Turning Search Engine Keywords into Action

I love search engine keywords reports in web analytics tools. Depending on the tools it may be referenced as Search Engine’s phrase, terms, or keywords reports. These keywords reports usually represents terms searched by users on Search Engines like Google / Yahoo! / Bing and reached your site after clicking on the link.

To make these keywords report useful and bring value to the business, you really need to segment and apply that into different kinds of reports to find that golden nuggets.

Here are some example of segments that are helpful and insightful:

• Segment of people who visited the site via terms containing “XYZ” which relates to a product ABC. Segment transaction limiting to a product ABC. Compare the geographic visitors or the hotspots on the map. Any difference? Maybe there are some demographic differences where marketing tactics/messaging/placements/etc should be revisited to improve the closer rate.
• Segment of keywords with bounces Vs. No bounce. What keywords and landing pages are yielding sticky results? Do a deeper dive and you’ll find out certain contents are not engaging. Perhaps a gap between visitors’ persona and landing page’s messaging/objectives/intent.
• Segment of keywords containing “XYZ” which relates to a product ABC. Is that traffic growing with traffic driven from other campaigns for the same product ABC? Perhaps that TV ads are contributing to growth in a product interests and people are going online to search for that product.

Great thing about search terms are that it represents the interests so you’re few steps closer to understand what users are thinking because traffic data alone won’t tell that level of details. Combining the data from keywords and landing page’s messages/objective, you could do a better deeper dive to adjust your landing pages or even SEO strategies to properly acquire the targeted site visitors.

I believe the key to turning the keywords report into something more valuable is to; understand the dimension that these keywords could be attached to, and associating it to another dimension that relates to your business goals/strategies/marketing/sales/etc.

To make that happen, we analysts will need to do a great job in segmenting the data that matters and articulate it in a way where business could digest so it could turned into action.

Here is a visual example representing what I’ve discussed above:

As you can see there is definitely a gap between traffic who are interested in product xyz and its conversion on the site for mid west states. What hypothesis would you make, and what further data would you look at? Will that tell you how you need to shift marketing strategies? These interesting findings are definitely great for an analysts to share with the business.