We've all seen this keyword report that shows you the top search engine keywords that drove traffic to your website are. It's found in Google Analytics under Traffic Sources->Keywords, and once you click "non-paid", it shows you all your organic keywords that are generating traffic from search engines to your website.
This report contains one of the great fallacies of modern web analytics, which is that it defaults to displaying this information ranked on this page by things like visits, pages per visit, and time on site.
Nobody puts up a website to maximize "time on site" or "visits", they want results! So click on that tab labeled "Goal Set 1" where you've configured Google Analytics to measure things like sales, e-mail signups, and leads, and then resort your top keywords by "Goal Conversion Rate":
Now this is useful. Which keywords are most "profitable" for you, yielding the results that justify maintaining your website?
This is useful information if you're buying keywords because that would tell you how much to pay for them, and whether or not you should buy more or less of them. But we're talking about organic keywords, now, and organic keywords don't exist on their own. Every organic keyword exists in tandem with a landing page on your site. After all, if you like (or don't like) your organic search results, and want to either emulate or improve them, how would you know where to start? Which of your pages are performing well that you can scrutinize?
The solution comes in a feature rolled out in the latest release of Google Analytics. Select "Landing Page" from the green-highlighted pulldown menu:
The resulting chart is almost perfect, except that there are a lot of single visits with perfect conversion metrics. That's too small a sample to draw conclusions from.
Use the "Advanced Filter" at the bottom to drop out all keyword-landing page combinations that are too small. While you should use a higher threshhold, I just dropped out every combo with less than 5 visits. Using the filter is easy, just click "Advanced Filter", and set Visits > 5.
.....
The final report is perfect.
You can use it to look at which combinations of landing pages and keywords are working well, compare those to pages that aren't working well, and either re-edit the copy on the landing pages, change the ask on those pages to raise it's yield, or use the techniques that seem to be working on those pages to create new landing page-keyword combinations.
If you're interested in spending more time on increasing your search engine traffic, and you should, since it's often your best performing traffic, I'll be trying out and reviewing a new product in 2010, Enquisite, to optimize organic search on a number of clients. (And yes, the people from Enquisite are giving me free access to their tool to try it out.)
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