This is a guest post by Tim Janssen. Tim runs a Shopify store selling Japanese chef’s knives. Time has taken a different approach to building an online business and I think offers a different perspective. Look for more guest posts from Tim in the future.
I want to talk a little bit about on-page and off-page optimization for an online store. When I sat down to write this post I began to realize just how big these topics are. So where do you start? How do you optimize something when you have no idea what to optimize for?
Before you can start optimizing your website you need to know what your potential customers are actually looking for. This is where keyword research comes into play. Keyword research is the art, yes the art, of finding out about your customers. To illustrate what I mean I will show you what keyword research means for my shop and how I do it.
When my two friends and I first started out we didn’t know a whole lot about Japanese kitchen knives. My friends are cooks and therefore were somewhat familiar with them, but none of us knew what made these knives special. I’m an Internet marketer and had even less of an idea. We came up with the idea at the gym one day. We wanted to “get rich quick” (spoiler: it hasn’t been quick so far ;-) ) and find a niche market that we could establish ourselves in. I said “why don’t we sell some special kitchen accessories” and so we eventually ended up researching all kinds of accessories.
At this point I should state that there are two ways to do keyword research: the hard way and the easy way. I opted for the hard way. Why? The hard way is free. You don’t have to spend any dime and since this blog is about bootstrapping I will of course show you that way since it’s a very good way to get started.
The best place to get started is the Google Adwords Keyword Research Tool. This is the best free keyword tool in my opinion as it is simple to use and comes from the big G itself, what more could you ask for? I started out by entering “knives” and got a pretty solid list back. I saw that Japanese knives was searched for quite often (9K searches/month as I write this) with MANY “longtail” keywords.
Let me take a minute to explain what “longtail” keywords are. Longtail keywords are related to very broad and general terms like “knives” or “insurance”. For example, “car insurance” could be considered a longtail keyword, though not a very specific one. Broad search terms get a lot of traffic per month (5 million searches). Your site would need a lot of “Google juice” to get ranked high in search results for those keywords. Furthermore, the competition is very tough for these broad keywords. Since we’re only starting out it is not advisable to compete with companies that have deep pockets for traffic. So instead of being a small fish in a big pond I prefer to be a big fish in a well defined pond. This is where longtail keywords help me. I can choose many longtail keywords, and obtain a high rank for those keywords without any serious optimization.
This is what keyword research is good for. It helps you find these keywords that you should try to go after. For my business these terms were all different kinds of Japanese knives. Santoku, Deba, Fuguhiki, Yanagiba and so on are all types of Japanese knives that I did not know before. I’m optimizing my site for these keywords and reaping the benefits of these niche keywords with little competition and very good searches on a regular basis.
You can check out your competition by just entering your keyword(s) into Google. The number of approximate results returned is your competition. For me that’s around ~200K for my main keyword: that’s a small pond but very juicy.
Here’s a quick example of using longtail keywords to make your pond smaller:
Searching for “car insurance” yields ~174 million results. This can be narrowed by adding a few terms. Searching for “car insurance for young drivers” only returns ~520K results. This is still a lot, but definitely better than 174 million. This is why keyword research is so crucial in the beginning. Use these results to determine what will sell quickly in the short term to generate a profit. Less competition means more searches per month. You can make your pond smaller and smaller this way. Of course, you also need to take into account how much your products cost. If you sell your product for $1 you’d need a lot more hits per month than if you sell your product for $10,000. Simple.
I recommend exporting the results of your keyword research into Excel. You can also use spyfu.com to find the keywords of your competitor which can be quite interesting. You can find all of the keywords and their rank for if you pay for the service but I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s a good free tool but not worth paying for in my opinion.
Another useful tool is the Yahoo Site Explorer. There’s a text field at the top of this tool where you can enter something like: “site: somesite.com –link” which would give you any sites that link to “somesite.com”. Sometimes you can just go to these exact sites and get your own links. This is very helpful when you start building “backlinks” (a topic that I’ll cover in a future article). For now it’s important to know that the fewer links a competing site has the easier it will be for your to get your site ranked well for keyword terms that you share in common.
The process I’ve described above is good for finding a niche for your online business but it can be very time consuming. You enter a keyword, export the resulting related terms and search volumes, combine it all in Excel, filter out duplicates, check out which keywords must be juicy, check out the competition for those keywords, and repeat. This is why most people say that keyword research is the hardest part of starting an online business and I can tell you from personal experience that this is true. There are, however, tools out there to make this job easier. In my next post I’ll show one of these tools.
My last piece of advice for this article is to sign up for Google Webmaster Tools. You can submit your site, authorize yourself as the owner of that site (Another reason that Shopify is a great platform is that they make this a very easy process. See the Shopify Wiki for more information.) Once you’re setup you’ll be able to see exactly which keywords you rank for and how high in the rankings you are plus your monthly views for each keyword. These are great statistics that you’ll want to have when you start to optimize your website.
Tim runs a store on Shopify selling Japanese chef’s knives. Doing solid research he has found that his top search terms are words like Santoku, Deba, Fuguhiki or Yanagiba. These keywords are paying off with highly targeted traffic and minimal effort.
No comments:
Post a Comment