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Web Analytics tools are nice to show you how many people are visiting your site, but their value can go well beyond that. Here is one simple way you can use your web analytics package to gain information you can immediately use to improve your site and generate more traffic.

There are two reports in most analytics packages that show how people found a specific page on search engines.

Keyword Phrase Report - This report show the entire phrases that searchers typed into the search box to find your site. “Blue Widgets”, “Red Widgets” would be an example.

Keywords Report - This report list the individual words searchers used to find your page. “Widgets”, “Blue”, “Red” would be an example.

I will explain on way to get information you can immediately act upon out of your Keywords Report.

On the surface, especially at the site level, this report may not tell you anything you don’t already know. If your site is about widgets, “Widgets” will of course be at the top of the list day after day, likely followed by the other primary keywords your site generally targets.

Filter the Keywords Report down to the single page level.

Pick a specific content page to target and improve, and filter the Keywords Report to only show keywords for that one page. Ideally, pick a page that gets decent long-tail traffic. If you can, open up the report in a window right beside the webpage itself so you can easily compare the two side by side.

Look at the words people are using the find the page. You will probably see a long tail trail off of a handful or two of words a lot of people use, trickling down to lots of words only a few people use.

Start by focusing on your top 5 words. Look at how you use them on the page. Check the title tag, headings, and links. Usually this won’t be too surprising. The top 5 words are likely prominent in these places.

Keep going down the list until you start seeing keywords that you don’t prominently use. What are they, and how do they relate to the page? This is where the opportunity is hiding.

Are groups of people finding the page using a word you didn’t expect or target?

Take Action!

1. Re-write your title, headings, links, and content to include some of these newly found keywords. However, don’t remove or de-emphasize the other more important words. If that doesn’t make sense for this page and these words, then:
2. Consider creating new pages to target these specific keywords.

Not every page will have these opportunities staring you in the face. Pick 10 pages to go through, and a bet you’ll find a couple good opportinities for improvement.

Don’t force these changes into any page where they don’t make sense. In my experience, the best page modifications not only include these keywords for search engine sake, but also make the page better for human visitors as well, after all, you’re now speaking their language.

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