Continuing with the series of SEO blog posts by our Director, Christopher Mills, today we’re looking at something that will teach you more about which keywords are performing for you.
A couple of weeks ago, I spoke about finding out which keywords were bringing business to your website and today I want to touch on a similar topic that will assist you in determining which keywords are performing well for you.
The first thing you want to do is fire up Excel and create a column for the landing pages on your website and a second column for the keywords that you are optimising for each landing page.
The next step is to open up your Google Analytics account and navigate to Landing Pages, which can be found under Site Content, which is under Content on the left. This report gives you a list of the landing pages on your website ordered by the number of visits received.
Finally, we want to take the list of landing pages and keywords, and link it up to the list of landing pages and the visitor counts. What we're doing here is determining which landing pages are getting the most visits and in turn, taking a look at which keywords are potentially bringing the most traffic.
Your spreadsheet will look like this when you're finished:
7 comments
PGR
May 2, 2013 at 10:08 amThanks for the post, I have a side-question though: what could explain sudden oscilations in analytics stats every 1-2 days? I’m talking about 1500%+, and this has been going on for about a month.
Chris M
May 2, 2013 at 11:23 am@PGR Cheers for the comment and appreciate of the post. Interesting scenario, 1500% is a large up and down, is that on organic traffic or all traffic? Also, without knowledge of what sort of traffic you get, it’s hard to deduce whether 1500% is actually, really, a lot. As in, if your traffic isn’t in the thousands, a 1500% increase isn’t that much, then again, if it’s every 1-2 days, that’s quite interesting. I would really need to look at your Analytics to determine the source of the situation, but to just give advise, I’d look very carefully at the Traffic Sources and see if you can pick a specific source up.
PGR
May 2, 2013 at 11:42 amIt’s mostly organic traffic from Google, which led us to believe that it has to be some kind of an error. Our visits from google range fron 200 to 5500 which could probably be explained with algorithn changes if it happened once every few months, not days.
Chris M
May 2, 2013 at 12:03 pmInitially I read this, “sudden oscilations in analytics stats every 1-2 days” as it was happening every few days.
Does the traffic go down drastically, but then come up again drastically? (sidenote: Haha, manic Anlaytics ;)). Algorithm changes don’t strike me as something that could be doing this, it just doesn’t feel right. Are you able to break down the organic traffic into keywords, and possibly evolve “(not provided)” into landing pages (like this: https://www.imoddigital.com/seo/google-analytics-keywords-bring-you-business). That might give you a better idea on what organic influencers might be coming into play.
Please excuse me, it’s very difficult to deduce this without access 🙂
PGR
May 2, 2013 at 1:13 pmYup, you’ve read correctly the first time, it’s happening every few days, that’s why algorithm changes don’t make sense since they happen once every few months at best. I’ll see what I can do about the keywords.
Chris M
May 2, 2013 at 1:15 pm@PGR Strange scenario, please do keep me informed as I’d love to hear the outcome. You’re also welcome to pop us an email and connect us to your Google Analytics account and we’ll have a quick look for you.
James M
May 2, 2013 at 1:21 pmTo be honest I am a bit stumped. I can’t seem to think of any reason why organic traffic would be doing that so frequently. I could understand if it was referral traffic as that could be tied to a bot or crawler misbehaving a little bit but not organic traffic. Really quite stumped.