Most keyword research focuses on determining search usage and competition levels for a given keyword - and on estimating how relevant to a website’s products or offerings the keyword may be. A simplified keyword research work flow might look like this:
- Brainstorm keywords & get synonyms from keyword tools
- Use search databases to determine keyword traffic levels
- Estimate query type and relevance of keywords to website topic/offerings
Is there anything wrong with this approach? Not necessarily - in cases where a new website is being developed, this is the basic process required. But what about for existing websites that have been up and running for a significant amount of time?
Look to analytics for crucial keyword data
Hopefully if you’re running a website that’s been up for any significant amount of time you’ve also had analytics installed to track traffic at the site. If you haven’t - go do that right now.
Your website analytics are a crucial source of data when it comes to keyword research. Most analytics platforms allow you to track:
- Referring keywords (for search engine traffic)
- The bounce rate of your pages (what percentage of users hit your page and leave)
- Time on site
- Pages-per-visit
- Conversions
- A host of other information
Any decent analytics setup will allow you to sort your keyword referrals based on conversion rates once you’ve established set goals. Don’t have goals or conversions set up? Look to your bounce rate, pages per visit and time on site as indications of how relevant the user found your site or page to be to their search query. Sorting keywords by these metrics gives you some concrete information as to the user’s intent and whether you’re meeting their expectations - not guesswork, but real data that you can take action on.
This data helps you:
- Understand where the value lies in your current search engine traffic - and consider what traffic you’ll potentially lose by optimizing a given page for a new keyword
- Get a better idea of what the user’s intent is in searching for a given keyword based on their actions
- Identify keywords with high conversion rates that you aren’t ranking highly for - these are solid opportunities for optimization
- Refine your navigation and content based on the language users search with - furthering your optimization for relevant keywords as well as your usability (but be sure to temper this effort with common sense - certain terms simply don’t make sense in navigational elements)
Overall, a review of your analytics data, if it exists, must be incorporated into your keyword research. Without it you can’t do much better than making educated guesses. With it you have a far better idea of what keywords are relevant in the minds of your users and therefor what keywords are most valuable to your website and campaign.
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