E-commerce Search Engine Optimisation (eCommerce SEO), is essential if you want to rank your online shop in as a high position on Google as possible. It will help your ranking on other search engines too, including Bing, but in 2025 Google is the most important search engine for e-commerce businesses in New Zealand.
The Google shopping search results are delivered based on relevance (as with all Google results) and also recent searches by each individual. In this way search results are individualised.
Doing this means knowing the specific keywords and phrases that are related to your shop products.
So you’ll need to do keyword research, which is an essential bedrock of e-commerce SEO.
Keyword Research
For shopping SEO results make your keywords aligned with each product you sell. Different types of searchers need different results – general information is not the same as results for customers looking for products.
Search queries align with each stage in the sales funnel. This includes people who have just started their search right through to people who know exactly what they want to buy and are now looking for the best deal.
Your keywords must first appeal to product searchers, not information searchers. For a quick sale, you then want to capture people who are close to making a buying decision. Remember what we wrote about about individualisation? You may still make a sale if customer has previously clicked on your shop products and they come back to search again.
Find Keywords With Buying Intent
The aim is to identify commercial keywords that indicate how close the customer is to buying.
Before you brief an SEO professional you need to know good keywords for your product range. Where do you find keywords?
Start with places that people often use to search for products. This includes:
- Amazon
- eBay
- YouTube
- Any other strong website that sells similar products to yours
Start by typing into the search box a keyword you think will rank well. Look for autocomplete options that will suggest other related phrases or questions.
On Google, also look for the People Also Ask section.
The great thing about using this technique to find keyword ideas is that major websites like Google, Amazon, and eBay understand the phrases the people use when searching for products, and they understand buying intent. They will show you answers which you may not have thought of.
AdWords Keyword Planner
You can also use the Keyword Planner in Google’s AdWords product to find keywords. You will need to have an AdWords account – it’s free.
- Sign in to your Google Ads account.
- Click the Tools icon (represented by a wrench symbol) in the top menu.
- Under the “Planning” section, select Keyword Planner.
The Keyword Planner will generate keyword ideas, and give you the average number of monthly searches for that keyword. You’ll also find AdWords bid information too, which can also be helpful because you can use the estimated bid for a keyword to get an idea of the level of competition that exists within the ad auction for that keyword.
Research Your Competition
The final source for e-commerce keyword research on this list is to check what your competitors use. Ubersuggest is a useful a keyword tool – it’s free to register but throttle control exists for daily searches.
Also manually check competitor websites and look out for Page Titles of product pages as well as the titles they give to products. These are key words and key phrases.
Keyword Research for E-Commerce SEO is an Ongoing Process
SEO never stops. So don’t stop searching and adding to your list, finding new opportunities, and getting rid of under performing keywords. Make this a weekly 15 minute task.
the numero® SEO team are happy to give your ecommerce store an audit to help you benchmark your performance against key competitors.
