SEO for Established Sites

 SEO for Established Sites

 Find target keyword niches for established sites

SEO for Professional 

There is a hard and an easy way to find target keyword niches for an established site. The easy way uses Wordtracker Strategizer which we’ll look at below. Before showing you the automated easy way with Strategizer, I’ll show you the manual hard route.

Either way your site will need to be set up for a Google Analytics account. (Although you can adapt the methods given here to other site visitor analytics software.)

Manual SEO with Google Analytics

Below is a keywords report from Google Analytics (GA).

The GA keyword report above gives you keyword data for single (aka exact match) keywords.

For example business strategy brought 1,340 visits in the report shown on the previous page. That’s nice but as we explored earlier there is a problem with it …

Single keywords rarely bring enough visits or business.

For example, if your site were to get 1,340 visits a month, these might convert into sales enquiries at a rate of 3-4%. That’s about 40 enquiries a month. You might convert 10% into sales. Which means you’re getting three or four sales a month from this keyword. Which is nice, but it’s not enough for most websites to get excited about.

Really, you want to be working at a bigger scale. To work at the scale required to make an interesting profit, we need to target (and see data for) groups of keywords (keyword niches).

You can see reports for one keyword niche at a time in Google Analytics by using the keyword filter at the bottom of the keywords report. This has been done in the GA report below:

See how all the keywords shown (689 of them) contain the keyword business strategy. This is our example site’s results for the business strategy keyword niche.

For one keyword niche we can see results for all the metrics Google Analytics has been configured to report, including Visits, Pages/Visit, Average Time on Site, Bounce Rate and if we clicked on the Goal Set 1 tab (in the image on the previous page) we would see response rates for different Goals.

So now all you have to do is find the different response rates for each of your keyword niches. Then sort them to find which ones give the best results.

The keyword niches that give the best results should be your targets for more SEO work.

It sounds easy enough to find them but there is a problem …

Even our not-hugely-popular example site got 81,245 visits from searches with 36,308 different keywords in the last month (there’s that long tail again).

Calculating average response rates for each of your site’s keywords is going to take a long time. A very long time.

And it gets worse. All that work will give a static view of one time period. We’ll see no trends over time unless I do it all again and again, and build graphs from the data.

It is clearly impossible to do this manually. Your only chance of using this method by hand is to go digging with your intuition – choosing a small number of keywords to build niche reports for.

You’re looking for those magical keyword niches that give your site the most response.

It’s like digging for gold.

Once you’ve found some potential keyword niches, you can find more information about them to help you prioritize them and plan your SEO campaigns.

For each keyword you can manually get:

• Estimates of search numbers from Wordtracker’s Keywords tool

• Google rank reports that give your website’s position on Google’s results pages.

For your chosen keywords, you’ll now have keyword niche reports showing visits, response, niche size, market share, opportunity (visits you might get in the future) and ranking.

All great stuff. And this is how many SEOs have done their keyword research for years. But it takes a long, long time and is incredibly boring.

You didn’t think gold digging was going to be easy, did you? No. But, we can make the whole process much simpler by using Wordtracker Strategizer.

Read on to see how Strategizer automates the process I have outlined, building new keyword niche reports daily with a collection of cool features to help you find and target your most responsive keyword niches …

Automatic SEO with Wordtracker Strategizer

Set up a profile on Strategizer and it will automatically find and show your site’s most profitable keyword niches, their visits, response figures and your site’s market share of it.

This information is shown with graphs and a range of other data including your site’s rank on Google’s results pages and forecasts of seasonal trends from Google.

On the following page is an example report for a UK-based ecommerce site, www.facewest.co.uk which sells adventure equipment:

Using the site’s top 1,000 keyword niches (above we see only 10), the report above gives a wide range of useful data.

Below is a quick look at those metrics (followed by a how-to guide to using them to find your site’s target keyword niches and planning SEO campaigns for those targets):

• Short term target keyword niches that should deliver the highest response rates from immediate SEO efforts.

• Long term target keyword niches that should deliver the most response from long term investment in SEO.

• A Google Insights graph to show seasonal trends for the same keyword niches. As is the case for this ecommerce site, winter products should be sold in the winter; summer in the summer. (Your target keyword niches’ seasonal trends might not be so obvious.)

• The site’s Google Rank (your position on Google’ results pages) for the seed keywords of each target keyword niche. In this case, we’re showing results from the UK, but you could choose another country if you prefer). A graph shows changes over time.

• Competitors’ Google Ranks. Up to four competitors’ Google ranks can be tracked alongside your own.

• Niche Size (estimates of the number of searches made with keywords in each niche). This is for the country and language targeted and the period of time of the report (which can be seven days, four weeks or 12 months).

• The site’s market share for each target keyword niche - allowing you to see your site’s potential for more results from each keyword niche.

• The opportunity offered by each target keyword niche – shown in the Opportunity graph. This is the difference between Strategizer’s estimate of the size of the niche and the number of visits your site gets.

• Visits, Response Rates, Transactions, Revenue, Per Visit Value and Bounce Rate for each target keyword niche.

Strategizer works by importing keyword reports from your Google Analytics account and converting them into these keyword niche reports. This is a huge number-crunching task and no other tool I know of goes to the effort of doing it. Strategizer will find you two types of target keyword niches. One for short term SEO and PPC; the other for your long term targets.

Short term targets with the highest response rates

The report on the following page (for www.facewest.co.uk again) shows short term target keyword niches found by Strategizer.

These are the keyword niches that deliver the highest conversion rates.

You can see fantastic Ecommerce Conversion Rates over 12% for suunto watch strap replacement and suunto t6 strap.

That means that more than one in 10 visitors who reached the site by searching with those keywords went on to buy something on that visit. Very nice.

By investing in your site’s SEO it should be easy to get more visits from these keywords. More sales should follow.

There’s a drawback with these highest responding keyword niches. They are usually small keyword niches and we can see this in the Niche Size column showing estimates of the number of searches made with them.

Because they offer the highest response rates they should be targeted first. But because they are small niches, any more than a small amount of work will stop delivering a profit.

Hence they are short term target keyword niches. Bigger niches worth bigger investments over time are long term target keyword niches …

Long term targets with the biggest potential

You can quickly see your site’s long term target keyword niches if you … Click the ‘New Targets’ button.Your long term target keyword niches:

• Respond at a higher rate than your site’s average response rate (Strategizer calculates this).

• Are sorted by Niche Size with the largest (those with the most long term potential) at the top.

• Are worth long term investment because their size means they offer large rewards, even if they might not have response rates as high as many of your short term targets.

Below, we’ll see how Wordtracker Strategizer can help you plan your SEO campaign’s actions for each target keyword niche.

Intelligent Automatic SEO with Strategizer

Each of your target keywords needs a plan of action.

If you click on Strategizer’s Actions tab, you’ll find recommended SEO actions for each of your target keyword niches. It works like this …

Check a keyword niche. For example, see the checked box to the left of suunto t6 strap below:

The keyword niche in the report above – suunto t6 strap – is small which makes the recommended actions quite simple.

Bigger keyword niches require more work and so get more recommendations.

Watch out for seasonal trends

We’ve already said this but it’s worth repeating: check for seasonal trends in the use of target keyword niches with the Google Insights graphs available on all Strategizer reports - just click the ‘Google Insights’ button.

If you’ve got comments or questions, please let us know at