You’ve spent time and money developing your Shopify store, but months after opening your digital doors, it’s just tumbleweeds and dust where you were expecting sales. If you’re struggling to get customers to find your Shopify store, then it’s time to do keyword research and make sure you’re category and product pages are actually targeting
You’ve spent time and money developing your Shopify store, but months after opening your digital doors, it’s just tumbleweeds and dust where you were expecting sales.
If you’re struggling to get customers to find your Shopify store, then it’s time to do keyword research and make sure you’re category and product pages are actually targeting words and phrases your customers use when shopping for your products.
Without knowing what your customers search, you’re always going to struggle getting people to your site organically, which means never-ending pots of spend on advertising.
Have you ever seen a sign for a motorway service station and thought, “we’ll wait until the next one” because the nearest one doesn’t show signs for the food or drink you want?
Imagine Google is driving down the motorway looking for a service station for a customer. You sell what the customer wants. But because you’ve not made it obvious, Google just drives right by.
Shopify keyword research matters because it’s how you understand what search queries your customers use so you can create collection and product pages, and even blogs, around those keywords.
These optimised pages are then signals to Google that you’re relevant to the customer’s search, and there’s more chance they’ll end up directing to you than the competition.
Say you’re like our Shopify agency client Charles & Ivy.
They run an eCommerce store selling high quality contemporary composite fencing and panels for people’s homes.
One of their key products is driveway gates. So, a customer looking for this product is likely to simply search “driveway gates”.
And because Charles & Ivy have a collection page that’s been written relevant to this search, they appear at the top of search results for it:
Shopify keyword matters because it helps you understand what phrases and queries your customers are using when looking for your products. Which means you’ll have more chance of creating the right content to appear for those searches.
Because you’re selling direct to customers, a lot of eCommerce searches can become instant sales. Around 64% of shoppers are directly looking to make a purchase when they begin a web search for a specific product, according to Google research.
So, keyword research for your Shopify store helps you get in front of the competition and deliver some commercial benefits for your business.
Doing keyword research helps you understand the searches that have the highest potential to convert.
We already know that Charles & Ivy ranks highly for driveway gates.
But that’s still a very broad term that’s likely going to lead to more research for customers.
Like what type of driveway gate do they want?
Luckily, because we’ve done our Shopify collection SEO, we know that many customers search for “composite driveway gates”.
And Charles & Ivy rank for this too…
This is important because the more specific the search a customer makes, the closer they are to making a final purchase.
Think of it in terms of buying trainers.
One person searches, running trainers.
The other searches Nike marathon running trainers for men size 12.
Which of those customers do you think is closer to buying something?
Doing your keyword research helps you uncover these high intent search terms that you can then create pages for to attract buyers.
Keyword research helps you uncover all the search queries and phrases customers use when looking for your products, so you can include them in your pages.
Say you sell running shoes for trail runners. One potential issue these types if runners will experience compared to road runners is puddles forming on mud trails. So if you include “waterproof running shoes” in your page strategy, you’ll appear for this query too:
Doing your keyword research can help you find similar searches for products that mean you’ll appear for a much broader range of enquiries.
Google is increasingly looking for “topical authority” in the website that it ranks, which basically means how much expert content is on your site relevant to what you say you’re about.
The reason is because back in the day any website could write a blog about any topic and rank for it, even if the website’s main themes were completely different to the topic of a blog.
Which is why you could have a marketing agency ranking for a search query about the best type of vegetables to grow in the summer (it makes no sense).
Doing keyword research for your Shopify store helps keep your long-term content strategy focused, meaning you can focus on building topical authority with articles and pages relevant to what you sell.
Let’s look at another of our clients, Clarke’s Golf.
For them we noticed a keyword trend of new golfers looking for the best golf clubs for beginners.
So we created a detailed guide that compared and recommended golf club sets for new players including a comparison of the best golf club sets for beginners, a guide on choosing the best golf club set for begineers and category and product pages to encourage conversions from customers reading the other content.
As you’ll know as an eCommerce business, product demand can change overtime, especially if your products can be impacted by seasonal changes, like the weather.
This is something Clarke’s Golf experiences.
As you can imagine, demand for golf products falls in the Winter because people can’t play as often. But as we get closer to the summer months, demand increases again.
Keyword trend data can show you rising demand for a product or keyword use. If you don’t already have pages for these searches, trends can help you create them early enough before the demand drops.
You can see in the example below of how search demand for “best golf drivers” starts to grow again as the UK enters the Summer months.
Using Google trends can help you find these trends in your category.
One of the most important things to consider when doing keyword research for your Shopify store is the search intent behind the search.
Search intent is just what the person expects to find on the other side of a search.
There are four types of search intent:
When prioritising search intent, always start with the most commercially valuable (commercial & transactional) because these are what people use when they’re ready to buy.
The next thing to think about with your Shopify keyword is the type of keyword you use.
There are two types:
Short-tail: A broad term of one to two words (like “golf clubs”)
Long-tail: More specific searches (best left handed golf clubs)
We’ve written a more detailed guide on long tail vs short tail keywords.
Your initial keyword list will be words or phrases relevant to your categories and products (men’s golf clubs, women’s running shoes, composite fencing)
Once you have this initial list, think about features, benefits, use cases that are relevant to your products (left handed golf clubs, waterproof golf jacket, trail running shoes)
Long tail keywords help you understand the additional searches your customers make when researching or looking for your products.
The easiest way to do this is to use a keyword research tool to find variations of your short tail keywords or find long tail searches:
If you don’t have the budget for a paid SEO tool, then you can do this research using Google Keyword Planner (which is free as long as you have a Google Ad account)
You can also use Google’s autocomplete to see what it recommends based on popular searches…
If you do in-depth keyword research for your Shopify store then it’s completely possible you’ll end up with hundreds (potentially thousands) of keywords.
And you can’t target them all at the same time, so you’ll need to prioritise your keywords so you know where to start creating content.
For prioritising your keywords, we’d recommend looking at:
Keyword relevance is the most important thing you need to look at. If you sell golf clubs, keywords about the best membership only golf clubs and courses aren’t going to be any good to you.
Transactional intent keywords are where you’ll make your money, so focus on these before you start looking at information content.
Keyword volume is how many people search per month for that keyword. Generally, short tail keywords have the highest volume because they’re broad topic keywords. Keyword difficulty is how hard it’ll be for you to rank for that keyword based on the current SERPs. Again, short-tail keywords tend to have higher difficulty.
Ideally you’re going to focus on the keywords with the highest volume and lowest difficulty. If you have a strong website already, it’s possible you could compete for high difficulty keywords straight away.
If you’re a new website, you might be better starting with lower competition searches until you’ve built up the topical authority for more competitive keywords.
Once you’ve prioritised your keywords you can start to match those words and phrases to the relevant pages.
Again, consider intent here.
Transactional pages are more likely to be product pages, while informational intent is going to be blogs or articles.
It’s important here to match the page type to the intent. Getting this wrong can hurt your chances of ranking.
The easiest thing to understand what type of page to create is to put the keyword into a search engine and see what the SERPs give you.
If you’re keyword returns a list of product pages, like in this example below, then you should create a product page for your keyword:
If your keyword returns a list of comparison articles, then that’s what you should create too.
Failing to match the intent with your page increases the chances that search engines won’t rank you, and customers will never find your website.
Customer behaviour changes all the time, and so does the way they search or the phrases they use.
So it’s important you continue to do keyword research to stay on top of emerging trends and even find gaps in the market that you can take advantage of.
If keyword research for your business sounds like a lot of work, get in touch and let’s see if our Shopify SEO agency can help.
We’ve got a full team of technical SEO and SEO copywriters who’ve helped large and small Shopify stores scale and get more customers from organic search.
Get in touch and let’s see where we can add value to your Shopify eCommerce store.
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