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How to Use Google Analytics as a (Free) SEO Keyword Tool
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Google Analytics is a powerful free analytics tool suite. Among its powerful features is keyword tracking. Google Analytics will track the inbound search engine queries that got people to your website. You can use its keyword feature to analyze your SEO keywords, but beware. Google Analytics (like all metrics programs) is a much better keyword confirmation tool than it is a keyword discovery tool.
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By Jason McDonald
Senior SEO Instructor - JM Internet Group.
Posted: June 22, 2010
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Contents:
Keywords for SEO: It's all about the Customer
Google, as you probably know, is a 'pull' medium. In contrast to the 'push' medium of Television, wherein ads are 'pushed' to viewers without their involvement (think: I am watching the Olympics, and on comes an ad for BMW which I did nothing to request...), Google is a 'pull' medium in which users (a.k.a. customers) start the process by typing keywords into the search box.
Assume, for example, that you are a Mom of a 16 year old living in Tulsa, Oklahoma. You want to buy the kid some really cool tennis shoes (or is it "sneakers") for his 17th birthday... So you use Google to start our search about tennis shoes / sneakers to identify the coolest trends and ultimately to locate possible vendors that sell shoes online. Here are some possible Google searches -
online sneakers
cool sneakers for boys
vs.
online tennis shoes
cool tennis shoes for boys
To Google, tennis shoes and sneakers are two very different searches. But to someone from Oklahoma, these are practically speaking the same thing. In fact, most Oklahomans do not even use the word sneakers - that is an East Coast term. Yet if you are a vendor of online shoes (whatever they are called, tennis shoes, sneakers, or what have you), you want to reach everyone. Customers who use the term 'sneakers' and customers who use the term 'tennis shoes,' and customers who might use both.
But you have to know which words are used, by whom, and how often. Google clearly puts our customer in the driver's seat, and that is why we spend so much time on keyword discovery.
Keyword Discovery vs. Keyword Confirmation
On an abstract search engine optimization (SEO) level, we can make a very important distinction between keyword discovery and keyword confirmation.
Keyword discovery is the process of identifying the entire universe of possible keywords that our customers might use. In this example, we would be building our keyword list out as tennis shoes, sneakers, sports shoes, athletic shoes, casual shoes, gym shoes, etc. Obviously the word "shoe" is important for our SEO keywords, but so are all the helper words such as sports or casual. In keyword discovery we seek to map the entire universe of available synonyms and helper words, bar none.
Keyword confirmation, in contrast, is measured by inbound web traffic, as registered in our web logs, that identifies what keywords we are actually attracting Google traffic for. If we write a blog post on the Coolest Boys' Sneakers for Fall, 2010, for example, and we get thirty inbound user sessions on the keywords 'Cool Boys Sneakers,' we are confirming that our blog / SEO efforts paid off for that particular keyword.
In other words, keyword discovery comes first; keyword confirmation comes second. Keyword discovery is about brainstorming and using the free keyword tools I teach in our online SEO classes to identify all potential keywords. Keyword confirmation is about measuring where you are doing well in terms of our inbound SEO keywords vs. web traffic.
Google Analytics: Using Google Analytics as a Free SEO Keyword Tool
Now that we understand the conceptual difference, we can turn to the fantastic free tool: Google Analytics. Analytics does a lot of amazing things, but one of the best is it reveals to us the inbound search queries that attract traffic to our site. Assuming you have set up your free Google Analytics account, simply click on Traffic Sources, and then Keywords. By default, Google Analytics will show you the inbound search keywords in descending order.
The danger here is that many web people assume that Google Analytics does all the hard work for you, and you don't need to brainstorm nor use the keyword discovery tools. The error here is that if you missed some keywords they most probably will not show up in your Analytics keyword data. If you optimized on sneakers but forget to identify tennis shoes, then your log will only show sneakers and hardly any traffic from tennis shoes. The fatal mistake is to assume that few people use the term tennis shoes, when all you really know is that you failed to optimize on it, and therefore failed to attract inbound traffic.
That said, you can go to the bottom of the page, and open up your search results to 500. Then look at the bottom of your Google Analytics Keyword list for ideas about what keywords people are using. You can even type in a subword to 'filter' the results. Used correctly, therefore, these less popular searches in your Google Analytics can be used as a decent tool for keyword discovery. Just remember that just because you have low inbound search volume for a keyword does not necessarily mean that those keywords are not high volume. All you really know is that your website isn't doing well for that target keyword. You must check the broader tools, like the Google AdWords Keyword tool to actually measure the true global volume.
Keyword discovery, in short, is very different from keyword confirmation.
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