Hi guys, welcome to another video in the training for Shopify x SEO. This video we're going to go through and sort of get into the real nitty gritty of optimizing estore. And obviously, one of the first things we need to do is do a little bit of keyword research. Now keyword research is really, really important. And if you've built any websites or stores before you'll you'll know how important that is. And if you've got an existing existing store, you'll you'll have a pretty good idea of what where your market is and what you're targeting.

There's plenty of pieces of software out there expensive software that you can use. And if you've got those and you can use them that's, that's great. There's some really, really good products out on the market. But I'm not going to work with those today. We're just going to work continue on the same where we can use essentially free tools to to build a strategy around their store. We're going to use anything to go out and find out the keywords that that are relevant to our market.

And that we may already be using an estore. But how we can then fine tune it a little bit more, and just have a much better idea on where our strategy is moving from from there. And it's a pretty simple, simple method that I use. But it works for me, again, using software. And there's lots of products out there in training on how to do keyword research. And some of the other can get really quite complicated.

And a little bit over the top. And to me, the best results we've had with not only eecom sites but other sites are where you just do simple keyword research that makes sense and it's logical and using the data. And that's where you find it's the best place to start. So we're going to use just work on three tools. We've already looked at these in some previous videos, sem rush, a refs, and we're going to use another The tool called keywords everywhere, which I'll talk about when we get to it. And sem rush and Iris will come a long way and sort of evolve so much that now, they can be used as standalone keyword research tools as well.

So you don't need a lot of the expensive products or software that that's out there on the market. Google Keyword planner is obviously free as well. But you just need to be aware of Google Keyword Planner, it's the data is based on essentially paid advertising and that's where the data comes from. So while it does provide information and is reasonably accurate, it's not necessarily completely relevant to organic search. And also, over the years, Keyword Planner has changed and AdWords have changed so much, that now they actually are not giving us all the data we need. So search volumes are a little bit skewed and recently removed search volumes and a lot of searches altogether.

So that's why we're going to use these tools. But however, and keywords everywhere, it does use the data from Google AdWords. But it still includes the volumes of search, which we'll show in a minute once we get to it. So we're just going to use our example site, the toy site to do a little bit of keyword research. Again, this is a site that's poorly optimized and haven't haven't had a lot of work done on it. And we can use this as an as an example when we go through the process.

Okay, so we head on over to sem rush and make sure you're logged in and you've selected all tools. And then you can see here in the field, it's got input domain keyword or truncated. So we're just going to put in the keyword and the keyword we're going to explore for our example site is plush toys. It's sort of a cool thing. Have that particular site, let it crawl a data and make sure we selected us. Then you can see it pulls back the total volume of keyword search per month for plush toys, just the broad term plush toys and it shows you that 6.6 K or 6600 searches per month.

And then also, you can come down here and you've got these other reports where it shows related keywords and also phrase match keywords. So, we'll just open up and view the full report. And then what it does, it pulls back keywords that are closely related to that particular core term, Pokemon plush toys, Mario plush toys, and on this particular store if we wanted to sell Pokemon plush toys and Mario plush toys, with these good volumes, it makes sense and it'll go into a little bit more when we talk about collections that these particular keywords or categories would actually make up our collection or particular collection pages. And as we work on down, we can see a lot of the other particular toys that people are searching for. So if you're, you know, just starting your store and you and you're, you know, you might have your heart set on a certain product, once you do keyword research, you might find that the search volume is actually quite insignificant or negligible.

And with a little bit of tweaking, it's quite simple to be able to find suppliers of products where there's good search volume, and you can actually go through the process of adding those products to your store. Having said that, the higher the volume in search, there's a good chance that there's going to be a lot more competitive. So and that's what you just need to be aware of. But this is a bit of an example of how come work so that now if we go back to To the next report, we can go to the related keywords. Now, as we go through this process, what generally happens is okay, we're trying to target plush toys on a particular site. And you might think it's really easy to if you're thinking about it, well, what what are other terms that people might be searching for when they're looking for plush toys to purchase online?

Well, the obvious one would be stuffed toys or stuffed animal toys. And we can see here that we'll actually put in stuffed toys in a minute. But there are certainly search terms for stuffed animal toys with which does have some volume and you can see stuffed animals, which is essentially the same as a plush toy. There's there's really large volume for that. So we would just keep in mind that any terms relevant relevant Stuff toys would be certainly topics and keywords that we would want to work into our site as we start optimizing the site later on. So just going back to our plush toys search term.

So what I've done is just clicked on volume here, and all that does is filter on search volume. So the highest search volume at the top, and then down to the last search volume as we we work down. So I'm gonna keep in mind some of these terms, you can even export the data into a CSV file. And you put that aside for me go to optimizing the pages later on. And you can work through these manually to make sure they're relevant to your particular site and just pick up start to look at certain turns which you might have not thought about, that does actually good volume for that you can actually work into your store. And then by understanding where the market is with these particular search volumes Once we in the next video when we work on optimizing our pages, that will actually be more than one video because we're going to work through each section of the site on its own.

Because there's a need to be quite granular for each section of the site. So we're going to keep these in mind when we work with those to understand where our volume is. And you'll see when we start working into the site, and how it makes sense. Then what I also like to do is use h refs, the keyword Explorer, so just log into h refs and go to keyword Explorer, and we're going to put the same term in just make sure we're selected. We've selected the United States just let it run its crawl. Okay, so we can see that the search volumes reasonably similar only 5000 this time, and but if you look down here, you can see you've got similar types of related keywords and one that we didn't see, I think On the other tool was stuffed animals and plush toys.

So that's a longtail type phrase that actually has quite, quite good search volume 3600 a month. But you can start to see when you start pulling back these keywords, just it gives you a much broader and clear idea of the market. So if I'm looking for a new product or a new line of products to add to my store, as we start to build the store out, I'll simply come and look at the type of plush toys that people are actually searching for. So for example, aggregate birds plush toys, when I've filtered by search volume, this is a term that you could quite easily add products to your store and be reasonably confident that the search volume is going to be there. And the Keyword Difficulty is a little bit lower obviously then, plush toy itself or stuffed animals and plush toys And you can use these Keyword Difficulty ratings to get a bit of an understanding what's going to be more difficult to rank and get organic search for then something else.

And the last thing that I also wanted to show you, which is a really cool feature that just added these questions. So essentially what this is, is it pulls back questions that people have actually typed into Google to do with that relevant topic. And this can come in really handy when we start building out a collection pages, and product pages, and especially blog posts. So you can use these questions to actually work into your content that a lot of other your competitors won't be doing. So you can work down through here and see what's relevant. And actually, again, you can export this data, and you can use that when we'll work through the pages later on.

This is a pretty cool concept and strategy that not many people are doing it. And because the longer tails and you can you've got the search volume here. He can really, you know, pick up some some low hanging fruit as it were, especially when you start working into too long content, collection pages and blog posts. Again, last free tool, this is a completely free tool. So the other two, obviously, sem rush that you have the free trial, but that will expire. And the same with a roof.

So keywords everywhere is a free is completely free. And it's a Chrome extension. So you can just grab that URL. So that URL on my slides actually for the Chrome extension, but if you just come to keywords everywhere.com to the website, and we've got the links here to install on either Firefox, or on Chrome and a bit of information about how it works. But we've installed keywords over here in Chrome, so what you can do is just open it up, first thing you need to do is go and update your settings and make sure you update your country. You've got some different filters and options here.

But yeah, I just generally leave them as default. Then we go back to the extension, and we can just go into keywords. So just be aware what this does. It doesn't want pullback, related type keywords, but it will give you reasonably accurate volumes. So if we put in plush toys, stuffed animals, Mario plush toys, plush toys, and stuffed animals. So you can see I'm using keywords that we found with quite good relevance and search volume in the other two tools.

And then we can just run get metrics and then it pulls back the volume for each of those terms. And similar to how Google Keyword Planner used to work, I like this tool once I've got my ideas from sem rush in a rush To use this tool, and it'll pull back the total search volume for the entire internet, and then it'll pull back the search volume for the location, obviously. But then it gives you the cost per click, which is equivalent to the cost per click if you're wanting to advertise on Google AdWords to gain the top one to three positions on the particular page of Google when you search, and this is a good indicator of how competitive a certain term is. So I use this a little bit say, let's say we were looking at adding a new product to our store or a new category.

To me, we ended up with three or four different types of plush toys that were pretty similar in search volume. But just for example sake, let's say Marissa plush toys had a cost per click of 31 cents and another category had a cost per click of 60 cents. This gives us a good indication that this is still really good search volume. But less competitive. So it's going to be all things being equal, it's going to be a little bit easier to rank, once we've optimized this tool correctly. And as you've worked through the process, with this tool, you can also download in PDF file or CSV or however you want to do it to work with that data later on.

Especially when you're really working clearly and you understand and you start starting to get an idea of your particular market and what what keywords, have good search volume, and within that range that you think you can compete with, always good to download the files on all tools, so you can aggregate them later on. It'll become much clearer once we work through using those keywords when optimizing our page, or pages. And it'll just give you you know, that little bit of a leg up in terms of optimizing the page correctly to get ahead of your competition. So that gives you a bit of an idea of really simply working through your keyword and analysis to get a handle on your market, the competition in the search volume for particular keywords and phrases. And you can use the related searches to work into your content later on, as we work through the optimization of the pages, using the three tools, and the in particular, the free tool keywords everywhere, which was the last time we showed.

So, I hope that all makes sense. We can now start really getting into the optimization of the pages themselves. And that'll be in the next video.