Professional Global SEO – SEM | janet bartoli

Internal Keyword Research

April 2, 2008

When looking into your keyword research for your SEO efforts are you looking at your web analytics reports? Are you looking through your internal searches within the web site? Why is the keyword research you perform internally so critically important?

I have many large scale clients who think they know what their visitors are searching for, yet they don’t realize how much information their own analytics programs can actually reveal about what products, services or information their visitors are looking for. Before you run over to Google Keyword research, Wordtracker or what ever external keyword research tool your using, login to your analytics program first.

Take a look beyond the top 10, those typically brand heavy keywords, and look at the long-tail keywords for some insight. While you’re at it, you might also check your internal search web log files. Conduct a search within your site on those keywords your visitors are searching for. Are you getting correct search results? If not, you might want to update the search area within your CMS. Sure it might bring up everything and the kitchen sink, but your top 5 results should, at the very least, be 80-90% correct landing pages. You can guess what will happen if they aren’t showing the right landing pages at all, yes, your bounce rate kicks up and the “stickyness” factor goes way down.

If you look down your internal search keywords list, where you see just 1-9 searches that might include those pretty obscure long-tail keywords, this shows that there is an audience, albeit small for now, that is looking for very specific information. Do you have enough supporting content that supports those long-tail keywords?

If you don’t have a great deal of on page copy to support those or any other important keywords you might want to generate new pages to support them and new pages = great SEO!

Filed under: SEO Factors