How to do keyword research for a Shopify store

00

What is keyword research for a Shopify store?

Keyword research is the process of identifying the search terms your potential customers use, understanding what they expect to find, and assigning each term to the right type of page on your store. It is the foundation of everything in our complete Shopify SEO guide: product pages, collections, and blog content all start from a keyword decision.

One principle before the steps: a keyword without a mapped page is a wish, not a strategy. The output of this process is not a list. It is a map, where every keyword has a page responsible for it.

step 01

Pull seed keywords from your own store

Before opening any tool, your store and your customers have already done research for you. Collect seeds from four places:

1. Your product and collection names. Write down the plain-language version of everything you sell. Not "Verdant Sphere No. 4," but "glass terrarium," "betta fish tank," "planted aquarium kit."
2. Customer messages. Your customers' WhatsApp messages are a free keyword tool nobody uses. When someone asks "do you have small terrariums for office desk?", that is a keyword ("office desk terrarium") with proven purchase intent, phrased exactly how real buyers phrase it.
3. Your store's internal search. In Shopify admin, check what visitors type into your store search bar. These are people already on your site telling you what they want, in their own words.
4. Google Search Console. If your store has been live even a few months, the Performance report shows queries you already appear for. Terms sitting at position 8 to 20 are your fastest wins: Google already thinks you are relevant, you just have not given it a good enough page.

For Dear Crafted, this step alone produced seeds like "terrarium hyderabad," "betta fish tank setup," "low maintenance indoor plants glass," and "customized 3d print gifts", none of which came from a tool.

step 02

Expand with free tools

Take each seed and multiply it. Free sources cover 90% of what a D2C store needs:

• Google autocomplete. Type your seed slowly and record every suggestion. Then add letters: "terrarium a...", "terrarium b...". Autocomplete is live data on what people actually search.
• People Also Ask. Search your seed and expand the PAA boxes. Each question is a blog post candidate and a future FAQ entry. Click a few open; Google loads more.
• Related searches at the bottom of the results page, and the "People also search for" panel.
• Google Keyword Planner. Free with a Google Ads account, no spend required. Volumes come in ranges without an active campaign, but ranges are enough to separate a 10-search keyword from a 10,000-search keyword.
• Google Trends. Essential in India for seasonality. "Diwali gifts" and "rakhi gifts" look small in annual averages but spike enormously in their windows. Trends shows you when demand actually exists.

When is a paid tool worth it? When you are past roughly 30 published pages and need rank tracking, difficulty scores, and competitor data at scale. Before that, a paid subscription mostly produces bigger lists you will not act on. Spend the money on content instead.

step 03

Classify by intent and map to page type

This is the step most store owners skip, and it is the one that decides whether SEO produces revenue. Every keyword carries an intent, and each intent belongs to a different page type:

The most expensive mistake in Shopify SEO is intent mismatch: writing a blog post for a commercial keyword that deserves a collection page, or stuffing a product page with informational content that belongs in a guide. Check the current search results if unsure. If Google shows shopping grids and category pages, it wants commerce pages. If it shows articles and videos, it wants content.

step 04

Take your competitors' keywords, ethically

Your competitors have already spent money learning what works. Read their decisions:

1. Their collection structure. Every collection on a successful competitor's store is a commercial keyword they believe in. Browse their navigation and note the patterns: by occasion, by price, by recipient, by category.
2. Their page titles. View any page's title in the browser tab. Deliberate stores put target keywords first. Note what they lead with.
3. Their blog topics. Titles reveal their informational targets. More useful: notice which posts they link from their homepage or navigation. Those are the ones earning money.
4. The gap. The real prize is not copying their keywords, it is finding what they missed. In our nichés we consistently find competitors chasing high-volume generic terms while ignoring specific, high-intent long-tails like "betta tank without filter" or "terrarium workshop hyderabad." Specific beats big for a store without domain authority.

step 05

The India layer

International keyword guides end at step 4. Selling in India adds three keyword classes your tools will underreport:

Hinglish and vernacular queries. Buyers search "sasta terrarium," "machli tank price," "gift items 500 rupees ke andar." Keyword Planner barely tracks these, but Search Console will show them reaching you. Include natural Hinglish phrasing in FAQ answers and product descriptions where it reads honestly.

Price-qualified searches. "Gifts under 500," "aquarium under 2000," "return gifts under 100" are enormous in India and map perfectly to price-based collection pages. Almost no D2C store builds these collections; the ones that do own the keyword.

Festival and occasion keywords. Diwali, Raksha Bandhan, Valentine's, weddings, corporate gifting season. Research these in their off-season using last year's Trends data, and have the pages live at least six weeks before the spike, on permanent URLs you reuse every year.

step 06

Build the keyword map

Everything converges into one sheet. Six columns, nothing fancy:

Priority rule for a store without established authority: specific and buyable first. A page ranking for "betta tank with filter under 1500" makes sales this month; ranking for "aquarium" happens years from now, if ever. Fill the map with 30 to 50 keywords, mark the ten highest-intent ones, and build or optimize those pages first.

07

How AI search changes keyword research

ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews are changing what a "keyword" is. People do not type "terrarium care" into ChatGPT; they ask "why is my terrarium getting foggy inside and how do I fix it?" The unit of research is shifting from phrase to question.

Practically, this means three additions to the process above:

1. Collect questions, not just phrases. People Also Ask, customer WhatsApp messages, and community groups give you full questions. Use them verbatim as H2s and FAQ entries.
2. Answer each question in a self-contained block. A direct 40 to 80 word answer under the question heading is what AI systems extract and cite.
3. Check the AI answers for your top keywords. Ask ChatGPT and Perplexity your primary questions and note which sources they cite. That is your real competition for the AI-native buyer, and it is often a different list than the Google top 10.

In AI search, the keyword is the question, and the ranking is the citation.

faq

Frequently asked questions

Final word

Keyword research for a Shopify store is a one-week process with a one-page output: a map where every keyword has an intent, a page type, and an owner. Seeds from your own store and customers, expansion with free tools, intent mapping, competitor gaps, the India layer, and a prioritized build list. Do it once properly and every product page, collection, and article you create afterward starts with a reason to exist.