SEO Keyword Research

The eCommerce Institute keyword research method first finds the “keywords” and search phrases your website currently ranks for.

Most businesses are sitting on a gold mine of opportunity and don’t even know it.
Once we find all the terms that your website ranks for, we will organize them into three groups:

1) Keywords ranking in positions #2-#15
2) Keywords ranking in positions #16-#50
3) Keywords ranking in positions #51-#100

Each group represents unique opportunities. The first group of Keywords ranking #2-#15 are within “Striking Distance” of a #1 position. We call these Striking Distance Keywords. It’s easier to get a keyword from here to position #1.

Getting a page from #2 to #1 can double the potential traffic! What’s so important about a #1 ranking? The page that ranks #1 for a keyword may get 30% of the clicks. CTR is the term for click-through rate.

SERP Features can influence the CTR, so it may not always be 30%. SERP features include Map Packs, Knowledge Graph, and Product Listing Ads. They take up space in the SERP and can draw some of the CTR from organic results.

So, if the #1 ranking gets a 30% CTR, a page ranking #2 might get a 15% CTR, #3 a 7% CTR, #4 a 3% CTR, etc. Moving from position #2 to #1 can be a 200% increase in CTR!

If your website has pages ranking #2 – #15, Google already considers that you have good topical authority. That’s great! Google is rewarding you with a high ranking. Moving most pages within striking distance to a top 3 ranking is easy.

We will get into the work that goes into this effort in more detail. But it includes reviewing the current page for specific ranking factors. We call this “On Page” SEO. We evaluate the page’s structure. This evaluation looks at the critical page elements that Google uses to understand the page.

The most important are page title, URL, metadata, and primary keyword usage. It includes NLP and LSI keywords, total word count, images, image SEO, and internal and external links. We also optimize for Google’s EEAT guidelines. Finally, we look at the competitor websites ranking above us. We conduct the same evaluation on their pages. The competitor evaluation helps us understand the changes needed to outrank the pages above ours.

But, before we start that work, we classify your keyword rankings by “Importance” and “Relevance.” We will focus on the most important and relevant terms first.
Importance is how much economic potential the keyword represents to your business and the likelihood we can rank for the term. We want to first target keywords with “Commercial” or “Transactional” intent. These are keywords that generate sales, leads, and revenue. They have the most “Importance”.
Next, we look at SERP results to see how relevant the keyword is to our topic. We will find the most relevant terms to our content and focus on those first.
After completing this phase, we look at the second ranking group #16 – #50. We call these “Existing” terms. Often, these terms need a new page on your website. Most often, your homepage ranks for many of these terms. That means the Google algorithm recognizes some topical authority related to the term within your website. With these terms, we need to create a new page dedicated to the term. With a new asset on the website optimized for the target keyword, it is easy to move these rankings up.

This group of keyword rankings represents a gold mine of opportunity. It’s just a matter of creating targeted assets of topical relevance on the website, and these pages will start ranking higher for the terms.

Lastly, we look at the group of keywords in the #51 – #100 range. We call these terms “Clustering Opportunities”. We will combine these terms into supporting pages. Taking groups of related terms or “clusters,” we integrate these terms into new pages. From these pages, we create contextual links to our primary pages. This structure helps Google see the highly relevant content and its internal relationship to our overall topical authority.