Guest contributor Nick Eubanks explains how to leverage your available website performance data to inform your overall SEO strategy.
When was the last time you looked at your Google Analytics profiles and really gave some thought to opportunities that are right in front of you? If you are like most of the people I talk to, not very often.
In my experience most people look at analytics simply to check their traffic, query volume, referral sources, AdWords campaigns, and maybe using some filters to disseminate some pesky (not provided) data.
But otherwise, not many of the SEO professionals or website owners I talk to take this information and use it to augment their SEO strategies to take advantage of opportunities.
Today’s post is a thought exercise for looking at your Google Analytics profile to discern opportunities that you may not realize you should be taking advantage of. I am going to ask a series of questions that I want you to think long and hard about. Some you may know the answer to off the top of your head, but others may get you thinking. This is the goal.
Q: What is the top 10 percent of your traffic-driving keywords?
Not sure? Go look.
Log into your Google Analytics account, navigate to Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic.
Now look in the bottom right corner of the screen to see how many overall organic keywords are driving traffic to your site.
Google Analytics
Total traffic-driving keywords.
As you can see in my above example, this site has 25,768 keywords driving organic traffic, so I know if I want to analyze the top 10 percent, I need to export 2,577.
Google Analytics by default will only allow you to export 500 keywords at a time which needless to say can be very annoying for larger websites. The good news is there is an easy way around this: simply add “&limit=x” to the end of the URL, with x being equal to the number of rows you want to export up to 50,000. (For me this would be &limit=2577.) Although your browser will still only display 500 rows on the screen, when you export you will get all the rows equal to ‘x’.
Now that you have your top traffic-driving keywords we need to make some sense of them. I do this by opening up the CSV file in Excel and doing some clustering between phrases containing the same keywords. Easiest way to do this is to use the Excel function Data > Subtotals, which will spit out something that looks like this:
- Keyword 1a 10
- Keyword 1b 25
- Keyword 1 Total 35
- Keyword 2a 15
- Keyword 2b 30
- Keyword 2 Total 45
One other way to do this is to use wildcards with a custom filter, where you individually filter for each set of keyword permutations. Here is how you would do this in Excel 2010:
- Select your column header row (usually A)
- Click Data > Filter
- Click the drop-down arrow
- Go to Text Filters > Equals
- In the equals text field type your first keyword filter like this *keyword*
- Click OK
You can now copy and paste this filtered list of permutations to a new sheet to further analyze your penetration for that set of keywords. This allows you to quickly see which permutations of your head and body keywords you are successfully penetrating. (See my related post on taking your keyword analysis to the next level.)
Q: Can you leverage branded search to drive non-branded search?
Are there holes in your industry or vertical where your brand could come to represent the product? In essence, branding your products to become closely-related and eventually synonymous with your brand.
For example:
- “Google” is used in place of “search engine” even if the person is referring to an alternate search engine (i.e. “Google [insert keyword]”)
- Lager for Yuengling beer (in some regions of the United States)
- Kleenex instead of tissue
- Xerox for copiers
- Pampers for diapers
- Kickstarter for crowdfunding
- Thermos for a vacuum flask (I had to look that one up because I only know them as thermoses)
I realize these are almost entirely first-movers in their respective product verticals, and this is not an easy feat to accomplish especially if you’re not an inventor or product engineer. However, this doesn’t mean you cannot position your product to get on the right path.
The best example from the list in terms of positioning themselves within the market to take advantage of making their brand synonymous with a product is Yuengling. Yes, I realize Yuengling is America’s oldest brewery which makes it an obvious first-mover.
But Yuengling did not start branding themselves as Lager until 1987, at which time they were not the only lager on the market. This market positioning is now allowing them to rapidly move into, and penetrate, new geographic markets.
Q: Who are your top referral sources?
Are these based on relationships or close contextual relevance? How are you growing your overall referral traffic? Especially since this traffic when contextual relevance is a steady performer for driving conversions.
If the majority of your referral traffic is based on relationships, how can you better leverage these relationships to gain more traffic? Consider the following:
- Do a series of guest posts on a topic that is complementary to the existing content on the blog. (For example if the blog is about gluten-free dieting, write about your favorite gluten-free recipe)
- Coordinate with the website owner to do a series of back and forth, or conversation posts. Where you take a topic that you will cover in 4-6 posts, split it down the middle, and respond to each other via posts hosted on your respective websites.
- Consider sponsoring a section of their website, for example a category, and in exchange for the branding and link you agree to provide in-kind coverage or more content.
If the majority of your referral traffic is due to close contextual relevance between your content and the content of the referring website, write a thoughtful and comprehensive introduction email and be sure to include both relevant signaling stats for both your website and the recipient’s website.
Metrics like indexed links, domain authority, social shares, and any other search engine or social signaling metrics that make sense given the nature of the content. This shows that you are not only are knowledgeable of the opportunity, but that you have taken the time to research the recipient’s website and you are not just another link-builder web spammer.
Q: What conversions are already driven by search? Where is search failing to create conversion?
What I am asking you to do here is examine the performance of your search campaigns and their net impact on your business. Some of these you will have data for, others you may have an educated hunch that you can confirm with data. Some examples:
- Search is driving sales but not subscription.
Are you only acquiring 1 new newsletter subscriber for every 10 purchases? Potential causes could include no compelling reason to subscribe, weak or thin content, not enough benefits for subscribers, no call to action, too difficult to subscribe. - Search is driving sales for products a, b, and c but not x, y, and z.
When you look at your ecommerce data by SKU or even category, is there a noticeable disparity between your segments? Is this greater than 50%? Potential causes could include pricing that is too high in comparison with closest competitors, or features and benefits are less compelling than your competitors (for example, money-back guarantees, free support, or even just better support.) - Search is generating higher refunds and chargebacks.
Remember that when visitors are finding you through non-branded search they don’t know who you are. Are you not accurately and comprehensively explaining and showing your products? Are you providing the same sales experience to your website visitors as telephone, email, and referral sales?
Wrapping it up
I hope this exercise has gotten you thinking about how to leverage your available website performance data to inform your overall SEO strategy.
As mentioned earlier in the post, a big chunk of opportunity analysis relies on your ability to disseminate your keywords performance data to identify opportunities and weaknesses within your SEO campaigns.
Stay tuned for insights into how to analyze your keywords to uncover these opportunities.
