When it comes to keyword analytics, the more data you have, the better choices you can make. This said, it is vital to examine all analytics data that are at your disposal so you can make sure that what you are looking at is not only accurate but is also actionable. There are a number of keyword tools to help you identify the right terms you should be targeting. Use them correctly, and you can reduce wasted energy and budget trying to optimize for negative keywords that do nothing but produce clicks that don’t necessarily convert.
Good keyword research is essential to any SEO and pay-per-click advertising campaign. With more data on hand, you can prioritize and make better decisions on how to go about your search marketing and optimization campaigns. Many search marketers and advertisers tend to crack down on Isolated, go-to metrics like cost-per-click. However, drawing on a single piece of information offers very little value and may even give you inaccurate insight into your campaign. This selective approach on keyword data can cause you to have a skewed or misleading view, leading to poor keyword choices.
You want accurate contextual data to help support your business decisions; otherwise, you may end up wasting a great deal of your advertising budget on keywords that bring good volume but low CPC. Just like with everything else, your keyword optimization and pay-per-click campaigns must be a fruit of well-balanced research that takes into account your business reach, traffic drivers, sales, and leads. Some essential keyword metrics you should consider include:
- Average search volume – This is a universally used metric in keyword research that can be derived from Google’s very own Keyword Planner. Search volume forms a good foundation for establishing the popularity and relevance of a particular search query. It is ideal to use an exact match type to get a precise representation of search volume for a given keyword query. For regionally locked business, for instance, it is important to specify geography in order to get a more targeted view of your regional search volume instead of a generic result. Monitoring how your average search volume rises and falls over time is also important so you can decide whether or not to continue targeting certain keywords and when to move on to more profitable search terms.
- Search result count – Although Google has on numerous occasions said that the value that the search engine displays for the number of search results isn’t an accurate metric, it is still worth considering as a good approximation tool, particularly for queries with fewer average results on display.
- Search demand curve – Plot keywords on a Number of monthly searches versus a number of keywords graph to determine their search demand curve instead of automatically assuming that a particular search term is a long tail. By using actual numeric values, you can have a better view of your search demand curve.
- Organic competition level/difficulty – Many people use Google Keyword Planner to determine competition metric. However, it should be noted that Google Keyword Planner’s competition metric reflects the number of advertisers using a particular keyword relative to all search terms used across Google—which means that it can’t really be useful for SEO because of the greater complexity of Google’s organic ranking algorithm over AdWords. A better approach to assessing search term competitiveness is using keyword difficulty percentage tools that assess keyword difficulty scores based on organic searches. There are also tools that can help you determine and track top ranking pages for a certain keyword, which you can in turn compare with your own website in order to determine domain authority.
- Available SERP real estate – An organic real estate in SERP varies and has been diminishing, especially with searches yielding answer box results, map packs, news results, ad-based, and image results. This reduces the traditional organic result real estate from the original 10 to a much smaller number. This is why available SERP real estate should likewise be considered so you can focus efforts to appear in the right places instead of trying to dominate traditional organic SERP real estate.
Keyword search is a complicated process that requires expert-level skills, knowledge, and experience to do correctly. You can count on SEOValley for help. Talk to us about your keyword research needs today.
