Use Your Google Analytics Tools To Create A Gift Basket Full Of Long Tail Keywords

Have you ever done keyword research? If not, I would recommend using the Google Ad-words Keyword Tool to determine how competitive your local market keywords are. There is problem with using this tool though, and that is, your competition is using the same tool, with the same keywords, and getting the exact same information. Also, this keyword tool can only show you search phrases that people have already used in Google, and you can't really gain any information into long tail keywords that don't have enough traffic volume to show up. 

Use your own Google Analytics account to find secret long tail keywords!

 

If you're like most of us here on Active Rain, you use Google analytics on your personal websites as well as your Active Rain outside blog. What are you doing with this gold mine of data? If your not doing anything with it, here is a little tip to get started on mining your data.

 

Go into your Google analytics account and click on "Traffic Sources" and then "Keywords" on the left hand side:

 

 

Now create a filter of one of your more competitive keywords or a "Head Keyword" like so:

 

(The filter option is going to be at the bottom of the page anytime you look at keywords.)

For my example I used the Head term "Logan Utah". By using that head term, I was able to filter every keyword that had the term in it, and dig deep into the long tail keywords people used to find my site. Now that we have these new keywords, we can dig a little deeper, and optimize our pages to show up for these keywords. 

 

Optimize Your Content For Your Top Converting Keywords And Fix your Bounce Rates!

As you can see from the graphic above, the keyword "Logan Utah Real Estate Listings" and "MLS Listings For Logan Utah Area" both had a "Bounce" ( the 100.00% number on the very right side.) Which means, the searcher came to my site via those keywords, but they left the page right after they landed on it. Why did they leave? It's most likely because I didn't give them what they wanted. 

 

How do you optimize your pages? Simple! Check this out:

 

 

Go into your Google analytics account, click on: Content ->Top Landing Pages.

You can see in the first red box my website received 5,810 visits through 191 pages. This means I have 191 pages I can research what keywords people found those specific pages from.  To do that, move down to the second red box, and click on one of the pages.

 

Click on a page and use the drop down box to choose "Entrance Keywords" like this:

 

This is going to bring up a keyword list when we used the "filter option" before as shown below:

 

(The top red box shows you I am viewing a specific pages entrance keywords.)

 

As you can see in the second red box, this page is performing rather poorly for the keywords it ranks for. There just isn't enough information on the page to keep a searchers attention. I need to re-optimize this page, or at least link to another page that is better optimized for these keywords. 

By knowing the search queries that drive traffic to a specific page, the bounce rate of those keywords, and the amount of time people spend on a page. It gives you the needed information to make your pages perform better in search engines and for the people that find them. You can also take those keywords the people found your page through, that don't really fit the page, and create a whole new page to target the specific long tail keyword. That is how you optimize your pages.  

 

How To Optimize Pages For Your New Keyword Strings

Take the keywords strings that you never new existed, create new pages with those keywords, and link to those new pages from your older pages using the anchor text of the new keywords you discovered. This is called internal linking, and it's a great way to get newer pages to rank for long tail keywords that don't have much competition.

 

WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO DO ALL THIS WORK?

I know, doing all of this research, determining what keywords are working on a page and what ones aren't is a long process, especially if you have 1000's of pages to optimize. Take a deep breath and think of the long term benefits this is going to have for your search engine optimization. Think of all the data you are gathering from your own market research that your competition doesn't have access to. Think of the amount of traffic this is going to drive to your website if you did one page a week. That's 52 pages a year, which you can optimize for many different keywords that no one is competing against.  

 

Questions? Check out these articles to get more in depth long tial keyword research analysis:

3 Steps for Optimizing Content for Long Tail Keywords

The Long Tail SEO Keyword Optimization Guide - How To Profit From Long Tail Keywords

Or leave me a comment below and I will answer to the best of my ability. 

Be sure to Subscribe to my blog so you don't miss my next article on how to optimize your web pages using internal linking strategies to rank for long tail keywords.

Lisa Udy

Platinum Real Estate Group

View My Other Blog @ Homes For Sale Logan UT

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