Focusing on your keywords
An entire book could be written on keyword distribution for e-commerce websites; however, as the aim of this book is to cover the main aspects of optimizing a Magento store, we cannot go into too much depth. Instead, we'll focus on three major considerations when choosing where to place our keywords within a Magento store:
- Purpose: What is the purpose of optimizing this keyword?
- Relevance: Is the keyword relevant to the page we have chosen to optimize it for?
- Structure: Does the structure of the website re-enforce the nature of our keyword?
The purpose for choosing keywords to optimize on our Magento store must always be to increase our sales. It is true that (generically speaking) optimizing keywords means driving visitors to our website, but in the case of an e-commerce website, the end goal—the true justification of any SEO campaign—must be increasing the number of sales. We must then make sure that our visitors not just visit our website, but visit with the intention of buying something.
The keywords we have chosen to optimize must be relevant to the page we are optimizing them on. The page, therefore, must contain elements specifically related to our keyword, and any unrelated material must be kept to a minimum. Driving potential customers to a page where their search term is unrelated to the content not only frustrates the visitor, but also lessens their desire to purchase from our website.
The structure of our website must complement our chosen keyword. Competitive phrases, usually broader phrases with the highest search volume, are naturally the hardest to optimize. These types of keywords require a strong page to effectively optimize them. In most cases, the strength of a page is related to its level or tier within the URL.
For example, the home page is normally seen as being the strongest page suitable for high search volume broad phrases followed by a tiered structure of categories, subcategories, and finally, product pages, as this diagram illustrates:
With that said, we must be mindful of all three considerations when matching our keywords to our pages. As the following diagram shows, the relationship between these three elements is vital for ensuring not only that our keyword resides on a page with enough strength to enable it to perform, but also that it has enough relevance to retain our user intent at the same time as adhering to our overall purpose:
