Keyword Research for Your Product Pages: The Ultimate Guide

Search traffic remains one of the major sources of traffic and conversions to any website. Keep your organic search visibility in mind when working on your most important “money pages” (i.e. those that drive direct sales).

In this article I’ll go you through both basic and advanced keyword research tactics for your product pages that will also positively impact conversions.

Keyword research lies at the heart of any marketing campaign, whether it’s a local or an international business. And despite what many business owners may think, keywords are not for search engine optimization only.

Keyword research helps a marketer:

• Analyze your competition and learn from it (what is it they are doing that seems to work for them?)
• Guide your content marketing campaigns
• Identify market gaps (what is missing and where does my opportunity lie?)
• Understand your customer better (what is it they are searching for and how can I help them?)
  

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Think about keyword research this way:

Behind each search query there’s a human being with an actual problem. Whether your (product) page is able to solve that problem well defines how successful your business is.

In order for keyword research to be able to provide the required amount of insight, you need to:

1. Group those keywords by relevancy (Providing a solution to each group)
2. Group those keywords by search intent (What is it your customer is going to do when searching?)

Let’s see these two in action!

Step 1. Identify and Group Your Keywords by Relevancy

1.1. Run Your Keyword Research Tools

The first step of keyword research is running your core term through tools like Spyfu, Majestic, Ahrefs or Wordstream and downloading hundreds of phrases your target customer is typing when searching for solutions, answers and/or products in your niche.

1.2. Use More Market & Niche Research Tools

Here’s one problem with traditional keyword research tools: Your competitors use them too.

Going a few steps further to better understand your niche is never a bad idea.

For example, searching Amazon and picking some ideas there is never a bad idea. Here’s the trick we discussed over at #VCBUzz Twitter chat on improving organic click-through rate:

Check out the market leaders’ TrustPilot/Feefo. Filter to show 4 and 5 star ones. Copy tonnes of their reviews into a word doc, remove filler words or words like “reviews” and run it through a Word Cloud generator. Find common adjectives people associate with a positive experience with this sort of service.

For example, with mortgages I found it was “quick” and “easy.” So used those in page titles and improved CTR notably. Different adjectives are used in different services very often

(Hat tip to Stacey MacNaught)

Another cool idea is to research your niche courses as these offer the best combination of influencer-driven and user generated content. Online learning marketplaces like Udemy or Skillshare allow you to search online courses and instantly see reviews and demand for those.

Kajabi Marketplace arguably offers more fruitful research opportunities. Kajabi is, after all, a platform that lets you create self-hosted courses, so the course sellers active here are more likely to take topic optimization and discoverability seriously than those active on platforms that promote courses for sellers.

What’s more, the Kajabi Marketplace is curated by Kajabi management to only include the very best and most successful content, so the course products listed here are from only real experts and niche influencers.

Once you find a course that may be complimenting your product, click it to see the details and pick up some keyword ideas.

This process will also help you find some niche influencers to possibly work with to promote the products that compliment their business.

(Hat tip to WordStream)

1.3. Add Question Research

Question research is another great source of keywords. You can pick up some question research tools and trick in this article.

Now that you have lots of data to work with, how to make sense of those enormous lists? There’s no way you can create as many landing pages to match all those search queries.

1.4. Cluster Your Keywords

Identify groups of keywords by relevancy and optimize your product page for the group of keywords instead of each individual one.

Serpstat’s clustering feature is a great way to make sense of huge keyword lists. It breaks your lists into meaningful groups based on how they are related:

How can this research help both rankings and sales?

Grouping your keywords helps you maintain focus: Instead of trying to target each individual query, it allows you to create landing pages that can get ranked for a variety of keywords within one group and capture all those potential leads.

On the other hand, keyword clustering gives you a better understanding of your niche, types of queries and questions your target audience tends to ask online. This provides you with more structured and organized ideas on how to serve them better.

Step 2: Group Your Keywords by Search Intent

Search intent analysis is the most important aspect of keyword research. It defines all your further actions when it comes to content creation and search engine optimization.

Search intent reflects the most probable kind of action a user is likely to take when searching. In other words, it helps you identify what your target customer intends to do when searching.

There are three main types of search intent: Do – Know – Go

• Do: Commercial search intent, also known as “transactional” search intent (your target customer intends to buy)
• Know: Informational search intent (your target customer is exploring the topic)
• Go: Navigational search intent (your target customer is searching for you or your competitor)
  

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Now, with our step above in mind, instead of assigning intent to each individual query, we try to identify search intent behind our keyword groups, which is much more doable:

So what’s next?

2.1. Match Your Landing Page Content to Search Intent

Now that we know what people are searching, create and implement your keyword optimization plan:

2.2. How can this research help both rankings and sales?

Search intent helps you understand your customer better and consequently serve them better. There’s no point in trying to sell right away to someone who has no intention to buy: This will result in page bounces (sending poor signals to Google and losing your leads).

Matching your page content to the search intent results in higher conversions and better page engagement (which is also an important search ranking signal)

Step 3: Create Content Matching Google’s (and Customers’) Expectations

The first two steps may have taken you a couple of days of work. On the bright side, this research will last you for a year or so (before you’ll have to re-address your search positions or introduce a new product)

Now that you know which keyword group refers to each product page, and which action is intended (“buy”, “research” or “research, then buy”), it time that you start creating content.

Google generates these search snippets based on what it is they have found to be serving the user best. We can reverse-engineer Google’s editorial decision and build the product page that matches both Google’s and users’ expectations best.

How can this research help both rankings and sales?

Like with search intent, this is another level of matching users’ expectations better, this time using Google search result page analysis.

The idea is, Google has already found that these terms tend to do a better job satisfying their users, so our task is to add them with in the copy to engage those people better, once they land on our page clicking through the search result.

Step 4: Ask and Answer Questions

Niche question research gives you even more insight into your target audience struggles and your own content opportunities. With Google’s “People Also Ask” boxes this research is easier than ever.

Notice those “People Also Ask” boxes all over search results offering users a list of related questions on the topic they have just typed:

Whenever you are working on your product page copy, take note of those “People Also Ask” results and think how they can be utilized.

It makes perfect sense to address popular questions on the landing page. This will accomplish several goals:

• Improve the page organic rankings (more optimized content generally helps rankings)
• Get it featured more (Most of those questions trigger “Featured Snippet” results when typed into Google’s search bar)
• Improve conversions+user engagement by giving your target customers good answers to their questions (and showing how your product can help)
  

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How can this research help both rankings and sales?

Questions are highly engaging: Asking a question triggers an “instinctive elaboration” reflex in human beings prompting them to stop and look for an answer. And higher engagement results in more time spent on a web page, more time to consider your offer and a higher likelihood of the conversion.

Putting it All Together: Creating a Search Optimized Product Page

So to make it easier for you, here are your basic steps:

1. Identify keywords people may be typing into a search box when looking for products and/or solutions you offer (using tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Spyfu)
2. Group those keywords by meaning using Serpstat clustering
3. Identify search intent behind each group to map out which group should applied to which landing page
4. Build content implementing the chosen group of keywords as well as related and neighboring terms using TextOptimizer

Further reading:

• 5 Elements of a High-Ranking, Better-Converting Product Page
• Growing Your Organic Search in International Markets [INBOUND Presentation Write Up]

And how do you research keywords for your product and landing pages? Let’s discuss!