SEO Strategy help

[steve45058]

Hi, I run a B2B 3rd party retail ecommerce site and I am kind of stuck on how to implement my SEO strategy. 
So I learned from AdWords data that the best converting words to my site is the (Brand name, Model Number).  Many of my B2B customers already know what they want/are looking for.  Now this is all fine and dandy for adwords, but I don't really know how to implement this strategy on the SEO side.  I do rank decent for some of these product keywords, but 99% of them I do not (which confuses me because some of the brands I rank high for are the more popular brands eg. more competition.)  When I do keyword research on SEMRush or another site, it tells me that the competition for this type of keyword strategy is extremely high.

Any Help, Advice would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks!

[Eric_Rohrback]

product specific keywords will be very competitive, because someone searching for those terms are very likely to convert to a purchase. You need to layer your approach a little bit when trying to drive customers in. The product pages will have the specific brand + model numbers, but then you will need to layer those under family/category pages that are more general. Those category pages should be optimized for slightly less competitive keywords (longer tail) which can catch users at the top of the funnel. Using remarketing can help bring those users back to the site at a later time when they're more likely to purchase.

Another thing to look at is navigation structure and internal linking. I would suggest running a tool like screaming frog or the Moz site audit to get an idea what might be going wrong. Fix the technical issues that might be holding you back. Screaming Frog is an awesome tool to get a really good idea what's going right, and what's bombing (tech wise). Some product pages may be more optimized than others, or they may have a better navigation path which could explain how they're ranking well (linked directly from homepage or another authoritative page). There's a lot of scenarios to why, but without knowing the site I'll say to take a good look with Screaming Frog. Pay attention how deep the product pages are within the site.

[TakeshiYoung]

If you have the resources, creating unique content around those product keywords can help you win. Re-sellers of products often just use the default manufacturer description, so if you can create unique content for your site you can stand out from the site. Adding additional content like product reviews, FAQs, instructions, etc. can also help with your rankings as well.

When evaluating competition, I would step outside of SEMRush and actually take a look at the pages that are outranking you. Do they have higher domain authority than you? Do they have more backlinks? Do they have more content? If you think you can do better on those metrics, then you have a shot.

[steve45058]

Thanks Eric.  I do plan on running Screaming Frog soon.  We are about to go through a site redesign so even though I know there are errors on the website, I know many of them will be fixed in a couple weeks.  Can you explain what you mean when you say "Pay attention how deep the product pages are within the site?"  Thanks

I do have general category pages with some content written, but I am not sure how to target long tail keywords.  I am in the phone reseller industry so I have general categories such as business phone handsets, which then draw down to brands/models, but I am kind of at a loss on how to promote something so generic?  I don't see myself beating out office depot, bestbuy, amazon, staples, etc. Even with keywords like these the competition is high.  Any ideas on this would be greatly appreciated.

I guess the thing that bewilders me with the specific keywords is that I don't understand how I do better for some specific brand/model keywords than others when I am not promoting one more than the other.  For some phones I can show up on page 1 as the 4th/5th result and then for others, I don't even show up on page 5, and my competitors which i previously ranked higher for for the other keywords are on page 1 instead.  And some of these products are not very popular which adds to the confusion even more.

[steve45058]

I actually do have content writers and video creators that create tutorial content on my products, but I am worried because the lack of views that my efforts in this aspect are futile.  I am not sure how to make this work for me.  I create new content every week.  I do plan on creating product reviews for the products as well as providing the actual product manuals.  My competitors actually do none of this at all.

Surprisingly many of my competitors do not have a higher DA than me and many of their backlinks seem blackhat and have many no-follow links.

I wrote this in my reply to Eric and I guess the thing that bewilders me with the specific keywords is that I don't understand how I do better for some specific brand/model keywords than others when I am not promoting one more than the other.  For some phones I can show up on page 1 as the 4th/5th result and then for others, I don't even show up on page 5, and my competitors which i previously ranked higher for for the other keywords are on page 1 instead.  And some of these products are not very popular which adds to the confusion even more.

[Eric_Rohrback]

Keyword research will be key, and that's really going to be where you want to focus down. Find related terms, long tail, and opportunities you may not have considered in the past. Don't get too held up on the head terms to start - Optimize for long tails (with head terms in them), then once those get traction you'll see progress on the head term. You really need a process/strategy around keyword research. It's not as simple as going to Keyword Planner and picking a few; competitive analysis and proper research is key to the whole process.

When I talked about page depth, there is only so many clicks a user will take on a site before they move on. Basically what I meant is to organize the architecture of the site (navigation) so that the user needs as few clicks as possible to reach the products. Fewer clicks (hops) for the user also means fewer hops for Googlebot. Fewer hops between products means more quality pages indexed, more quality pages indexed means a wider spread of keywords to be found on, more keyword rankings = more traffic. Optimize for the customer first, since that's how you make money. Make the site easy to navigate, and you'll see a lot of benefit from that.