shoes of the consumer and think of what they are going to use to search for in order to find your products. In the case of the dog toy website get specific like, “Golden Retriever Toys” or “Frisbees for Dogs.”

Once you have exhausted every possible of combination of keywords you think of, it is time to use some tools to help us out.

Keyword Research Tools

There are hundreds of free tools out here that will help refine your keyword research. Some of the big ones are WordTracker, SEO Book Keyword suggestion tool, and the search engines even provide you with their own keyword research tools. I like to use the free tool provided by SEO Book. The have a list of some of the better keyword research tools as well as their own which is very helpful.

Below are the results from WordTracker’s free keyword suggestion tool. I typed in dog toys, and it gives me the top related searches to the term Dog Toys:

As you can see this is very helpful information and we can add these keywords to our list of keywords to target.

Really spend some time researching keywords before you jump into your SEO campaign. It will pay for itself in the long run. If you are targeting the wrong keywords, you are going to bring in traffic which is irrelevant, and they won’t end up purchasing your products.

Another great way to find keywords for your website is to see how people are currently finding your website. It order to do this, you need some kind of analytics software. One of the easiest to use and best out there (not to mention free) is Google Analytics. You can read how to install Google Analytics in Miva Merchant here.

Google Analytics will tell you how people are finding your website and also which keywords they are using to get to your site. This information is invaluable.

Now that you have a huge list of keywords to target, it doesn’t make sense to use all of them. After all, some keywords will convert better than others. Ideally you only want to focus on the top 15 or 20 best converting keywords. This will bring in the most target traffic to your website - People who are actually going to purchase your products.

But don’t stop there - besides these general keywords which you have found, each of your main categories should also be using its own list of targeted keywords. Say for example you have a category called “Dog Rope Toys” then you want to use dog rope toys related keywords in the title, Meta tags, and category header text. This will further optimize your websites sub pages.

One of the most asked questions is, “How do I know which keywords will convert best for my site?” To answer this question you need to do two things, Test and Track.

One of the quickest and easiest ways to test which keywords convert well is to use Google Adwords to create a test Pay Per Click Campaign. This allows you to quickly test out different keywords and see which ones are getting the most clicks to your site. But you don’t just want to track click, you want to track purchases. In order to do this, you must be using Adwords conversion tracking. This allows you see which keywords actually resulted in purchases. This is a great way to quickly see which keywords will work best for your website. Test and Track!

Keyword research is the first step to any successful SEO campaign. It takes a lot of time and a lot of testing, but it is well worth the effort. Once you have your list of great converting keywords, optimize your site with them and pretty soon, your site will be getting the 1st page rankings it deserves.

About the Author: Brennan Heyde is an e-commerce consultant working in San Diego, Ca. He specializes in online marketing and SEO for e-commerce.  Have a struggling e-commerce website? – Contact Brennan today for a site analysis.