Site Optimization Utilizing Keywords from Search

When it comes to analyzing “keywords” against your website, you could probably look into few different areas of keywords analysis.  This post talks site optimization by using keywords from search.

1. Keywords from search engines

2. Internally searched terms

3. Data from Google Search Console

For Optimizing Your Site for Search Engines Keywords
In terms of keywords coming from search engines, it is obvious that certain keywords are going to perform better.

Possible questions to ask yourself prior to looking at the metrics, following this kind of questions could guide you to the right direction:

• Which terms are converting or satisfying the goal?
• Are there any other keywords or phrases similar to those high converting terms?
• Why similar phrases exist, but perform differently?
• Which terms are generating a lot of referrals, but have a high bounce rate?
• Which terms are generating more page views per visit?

Keep in mind, Google Analytics doesn’t provide the keywords level visibility like it used to.  So this suggestions to look into the Google’s keyword is for Paid Search Ads (via AdWords).  AdWords still provides GA integration with keyword level information and measures.

Once you arm yourself with these types of questions, you’ll get a good sense of where to start in your analytics tool. Typically, referring keywords are located in the traffic source section. Depending on the analytics tool you have, you might need to segment your traffic source first, before analyzing various metrics.

Site Optimization with Search Keywords
Most likely you’ll be looking at reducing that bounce rate, or increase conversions, or improve user retention. Things to look at the landing page or pages causing high exists are:

• Call to action
• Engaging content or persuasiveness of the content
• Hyperlink allocation across the page
• Font color and size
• Too many ads
• Page required to scrolling (content above or below the fold)
• Content not meeting your customer’s objective or goal

Check out the improvement points, modify the contents, and test it. Continuously improve and optimize to better meet the goal of your site.  With keywords data from Paid Search, I have seen a very high performing strategy using SKAG (single keyword ad group).  It is very time and resource-intensive, given that you’ll need to create a custom landing pages for every ad groups.  However, it performs really well if it is done right.

In Google Analytics, you’ll find such helpful metrics under the “Traffic Source” tab. Don’t forget to utilize the “views” functions to slice and dice the data.

Check out my other blog post that will give you another idea on how to optimize your site using search keywords.

How to use Tableau to analyze Google Search Console data