In my day-to-day role, I talk with a lot of SME e-traders about improving their SEO. Often, they have little to no understanding about how SEO works, or what it all really means. Essentially, they just know that they want to make more sales and come to the conclusion that more traffic will deliver this.

For me, SEO is a part of a bigger puzzle; it’s all about getting your design right, using social media correctly, good marketing and of course, well optimised content.

Then there’re the different aspects of SEO as Google considers many, many areas when deciding on ranking. Here, I will look at keywords.

Don’t give up

My clients often say things like, “I don’t have time to work on SEO”, or “I tried some things but nothing changed after a week or so, so I stopped.” If this is you, please keep reading because SEO is on-going; there is no quick fix and genuine, positive change can take time. This is so never truer than when we are talking about keywords. Any changes you make will take time for Google to index and breaking into the top ten for the most popular keywords will need to be a long term project.

I think it’s important to understand a few basics.
1 - Appreciate that even as a SME, you need to consider big businesses as your key competitors; after all, they are the ones keeping you out of the top ten for the major keywords
2 - Big brands will always have a lot more power due to increased exposure, more social interaction and because they have teams of people working on their SEO.

Get ahead with less popular keywords

Don’t think it’s all doom and gloom though, there are ways to compete, namely with the low competition keywords.

Let me give you an example. At the time of writing, a search for ”Adidas shoes” returns top 10 results for a few obvious sites, namely Adidas itself, Amazon and some major shoe brands. Let’s say you are a small sports retailer and want to compete. With the amount of competition you’ll find for such a popular term (millions of other pages!), this will be hard. It’s time now to invest in a keyword tool to start thinking outside the box and find those low competition keywords.

Identify your keywords

You first have to put yourself into the mind set of your average customer and there are two great ways to do this: customer surveys, or even better, Google Analytics. You can use Google Analytics to discover which search terms have previously been used to find your site and then embellish on these. You may find that rather than just searching for a general term, such as ”Adidas shoes”, potential customers may type something like “where can I find Adidas shoes” or “Adidas shoes in blue and yellow”. It’s these longer, lower competition keywords you need to concentrate on.

Adapt your content

You need to weave your selected new keywords into your site content, and a blog is a great way to do it. You can use posts to pose and answer those questions that potential customers are asking.

An example of this may be something along the lines of “Are Adidas or Nike trainers better for runners?” These types of questions provide engaging content, and they also potentially garner inbound links. Plus, you can also link to your products and drive sales.

So the advice is to think outside the box. Make sure you have access to a good keyword tool and use analytics to understand your customers. Once you decide your target phrases you can write your blog posts and post them on appropriate social networks. Once you are ranking well for these lower competition terms, breaking into the top 10 for the high competition words will be that much more feasible.

 

By Tim Pritchard, SEO specialist at ecommerce software supplier, SellerDeck

 

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