Pull up any search engine and type in a common term. Let’s use “gourmet food.” My search engine of choice gives me over 42 million results. Currently, users search for the term about 4,400 times per month. In Google AdWords, the pay per click suggested bid is approaching $1.50 per click. The upshot: there is a lot of competition for this term.
Perhaps you sell gourmet food. But more specifically, you sell gourmet food products. Each of the products you sell has a page on your site and every one of those pages – every product – might be a desired destination for a buyer. So rather than focusing entirely on the broad terms that define your business on the whole, you can choose to zero in on terms that are actively searched by shoppers, if not in such significant volume.
Pulling in traffic with key terms that relate to departments and individual products is a great way to go. If you bid on the names of your products (and similar mixtures of them that get some search volume) each term will get much less traffic than the broad ones, but all together they will add up to significant incoming visitors that are likely to be more qualified because you know they were searching for exactly what you have.
Do the research. Find terms that get enough traffic and are not heavily bid on by competitors. Look for easy mistakes shoppers might make, such as confusing the exact name of a product. It might also be worthwhile to use general names for types of products. For instance, “gourmet sugared nuts” is specific enough that people searching for it will certainly be interested in your sugared pecan product, even if they don’t know that the proper name is “Walton’s Sweet Pecans.”
By honing in on the actual terms your potential customers are using when they seek a certain product, you can funnel the most relevant traffic to your site and bypass the expensive terms that have lots of competition and may or may not actually deliver qualified shoppers.