Keywords are the backbone of search engine optimization, and when we're measuring our
SEO efforts, analyzing the different keywords that are bringing people to our websites is
an excellent place to start. Inside Google Analytics, we can navigate to the Organic
Search Traffic report by drilling down through Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic.
This report will show us all the keywords that have driven traffic to our pages from
organic search engines, and although we are only looking at 10 by default, you can change
this to show up to 500 rows at a time. Another quick tip is to use the Secondary dimension
dropdown so that we can see which search engine sent us the traffic. Just select Source from
the dropdown and you'll see another column of data show up with this information. By
default, we'll be looking at general site usage metrics, and here we'll be able to get
some insights around just how engaged visitors are that find our site through certain keywords.
Take a look at the second and third rows. We can see that the keyword "explore california"
keeps people on the site six times longer than "california events," and people view
three times more pages. Not only that, but we're getting a lot more visits from this
particular keyword. Looking at the Bounce Rate, we can see that people are much more
likely to dive deeper into our site if they found us from a Google search on the "explore
california" keyword as well. If you haven't yet configured goals in your Google Analytics
account to track business outcomes, you'll probably want to stop this video and make
that your top priority. You can't manage what you can't measure, and that goes for all of
your online marketing efforts, not just SEO. Once you've got your goals set up, you can
click on a goal set to see how your keywords are performing with respect to your business
objectives. Here we've got even more data that tells us california events isn't necessarily
a good keyword for us. The explore california keyword is driving more contact form submissions,
newsletter signups, video views, and PDF downloads by far. Of course, if you have configured
ecommerce in Google Analytics, you can also look at not just goal data, but transactional
data for each of the keywords you are analyzing. One thing we need to mention is that in late
2011, Google made a change to how it allows Web Analytics Tools to capture keyword data
from organic searches. If a user does a search while logged into their Google account, Google
now encrypts the keyword data so that it cannot be read by Analytics Tools. And unfortunately,
this means that all of those keywords are dumped into a generic row of data called not
provided. Here we can see that over half of the organic traffic to this website came from
users that were logged into Google, and unfortunately, that means that the keywords that they used
are unavailable to us in Google Analytics or any other web analytics software. One thing
that we can do is drill down on that not provided link and change your primary dimension to
Landing Page. This will at the very least allow us some insights into how the ranking
pages are performing, and if we combine this with data around which of our pages are ranking
for which terms, we can often infer the keywords that led to these visits. Remember that when
you're looking at keyword reports, you're only seeing data for people who found your
website through a search that you ranked for, and they clicked on you in the search results.
What that means is that Web Analytics is not a very good indicator of what opportunities
you are missing. If you don't rank for a keyword, no one is going to be clicking on a search
result for you, and no data for those missed opportunities will ever show up here. Make
sure to continually look at data from your keyword research tools as well, to identify
keyword opportunities, and once you do start getting traffic from them, you'll be able
to analyze how they perform in your Web Analytics tools. Earlier in this course, we looked at
Google Webmaster Tools, and one thing you can do is link your Google Webmaster Tools
account to your Google Analytics account. Once you've done this, you can view all of
this data under Traffic Sources > Search Engine Optimization. In the Google Webmaster Tools'
Queries report, you can find data on impressions in search engine results, your average rank
positions, and clicks and click-through rates. Note that these numbers aren't perfect. So
feel free to take the data in Google Webmaster Tools reports with a grain of salt. That said,
it's still accurate enough to get some valuable insights based on the trends rather than the
raw numbers. One thing to look for are keywords that have high impressions, but low click-through
rates. This means that you might be showing up in the search results, but no one's clicking
on your listing. This could mean that you've got problems with your title, or maybe your
description, and it's worthwhile to take a closer look. With all of the data available,
analyzing keywords can be an intimidating task, but it's an extremely important one
for anyone doing SEO. Because everything begins with a search, understanding what happens
after searchers click on those pages that we've worked so hard to rank for is the key