While you may have been happy with high organic traffic, your business may be happier if that traffic resulted in increased conversions and revenues. What you need to uncover are the best and worst keywords that result in conversions so that you can improve your strategy.
If you use Google Analytics along with a tracking goal, you can seek out keywords that lead to conversions. You can make a customized report to know about completion of goals and isolate specific visits by keyword or can use your traffic sources to isolate goals by way of corresponding keywords.
In Google Analytics, you need to go to Traffic Sources, then to Search, and then to Organic, before choosing the Goal Set. You can sort the goal conversion rate column to locate keywords that deliver most conversions. You can also incorporate a filter that includes visits that only display results that are more than a specific number to avoid misleading figures.
Next, you need to find pages of your site that bring in the most traffic. You should select “Secondary Dimension” and then click on Traffic Sources and then on Landing Pages in your Drop-Down menu. The resultant report should be exported to Excel and you will not need Analytics to complete this strategy.
This report contains keywords that provide the maximum amount of conversions and you now need to know their rankings. You actually need to improve their ranking and their visibility, and hence need to know their current SERP position. You can use tools such as Microsite Masters and Link Assistant to do so.
Once you have used the above tools to get keyword rankings, you need to incorporate them in your Excel worksheet together with other data such as keywords, URLs, visits, and conversion rates. This tactic will provide high-conversion producing keywords that do not rank high as you may be expected them to be. Here is an opportunity to boost SERP visibility for those best keywords, which in turn will improve conversions.
You will need to prioritize on terms such as highest traffic, highest ranking, or highest conversions based on your specific needs. You will need to implement SEO strategies that can help improve rankings for your chosen best keywords. These include on-site and off-site strategies such as engaging in on-page SEO. You need to review your title tags, image tagging, and placement of your keywords in headlines, subheads, and body.
You also need to improve the content on your site and making your content much more relevant and informative can boost temporal rankings for keywords for a URL, which can sometimes remain high for a long time. You should also include anchor text links on your most linked pages on your website to link with pages that you want ranked higher. You will be able to transfer semantic relevance and pooled link equity to those pages.
You should also add branded links, and variations anchors along with trigger words and citations to target URLs in a natural manner. This inbound linking tactic will pay rich dividends. You should also try to get more social shares for your content even though at present this tactic will not influence rankings in any way. However, it will surely make you more popular by boosting your online presence and can reward you in an indirect manner.
Once you have all of the above data at hand then it is time to leverage the most out of your best and even your worst keywords. You can get a report of your worst rewarding keywords by using the same process of locating your best keywords, but by sorting with the lowest goal completions.
You should then analyze each page and keyword queries that have led traffic to that page while looking at possible improvements to boost conversions. You need to check if those keywords are closer to the sale or if they are better aligned with any offer displayed on that page. In addition, you need to check if their nature is general or specific to queries typed in by users.
You also need to analyze each corresponding landing page opened by those keywords. You need to compare landing pages of the best keywords with the worst to locate the problem. You must scrutinize the content quality, structure, and format of the page. Furthermore, you need to check offers provided on that page and ensure that it matches up with user expectations. The same goes for the topic on that page that should be relevant to the user query.
Once you practice the above tips, you will slowly be able to get the most out of your best keywords in terms of SERP rankings and conversions as well as transform many worst keywords into your best ones.