To me one of the saddest things to see is a website that has spent time and money optimising for keywords with low volume or poor conversion rates.
Google AdWords keyword tool can help you pick keywords with good volume. But how do you know if traffic from a particular keyword will convert?
“Search intent” is a phrase that’s banded about a lot. There’s plenty of information out there about it. I won’t go over old ground other than to summarise by saying that someone searching for “buy green widgets online” is far more likely to convert than someone searching for “what’s a green widget?”.
This kind of analysis is useful and will help greatly in shortlisting keywords. But there’s no substitute for real world data. That’s where I find that Google AdWords can really help. I’ll share my process in a moment, but before I do I’ll state I’m making these assumptions:
- That you have Google Analytics set up.
- That you have ecommerce tracking set up within Analytics.
- You have linked your Analytics and Adwords accounts.
Assuming that you’ve ticked off the above, the next step is to set up well structured AdWords campaigns for each of your main products and product categories. Be adventurous with your keywords and be prepared to spend a little more money than you’d like to in the short term. Remember, this isn’t necessarily about driving traffic or sales yet. It’s a data gathering exercise and the data is valuable in the long run.
Once your campaigns have been running for a week or two, if you go into Analytics ecommerce tracking and segment out only traffic from Adwords, you’ll be able to see not only the number of visits from each keyword, but each keyword’s conversion rate, average sale value and per visit value. This information is extremely powerful. By combining it with impressions and CTR data from Adwords you can approximate what any given keyword would be worth to you per month if you had a top three result.
Although Adwords can be costly in some markets starting your long term SEO process armed with this data will save you from that moment where you realise all that traffic from your hard earned number one spot isn’t translating in to sales. Want to know know more from our experts? Get in touch with the team for more valuable advice
