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 AdSense CPC with Search Volume

How to properly leverage the AdWords Keyword Tool Keyword Research Results

This article highlights techniques for using the AdSense Keyword Tool as a keyword research resource, using both CPC and Search Volumes effectively - and why you need to use both!

Regulars here at the KeywordCracker blog will know that I often preach that the CPC column in the Google AdWords Keyword Research Tool is the best way to gauge the profitability of a keyword or keyword phrase. Of course, this works well for beginners, but some of us want to master AdSense, as well as drill down onto keywords that will enrich us via other revenue streams.

If you only look at AdSense revenue, of course, CPC remains a good indicator; after all the higher the CPC, the more the keyword will make when a visitor clicks on it. And since you are using the Keyword Cracker methodology, you know where the tipover point is, as well as the anticipated conversion rate for both the keyword phrase, and other products on the page. From a purely revenue point of view, this is enough for a throwaway site.

However, if you are building for long term visibility and wealth generation, the equation shifts slightly.

Now, not only do you want to know how much a keyword will pay (relative to other keywords, of course), you also want to know what the traffic will be on that keyword. In addition, it would be nice to know where the tipover for the whole keyword set is. In other words - which keyword has to take priority, based on current and historical search volumes?

Luckily, Google have made this really easy for us. The first thing to do is export the keywords to a spreadsheet. That could be a Google Document, OpenOffice Calc spreadsheet, or an Excel sheet; it's not important. What is important is to make sure that you have exported the CPC, Search Volume, and Average Search Volume, along with the Advertiser Competition.

These are the four metrics that you will use to create a 'score' for each keyword phrase.

I have been fooling around with this for a while, and I think I have found a good combination which yields the most profitable keywords, and at the same time, identifies those that will offer long term wealth. But it's a moving target, and has to be recalculated every month as seasonal demands change.

And don't be fooled - every single keyword phrase can be subject to seasonal shifts, not just the traditional ones like weight loss, diets, sunglasses and vacation destinations.

My current formula multiplies the CPC by the Advertiser Competition, and multiples that by the average search volume over three months in the same period of the previous year. The result of this multiplication is then weighted by last months search volumes, where available.

I'll keep you posted as to how that gets on!

Learn more about this topic in 'The Adsense and Keyword Research Guide'.

Until next time,
Guy

The KeywordCracker
'The Adsense and Keyword Research Guide'