Google Analytics Insights - Micro-Optimizing With Keywords

While Google Webmaster Tools are a great way to see what your top ranking and top performing keywords are on Google, finding out what's really performing overall requires site analytics. And Google provides a great tool for that too.

First, I don't know if "fat" is a term used to describe keywords in the broader SEO world. We used it a lot when I was in sales to describe products we sold that had high margins (and thus higher commissions). For example, if you had a customer who was dead set on buying the el-cheapo Sunday Circular camcorder, you could salvage the sale both in terms of your commission and overall margin on the sale, by getting him to buy a spare battery. Batteries were "fat", meaning their mark-up was in the range of 100-150%.

So, when I see a keyword or keyphrase that's got a lot of searches via WordTracker, I describe it as fat. One such term is "free clip art". For that reason, I've tried to make sure it's littered around my site, my incoming links use it, etc. That's because I have a clip art library with over 3,600 items in it.

But I've been finding that it's making sure each one of those 3600 pieces is labeled properly that's generating more hits than any kind of SEO I've been doing on "free clip art". Let's look at my Google Analytics table for my top key terms and phrases generating search engine clicks this month.

Now, "free clip art" is my top search term, but there are two things to think about. First is that those 249 visits represent less than 0.8% of my traffic coming from organic search results. Or to put it another way, it's around 1/126th of my total traffic coming from search. Another thing you can't see is the breakdown of which search engines are sending it. While Google represents a large portion of my overall traffic as I build my user base and grow return visits, it represents 4% of the clicks for "free clip art". 83% of those clicks are coming from MSN. That means for all the optimizing I do for "free clip art", while Google search results represent 95% of my search results traffic, Google search results for that term represent .06% of it.

But do you see where the next 14 top items are coming from? 13 out of 14 are a noun and the word "clip art" or "clipart". If you go down the list, that trend continues. And if you look up at the top of the graphic, you'll see that I have 19,404 different search terms that have generated visits so far this month. My number of search terms is about 65% of my number of search visits.

Yesterday I had 2,085 unique visitors. And a huge chunk of that came from search engines. But the amount coming for that big fat term, "free clip art", is negligible.

Remember I wrote about the value of search rank a while back and showed how capturing the top spot for a specific keyword had a variable value depending on the number of searches for the keyword. I also said that the "fatter" the keyword, the more competition there would be for the top spot.

So, while I'm not getting a whole lot of play on a fat keyword, I'm picking up good numbers on hundreds of thinner ones.

So, when you're considering your SEO plans, it's all well and good to try to capture that top spot for a fat keyword. If you can do it, you can get some nice traffic. But keep micro-optimization in mind. Make sure relevant keywords for each page are getting placed in the title, the URL, and the header tags. Because if you have 4,000 pages like I do, the aggregate traffic from the "thinner" keywords could provide a nice stream of visitors while you chase the fatty.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 28th, 2007 at 1:51 pm and is filed under Online Marketing And SEO, Techno Thoughts.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.