How to Research Keywords for Your Online Shop with Market Samurai

The success of your online store depends on quality keyword research. Did you hear that? Have you ever worked on finding the perfect keywords for your ecommerce store? When people make a search through Google they are most likely to choose one of the first ten links on the first page (usually the first or the second!). Are all of your products ranking in the top ten?

After you get up and running with a nice ecommerce platform one of the next steps is strategizing your keyword approach, since it’s an essential part of your marketing strategy.

Several tools offer options for finding relevant and high ranking keywords to boost your SEO, but one of them stands out. It’s called Market Samurai.

What is Market Samurai?

Market Samurai is a local software you can download from the Noble Samurai company. Noble Samurai sells four products: Scarcity Samurai for boosting sales with list building and sales pages, Domain Samurai for choosing the right domain name for your business, Article Samurai for syndicating relevant articles and building backlinks, and Market Samurai.

The Market Samurai platform focuses on improving your online marketing by boosting your search engine optimization efforts. Monetization, search engine rank tracking, SEO intelligence and keyword research all tie into how the program assists your online store in bringing in more customers by moving your search engine rankings up the ladder.

That said, we’re going to talk about how to use Market Samurai to research your keywords.

Why is Keyword Research Essential for Online Stores?

An online business is fueled by its search engine rankings and social power. Some businesses run primarily off buzz through Facebook and Twitter shares. These companies typically sell revolutionary new products that beg for people to email their friends.

On the other hand, most online businesses, even if the products are new and revolutionary, need to bring in organic search traffic that only results from your search engine listings landing high on Google, Bing and other search engines.

Many factors play a role in how high your pages land in the search engines, but keywords are the backbone for showing search engines and users that what you sell is relevant to what they’re searching for. For example, a discount designer tuxedo shop might target words like “discount designer tuxedos” or “cheap tuxedos for weddings” depending on how many people actually search those keyword phrases.

Once the most desirable keywords are found you can start blending them in with your product pages, including them in meta tags and even naming images to include the keyword.

The only problem is, how do you figure out which keywords are best to target for your business?

That’s where Market Samurai comes in.

The first step is to download Market Samurai and install it on your computer. They offer a short free trial for you to test it out. Keep in mind that Market Samurai is a local software so it runs off your hard drive and not your browser.

Step 1: Finding Relevant Keywords with Market Samurai

Market Samurai helps you research keywords by evaluating four areas:

• Relevance
• Traffic
• Competition
• Commerciality

The first step we want to take is figuring out the most relevant keywords for your business.

So, let’s say you run a photography business. Open Market Samurai and click on the New Project button.

Type in the most general keyword you can think of that relates to your business. We’ll type in photography and click on the Create button.

Since we want to create a list of keywords that are relevant to photography you can click on the Keyword Research button.

Click on the Generate Keywords button on the far upper right hand side of the new page.

This displays a giant list of keywords that could potentially relate to your business. The first way to remove irrelevant keywords is to scroll through the list manually and click the X button for any keywords that clearly don’t relate to your business.

So, if you don’t sell stock photography for free, just click on the X button to remove it from the list. You can also remove groups of keywords.

If you don’t sell any stock photography then none of the stock photography keywords are useful. Scroll over one of the stock photography words in the list and click on it. This highlights the word, so you can then click on the X button and it adds the particular keyword to the Negative Keyword panel.

The second way to find more relevant keywords is to hone in on the keyword phrases that include a keyword that you absolutely want to target. Let’s say we want to target every phrase with the word “photography” in it.

Click on the word “photography” in one of the phrases and select the check box icon on the right hand side. This adds “photography” to the Positive Keywords field so that every keyword phrase without the word “photography” in it is filtered out of the list.

The final way to find relevant keywords is to focus in on phrases that include a certain amount of words.

Since long tail keywords phrases (phrases with more than three words) are particularly helpful for boosting SEO, you can go up to the Phrase Length drop down menus and choose a minimum and maximum for phrase length.

After that, you should have a list of keywords that are at least relevant for your online business.

Step 2: Finding High Traffic Keywords With Market Samurai

After you’ve create a relevant list of keywords for your photography business we need to see if we can find keywords that receive lots of traffic.

Click on the Keyword Analysis button in the bottom right hand corner of the window.

Wait a moment for the search to process then move up to the Keyword Research area at the top. Check off or uncheck the tabs to reflect a similar layout as I have in the image below.

Now that you have the search results, how do you analyze the results? Click on the Searches filter to sort them from highest to lowest. This gives you three metrics to analyze.

What do these metrics mean?

Searches – Average number of people searching for the keyword each day

SEOT (SEO Traffic) – A reflection of how many visits you would get if you ranked number one in Google for this keyword (This is a better indicator of keyword strength, since you actually want people to click through your links and not just search for them)

Trends – You can click on these little trends buttons to see if the search trends are going up or down for that keyword.

So you can now filter based on how many searches come in and how much SEO traffic accumulates for the keywords. Use the first page to identify keywords that you know people are searching for.

Step 3: Evaluating Market Competition With Market Samurai

The only problem with choosing the most searched keywords is that there might be too much competition, especially if you run a smaller site. There’s often no chance of you ranking for these keywords, so it’s best to target other keywords with less competition.

Check off the Title and Anchor Comp box at the top of the window, inside the Keyword Research box.

Click on the Analyze Keywords button to fill in the information under the TAComp column in your table.

Scroll up to the Title and Anchor Comp checkbox tab you marked off before and click on the + sign. Market Samurai recommends you punch in a value of 30 to filter out keywords that are too competitive and ones that are useless to even target.

When you click out of this field it will refresh your data. You’ve now identified the keywords that have around 30 sites legitimately competing for the top spot in Google. These are the ones you should go for, because the competition is just right.

Step 4: Judging the Commerciality of Your Keywords

Moderately competitive, high-ranking and relevant keywords are nice, but we really want keywords that make money with click-throughs. Market Samurai uses an interesting formula to to value each keyword by taking the amount of money the top advertisers are spending for the keyword in Google AdWords.

To see which keywords are most valuable, go to the Commerciality tab at the top of the window and check off SEO Value and Avg. AdWords CPC.

Click on the SEOV header to filter the column from highest to lowest. This now displays the value of each keyword based on SEO traffic and Google AdWords payment trends.

So, as long as the keyword is relevant, has a moderate competition and is high ranking, you should always think about choosing the keywords with the highest dollar amounts under SEOV.

Conclusion

That’s it for learning how to research keywords for your online shop with Market Samurai. Share your thoughts in the comments section if you have any questions.

Feature image curtsey of Robert Haverly