Before you optimize your site, it's worth doing the research to know what you should optimize for. Doing keyword research helps you figure out which words or phrases people are searching for and which ones you can actually rank for.

Most stores open without doing any research, and they think they'll rank for hugely popular terms such as the following:

• Shoes
• T-shirts
• Chocolate
• Razor subscription

These terms are highly competitive. With a little research, using tools later in this section, you can optimize your site for search terms that are much easier to rank for. We'll look into the following:

• Creating a list of potential keywords
• Comparing the search volume of different keywords
• Optimizing for the best solution

Once you know how to do all of these, you'll know which terms you can try to rank for in search engines to get some free traffic.