By default, e-commerce websites are set up to target broad, high-volume and high-competition search keywords. If you’re a furniture retailer, your site will be optimised for keywords like “chairs” or “tables”.
Unless your website has significant site authority – usually established over time through high-quality, relevant backlinks, content depth and domain age – you’re going to find it difficult to outrank your competitors on these keywords, especially if you’re up against retail giants. Homing in on lower-competition long-tail keywords is a smarter way to increase organic visibility and, ultimately, revenue.
If, for example, you have a women’s fashion business, shoppers could come to your site via a generic keyword search like “dresses”, but a more specific long-tail keyword search could be “maxi dresses”. Better yet, “black maxi dresses”.
This has only become more urgent with Google’s recent shift toward AI-driven search. With the wide rollout of AI Overviews and conversational search tools, shopper behaviour has fundamentally changed. People no longer type single words into a search bar; they are now asking Google long, hyper-specific questions. If your site isn’t built to capture those precise phrases, you’ll be invisible to consumers.
The best way to solve this is to create collection pages targeting low-competition, high-intent long-tail keywords. This will help you reach target audiences faster and scale your business for less.
However, this is where a bottleneck occurs.
Speeding up the process
You’ve no doubt heard of programmatic advertising, the automated buying and selling of digital ad space. Now, there’s programmatic search engine optimisation. As the name suggests, programmatic SEO automates tasks for increasing your website’s presence on search engines, specifically through the creation of landing pages that draw traffic to your website.
Using programmatic SEO, you can automate the process of identifying relevant long-tail keywords and creating pages to target them effectively, eliminating the bottleneck.
Scale up and save on paid search
For retailers with hundreds or thousands of unique products, creating landing pages to capture those search terms won’t be quick. Programmatic SEO speeds up the process by using a single, dynamic template to automatically generate pages, allowing businesses to dominate search results for specific, varied queries.
One business that is employing this strategy to great success is Myer. Analysis of the store’s site reveals that the search term “shirts” returns 123 category pages. These pages rank for more than 1,000 long-tail keywords, driving around 7,000 users to the site each month. To achieve a similar result through paid search, Myer would have to spend more than US$2,000 a month on Google Ads.
The opportunity is clear for retail businesses with an online presence. With AI actively training consumers to search with longer, more specific queries, the long-tail bottleneck is only going to get wider. Brands that stick to manually creating collections will find themselves priced out of broad keywords and unable to keep up with the infinite variations of AI-driven search, leaving them quite literally to leave money on the table for competitors who can automate the answer.
Bhushan Satghare is an SEO Director at the integrated marketing agency Impressive.
Further reading: What does ‘discovery optimisation’ mean for retailers?
