How to find keywords for your online store

Most merchants look for their keywords in the wrong place: in generic tools that display impressive search volumes for queries their store will never win. "Shoes" gets searched 200,000 times a month; you will never outrank Zalando on it, and that is fine. Your real keywords are elsewhere — and for the most part, they are already asleep in your catalogue.

Here is the complete method, with no £100-a-month subscription.

The principle: the long tail wins

A long-tail query is a precise search, low in individual volume but high in intent: "cold air intake kit alfa romeo 155 v6" rather than "cold air intake". Three properties make it the gold of independent e-commerce:

• Competition is low. Big sites optimise for volume queries; precise queries are still there for the taking.
• Intent is high. Someone typing an exact reference is ready to buy. The conversion rate on long-tail queries is commonly 2 to 3 times that of generic ones.
• They add up. Fifty queries at 30 searches a month are worth one query at 1,500 — except the fifty are winnable.

Everything that follows aims at building that portfolio of precise queries.

Source 1: your catalogue

This is the main seam, and the most neglected. Every product × attribute × use combination is a potential query:

• Product + compatibility: "green filter air filter clio 3 rs"
• Product + problem: "intake filter whistling noise"
• Category + criterion: "road-legal stainless exhaust system"
• Product + comparison: "cold air intake or stock airbox"

The manual exercise: take your twenty best sellers and, for each, write three questions a customer asks before buying. You have just created sixty targeted article topics. That is exactly what Publium's catalogue analysis does automatically — it reads products, categories and attributes, and derives suggestions sorted by intent and potential — but the logic is the same by hand.

Source 2: your customers, literally

Your customers hand you their queries every day:

• Your store's internal search. PrestaShop logs what visitors type into your on-site search box. Those queries are phrased in their words, not yours — and every search with no results is a hole in your content.
• Support emails and calls. "Does it fit without drilling?" asked three times equals a "fitting without drilling" article to write.
• Customer reviews, yours and your competitors': the buyer's vocabulary sits there in the raw.

Source 3: Google itself, for free

Three reflexes that cost nothing:

1. Autocomplete. Type your base keyword and note the suggestions — they are real, frequent queries.
2. "People also ask": every question in that box is a potential H2, sometimes a whole article.
3. Search Console, if your store has some history: the Performance report lists the queries where you already appear on pages 2 and 3. Those are your fastest wins — a dedicated piece of content is often enough to move to page 1.

Sorting: not all queries are equal

Once the list is built (aim for 50 to 100 queries), you have to sort it. Two criteria, no more:

Intent. A query is informational ("how to clean a performance filter"), transactional ("buy green filter R2100") or navigational (brand plus product). The blog targets informational, your product and category pages target transactional — we devoted a whole article to search intent, because it is the most common targeting mistake.

Specificity. Between two queries of equal intent, take the more precise one. It has less volume but you can actually win it, and it converts better.

Then assign one main query per piece of content, never two pieces on the same query: two pages aiming at the same keyword cannibalise each other — Google hesitates, and neither ranks properly.

From list to calendar

A keyword portfolio is worthless without production. Turning it into action:

1. Rank your queries by priority: first the ones where Search Console already shows you on page 2, then recurring customer questions, then the rest.
2. Turn each query into a title you have actually worked on — the query should appear in the title, naturally.
3. Plan at a sustainable rhythm, and write. Every article should link to the relevant product pages and to your other articles — the e-commerce internal linking guide explains how to structure those links.

If "write" is the step that stalls — and it almost always is — our How it works page shows how Publium chains catalogue analysis, keyword suggestion and writing, so that the list of queries becomes a published blog rather than a forgotten spreadsheet.

What to remember

Your keywords are not in a subscription tool: they are in your catalogue, in your support inbox and in your Search Console. Aim for the long tail, one query per piece of content, intent before volume. And remember that the best keyword in the world earns nothing until the article is written — publishing regularly is what turns a strategy into traffic.