Using Google Analytics and The Google AdWords Keyword Tool Together

As the largest search provider, Google is uniquely placed to help online marketers, content providers, entrepreneurs and business owners research their online market niches. They have even placed the tools to do so at our disposal, so why not make the most of their generosity?

The technical side of Analytics and using AdWords for SEO (search engine optimization) often challenges people who would rather be writing, selling, or out there doing business.

This short article should help to dispel some of those fears, and help the reader get to grips with using these powerful tools to propel online earnings to new heights.

Google Analytics Organic Search

The secret to online success is often said to be traffic. It's like footfall in the real world – a retail outlet on a busy high street is expected to do better than one in a less frequented side street.

However, as in the world of bricks and mortar retailing, online customers will also travel a bit further than the high street if you offer them something special. At the same time, mere visibility is no guarantee of success.

Google Analytics provides a lot of information, but for the purpose of keyword research, only one page is of special interest : the Organic Search page.

It's found on the left hand menu, under Traffic Sources->Sources->Search->Organic. Once a project has been selected, and the right page located, the user is presented with a spreadsheet style page containing several columns.

We're interested in the following:

• Keyword
• Visits
• Pages/Visit
• Average Visit Duration
• Bounce Rate

In essence, we want to find those keywords for which visitors are viewing multiple pages, and spending time on the site, with a low bounce rate. This may only generate five keyword phrases that we can honestly mark down as being of interest, but they're the online equivalent of a warm lead.

That is, they are people who have raised their hand, and volunteered to go the extra mile to find your page. This implies that there may be others who just missed out, stuck to the high street, and found one of your competitors.

These people might have used slightly different keyword combinations which returned pages higher up the search engines indexes (Search Engine Result Pages, or SERPs) than yours; so, how do we find them?

The AdWords Keyword Tool

The AdWords Keywords Tool provides a way to estimate the potential comparative search volumes over a set of generated keywords.

For each keyword or phrase it is given, the tool will look through a database of actual online searches, and match relevant keywords to the initial phrase, and return both the competition for that phrase (in AdWords terms) and the potential search volume that it could capture.

There are a whole raft of filters, and some are useful in certain situations, but for now we just want to get a feel for the market, and so we look at:

• keyword phrase
• competition index
• global search volumes

Analyzing each keyword phrase from the Analytics tool in turn, we want to select a reasonably limited number of phrases and so can afford to be quite selective. Different markets have different thresholds, but a good rule of thumb is to target 'Low' competition keywords with 10k – 100k global search volume figures.

Anything larger than this will be terribly hard to capture, and indicates that the keyword phrase might not be niche enough to be certain of providing a stream of qualified leads.

The keyword phrases can be written into your content as blog posts or article prompts and used to generate traffic towards your web properties. As long as you remember to keep applying the process to discover new keyword phrases, you'll never run short of inspiration or targeted traffic again.

Using Blog Posts for Keyword Research

Blogs are great for many things; from getting quick feedback on an idea (if you've allowed comments) through to testing out new ideas and marketing formulae (if you're testing and tracking the keywords properly).

However, many people forget that they are also great for keyword research. In particular, they work well for researching long tail keywords, as well as keyword phrase variants. 


A word of warning – they're not much good for one or two word primary keyword phrases; use traditional methods, as well as commercial products such as Market Samurai or WordTracker for these.

Easy Keyword Research with Blogger.com

Perhaps the largest of all blog sites is Google's Blogger. You're reading a blog hosted by Blogger, and one of the principal advantages from many users perspective is the relatively tight integration with Google's tools, such as Google Documents.

One other aspect that's attractive, and which prompted this article, are the statistics that can be tracked.

For example, Blogger tracks the location of people visiting your blog. There are also the usual page view statistics, as well as one very interesting piece of data – the keyword phrases people used to find your blog.

Here's how it works: 

• someone types a keyword phrase into Google;
• Google fetches the pages from its database and displays the result list (SERPs);
• the user clicks a URL;
• Google redirects the user's browser to the target page.

Now, once this redirection has taken place, the session variable known as the HTTP Referrer contains the original Google search URL (the one you can see in the browser status area, if you hover over the link text.)

Blogger can then access this data, and extract the exact keyword phrase that the user originally typed in before choosing your page from the SERPs.

How does this help?

Well, if even if your page appeared well down in the list for one or two keywords, there's at least half a chance that other keywords in the query are related to content that you could provide. 

So, at worst they'll be good prompts for future blog entries.

The place to look for these gems is in the Traffic Sources menu item, accessible from the Overview page of the blog in question (Overview->Stats->Traffic Sources).
At best, these keyword phrases can offer useful insights into what people are looking for, and what you should be targeting in order to make the most of the traffic on offer. And that's the key – traffic. 

But what happens if you've got a blog that doesn't get enough traffic for this analysis to be helpful?

The answer is simple - blog, promote and wait. Or, boost your profile by simultaneously publishing on other places like Squidoo and HubPages. Once Google notices your blog, and you've got a few posts under your belt, you'll be able to reap the keyword research rewards!

New Keyword Research Software : The Recombinator

Free Keyword Research Software!

Just a quick post to let you all know that version 0.1 of the Keyword Recombinator is now available. This free keyword research tool allows you to enter a single keyword phrase, and have it Recombinated into a variety of different forms. This is much easier to explain with a quick screen shot:

The keyword phrase in this example is 'best keyword tool', and it has been Recombinated into a variety of unique and innovative forms.

The resulting list can then be exported by clicking the Export button. It's that easy.

Generate mis-typed keywords, domain names, and long tail recombinations of keyword phrases. All for free!

News Flash : this software is so recent that there is a new feature not shown in the screen shot - export with spaces, hyphens, or underscores. And, if you stay in touch with the author, he'll give you a heads up when the next version is available : with automated URL generation!

(You can also check the #krg-tools channel on Twitter, too.)

Have fun!

Guy
http://twitter.com/leckyt