Most Yahoo! Store owners know that search engine optimization (SEO) is one key to a long-term, successful online business. On a daily basis I see and talk to new store owners either asking us to make sure their site “ranks well in search engines” or asking how they can do it themselves.

This article discusses what i believe is the most fundamental aspect of SEO, and the aspect most often neglected: keyword research.

If you have studied anything about SEO you know that search engines do not rank sites. (And if you haven’t yet learned much about SEO, read our free eBook: Search Engine Optimization for Yahoo! Stores) They rank pages. And they rank pages in relation to each, specific search performed. In other words, SEO is NOT about getting your site to rank well. Ultimately, it is about getting your site’s pages to rank well for specific keywords and phrases that your potential customers are searching for.

In order to even begin then, you must first know what keywords or phrases you want your pages to rank for. That is what we will explore.

The first thing to keep in mind when performing keyword research for an ecommerce site is that you are not interested primarily in traffic . You are interested in sales. Much of what is written about SEO focuses on how to get more traffic to your site. And for sites that are selling advertising, make money through AdSense, etc., traffic is the key. But for a Yahoo! Store (or any ecommerce site), while more traffic is better than less, ultimately traffic is not what you are after.You are after sales. If your SEO effort leads to doubling your traffic bu halving your conversion rate, you’ve just wasted a lot of effort for no more money.

So, when doing keyword research for your Yahoo! Store, start  by defining your “money terms”. Your money terms are terms that when searched for, are likely to result in a purchase by the person doing the search.

As an example, if you run a site selling cell phone supplies, the likelihood that someone searching for the term “motorola” purchasing from you is far less than the likelihood of someone searching for “motorola car charger” or motorola phone accessories”. The chances are, someone searching for the latter 2 phrases are looking to buy something you sell. thus, if you successfully expend time and money working to get your Motorola Phone Accessories page to rank well for those terms, there is a strong likelihood that the traffic that effort brings in will pay off.

On the other hand, if you spend a lot of time trying to get your pages to rank well for non-money terms, you may bring traffic, but the revenue from that traffic is likely to be much lower or non-existent.  So, focus first on your money terms.

Make Your Initial Keyword List

OK. So we know we want to begin by thinking of money terms. With that in mind, start making a list of all the money terms you can think of, related to your site. “WOW!” you may be thinking. If you have a large product catalog, that may be A LOT of terms. In order to make it more manageable, we will leave out all of the specific product names for the time being. Those are definitely money terms, but luckily, a properly optimized Yahoo! Store will automatically do a good job of targeting those terms. Start by making a list of non-product name terms. Ask yourself, what someone is looking for your products, what are they likely to type into a search engine? Ask this question for each line or category of products you sell.

This should result in a good starting point, a good list of keywords that ou MIGHT choose to target.

Vet Your Initial List

No, these terms are not running for political office, but you still need to vet them. Befre deciding which terms to target with each page, we first want to determine several factors:

1. How many searches are performed for each term in a given time period?

2. How much competition will you have for each term, and how string is that competition?

3. Do I have (or can I create) the content needed to support the term, both for SEO purposes and for conversion purposes.

I recommend assigning weights to each of these factors in order to help you rank your initial list in order of which terms will be most profitable. Keep in mind, profit is not determined by which terms could bring in the most traffic if you got to #1. Profit is determined by which terms will leave you with the most money from the sales generated by traffic brought in and after accounting for the time and money you spend obtaining that traffic.

Lets start with determining how many searches each term gets. There are many places you can do this research, but the simplest is probably just by using Google’s Keyword Tool here: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. This tool helps with this step and with the next. It will show you how many searches there are per month AND how much competition there is from AdWords bidders. Even though we are not talking about PPC marketing, AdWords competition is a good indicator for organic search competition. If people are spending money to buy keywords, chances are they are also trying to optimize for those same terms.

So, you type in your keyword or phrase, click “get keyword ideas” and Google returns a list of keyword ideas, starting with the one you entered.

Note the number of searches per month and the Advertiser Competition. The perfect keyword is one with a lot of searches and low competition.

Now that we know how many searches are performed and have a sense of how much competition the term has from Google’s Keyword Research Tool, we will get a little more information about the competition. Simply go to Google and search for the keyword. In the top right of the results screen, you’ll see:

Results 1 – 100 of about 43,700,000 for your search phrase

This shows you how many other pages in Google’s index have your search phrase. The higher the number, the more the competition. However, more important than the number is how well optimized the competition is.

In order to determine this, note the top #2, #5 and #10 result domain. Then go to Yahoo and perform the following search for each of the 3 domains:

Linkdomain:domain.com –site:domain.com

This will return all of the pages that link to that site, excluding links from that site. If this is a high number, it is likely that you will need a lot of backlinks to compete. If it is a low number, the keyword is likely not very competitive. Write down the result of this query for each of the 3 sites checked. NOTE: You don’t have to check #2, #5 and #10. Just choose a site near the top, one in the middle and one near the bottom of page 1. Checking only the top site may not give you relevant information. If the top site has 10,000 links but #10 only has 20, you may not be able to easily get to #1, but page 1 may be very attainable.

Now you should have a sense of how popular your terms are and how competitive they are,which should help to start determining which keywords are your top priority. The final step is considering your site itself. In order to effectively target and convert specific keywords, you will need content related to those keywords. You want to make sure your have content that both visitors and search engine will see as directly related to those search terms. That will help you rank for them and convert.

That’s it for Part 1 of this article. In Part 2 we’ll explore more about how to use all of this initial data you’ve gathered.