Ecommerce Keyword Research: Build a Keyword Map Your Store Can Rank

Getting ecommerce keyword research right turns on where each term gets assigned. A store can follow every published step and still watch six months of work produce nothing. I checked what Google actually returns for real buying terms, and a single qualifier is enough to flip the answer from shop pages to buying guides. The count and the method are further down.

So open whatever list you are working from, pick ten terms off it, and search each one. Look at what Google returns: shop pages, marketplace listings, or buying guides on sites that do not stock the item.

Say you have given a term to a collection page and eight of the results are buying guides. You will not be able to rank that page for that term, because a collection page is not the page format Google is choosing for that query. On-page SEO work does not change which format Google picks, so the term needs reassigning to a page type that matches, or dropping.

I am John Butterworth. I run Mint SEO out of Manchester, with 11+ years in SEO and 3M+ organic sessions driven for the stores I work with. In the audits I run, that check is the single thing most often missing from a list somebody has already paid for.

It takes two minutes a term. This article is the process I use, in the order I use it.

Why a keyword list is not a keyword map

Your list becomes a keyword map when every row has been checked against the kind of page Google ranks for that term. Until then it is a vocabulary exercise.

Published advice rarely mentions that step, so I counted. Of the ten pages then ranking for this topic, three mention the page type of the results at all.

Two out of sixteen went as far as telling you to open the results first. That same habit runs through our ecommerce SEO checklist for the rest of a storefront.

The one check that separates a list from a map

Search the term and sort the first page of results into three buckets.

Shop pages sell the item, whether that is a collection, a category page or a product listing. Marketplace pages are Amazon, eBay and their equivalents. Editorial pages review or rank the item without selling it.

Having sorted them, ask whether the dominant bucket is one you own a page type for. That is the whole check.

It matters because running the rest of the process well is not enough on its own. A furniture store owner posting in the r/SEO thread 6 Months of Hard SEO Work, Zero Growth listed what he had done: "Internal linking strategy is strong with some pages with 30+ contextual links. No crawl or index issues. Our technical health score of 98."

His result: "6 months in and clicks are flat." Nothing in that account is sloppy. Work was done and the clicks did not move.

What to do with terms whose results are editorial

A term whose results are dominated by editorial is not lost. What has to change is the page type you give it.

On best running shoes for flat feet, five of six results I recorded were reviews. One manufacturer got through, and it was the running brand Brooks, with a page dedicated to shoes for flat feet.

Note what that page is. Brooks built it for the one problem, reached through a solutions path, and did not send the term to their general running-shoe category.

Copy that. Where your term names a problem, the page has to be about the problem, whether you answer it in a guide or scope a collection to it. A general category page competes with neither.

The order the rest of the work happens in

Everything downstream inherits these decisions, which is why assignment cannot be an afterthought. Your deliverable is a keyword map: every term bound to a URL you own.

Because that map is what the strategy it feeds into is built on, order matters.

Establish what a term is worth. Check what kind of page can rank it. Gather candidates, land them on templates you own, then weigh the numbers and decide the overlap cases.

What a keyword is worth to your store

Sort candidate keywords by the job a shopper is trying to finish. Your ranking order will shift considerably from the one search volume gives you.

The four jobs

Four jobs cover almost everything. A shopper names a category and wants the range, or names a product and wants that page. Others describe a problem, or check a detail before committing.

First two are what collection and product pages exist for. On those terms your keywords are genuinely in the running.

Searching leather sofa returned ten retailer pages, from Bassett Furniture and Ethan Allen through to specialist leather furniture makers. On cordless vacuum cleaner, nine of ten were shops or marketplaces.

Give those transactional terms your collection pages first. Search intent there is unambiguous, and a well-built collection page is the only page type in the running.

Where a big number misleads

Job three is where search volume misleads. A term can carry a healthy monthly figure and still be one your store has no page type to compete for.

On best office chair, ranking pages compete on hands-on testing, one of them having tested over 60 chairs. No collection page answers that, however many chairs it lists.

Paying subscribers are blunter about these tools than the marketing is. In the r/SEO thread Stop paying for keyword research, one called them "confidently inaccurate for lots of columns" while still rating them "good for keyword discovery". Use them to find candidates for your ecommerce keyword research, and treat the column you sort on as the weakest thing on the screen.

Sort by whether you can win a term first. Sort by size second.

Read the results before you assign anything

Because that pattern shows up in nearly every audit, I wanted to see whether it survives measurement.

The six terms I searched that day were picked to make one comparison possible. Three are plain category names, and three carry a qualifier, either the word best or a stated use case.

Among the pages that came back was waterproof hiking boots at REI.

I then classified all 46 organic URLs returned across those six terms. Every URL went into one bucket: shop, marketplace or editorial.

What we found across six terms and 46 results

Source: our own count, six terms, US index, 5th August 2026.

Across three unmodified terms I recorded 25 of 27 results as shops or marketplaces and two as editorial. Across three qualified terms, 12 of 19 were editorial reviews and five were shop pages. Adding one qualifying word moved my count of shop pages from 93% to 26%, a pattern that also shapes how we go about growing ecommerce sales.

Behind that swing, the products did not change. Qualifiers did, and a qualifier decides which page type Google will rank.

Term selection and page assignment are therefore a single decision.

Classifying a result set in two minutes

You do not need to repeat any of that. What you need is the classification.

So: read the first ten results, note which bucket each falls into, and write the dominant bucket beside your term. Terms carrying a qualifier skew editorial more often than you would expect.

Two minutes a term is your whole cost for not building a page that was never going to rank.

Shop, marketplace or editorial

Marketplaces are what stores forget. On qualified terms you compete with ranked marketplace lists as well as reviews, and both answer a shopper's question more directly than a catalogue page.

Amazon holds a position on best office chair with a best-sellers listing for home office desk chairs. Sales data answers "which one should I get" without any testing at all.

One manufacturer does appear in that set: Herman Miller's office chairs collection. Reviews around it are largely about their chairs.

That recognition is doing the work. A less recognised brand cannot take the position by copying the page.

The split terms

Some terms are genuinely contested, and those justify covering the ground twice. Waterproof hiking boots split four editorial, three retailer and one marketplace.

REI's collection holds its shop position because the filter value sits in the URL path itself. That URL behaves as a category.

Where a result set splits like that, you have permission to build both a collection page and a guide.

Pulling the candidate terms together

Your best keyword source is one you already own, and three more cost nothing.

Search Console queries

Search Console query data beats every third-party source, because it records what Google served. Third-party databases only estimate.

Andrew Cock-Starkey of Optimisey writes on keyword research in Search Console that it "stands out for its accessibility, price point (free), and because the data comes directly from Google itself".

One handling detail before you filter: Search Console lowercases all query data. A case-sensitive regex filter will silently miss rows.

Start there. Those keywords are free, specific to your catalogue, and no competitor has them.

Site search and support inbox

Language your customers already use sits in your site search log and your support inbox. No tool database contains these keywords.

Qualifiers come from here, and qualifiers decide page type. These keywords feed the check in the previous section directly.

Sourcing is a multi-source job anyway. As another commenter in that Stop paying for keyword research thread put it, one tool "should not be the only one, and it definitely shouldn't be the only way keywords are analysed".

Planner, autocomplete, marketplaces

Free sources carry most of the discovery stage.

Most ecommerce keyword research starts at Google's Keyword Planner, and search autocomplete and the search bars on Amazon and eBay belong beside it. Those will surface a seed keyword list and the long-tail variants around it.

Where paid databases cover a niche badly, free tools do better. One r/SEO moderator was advising a small business whose sector vocabulary the Planner refused to return. He recommended something else entirely: "Look at the sites that rank first." Then: "Peer-over-horizon: try a keyword, publish it and see what other keyword data comes in."

Spend your budget on deciding what to do with these terms. Collecting them is the cheap part.

Competitors

Treat a competitor's structure as evidence of what Google rewards. Do not treat it as a list to copy.

Less is there to copy than you would think. Across those same sixteen pages I measured a mean pairwise similarity of 0.8876 between the top ten, a sameness that also shapes how we approach ecommerce SEO. Five pairs came close enough to count as near-duplicates, and one pair of heading structures matched at 0.9529.

Even the most differentiated page in that set stops before the page-type check. Copying the field's list gets you the field's result.

Landing the map on the templates you already have

Every row has to land on a template your store has. Page types cannot be invented. On Shopify the set is short: collections, products, blog posts and pages.

Which template takes which term

Category terms go to collection pages. Product and model terms go to product pages. Problem and use-case terms go to blog posts or guides, while detail-checking terms belong where the product already sits.

Keyword mapping is the work, and it moves revenue in a way a longer list does not.

In the audits I run, the pages a store needs are usually already there.

What I find instead is a head term pointed at a product page, a model number pointed at a collection, and four filtered addresses competing for one phrase. Fixing that builds nothing new.

Filter and tag URLs

Filter and tag URLs your theme generates are not spare inventory for a keyword map.

Count them before you assign anything to one. A collection with five filters and a handful of values behind each will generate thousands of addresses, and most Shopify themes leave every one of them reachable.

What happens to those addresses is documented. Google's guidance on faceted navigation explains that a crawler has to fetch one before it can judge whether it was worth fetching.

That is why it works through a great many and keeps almost none. Blocking them in robots.txt is the recommendation.

So a term assigned to a filter address is a term assigned to a page Google is being told to ignore.

Your theme decides whether any of this applies. Where it filters after the # symbol, nothing new becomes crawlable, because Google does not process fragments when it crawls.

When no template fits

Where nothing fits, build a page that stands on its own. Do not point a term at a filtered view of a page you already have.

Wayfair ranks for wooden bed frame with a filtered wood beds category. Read the address: the wood-beds value sits in the path as a named segment, where most themes would have appended a query string.

An address built that way can be indexed as a page. One assembled from parameters is a view of a page.

That distinction is what decides whether a URL can hold a keyword.

What the numbers beside each term are worth

Treat search volume and keyword difficulty as a rough sort order, never a forecast. One dated event explains why I hold them loosely now.

The num=100 change

In mid-September 2025, Google disabled the &num=100 parameter, which had let tools view 100 search results on a single page.

Before that, a rank tracker could read a full page of results in one request. Afterwards it could read only the standard ten.

Tyler Gargula of LOCOMOTIVE Agency documented what it did to reporting the following day. It reset what ecommerce keyword research can assume about its own numbers, and the reset has not been undone.

Mechanism matters more than the event here. Rank trackers pulled 100 results at a time, so "even if your website ranks at position #85 for a keyword, it would still register an impression in Google Search Console when a bot views that extended results page."

Those impressions were never shoppers. Once the parameter went, they stopped being recorded, and average position improved across the industry without anybody's organic search visibility changing.

Your historic keyword footprint was partly an artefact of measurement. Whatever smaller number you see now is the more honest one.

Using the figures anyway

Numbers still rank candidates against each other. What they cannot do is tell you whether you will rank.

Since September 2025 they cannot reliably tell you where you rank either. Any position beyond page one is recorded only when somebody paginates to it, so an empty row in your Search Console report is not proof you do not rank.

Use them to order your shortlist. Let each SERP decide which page gets the term.

When two pages on one term is the right answer

Received wisdom says two pages targeting one keyword compete and both lose. Data on sites that are winning does not support that as a blanket rule.

The 2026 study

Studio 36 Digital is a UK agency that publishes its research openly, and last winter it went looking for how common internal overlap really is on sites that rank well. It analysed 2,500 keywords on the UK index, counting how many URLs from one domain appeared for a single term.

Their sample was drawn from a hundred high-authority sites across ten industries, taking the top twenty-five traffic-driving terms from each.

Overlap turned out to be the norm. Across that sample the typical site put 4.7 URLs in front of every top term, more than two thirds fielded five or more, and barely one in eight kept to a tidy one or two.

Their sample is large content publishers, and no store appears in it, which decides how far you can carry the finding. What it establishes is that a blanket rule describes almost nobody who is winning.

The test

A narrower test is more useful. Does each page answer a different question?

RunRepeat holds two positions on waterproof hiking boots with two guides, one on waterproof boots generally and one scoped to lightweight waterproof boots. Each answers something the other does not.

Scope your second page deliberately, or do not build it.

Your authority bracket

That finding bites hardest on a small store. Sites below a domain rating of 50 with three or more competing URLs consistently ranked in positions 8 to 20, against rivals with consolidated content.

Our furniture store owner from earlier reported a domain rating of 33. Most independent stores sit at that level or below it.

Studio 36 also found commercial intent queries suffer from split coverage regardless of authority. Those are the queries your revenue depends on.

Keyword cannibalisation costs an established publisher very little and costs you a lot. Until your domain rating clears 50: one term, one page.

Get your keyword map checked before you build the pages

A wrong keyword map costs you a quarter of work, and you will not find out until the quarter is over. Checking one costs an hour.

Checking one is what our SEO audit does. You send the list and the store; I go through the assignments and hand back an ordered set of decisions. Nobody needs another 200-point document.

Keyword strategy is the first of the eight disciplines we run, defined as finding the searches that map to products and buyer intent. On your map that means going through assignments term by term against what each SERP ranks.

You get told which rows are sound, which need a different page type, and which to drop. Before you build three months of work on a keyword list, book your SEO audit.

Keyword assignment mistakes that cost the most

Expensive mistakes are versions of one thing: following a process without checking it against the evidence in the results.

Assigning terms to pages without looking at what ranks is the costliest, and it is what this article is about. Chasing head terms your page type cannot win is that same mistake wearing a bigger number.

Pointing keywords at filter and tag URLs creates pages Google would rather skip, and those keywords then rank nowhere. Trusting volume and difficulty as forecasts means building against figures that changed meaning in September 2025.

Splitting a commercial term across several pages costs positions at the authority level most stores are at.

One more, and it is harder to see: assuming a longer article or a longer list is the differentiator.

Among the sixteen pages I sampled, the shortest ran to 1,457 words and the longest to 6,273. Two pages that mention checking the results are not the two ranking highest.

Those pages are near-identical in substance, five pairs close enough to count as duplicates. More of the same thing will not get you past them.

Keywords are one discipline of eight, and what an ecommerce SEO audit looks at covers the rest of what costs a store rankings.

What you want at the end is a map you can hand to a developer. Start with ten terms at the top of your list, and a check that takes two minutes each.