Good keyword research is essential for any search campaign to bring in the right visitors. The best visitors to target for an E-commerce would be users on the verge of purchasing a product! So how do you get visitors like this?
First of all, what is the searcher looking for?  Are they:

• searching for a particular website? (Navigational query)
• looking for information? (Informational query)
• researching a potential purchase? (Commercial query)
• purchasing something now?  (Transactional query)

Without careful research, you could be wasting time & money on optimising for keywords that are used by searchers that aren’t looking to purchase anything.  This SEOmoz article divides up searches into, Navigational, Informational, Commercial and Transactional which makes identifing the searcher intent easier.

By targeting the searchers looking to purchase (transactional), you make your online marketing work harder and more efficiently for you  because you spend less time optimising for keywords that will not bring in any improvement in revenue.
So you know that optimising for transactional queries is our goal, but how do you go about doing it?

1. Identify keywords that suit the intent of the user:

Including call to actions and incentive terms like: “buy”, “review”, “purchase” and “deals” on your existing keywords.
A new keyword could be “buy (PRODUCT NAME) online”
So “buy Canon SLR” for example. Simple!

2. Then we check to see if this keyword is used by searchers with commercial intent:
   • 0.78 “Canon”
   • 0.99 “Canon Camera”
   • 1.00 “Buy Canon SLR”

I use this Microsoft Commercial Intention tool to find these figures. A keyword with a score of over 0.5 has a strong “commercial intent” according to Microsoft, so the probability that a searcher will purchase is high.

3. How easy is it to get rankings for this keyword?
   • 0.78 “Canon” High search volume
   • 0.99 “Canon Camera” High search volume
   • 1.00 “Buy Canon SLR” Low search volume

Local (& Global) search volumes all get lower as the commercial intent rises. This means more traffic competing for keywords that don’t convert as well as others. This looks like an opportunity to get a good page of content live targeting this term. It means your new page will have less competing sites, and a higher chance of converting. Two birds with one stone

You can also use this to see how difficult it will be to rank for these keywords using the SEOmoz keyword difficulty tool.

4. Match users need on the landing page:

There is no point in getting a top ranking if all users do is click back once they see your website doesn’t actually sell the camera they want. Prepare the user for the call to action on this page by adding “Buy Canon SLR Camera” as part of the description or title. This helps the user to click on the page when it is displayed in the search results.

This also prepares the user for what is expected of them (to purchase the product). This will tend to filter out users searching anything but transactional queries.

Also, doing some Multivariate testing on the landing page will ensure you have the best chance of converting the user into a paying customer!