Actionable Analytics: Keyword research that brings more traffic to your website

How many times have you had someone give you a "keyword report" from your analytics product and not known what to do with it?  Top keyword lists fall into the realm of analytics data whose purpose is not immediately obvious.  Also in this realm are visitor "traffic reports" and "top content" reports.  Unless you have an active program going to generate traffic from your keywords, then such a report is useless to you.

For example, I once had a client say to me:

Client: "We had xx thousands of visitors come to our website last month.  Is that good?" 

Me: "Do you have any kind of organic marketing program that can influence that number?"

Client: "No."

Me: "Do you have a paid media campaign that gets scaled up or down based upon your traffic?"

Client: "No."

Me: "Do you have any commitments to funders or partners about how much traffic will visit any part of your website?"

Client: "No."

Me: "Then it doesn't matter, you can ignore it for now."

Data like visits, visitors, top content, and top keywords only matter as a barometer for measuring the ongoing work you are doing that may effect them, or if you have some kind of commitment to maintain a particular performance level.  If you have no intention of doing anything to generate more traffic, it's mostly a wasted act to obsess over your traffic reports to learn anything.

Today I'm going to show you where to find the top organic keywords report, which shows what keywords are delivering visitors to your site from search engines.  Then I'll show you how to research these keywords to find similar ones you should be incorporating into your content so that you can get even more traffic.

Of course, every reporting period you can look at the keyword report to measure your progress, which is what makes it an actionable analytic.

Step 1: Find the top keywords/search phrases bringing traffic to your site

This is trivially easy.  On Google Analytics just go to Traffic Sources->Keywords and make sure you click "non-paid".  You should have a report that looks something like this if you select "Landing Page" as the second column item:

If you're using Omniture SiteCatalyst, go to "Traffic Sources->Search Engines - Natural".

Find one or more keywords or phrases that is actually appropriate to you, such as "fundraising metrics" is for me.  If you're constantly writing and publishing, that is an organic search engine optimization program.  How do we find more words similar to this that people search for?

Step 2: Use the Google Wonder Wheel to find similar keywords and phrases

There are indeed a lot of ways to do keyword research.  There are paid tools, and free tools, but one of the first you should look at it the Google Wonder Wheel.  Go take your phrase, like "fundraising metrics" and run it through Google.   Click the "Show Options" link above your search results and you'll see a line of options down the left.  Look all the way down to where it says "Related Searches", and click it.  Your results will look something like this:

From this I picked up the following related search phrases:

1. donation metrics
2. fundraising measurements
3. charity metrics
4. metrics nonprofit fundraising

Copy these down in a list with the original "fundraising metrics" and set it aside.  Now click the Wonder Wheel option right below "Related Searches" and you'll see another way of viewing related searches visually.  (I love the graphical presentation of the Wonder Wheel)  It will look something like this:

The results won't be different, but you can easily expand out to explore related terms.  Don't go too crazy, remember your core term.  After looking at a few of these, I concluded that I should also add "fundraising analysis" to my list.  Let's review the list of phrases:

1. fundraising metrics (the phrase I'm currently using)
2. donation metrics
3. fundraising measurements
   
4. charity metrics
   
5. metrics nonprofit fundraising
6. fundraising analysis

Now we're ready to research them.

Step 3: Evaluate keywords with Google Ad Keywords

The best tool for this is the "Keyword" tool that is built into Google AdWords.  Go get a free AdWords account and find it under "Tools->Keyword Tool".  Copy and paste your list of current and potential phrases into it, and the Keyword tool will tell you incredibly useful things about those phrases, in particular, what is the monthly volume of searches.  Here are the results I got:

This is a great big "DOH!" moment for me.  I have used the phrase "fundraising metrics" in my latest ebook about nonprofit fundraising web analytics without checking to see if that's a highly searched phrase in Google.  Now that I look, I should have used the phrase "fundraising analytics".  That has 10 times more searches than "fundraising metrics" does.

Lesson learned.

Be careful about letting the AdWords tool suggest additional phrases to you.  It casts a very wide net, and you'll find that it suggests phrases that are not appropriate to your content, which can be a waste of time if you're buying ads.  (If you're developing the organic content for it, then it's a fine idea, though it's suggestions can include extremely competitive and generic keywords.)

Once you've identified some phrases that look like they have potential, you can start to incorporate them into your writing, which is the first step of any organic search engine campaign.  Also if you're going to start doing any AdWords purchases, whether its through a Google Nonprofit Grant or through actual budgeted ad dollars, you already know what phrases you want to be advertising on.

Comments

[Nicole]

Thank you for sharing such great information! I really learn a lot from your e-newsletter and blog.

[Shabbir]

Thanks! Always nice to have appreciative readers.