Keyword Research
Keyword research is fundamental to search engine optimization. Our library of keyword-research content includes basic instruction, little-known tactics, mapping keywords to content, helpful tools, assessing keyword difficulty, and more.
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Keyword Research
SEO: Google Limits Keyword Data to Advertisers Only
September 16, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
Keywords and topics are central to contextual relevance, a primary ranking factor for search engines. In the wake of the changes to Google’s Keyword Planner, the natural search industry’s go-to ...
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Keyword Research
SEO: How to Maximize the Long Tail
August 12, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
Ecommerce sites are naturally suited to target the long tail of organic search performance. How you optimize your site determines how long its tail could be. The long tail of search ...
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Keyword Research
SEO: Using Keyword Research to Better Your Business
February 5, 2016 • Jill Kocher Brown
Which products and attributes do your shoppers want most? How could your navigation help consumers find what they want faster? What content areas should you focus on? Where should you ...
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Keyword Research
SEO: The Best URLs Contain Keywords
November 20, 2015 • Jill Kocher Brown
Most ecommerce sites that perform well in organic search have jumped on the keyword URL bandwagon. Optimizing URLs to contain keywords is good for search engine optimization and also helps ...
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Keyword Research
SEO: Prioritizing Keywords and Content
November 2, 2014 • Jill Kocher Brown
With limited resources and a vast sea of keywords and content that need optimization, some marketers need to prioritize the search engine optimization work they do to focus solely on ...
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Keyword Research
SEO 201, Part 7: Using Structured Data
October 24, 2014 • Jill Kocher Brown
This is the seventh, and final, installment of my “SEO 201″ series, following: “Part 1: Technical Rules”; “Part 2: Crawling and Indexing Barriers”; “Part 3: Enabling Search-engine Spiders”; “Part 4: Architecture Is Key”; “Part 5:
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Keyword Research
Google Updates Keyword Planner with Dates, Devices
April 25, 2014 • Jill Kocher Brown
The depth of keyword data available to search marketers has varied widely over the last couple of years. This week, Google AdWords made several enhancements to its Keyword Planner tool ...
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Keyword Research
SEO: Getting More from Google’s Keyword Planner
March 21, 2014 • Jill Kocher Brown
Keyword research is the foundation of search engine optimization. Keyword data allows us to peek into consumers’ desires and analyze what they really want. Google AdWords Keyword Planner opens that window ...
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Keyword Research
Understanding Google’s Keyword ‘Not Provided’ Data
September 27, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown
Google quietly released major changes to its search product this month to, among other things, move toward encrypting all search activity. The move is touted as an effort to protect ...
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Keyword Research
SEO: Is your Site Relevant for that Keyword?
September 13, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown
Understanding the interplay between search relevance and intent can mean the difference between a well optimized site and a lot of time wasted chasing keywords for which you’ll never rank. Organic ...
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Keyword Research
SEO: Using Google’s New Keyword Planner
July 19, 2013 • Jill Kocher Brown
Keywords are the foundation of search engine optimization. They’re what searchers type in Google’s search box, and what marketers incorporate into their web pages to attract searchers to their sites. Google recently launched a new tool that changes the way we research keywords: AdWords ...
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Keyword Research
Using Keyword Research beyond SEO
November 30, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
Keyword research is one of the foundational pieces of search engine optimization because it illuminates the exact words real-life customers use to search for the products we sell. But why stop there? The insights that keyword research provides can inform other many other areas of the bu...
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Keyword Research
Google Analytics: Overcoming ‘Not Provided’ Keywords
November 7, 2012 • Jaime Brugueras
What do you do when 36 percent of your traffic data is gone? For most of us, the answer is “panic.” After all, for an online business, traffic data and search-engine-optimization knowledge is essential. If you don’t understand the behavior of visitors to your website, then your business...
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Keyword Research
SEO: Marshaling Your Keyword Army
October 12, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
Content optimization for search engines seems straightforward. You research the keywords that your customers use most frequently and you use them on your site in the places that matter most to search engine algorithms. But deciding which keywords to apply to individual pages when you’re...
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Keyword Research
5 SEO Keyword Research Sources in Google
October 3, 2012 • Chris Silver Smith
Many search marketers are intimidated by the keyword research phase of search engine optimization. They falsely assume that it requires purchasing expensive subscriptions to tools, or hiring experts. However, Google provides a wealth of data that you can leverage if you know where to look. Read on for five fantastic sources of keyword ideas in Google itself.
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Keyword Research
SEO: Using Excel for Keyword Analysis
August 17, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
Excel is the SEO tool I use most frequently. Excel helps me organize my thoughts, decide which keywords or pages to focus on, illustrate key concepts, and even draft rudimentary content. This article lists my favorite Excel formulas, menu items, and keyboard shortcuts for search engin...
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Keyword Research
SEO Keywords: ‘Red Roses’ vs. ‘Roses Red’
June 22, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
Search engines are code-driven, logic-based pieces of software and hardware that know and do what they’re programmed to do: rank data gathered from crawling websites according to specific algorithms against searchers’ queries. Those algorithms based on keyword relevance prefer exact mat...
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Keyword Research
SEO: How to Amplify Keyword Signals
May 11, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
Search engine optimization is all about "signal" and "amplification." The signal is simply using relevant keywords. Amplification is about how to use those keywords and encourage linking and sharing. Think of the keywords as the voice of a site and the amplification as a megaphone. The ...
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Keyword Research
Optimizing a Page for Search Engines, Part 3: Keywords to Content
January 27, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
Editor's Note: This is the final installment of a three-part series on optimizing ecommerce pages for search engines. The first two installments, "Part 1: Keyword Research" and “Part 2: Keyword Mapping,” we published previously. I discussed keyword research and content mapping in detai...
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Keyword Research
Optimizing a Page for Search Engines, Part 2: Keyword Mapping
January 20, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
Editor's Note: This is the second installment of a three-part series on optimizing ecommerce pages for search engines. The first installment, "Part 1: Keyword Research," we published last week. "Part 3: Keywords to Content" we published after the article, below. Keyword research is ess...
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Keyword Research
Optimizing a Page for Search Engines, Part 1: Keyword Research
January 13, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown
Editor’s Note: This is the first installment of a three-part series on optimizing ecommerce pages for search engines. “Part 2: Keyword Mapping” and “Part 3: Keywords to Content” we published ...
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Keyword Research
SEO: Automating Keyword Selection with AdWords API
August 23, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown
Optimizing a website around highly searched keyword terms can materially increase traffic from search engines. But identifying those keywords takes time. Few SEO managers relish the tedium of slogging through thousands of keyword variations — as critical as that process is to a search-e...
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Keyword Research
Supercharge Your Opera, Firefox Web Searches with Search-Preference Keywords
November 5, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Every major web browser allows users to conduct a web search directly from its address bar. But Opera and Firefox take this convenient shortcut a step further, allowing folks to search several different sites or engines directly from a single spot. For professionals who work on the Int...
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Keyword Research
SEO: Keyword Research and Analysis
June 22, 2010 • Bill Hartzer
Editor’s Note: is a contributor to Practical eCommerce and the owner of BillHartzer.com, a Dallas-based online marketing firm. Hartzer wrote the article, below, which first appeared in that company’s blog. Keyword research is one of the most important parts of online marketing. Somet...
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Keyword Research
Test: Mobile Search Results For Popular Retail-Shopping Keywords
March 25, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
The number of mobile users is increasing at a far greater rate, it seems, than the number of mobile sites. But some merchants have already begun reacting to the mobile web by optimizing their sites for these devices. In order to get a feel for the current status of the mobile ecommerc...
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Keyword Research
Ask an Expert: How to Get Better Search Rankings for Major Keywords
February 8, 2010 • PEC Staff
"Ask an Expert" is an occasional feature where we ask ecommerce experts questions from online merchants. For this installment, we address a question about ranking on search engines for major keywords. It comes from Jeramie Westbay, owner operator for Crazy Ed's Roadkill, an online store...
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Keyword Research
Ecommerce Know-How: Understanding Brand-Influenced Search Queries
August 25, 2009 • Armando Roggio
When shoppers navigate to a search engine and begin their queries, they usually have some idea of what they are looking for. In many cases, that initial idea is the result of brand-influence. In very general terms, search engine queries fall on a specificity scale. On one end of this s...
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Keyword Research
SEO: Estimating Sales Potential from Keywords and Phrases
February 19, 2009 • Jill Kocher Brown
The perception that search engine optimization is a limitless source of free traffic and sales is one reason that SEO campaigns sometimes fail to live up to expectations. Yes, SEO efforts can deliver excellent returns on investment. But how much expected return is realistic? This articl...
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Keyword Research
PeC Traffic Report: Use Blog Titles that Reflect Keywords and Content
December 26, 2008 • Armando Roggio
Blog titles play an important role in how search engines index blog posts. Bloggers that want to get the most web traffic possible seed post titles with important keywords and make interesting promises about the content. Many online retailers use blogs to both communicate with consumer...
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Keyword Research
Keyword Research: Wordpot Rivals KeywordDiscovery, Wordtracker
September 4, 2008 • Jeff Muendel
While website architecture, link building, and template coding all affect search engine optimization, keyword research and placement is perhaps the easiest SEO attribute to implement. It is often the low hanging fruit of an SEO campaign. To that end, a few months ago, I wrote about Goog...
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