When I’m talking with people who are beginning the process of launching an online store, they’ll often ask me what the most important thing to do is when planning a website. The answer is keyword research.

When you open a brick and mortar store, customers will see your sign outside and come in to see what you have, but on the Internet customers can’t drive by your store to get interest in your inventory. Many of them will find you through search engines, which are powered by keywords.

Keywords are phrases that people type into search engines by Google in order to find something online. When people are shopping for something specific, they’ll type a few words into the search box and then click submit to find a store that sells it. The exact words and their order matters, and it can be hard to just guess what people will actually be searching for when they want to buy products like yours.

Keyword research gives you insight into what people are searching for online for the most and what phrases they are entering. You’ll need keywords for everything from naming your store to naming your products to naming your categories. I really can’t overstate how important it is that you invest enough time into keyword research if you want to succeed with an online store.

The good news is that keyword research is very easy these days, thanks to Google. The search engine offers a tool called the Keyword Planner that you can use to discover keywords.

Here’s an actual example from my online store. I sell dance clothing and had a particular pair of dance shorts that I was having trouble naming. The shorts had a very wide waistband that could be worn up as high waist shorts or folded down to wear as standard or low rise shorts. Both the high waist and the fold over waist were important features of the products and could be equally good names, so I used keyword research to find out which one was more popular.

The Google Keyword Planner allows you to enter in a specific keyword or multiple keywords and then tells you how many people are searching for that specific term. In addition, the keyword planner will display related keywords for the item. You may end up finding out that there is another word that is even better than anything that you had considered or that you would get more hits if you changed the order of words.

In addition to telling you how much traffic a specific keyword gets, the Google Keyword Planner tool lets you know how competitive the keyword is. Products are categorized as low, medium or high competition. Keywords that have low competition have fewer sites targeting them, giving you a chance to come in highly on the search engines.

When you’re digging into keyword research, you’ll want to consider long-tail keywords, longer chains of keywords that people search for. There is usually less competition for these types of keywords, giving you a better chance of getting sales.

Back to my example above, it turned out that high waist dance shorts got more traffic than fold over dance shorts; however, there was a lot of competition for the phrase high waist dance shorts. Using words like blue high waist dance shorts as keywords allows me to come up higher in the search engines.

Focusing on long-tail keywords will help you get more sales than more general short keywords. This may seem counter intuitive since there are fewer people searching for them; however, people who are entering highly specific keyword phrases into the search engine are usually those who are ready to buy. It’s better to get all 10 of the people who are searching for blue high waist dance shorts every month to buy from me than to get just one of the 1000 people who might be searching for just high waist dance shorts.