How Long Tail Keywords Can Improve Your Ecommerce Conversion Rates

If you run an ecommerce business, conversion rate should be one of the mains KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) you track.

Let me explain it very simply -- you can double your current sales or revenue in two ways:

1. Double the traffic: This is a no-brainer. If only five out of a total of 100 prospective visitors convert each month, doubling  your website traffic to 200 visitors each month will get you 10 sales. This is a simple calculation that most brands use. If you double your audience, you may end up doubling your customers.
2. Double the conversion rate: Now this is a very interesting strategy -- here, you do not need to put any effort into increasing traffic. Instead, just concentrate your efforts on improving your conversion rate. If your current conversion rate is 5% (which means 5 sales from 100 visits), doubling the conversion rate to 10% will double the customers (10% means 10 customers from 100 visits).

Now you might be wondering: which is the easier method?

The right method differs by industry, budget, and available resources. But if you have not done any conversion rate optimization (CRO) for your website yet, be very sure that improving the conversion rate is much easier than trying to drive more traffic.

I am not going to elaborate on all the ways to improve conversion rates or bore you with a detailed blog on CRO tips -- there are many of those already available on the internet. In this blog post, I will explain how targeting long tail keywords can improve your ecommerce conversion rates dramatically.

You don't need to do any design changes to your website, and you don't need a copywriter or a content writer. You don’t even need to be proficient in technical SEO to implement this. You can do it yourself -- or ask your SEO executive to implement this strategy. I’m also going to show you how long tail keywords not only improve conversions but also click-through rate (CTR).

Search intent

If you perform Google research on any ecommerce keywords, you can see that almost all results are optimized for the exact keywords -- exact keywords are used in the title, description and URL slug. This is the basic on page optimization we’ve all been taught.  However, there is a huge opportunity here that we’re missing.

Search intent is a very crucial factor that directly impacts CTR, bounce rate and conversions. Understanding the search intent for a keyword can help you convert your website visitors easier than you think.

I’ll explain: If you optimize your website for a core keyword like ‘baby strollers,’ it’s simply too competitive to climb the SERPs. And more importantly, it may bring in a mixed audience -- a mixture of legitimate buyers and users just looking for information.

Imagine you have a mixed collection of strollers and you rank for the keyword ‘baby strollers.’ The visitors you get through that keyword may not find the stroller they were looking for. They may be looking for a baby stroller with a car seat. But you don’t have that specific kind of product in your inventory, and the visitor clicks over to your website since you were ranking at the top.

The result? No purchase and an increased bounce rate.

Opt for long tail keywords

Imagine that you optimized your product page for a keyword related to your specific product, such as ‘baby stroller with a car seat.’  The visitors who come to your site would have the intent to buy the product since their search query is very connected with the product that you're selling.

And guess what: it's much easier to rank for ‘baby stroller with a car seat’ than it is to rank for 'baby strollers.'

So, instead of optimizing and ranking for generic keywords like ‘baby strollers,’ it would be ideal to rank for a number of specific long tail, product-focused keywords so that your site will rank for the intended long tail search queries.

The best way to do this is to optimize your website for five different long tail keywords, with a product listing page dedicated to each of these keywords.

Create five product pages for five long tail keywords, such as:

• Baby stroller with a car seat
• Car seat that turns into a stroller
• Lightweight baby strollers for travel
• Low price baby strollers
• Jogging stroller travel system

This will increase your chances of ranking for your chosen long tail keywords (which have much less competition than short tail keywords) -- and you're also narrowing down the audience to one with a higher purchase intent.

Make the change to your website

Start by structuring your product listing pages -- group them into similar categories. Optimize separate product listing pages for each category of product. Adding a call-to-action dedicated to the particular type of product works well.

Now when you have different pages for each product category, the call-to-action can be more specific: "Buy Lightweight Baby Strollers."

This will improve the CTR since the text is actually the user's search query.

If you are running a big ecommerce site, the process of grouping products and re-optimizing listing pages may take time. But believe me -- it's well worth the effort.

And remember: do not expect a sudden hike in conversion rates from the very next day. Give the search engines some time to index and crawl the new site structure and re-quantify the PageRank to the newly created pages.

To sum up, incorporating long tail keyword strategy into your on-page optimization can greatly impact the SEO and conversion rate of your ecommerce website. Do proper keyword analysis and implement it right away. If you are just starting up with your ecommerce business, I recommend choosing one of the best ecommerce platforms for SEO.