Automatic SEO ecommerce case study: Tahoe Mountain Sports

Posted by Mark Nunney on 07 July 2011

Smart SEO can make your online business more successful by focusing your efforts on the searches (keywords) your buyers are making. This case study shows how Wordtracker Strategizer can save you days of research trying to find those keywords, planning the actions required to target them and reporting your results.

Our case study is TahoeMountainSports.com, the website of a real world shop that like many makes a significant proportion of sales online and must do so profitably.

Using TahoeMountainSports.com as a guide, you’ll see how you can use Wordtracker Strategizer to help increase your own website’s visits and response.

If you don’t have a subscription to Strategizer you can take a free 7-day trial and copy the techniques used here.

Targets, actions, reports

Strategizer helps in three stages:

• Finding targets. Strategizer will identify the groups of keywords your SEO and PPC should target with both short and long term work.

• Planning actions. Strategizer will help you decide what actions to take with your SEO and PPC.

• Reporting results. Strategizer will monitor your sites visits, response and ranking on Google’s results pages - helping you choose your next targets and report to the boss, the board or clients.

Automatic SEO

Configure a site profile on Strategizer and you can immediately see your most profitable keyword niches – those you should target first. See the following Strategizer report for Tahoe Mountain Sports:

The report above includes:

• Short term target keyword niches that should deliver the most profits for the least effort. (Long term targets can be viewed with a few ‘clicks’.)

• A Google Insights graph to show seasonal trends for the same keyword niches. As is the case for Tahoe Mountain Sports, winter products should be sold in the winter; summer in the summer. (Your target keyword niches’ seasonal trends might not be so obvious.)

• TahoeMountainSports.com’s Google Rank (position on Google) for the seed keywords of each target keyword niche in the site’s target country (USA). Trends are graphed and changes since a chosen benchmark date shown.

• Competitors’ Google Ranks. Click the Google Rank tab to track up to 4 competitors’ Google ranks.

• Google’s estimate of the size of each target keyword niche (the number of searches made). This is for the country and language targeted and the period of time of the report (which can be seven days, four weeks or 12 months).

• The site’s % market share for each target keyword niche.

• The opportunity offered by each target keyword niche – shown in the Opportunity graph. This is the difference between Google's estimates of a niche's size the number of visits your site gets for it.

• Visits, response rates, Transactions, Revenue, Per Visit Value and Bounce Rate for each target keyword niche.

Working at the scale required for profit

Strategizer finds groups of keywords to target and we call these ‘keyword niches’. A keyword niche is a group of keywords that share the same seed keyword. Eg, all keywords containing sol sunscreen.

Strategizer does this by importing keyword reports from your Google Analytics and converting them into keyword niche reports. This is a huge number-crunching task and no other tool goes to the effort of doing it. It’s explained in more detail in this introduction to Strategizer.

Monitoring and targeting keyword niches allows you to always be targeting the long tail of search and so work at the scale required to make a profit. Ie, to target enough keywords to get the visits and response required to make the sales levels you need.

Targeting keyword niches also aids smart SEO because if your site can get results for a keyword, eg sol sunscreen, then it can easily get results for other keywords that contain sol sunscreen eg, sol sunscreen stick.

Really really easy SEO simply finds the keyword niches your site currently gets the most response from and targets those keyword niches for more visits and response.

Strategizer will find you two types of target keyword niches. One for short term SEO and PPC; the other for long term …

Short term targets with the highest response rates

The TahoeMountainSports.com report above shows short term target keyword niches.

These are the keyword niches that deliver the highest response rates.

You can see fantastic Ecommerce Response Rates over 10% for aqua socks for men and sol sunscreen.

That means that more than one in 10 visitors who reached the site by searching with those keywords went on to buy something. Very nice.

More such visitors should be easy to get. More sales should follow.

There’s a drawback with these highest responding keyword niches. They are usually small keyword niches and we can see this in the Niche Size column showing Google’s estimates of the number of searches made with them.

So because they offer the highest response rates they should be targeted first. But because they are small niches any more than a small amount of work will stop delivering a return.

Hence they are short term target keyword niches.

Bigger niches worth bigger investments over time are long term target keyword niches …

Long term targets with the biggest potential

You can quickly see your site’s long term target keyword niches by clicking the ‘New Targets’ button (see below) and then ‘Long term’ from the ‘Short or long term’ options.

The result is a list of long term target keyword niches (see below) that:

• all respond at higher than the average response rate for all keyword niches

• are sorted by Niche Size with the largest at the top: ie, those with the most potential at the top

• are worth long term investment because their size means they offer large rewards even if they might not have response rates as high as short term targets

Note the presence of brand names here, including Kuhl and Kavu. It’s common for brands to deliver good response rates on ecommerce sites.

Find more target keyword niches by refining Strategizer’s filters

Using your site’s data and name, Strategizer has used some simple deductions and intelligence to find the short and long term targets it suggests.

You can also use the ‘New Targets’ button to follow four simple steps to use your own knowledge about your site, market, margins, stock levels and company strategy to refine Strategizer’s targets.

You can also click the Filter button to exercise complete ‘manual’ control over which niches appear in your reports.

For example, the image below shows the Filter being used to see only keyword niches that have brought more than two Transactions.

Look for all possible targets by sorting with multiple metrics

You can find all possible new target keyword niches by sorting your reports by different metrics.

You can change how your reports are sorted by simply clicking a column name.

Eg, click the Transactions column name (highlighted in image below) and those keyword niches that have brought the most sales will appear at the top of your report.

The above report reveals two new brand names, Patagonia and Deuter delivering substantial sales.

Reminder: these reported results eg for Patagonia, do not come from the exact keyword but from thousands of different keywords containing Patagonia - 4,890 different keywords in the case of Patagonia.

Keyword niches that bring the most transactions should be targets no matter what their response rates.

Similarly find keyword niches that bring the most Revenue and have the highest Average Sale Value.

Consider including as targets those keyword niches that simply bring the most Visits even if they don’t qualify by other criteria. Include them if you are confident of either of the following:

• Those searching with them are too early in the buying cycle to buy but may do so in the future. Meanwhile you are branding to them and earning their trust.

• You can increase their conversion rates.

• They bring value to your site other than measured response. This might include long visit times, taking part in discussions, sharing your content and brand across the web. (Google sees these things and likes them.)

If your site doesn’t directly sell products or you don’t have Ecommerce tracking installed then use all your site’s Goals to find all possible target keyword niches.

If your site doesn’t have Goals configured them make this so as soon as possible. Meanwhile, use Bounce rate, Average Time on Site and Pages per Visit as your response metrics (all viewable on the Site Usage tab).

Planning your SEO actions

If you click on Strategizer’s Actions tab, you’ll find a set of simple guidelines you can apply to any of your target keyword niches to determine what SEO and PPC actions you should take.

I’ll take you through them here …

Always first check a keyword niche’s seasonality using common sense, your own market knowledge and the Google Insights graph on Srategizer.

Then use the following rules to plan SEO actions for your target keyword niches:

• For small niches (Niche Size < 1,000/mth): optimize one page with on-site SEO.

If the Google Rank shown on Strategizer is less than 4th then target more keywords with the target page’s ‘page title tag’ and add more copy to the page.

• For medium niches (Niche Size 1,000 - 1,000,000/mth: optimize an existing or new category home page for the niche. As Tahoe Mountain Sports have done for Patagonia.

Create a hierarchy of child category pages eg, to match a brand’s product types. See Tahoe Mountain Sports’ Patagonia category pages for women’s clothing, men's clothing, kids' clothing and more.)

SEO each page for search engines.

Add unique copy to all your category pages. Within that copy, link directly to pages for the brand’s best selling products. If you don’t have an ecommerce site, use the same principle and link to the category’s most responsive pages.

Link to your best category pages from your home page (and from as many other pages as you can).

Get links from other sites directly to your most important category pages.

Build a page that lists links to all your category pages. Like this page showing all brand pages.

If the Google Rank shown on Strategizer is lower than 4th then prioritize on-page SEO (including building new pages).

If the Google Rank is 3rd or higher then shift the emphasis of your work to link building.

• For large niches (Niche Size > 1,000,000/mth): find medium-sized child niches within the large niche and optimize them as medium-sized niches (see above). More

Read about planning PPC actions for your target keyword niches.

More on how to optimize a page for search engines.

Coming soon: automatic PPC and SEO action plans for each of your target keyword niches.

Monitor your results and repeat this process

Once you start to implement your SEO and PPC, monitor your site’s results with the Strategizer’s reports looked at above.

Repeat the process above to:

• find new target keyword niches

• check that existing targets remain the most responsive and worthy of your efforts

If you’re not already a Strategizer subscriber you can take a 7-day free trial here.

Try Wordtracker Strategizer free for 7 days

Wordtracker Strategizer tool will transform your search marketing from guesswork into science - from single keywords into keyword niches.

With Strategizer you can:

• Work at the scale required for profit by targeting keyword niches.

• Target the keyword niches proven to deliver the best response to your site.

• Target the keyword niches you know you can beat the competition for.

• Target the keyword niches you know you can get more results for.

• Discover the market size (the number of searches) for each target keyword niche and your market share.

• Know how much effort each keyword niche should get (no niche is too small).

• See market trends for target keyword niche with Google Insights graphs.

• Take the guesswork out of your search marketing.

• Plan your action-led SEO strategies in minutes.

• Track target keywords Google rankings.

Please note that for Wordtracker Strategizer to work you must have Google Analytics installed on a website that already receives organic non-paid traffic.

Take the free trial