August 10

0 comments

Can you see which keyword brought traffic to your site

By Jason Khoo

August 10, 2020


Transcript

Hi guys, and welcome to another edition of Zupo SEO Talk & Tea. 

Today's conversation is, can you see which keywords you're optimizing for [inaudible 00:00:13] traffic to your website? This is an important question, because every company and every business wants to be able to have strong analytics. They want to be able to make sure that the marketing they're doing, where is the business and leads, where they're coming from. A question that we often get asked a lot... But before we began, this is Zupo SEO Talk & Tea and I want to introduce the tea we have today. We have a Ryokucha green tea. This is a tea that was very popular in the beginning of our channel and I had it on the series for a while.

So, I want to bring it back. I've been holding it off because I really only have enough for two more tea servings. And I've actually... I'm using one of those two today. So, we won't be seeing this for a while because I'm going to save the last one for myself. But this tea is... It tastes like toasted brown rice. That's the best way that I can put it. And it's a great tea. If you want try a unique style of green tea, this is a gift from what... Again, one of my friends, Brad Jashinsky, who is the director of marketing for John's Incredible Pizza. So again, thanks Brad for gifting us this tea, but let's get brewing [inaudible 00:00:01:24].

So, can you see the keywords are bringing traffic to your website? So, unfortunately the answer is no. Back in the 2010s, and I think before 2010, you used to be able to. You used to go down to analytics and then you can see what exact keywords were bringing traffic to your website. And then what exact keywords were bringing conversions to your website.

I don't remember the year. If I had to guess [inaudible 00:01:43] 2009 or '10 that Google changed the rules around a little bit. And now you actually can't see the keywords that are coming to your website. So, the quick answer is no, but there is a roundabout way to do things. And just a quick kind of deep dive into what I mean by this is when you go into analytics, you'll have a acquisition channel clout organic search. And everyone probably is familiar with it but if you're not Google Analytics can be installed in your website and it'll just show you the general traffic of what's coming to your website and on the left panel, you'll generally see acquisition. If you click that, it will break down your traffic based on where they came from.

Organic search is usually one of those channels. And then in that channel, you can see where people came from, but you'll see that a majority of the keywords or a majority of the rows or not majority. Sorry, let me slow down a bit. The top row will usually be not provided and it will have a majority of your traffic. Meaning that Google is not showing you any keywords that people are using to come in. Generally, you'll find a couple here and there, they might be your brand or something like that but usually the not provided row is 98% of your traffic coming to your website from organic. So, you are unable to see it. So, long story short, analytics, you really can't see what keywords. Where you can as if you do Google paid ads. If you do Google ads, you then can see down to the keyword, what people are typing in.

But when it comes to organic search, you can't. Now there is a not so perfect way around this. So, analytics is where it stops. That's where you can kind of see like, "Okay, I know I'm getting organic search traffic, but I'm not sure what keywords they're typing in."

There's two ways that you can try to paint that picture. One is to identify your top landing pages by organic search. So again, you could go into your organic search and then look at the pages that have the top entrances of your website and then based on those pages, you can have a general tell of what keywords you are... What keywords are bringing in traffic, because you have your keyword optimization. You probably have a page you optimize for that keyword. And if that page has a lot of entrances, you have a general better idea that, "Okay, this page we targeted 10 to 25 keywords so it must be these 10 to 25. And we know the rankings of these 10 to 25. These are the ones on the first page. So, we have some confidence as these keywords."

Now you can supplement that also with another tool called Google Search Console, which is tied with analytics. Google Search Console and analytics will give you two sides of data that don't exactly match perfectly, but they will give you two sides of the data. Google Search Console will give you how many impressions and clicks your website got on Google Searches. Therefore what you can do again, not perfect, but it's a method, you can go into your search console, look at the landing page [inaudible 00:04:35] corresponding with the analytics. And then with that landing page in search console, you can then see, okay, what are the top impressions and clicks for that page from searches? And then do those keywords line up with our keyword rankings and what we assumed on analytics side?

Most likely they will, but of course there's always a curve ball, but that's a great way for you to have general confidence. Of course, everyone wants a one to one penny to penny attribution at matching. When it comes to organic SEO and a lot of unpaid marketing today, you have to rely on this not so perfect matching. Even in pay, you have to do that and in some levels. So, the best way, if you really want to get as close as you can, analytics, your own ranking reports and then search console and merging those. And again, a quick top level... Find the entrance pages, find the corresponding rank keywords that you're trying to rank for that entrance page. And then on service console, look at the entrance pages, impressions and clicks to see what keywords are bringing the most clicks, and does that correspond with your ranking report?

That will give you the best idea of organic SEO or organic searches where, what keywords people are typing in to get to your website. So, hopefully that will help you in your analytics reporting. Hopefully it'll get you a little bit closer to what you need to know. I'm going to go ahead and pour out my toasted brown rice tea. It is a hot day, so drinking some hot tea. I'm going to just keep sweating and sweating, but if you guys found that video enjoyable please like and subscribe. And I hope to see you guys again soon.

Thanks everybody.

Jason Khoo

About the author

Jason is founder and CEO of Zupo, which is an Orange County based SEO consulting agency helping construct powerful long term SEO strategies for our clients. Jason also enjoys multiple cups of tea a day, hiding away on weekends catching up on reading and rewatching The Simpsons for the 20th time.

{"email":"Email address invalid","url":"Website address invalid","required":"Required field missing"}

Never miss a good story!

 Subscribe to our newsletter to keep up with the latest trends!

>