Quote:
Originally Posted by gareth_esutera
You can actually use Analytics to determine what keywords to target. For example, you see many people arriving through your site by searching keyword1, keyword2 and keyword3, but the thing is, those keywords are mentioned only in your blog on the passing but are never the main subjects of any of your post. As a result, several visitors quickly click the back button. This can give you the idea that maybe, you should write posts with more focus on keyword1, keyword2 and keyword3.
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Analytics will show you which keywords your URL is ALREADY ranking for. So rather than trying to make an entire other page that ranks for keyword1, keyword2, keyword3... since your page already obviously ranks well enough for you to be found in the SERPs for those keywords, why not re-optimize your page for those.
In the above example, your title element may be <title>keyword4 - keyword5</title> but you NEVER get traffic from keyword4 and keyword5 because they are WAY too competitive or perhaps no one ever searches for those keywords. If you notice that page is already getting traffic from keyword1, keyword2, keyword3 almost exclusively even without you specifically targeting them then you might want to consider changing your <title> to something like <title>keyword1 - keyword2 - keyword3</title> (if they are very similar) as well as changing other on-page elements like <h1> and <h2>s to target keyword1, keyword2, keyword3. Perhaps you were targeting the wrong keywords all along on that particular page.
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Google external adwords tool is a great resource for doing keyword analysis. It can help with keyword suggestion by pointing it to a URL on your site or copying a blob of text in for which you're trying to decide on what keywords to target. It can also be used before you even write a line of content to simply get suggestions on keywords related to a topic you're considering and the associated US and Global search volumes for each (I recommend setting the Match Type dropdown to EXACT).
Combine this with searches at Google for each of the suggested keyword phrases in quotes ("
keyword phrase") and searches with intitle with the keyword phrase in quotes (
intitle:"keyword phrase") and noting the number of results returned to determine how competitive the phrase is, and you'll have a pretty good idea of which keywords to target. Your looking for phrases with very little competition, but which get a decent amount of search volume.
IMO having a page rank well for a keyword phrase that get's 10 searches per month is FAR better than having a page that doesn't rank well at all but gets millions of searches per month. 10 extra unique visitors per month (which you might get from the first page) is FAR better than zero unique visitors per month (which you're likely to get if you not on page 1 or 2 for the second page targeting the competitive phrase).