Optimizing Your eCommerce Site With Longtail Keywords

If you are starting your own eCommerce site or you already have one and you just cannot understand why your goods are not selling, it’s probably because your target market does not know your site exists.
It may be because you are not targeting Longtail keywords, you are trying to compete with the big boys for generic keywords, and that’s a fight that you are not going to win. Amazon, Ebay, Buy.com these guys have whole departments dedicated to getting their products to the front page of the Search Engines.

Generic vs lontail keywords

For arguments sake lets look at the keyword ‘Digital Camera’ if you type this into Google you will get over 58,000.000 results, with the top 10 sites in Google all over PR2 with thousands of backlinks. Are you going to beat them out? Hell no.
Now look at ‘Canon T2i’ this returns about 1,200.000 which is still too competitive, Now lets try ‘Buy Canon T2i’ Google results return 232,000 websites competing for this longtail keyword, this is a much more manageable number, with the correct SEO you will be able to compete.

Ranking for longtail keywords

Most of us understand the concept of SEO. It’s the same with all phrases – your potential to rank is really centered on a mixture of page strength and content material (Yes Google uses many more factors). To optimize these we use a combination of onpage optimization and link building.  
So let’s take a look first at onpage optimization.

How to optimize for the longtail keyword?

It is not realistic to explain all the different technologies and to ensure that the bots are able to crawl your site. So let me break it down:

• Firstly you have to make sure that the Search Engine Bots are able to crawl your inner pages. If the bots are not able to gain access to the internal pages then you could have bigger problems than fine-tuning your content and building backlinks.
• Push the items with the highest ROI (Return on investment) potential up in the hierarchy of your site. Amazon does this automatically, they have a huge site and cannot do it on a case by case basis, but you can, manually optimize longtail phrases with the highest search volume and best chances for conversion.
• Make sure you’re linking to the product pages with the brand and model number of the item and also put the best selling items higher in the hierarchy of your site.
• When you’ve got the internal linking right you need to follow that up with some onpage SEO. I am referring to optimized titles, descriptions, H1 tags, content, etc. Unfortunately i will have to leave the details of onpage SEO for another article.

Building backlinks for your longtail keywords

There are two primary aspects of link building that one needs to address when we’re looking at longtail keyword optimization. The first is to the homepage for site strength and the other is to specific internal pages. The rationale is that we’re going to link to particular internal pages, you’re not as powerful as Amazon and so you must build links to be competitive anywhere they do not.

Building backlinks to your inner pages is practically the same as to your homepage. True you can’t use directories but that’s nearly the only link building method that would not be relevant.
You have to build links to the unique product webpages. Amazon can create a web page, link to it and have it rank – you most likely can’t.

For products and specific models you know will be popular for a long time – building links can be a long term approach. In my opinion it’s good practice building links to “Coming soon” product pages and getting them indexed before there’s any real competition, this gives you a leg-up over your competition. You might even win out over Amazon for a while.
Don’t overdo it in the link building department. You probably have tons of products. Unless you know for sure that a specific product is going to be HUGE only build a few links and move on.

Going Forward

It’s not realistic to expect a 850 word article to cover all the aspects of longtail keywords and how they boost search engine rankings, this topic requires a 50+ page book, but i hope that i have given you enough information that you can start using to get your pages higher up in Google, Yahoo and Bing.
The best way to find good lontail keywords is by using a good keyword analyzer/keyword tool, you can use the free Google keyword tool but to get ahead of the competition you will need tools that provide better results. I have two articles that will help you decide:

Market Samurai Review
Best Keyword Analyzer