There are lots of tools out there to view recommendations, costs and inventory (Google) or view competitive information for free or free trial - just to name a few. But, the best place to start your keyword research is using your analytics to find out what your current visitors are searching for on your Web site.

If you have a ’site search’ on your Web site and you expose the search term in the query string of the results page (This is accomplished by having the search form programmed to use the ‘GET’ method, not the ‘POST’ method), you can see in your Web reporting not only what visitors are looking for when they visit your site, but also the high value keywords.

In Google Analytics, simply edit your profile to enable ‘Site Search’ and then, list the parameter that contains the search term. If you don’t know what this is, all you have to do is a search on your site, then look in the address bar to find the word you searched on. The parameter will be immediately before the =. For example, searching on ‘dog kennel,’ a result URL may look like this:

www.mysite.com/searchresults.asp?keyword=dog+kennel

You would enter ‘keyword’ as the query parameter.

Once you have that set up and collect data for a few days, you’ll be able to see the keywords that visitors are searching for in your reports - along with the number of unique searches, search exits, and other metrics.

ClickTracks takes it even a step further by showing cost, conversion, ROAS (return on ad spend) and time on site, as well as other metrics.

Filed under: Analytics, PPC on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 by Joy Brazelle |
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