Analyzing your site’s keyword traffic is a highly effective way to determine where your most valuable traffic is coming from. By digging into your keyword traffic, you can refine your SEO efforts, target high-quality traffic in your paid search campaigns, and capture additional traffic from relevant searches.
Keyword traffic analysis can help you:
- Identify content topics that your audience will find informative and useful
- Prioritize your content production efforts to target the most valuable, high commercial intent keywords
- Structure your paid search campaigns to target relevant keywords with tightly organized ad groups
- Find negative keywords that you should exclude from your PPC campaigns
Let’s review three steps you should follow to better understand your existing keyword traffic and find new keywords to target in your search campaigns.
Using Google Search Console to Analyze Keyword Traffic
Identifying and analyzing keyword traffic is simple. The functionality offered by Google Search Console, formerly known as Webmaster Tools, allows you to quickly and easily identify keywords that are driving traffic to your website, making it an excellent starting point in your keyword traffic analysis.
Inside Search Console, go to Search Traffic > Search Analytics:
Here you’ll find all your keyword traffic data, including what search queries your site ranks for as well as the number of impressions and clicks to your site for each keyword, CTR and average position.
Identifying New Keyword Opportunities with Free Keyword Tools
Keyword suggestion tools, such as WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool, are an excellent way to discover new keywords to target with your content for SEO purposes, as well as keyword groups for your PPC campaigns.
Simply enter a keyword into the Free Keyword Tool to get started. The Free Keyword Tool will then present you with keyword research data such as related search terms, their relative frequency, overall search volumes in Google, and the competitiveness of these terms:
One of the best uses of the Free Keyword Tool is to conduct keyword analysis on terms that are relevant to your business, but that you’re not yet ranking for in the search engine results. Ranking highly in Google is a great way to build your traffic stream, expand your audience, and ultimately raise awareness of your brand.
Using Keyword Traffic Data in Your PPC Campaigns
Keyword data, such as that provided by the Free Keyword Tool, is highly valuable to PPC advertisers. It allows you to identify keywords with the most relevance to your business and the strongest commercial intent, so you can make sure your Google ads show up when people are looking for the products and services you offer.
PPC has a few major advantages over organic search. The first is that it is possible to drive web traffic to your site much faster than relying on improving your organic search rankings alone. Even with a modest budget, you can drive qualified traffic to your site without waiting for your SEO efforts to yield a noticeable return.
Secondly, Google allows you to create highly compelling, full-featured ads that rank at the very top of the search engine results page, whereas you have very limited control over the appearance of your organic listing. These ads can include images, pricing information, ratings and more. If you were shopping for a hairdryer, wouldn’t you be attracted to click on a listing with a picture of the product?
Ultimately, a combination of SEO and PPC is the most effective approach to driving traffic to your website, and both techniques require keyword traffic analysis. Learn more about using keywords for paid search marketing in PPC University.
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