The success of your e-commerce website has a lot to do with your site, how it looks, how easy it is to shop, your product mix, merchandising and the relationship you build with your site user. If you have no visitors none of this matters. And, unless you have an extensive advertising budget your visitors will come from search engines in the form of natural search results or pay-per-click advertising.

This makes keyword research absolutely necessary to the success of your site. Knowing what keywords and key-phrases people are using to find your site. Without this information all of your optimization and pay-per-click fees could be going to waste. This is the reason that we strongly recommend keyword research for all of our clients. 

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is the process for defining a set of keywords and phrases that are likely to produce visitors that want your products / services. After you build your e-commerce site your next step will be to try to entice visitors to shop there. While traffic can be generated through traditional and online advertising the most effective way of reaching those visitors is through search engines because search engines are where people find web sites.

How do we pick keywords for a site?

While we can't tell you all of our secrets we can give you an overview of how our process works.

• We start with a set of keywords you provide. This list generally contains only a dozen or two key phrases.
• Using our resources we do a search for about 200 sites that are ranked for each of the keywords you provide. We look at the content of each of those sites for additional key phrases that may fit your business. The number of key phrase combinations in this process is staggering - in some cases exceeding a hundred thousand possible combinations.
• We then manually review the key phrases for likely candidates for your site. This "short list" can contain as many as 500 possible candidates.
• This list of key phrases are returned to you for evaluation. Your job is to remove any of the key phrases that do not relate to your business. 
• Next we use our unique process for developing contextual relationships between single keywords and multi-word phrases. This process produces the keyword phrases used to complete the research and optimization processes.
• The next step uses a list of about over 350 MILLION actual internet searches to determine an approximate number of times the keywords are used in searches in any given 24 hour period. We use this to prioritize the key phrase list based on the number of potential searches per day.
• Once we have a list of the most used key phrases we then do two competitive evaluations. The first determines the number of sites competing for the key phrases in the top 4 search engines. The second shows the current bids for each key phrase in Overture (the most popular pay-per-click engine).
• We provide you with a process that further defines the importance of each key phrase to your business. Once completed the resulting list gives you the top key phrases you need to concentrate on to optimize your site or to include in your pay-per-click campaign. You can choose to optimize your site yourself or use our optimization services.

Basic Initial Keyword Research Package: This is the package used prior to any site optimization or the start of any pay-per-click campaign. You receive an in-depth list of keywords for your site, competitive research for the five top search engines and top 10 current bids for each keyword on Overture.

Price:    $595.00

Keyword research projects generally require at least two weeks. Contact sales@webtransitions.com or call 888.397.2474 for more information.