SEO: How to target Long Tail Keywords with your Category Pages with Kristina Azarenko (episode 007)

by April Buencamino-dy

Kristina Azarenko is an SEO consultant who focuses on delivering results, for one eCommerce client she achieved a sales increase of 5400% in just a few months. She’s globally respected SEO – whizz who has been featured on pretty much all the key SEO sites and conferences – so we had to have her on the show.

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About Kristina

Kristina got into SEO unintentionally. She was working in a job she didn’t love when she stumbled upon an SEO course online. As soon as she took the course, Kristina says she got the SEO bug in a good way.

She even took a couple days off of work to do more studying on the subject. Pretty soon she landed a job at an SEO agency and never looked back.

Her career took off and is still driven by her passion for the subject. 

Don’t worry about missing details—we’ll include a link to Kristina’s blog detailing the step by step how to.

Longtail Keywords

Targeting long tail keywords is crucial for eCommerce. Especially helpful in saturated markets, a long tail keyword is something specific which people are looking for on Google.

When it’s something specific vs. something general, it can have many advantages. If someone is looking for t-shirts for example, it’s hard to know how to stand out or where to start. Because the competition is insane in the world of selling t-shirts it’s really hard to rank in the top three.

So it’s crucial to get specific. A good example of a long tail keyword would be something like “Korean T-Shirts for Men” This specificity means you are more likely to find willing buyers.

Because there are fewer people searching for these specific keywords it’s a double win—less competition and finding people who actually want to buy your product. 

Where to Focus Long Tail keywords

Generally, the most visited landing pages for eCommerce websites are category pages. With that in mind, it’s a good idea to focus your long tail keywords on these heavily trafficked pages.

It’s not the same for everyone and Kristina says it’s important to look at your own data. Starting on category pages is a great way to start, but don’t neglect the rest of your site! 

Sometimes stores remove seasonal category pages and Kristina says Don’t! She says even if you’ve stopped selling a certain type of product, it’s important not to remove these pages! 

It’s important to tailor your SEO strategy to fit your business and the category pages with long tail keywords is best suited for online stores that have lots of products — more than 50 and beyond, with categories and filters. If your business is smaller you can still use this idea, but doing it manually will work just fine. 

Kristina’s SEO Framework 

Kristina has developed a step by step framework to help build a scalable SEO solution for businesses. To explain it, Kristinal uses the example from one of her clients.

They were using very general categories like ‘shirts’ and ‘pants ‘ and weren’t getting good results.  Her first step with the company was to rethink the categories themselves. She evolved ‘t shirts’ to ‘t shirts for men’ ‘t shirts for women’, ‘sleeveless t shirts’ and so on.

This approach works well for all size online stores. Kristina was able to overlay her framework on top of this idea by using filters which makes it scalable

Framework Step by Step

  1. Complete keyword Research! Analyze and understand what people are looking for in your price range, color and so on. 
  2. Analyze existing filters and see how they match up with your keyword research. but don’t start adding new ones just yet. Find the filters that will become the foundations for your categories. The most important thing is to create value!
  3. Define the rules for creating the pages
  4. Define the rules for canonicalization — A canonical tag tells google which page should be treated as the most important. Understand the difference
  5. Make sure links to newly created pages are added to your website with href attributes Set Internal Linking for Success. Links found inside the website infrastructure all links should be added with href attribute
  6. Add Title and H1 tags
  7. Test Everything. Every step comes with acceptance criteria—basically what it should look like and how it should function. Make sure there are no mistakes in implementation
  8. Improve. There is always room for improvement!

The client for whom Kristina created this framework implemented it within three months and projected a revenue of an additional 2 Million!

Insider Tips

If we’ve inspired someone to take their first step with SEO Marketing – what do they need to know to give themselves the best chance of success?

  1. Be curious and always learn new things. 
  2. Have your own website and learn as much as you can there. Experiment with it. Break it! Play with it!

Once you’ve started of course you’ve got to ‘keep optimising’! So what’s your favourite way to improve SEO marketing performance?

Have a look at search console and Google Analytics and be curious about your stats. When you identify something that has gone wrong, analyze and test new ideas. 

It’s impossible to improve our marketing unless we’re monitoring the performance – but the list of stuff we could monitor can be overwhelming. So what, for you is the number one SEO marketing KPI?

Traffic related to sales. Not just traffic, not just sales, but traffic related to traffic

Crystal ball time – what’s coming up in the next 6-12 months that we should be getting ready for in SEO marketing?

eCommerce is going to be growing rapidly. Even with the impacts of the pandemic, Kristina believes that eCommerce will continue to overtake shopping.

Interview Links

Kristina on Social media:

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