How many keywords is too many?

[theaffair]

Hi there Moz'ers,

I run a mens fashion brand called THE AFFAIR, where we craft premium T-shirts and Art Prints inspired by your favourite books.

So my problem is that I have no idea what to try to rank for keyword wise because every product is inspired by a different book and author. Whilst I could go very wide and try for terms such as "graphic t-shirts" or "printed t-shirts" they are a) super competitive and b) bear no relation to the primary selling point being the literature inspired basis of what we do. But on the flip side, there's just not that many people searching for "Jules Verne t-shirts" or even "Adventure t-shirts" to go a little wider at the genre level.

Basically I'm confused at a conceptual level about how to best select my keywords and desperately need some help before running down the wrong path!

For what it's worth the site is built on WP (using WooCommerce) and I have installed Yoast and begin playing around with it... But anyway it's the larger strategy that has me stumped at the moment and I really don't know where to begin.

Thanks for your time and all comments very much appreciated.

FREE T-SHIRT to whoever has the best solution

cheers
Zoltan

[TheeDigital]

Zoltan,

Everyone brought up some good points.  Yes, keyword research is what you need to strive for but I would definitely shoot for some diversity in your link building and anchor text.

Also I would build inside out...for example yes you build t-shirts, but let's go for the longtail keyword first the "Jules Vern Custom t-shirt" or "20,000 leagues under the sea" t-shirt.  This will help you build for the longer tail keyword quicker than the short tail, but you also need to remember not to forget about those short tail keywords such as "graphic t-shirts", "book t-shirts" etc.

Before you do anything though, I always ask my clients to answer the following questions:

• What are your business' goals?
• How do you plan to market your t-shirts through inbound marketing?
• How have people found you in the past?

If you can answer the those 3 questions, it might prove to be beneficial in both your marketing and link building tactics.

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi Zoltan,

If done properly, you can carve a niche for yourself and create a never-existed market. If you look the key phrase you quoted,  'Jules Verne t-shirts', its a combination of two highly searched keywords. Both of them individually have great search volume, the issue is no one till now has been searching for this combination and here you have a great opportunity to 'create' the market. Few years back, I used a product from the USA that was immensely popular there. I wanted to sell it in a different country where people hardly heard about the product. I felt its going to be a huge hit in the new market (as I used it personally and felt great about it) but, there was no awareness or demand for the product there. So, as a determined marketer, I wanted to create the market first by spreading the awareness of what the product was and how it can change lives of its users so on and so forth. The second step was of-course, selling the product in the newly created market. That endeavor of mine was not so successful that I thought it would be in the new geography but thought me many lessons that proved to be invaluable later on.

Coming to your situation. Firstly, you should ideally spread the word about your products, bring in an awareness. You can leverage the power of social media, niche forums related to both, the author or the book and product related.

For the keywords list, you should be ideally using the combination of your (product) and (author and/or book). You can also look at generic phrases like, 'custom t-shirts', 't-shirt printing'(exact match global search volume of 74,000), 'design your own t-shirt' (this has an exact global search volume of 33,100).

To conclude,

Create the market if it does not exist (as in this case) then sell the product.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

[DennisSeymour]

Hi

I would start with keyword research. Those keywords will always be competitive, but it's what you will have to aim for.

Start going through other words related to it(or longer tail keywords so it's easier) - make a list on a spreadsheet and start working on those to build your relevance and trust. Targeted to your inner pages. Yes, the Jules Verne example you mentioned is also something you can do at this point.

Eventually, with a properly optimised ecom site, you will start ranking for different words you werent even considering and you will have to do more for those to increase traffic even more. Never forget to build your brand and to actually getting the word out using other mediums, that will speed things up.

Tip: Be sure all your products have unique content, as well as on the category pages.

Try to read more about keyword research and ecommerce. Places like inbound.org has a good compilation