Once you have your site up for awhile and you start getting search engine traffic you probably realize that it’s important to know what words are bringing you traffic, and which pages they are going to. If you are using Google Analytics to track this information (which I highly recommend) then you have a TON of information available to you though, and it can be hard to determine which elements are important for our purposes of getting more search traffic, and which ones aren’t.

Google Keyword Search Statistics

In Google Analytics, when you look at your site you are going to see a clear ‘Traffic Sources’ tab on the left side of the screen. Underneath this tab is a ‘Keyword’ element, which will show you all the keywords you have seen traffic for. Be sure you are looking at a wide stretch of time – 6 months or more. This will set us up to see the information we need to see.

From here, the single biggest piece of information is simply the amount of traffic that we have received overall. How many people found our site through each of these keywords? The more, the better, end of story. A keyword bringing you traffic is a good keyword, and one you should focus on.

It’s easy to sweat things like bounce rate and the like, but really, there’s not a lot to be done about terms like this directly. Picture yourself on the internet – if you are searching for something online, chances are you go to a few sites, very quickly determine that the information you need isn’t there, and leave. As a result, bounce rates as high as 80% can probably be expected, especially for general keywords. What you can do is target your site for the keyword a bit better, which we will talk about… next.

Keyword Search Analysis

Let’s say you rank for ‘wool sweaters on sale in boston’ but your page for some reason doesn’t account for Boston at all. In fact, it’s just a description of different types of wool sweaters. These searchers may click on ads, and in fact they probably will click on ads at a relatively high level, but you’re not really serving them that well. If this is your highest delivering keyword, then you may want to redirect the focus of the page a little to address wool sweaters in Boston. One option in such a situation would be to look for an affiliate link to a Boston sweater company, and add that to the page. This could very easily get you a high clickthrough rate and make you money fast.

Essentially, you want to try to serve as many searchers as you can. If you see a long tail keyword ranking well, adjust the page to address that keyword. These long tail keywords typically are searchers who are closer to a sale anyway. Someone searching ‘sweaters’ could want to buy a sweater, or see pictures, or even be trying to find people who sweat a lot (I’m not joking either, online searchers are strange creatures). But someone searching ‘buy sweaters for under 20 dollars) would be well served by affiliate links to stores that sell just that.

Keyword Search Tool

The inherent difficulty with search tools is that they can only provide estimates – you won’t know what kind of traffic you get until you put a post up. Does that mean you can’t rely on search traffic tools? These tools will give you a great place to start, as they offer up many short tail terms that they have discovered people search for. This will help give your site some initial focus. But once your site starts getting traffic, you want to start catering to this traffic.

Keyword Search Volume

Again, the volume levels in keyword tools are estimates, but the best tools are able to give you relative ideas of which ones are stronger than others. So if a tool says that ‘sweaters’ gets 100,000 searches a month and ‘t-shirts’ gets 75,000 searches a month, it’s safe to say that sweaters will get more traffic than t-shirts, even if it’s also safe to say that these numbers are not literally correct. Use this to help discover niches that you are interested in, write articles around the keywords you find, and then start linking until you get traffic that you can refine your posts to cater to.

Keyword Analyzer

The Google Keyword Tool does a great job of providing an easy to use, free database of search traffic and keywords, but in order to make a lot of money online you’re going to need to keep track of your long tail traffic too. There are a number of tools online, but there are two I can personally recommend that helped me get to where I am. Neither are free, but they are cheap enough to be worth the money if you’re making even just a few dollars a month online.

If you don’t have a site yet, and are unsure what kind of product you want to pursue, then I suggest going to The Keyword Academy. The Keyword Academy is designed for beginners in the internet marketing world, and will help you go from no experience to a website that will make you money in a year. The eBook that comes with the program is extremely detailed, and is the result of hundreds of people using the program and submitting feedback to the owner, Mark Butler.

If you already have a site or a product, and are looking for an easier way to manage the information coming in, I would suggest the Keyword Strategy tool. This tool is a database that will track thousands of keywords for you at once, along with your social media efforts, backlinks, and any and all sources of traffic you receive. If you do not have a site yet, or are not overly familiar with the keyword process, this tool is probably going to be overwhelming. But once you have hundreds of searchers a day and need a way to sort through the massive amounts of information you are receiving, this it the tool to help you.

In conclusion, the sole keyword search statistic to worry about is the keywords sending you traffic, and the pages they go to. Make sure the page is optimized for the biggest amounts of traffic, and you will be optimizing your return on your site.