Article Category: Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Web Development | Article Tags: analytics, insights, keywords, seo, traffic, webmaster tools
If you run a business and own a website, chances are you’ve been told that in order to boost traffic to your site or blog, you need to optimize your website for certain keywords, and perhaps even purchase pay per click credit on search advertising platforms like Google Adsense and Adwords.
How does the site owner choose what keywords are going to most positively impact his website’s traffic and conversion rate? Believe it or not, its actually more difficult than people want to believe. The reason why choosing keywords is difficult is because you must walk a fine line between words and phrases that are widely used in user searches, they can’t be extremely competitive by other business websites, they must have ample traffic estimates, the cost of the keywords [if doing paid advertising] must not be high, and you need to gauge the terms’ level of interest on the internet in the past, present, & future.
Meanwhile, a growing number of businesses are becoming aware of the benefits of optimizing their website and would like to take a more aggressive approach to improving the targeted traffic to the site. Unfortunately, business owners often choose a set of keywords that they think describes their business but do little to no research to determine the actual practicality, value, usefulness, and feasibility of optimizing for the keywords they have specifically chosen. In other words, business owners can fall down the slippery slope of getting married to the wrong keywords.
To help address this issue, we think it would be useful for our readers to see some of the powerful search tools that exist to help determine which keywords a business should adopt as their website’s representative keywords and key search terms.
Determining General Interest Level
There is a wonderful tool that was created by Google called “Insights” that allows you to input search terms and view the general level of interest those terms have had over the last 6 or 7 years.
Go to http://www.google.com/insights/search/ and enter your keywords, set a location preference, and even a time frame, if you so desire.
There is something interesting to understand about the graphical results that are returned to you once you submit terms: The numbers normalized to fit the 0-100 scale in the y-axis. That means that if you compare “Michael Jackson” and “roofing”, you will probably see that MJ’s term is soaring high above the roofing traffic. However, if you compare “roofing” to “roofing contractor” you will see that the former performs slightly better than the second. This will help you easily determine the relative interest of your search terms on the entire web.
Actual Keyword Potency
The Adsense keyword analyzer tool is good for this area of keyword research. After submitting terms, it will show you useful metrics like “Global Traffic”, “Local Traffic”, “Level of Competition”, “Predicted Number of Monthly Impressions”, and “Estimated Avg. Cost Per Click”. Additionally, if you so desire, it will output similar and related search terms and how they compare to the ones you entered. This is often useful for uncovering alternate search terms that perform much better than yours.
This means that when using this tool, you should expect to be taught a lesson about the effectiveness of your chosen search terms. If your terms are weak and powerful, you will see that very quickly, and you will have to decide whether or not you will take the advice of this search tool.
Keyword Density Checking
If you sign up for an account with Webmaster Tools (http://www.google.com/webmasters/), you will be able to view the general keyword hierarchy and breakdown of the actual content on your website. This means that if you’ve decided your keywords should be “roofing contractor” and your site shows that the most reoccurring keyword terms on your website is “cheeseburger”, then you have much work to do to revise and rewrite the content on your site so that visitors can easily find the information they wanted to find on your website.
Entrance Search Terms
Often, when checking out the analytics of your website on Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, you’ll notice there are metrics pertaining to search terms and what terms were clicked on before they were sent to your website. Looking through these can, at times, give you some other ideas about special phrases that you hadn’t yet thought of.
Conclusion
Don’t let yourself get to stuck with one set of keyword terms before doing your due diligence to research the value of those terms. The reason being if you refuse to look at the data, you may be sitting on top of a keyword-poor website and your SEO or PPC dollars may be going to waste, and you should always try to make every dollar count.
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