I was recently tasked with helping out with SEO for an online store with very minimal budget. The website had been given very little seo love in the past but did at least have Google Analytics installed. These two factors combined made me feel very confident in being able to help out in a big way. I did, however, need to work fast because of the tiny budget. So the million dollar question (or couple hundred dollar question in this case) was what could be done in short time that would produce the best results. Here is what was done:
Gathering the Search Data
The first goal was to get a list of all keywords that resulted in more than 1 visit and did not include any “Brand” oriented keywords. I went straight to Google Analytics to the Keyword report page. I set up a couple of filters to not show key terms that included “Brand” oriented search terms as well as filtering out keywords that resulted in less than 2 visits. I didn’t want the brand name search terms because I knew they where having no issues ranking well for them. I then exported this list as CSV for use in Excel.
I then grabbed all of the keywords and pasted them into the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. I made sure that the tool was set to “Exact Match” to make sure our traffic estimates would be accurate for this purpose. This would give us a list of our search terms with an estimated monthly number of searches for each. I then exported to CSV.
The next step was to grab the current Google ranking for each of these terms. I ran the same seed list through a rank checker tool and once again exported the list to CSV.
Combining and Working with the Data Sets
We now sorted each of the CSV files by Keyword Name and combined all of the data into one table. We now have all of the base information needed to make some really informed decisions on what we should be focusing on. A couple more columns would be added to each called “Traffic if Rank 1″ and “Potential Visit Increase”. The “Traffic if Rank 1″ column would be the result of multiplying the monthly search data we got from the Google Adwords tool by .4 to give us a rough estimate of how much traffic would be gleamed if we got the term to rank one. The “Potential Visit Increase” would be the result of subtracting the “Visits” column from the Analytics export from the new “Traffic if Rank 1″ column. This shows us how many more visitors per month we could gain if we got the term to Rank 1.
Now I ran a filter to only show rows that had a current Google Rank between 2 and 20. I then sorted the filtered list by the “Potential Visit Increase” column. The result is a list of terms that are on page one or two of a Google search result page in order based on how many more visits we could gain if we increased rankings for the term. I then read through the list hand picking out very relevant terms with high potential and pasted them into a separate list where I would organize them topically based on a couple of pages on the website.
Applying the Keywords
Now that I had a high value list of keywords to focus on I edited a few of the pages to update Title Tags, Alt tags, headings and copy with the focus key terms. Keeping it tasteful here is crucial. I didn’t want to cannibalize the content…just focus it a bit around my findings to give the pages the help they need to gain a few crucial rankings for the terms.
I then ran the website through SEOMoz’s Open Site Explorer tool to look for any easy fixes and opportunities. A few inbound links where pointing to pages that don’t exist any more so 301 re-directs where created passing them to appropriate new pages to re-gain the link juice. I also found a couple of inbound links that I new I would be able to get better anchor text on. I requested these links be updated with the new focus key terms at the top of my list and called it a day.
Checking back a bit later I could see definite increases in traffic in their Analytic account overall especially around the focus keywords. There are definitely more thorough ways and deeper analysis that could have been done with more time. This particular strategy, however, was done very quickly while producing respectable results.
After I did this project I demo’d a tool that would have made this process even more efficient. The SEOgadget Keyword Research tool is definitely worth looking into.