E-commerce SEO Masterclass: Part 3 – Nail the Fundamentals 🔍
Today, we’ll expose all the holes in your SEO strategy, but don’t fret – we won’t leave you without a solution. As you discover your SEO issues, you’ll also put together a mini roadmap that prioritizes your workload based on the highest potential impact.
Let’s audit your store to figure out what’s not working:
1. Run an SEO Audit (Your Baseline Check). Conducting an SEO audit helps you diagnose your site’s SEO problems, so you’re fixing only stuff that moves the needle for your store.
To do this, open the Plug In SEO app in your Shopify App section. In the left-hand panel, navigate to the SEO Scanner and run a scan.
Depending on how many items you have in your store, this might take time, but be patient. It doesn’t take as much time as an SEO expert would, regardless.
My scan of around 22,000 elements took less than an hour. So, keep it running in the background while you move on to the next item.
This audit will give you a roadmap for where to focus your efforts. Without it, you’re flying blind.
Now, let’s use Google to figure out what’s working:
2. Analyze your store’s SEO metrics against industry trends
You need to figure out what people are searching for today, and which bring traffic to your store.
Fire up your Google Search Console account. Navigate to “Performance” on the left-hand panel. Your aim here is to figure out what search terms customers have used to find your store in the last seven days, so that you can begin optimizing these pages and do more of what is working.
Use this handy spreadsheet template (make a copy) to write down the top keywords that brought traffic to your store in the last 7 days.
One keyword per line. If there’s a variation, add it to the “KW variations” tab as below:
3. Keyword Research (Uncovering the Gold)
Continue until you add your top ten queries to the spreadsheet and the number of clicks and impressions each keyword gets.
Now, it’s time for more in-depth research into these keywords to discover:
- Long-tail keywords (more specific phrases) your customers use to find stuff you sell.
- Competitor keywords (what’s driving their traffic).
- Product-specific terms that align with your catalog.
There are two ways to do this. Easy and cheap, then harder and more expensive. We want to get things moving quickly, so let’s start with easy and cheap.
Easy/Cheap
Open Plug In SEO again and navigate to Keyword Studio.
You should see a list of automatically generated keyword ideas based on your store’s products. Any long-tail keywords you see in these lists represent opportunities.
If you find keywords in this list related to any of your seed ten keywords, add them to the “Opportunities” section of your spreadsheet.
For example, “black opal care” should come under Opportunities
Insert a new row below the primary term to highlight these as opportunities.
If you can’t find any matching keywords related to your recent traffic generators inside Plug In SEO, move to the second layer of research – your SEO tool.
More in-depth/expensive
For this study, I’ll use Ahrefs. It doesn’t come cheap at $99/month, but the $29 version might be suitable for your needs for now. There’s also a limited version you can access at Ahrefs.com/free-seo-tools (which I use in the second example).
Type your root keyword in, to see what the internet searches for in relation to your keyword, ranked by search volume. Here’s what we get for “black opal”
Your aim is to find the highest traffic, and lowest keyword density versions of the keywords you use in your store.
In this example, all the terms for “black opal” have relatively low keyword densities (green) to be fair. However, “black fire opal” has a search volume (SV) of 1.8K (that’s 1,800 monthly searches) and a keyword density of 0 (low saturation) so, of course that’s the lowest hanging fruit – and the term we should start with.
Another thing to remember: don’t stick to just the terms you know. Type in different variations of your root keywords that you found on Google Search Console to find high traffic, low KD versions you might be missing out on.
For example, keyword research shows that the item in the photo below goes by different names, depending on what region you’re targeting.
Imagine you’re trying to put the item below in front of potential customers in the USA.
If you optimize your product titles, descriptions, etc for the term
- “tracksuit bottoms”, you put the product in front of >100 searchers monthly, up against low competition
- “tracksuit pants”, and you put it in front of >100 searchers monthly, up against low competition
- “sweatpants”, and you put it in front of >100,000 searchers monthly, up against medium competition
- “wide leg sweatpants”, and you put it in front of >10,000 searchers monthly, up against low competition
So the best keyword to optimize for in this list is “wideleg sweatpants”
P.S The limited version of Ahrefs was used for this, and won’t give you exact figures and in the “opal” example.
Rinse and repeat for all your keywords. Your store audit should be done by now. You should also have a list of low-competition variations of keywords that brought traffic to your store over the last 7 days.
🔑 Pro tip: You can use this handy spreadsheet template to track your keywords.
Resources: Search Console | Merchant Center | Plug In SEO | Google Business Profile
Missed previous lessons? Recap here: Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 4 | Day 5
Need the heavy lifting done for you? Get 50% off the Quickstart Service using code “dtcdaily50”