The top searches on Google that refer to your site can tell you a lot about your content, what people are looking for and where you can optimise pages and grow traffic.
"Go Where The Mushrooms Grow"
Farmers of ye'olden days would seasonally rotate their crops from one patch of land to another, working on the basis that the fertility of each patch of land suited certain crops depending on the nutrients extracted and returned by the previous season's crops. However, where farmers hoped that a certain patch of land would bear fruit (or Veg/Grain), they sometimes found that another area unexpectedly proved better...
The lesson here is don't "tender" to parts of your website that aren't reaping you traffic, use what Google Analytics tell you to optimise what's already working. People start businesses on assumptions, ideas, hopes and available research; when you get going and find out your assumptions were wrong, you have to change your game plan and adapt to the opportunities the market presents.
Focus Shift.
My top searches (i.e. Google Searches that sent me organic traffic) are below:
They're a motley crue of terms (not all of which are shown), which on first glance are not overly informative to me, however, look deeper and there's some great trends I can take advantage of to try to increase the woeful levels of traffic to OperationHappyHour:
- Chat.
Searches for localised chat from places as far fetched as "Palestina," "Kibris," "Krasnodar" and "Bijeljina" are sending me a significant proportion of traffic (I have a chat room for every city in the world). Unfortunately, ALL of these chat rooms are empty (more on that idiocy later), but traffic is traffic, and even though these visitors will mostly leave immediately, I can do something with them....
- [Insert Bar] + [Insert City]
A lot of people search for a venue by typing in the name, immediately followed by the city it's in. This makes perfect sense - if there are hundreds of Pubs named "The Royal Arms" in the world, it stands to reason that you would laser-target your search this way. My venue pages already take good advantage of this with the Venue's title and location in the URL, Page Title and Page text.
Now, as useful as those insights are, it's more interesting to understand the value of those keywords and what other keywords are not "bearing fruit" (i.e. Clicks).
"I know Kung Fu"
Having exported the Top 100 searches from Analytics, I then pasted these straight into Google's Keyword Tool (not all shown, ordered by Search Volume):
Again, not a great deal of surprises, most of these terms of low volume / low competition, with a couple of obvious exceptions. It's fair to say at this stage that even though
the visits I'm getting from some of these searches are low, this is most likely because the site is so low in the SERP's
Always check the small print
What's MUCH more interesting on the Keyword Tool is the "Additional Keywords To Consider" section (ordered by relevance) -
The top 30 or so suggestions here are a waste of time - ridiculously generic terms with ludicrous competition, however scroll down and you start to find some gems with very low competition, and more importantly, start seeing Search Trends related to your site that aren't connecting ...
Observations:
- High Search Volume, Low Advertiser Competition
There are LOTS of similar terms with a good 2000-8000 searches per month, with mostly ZERO advertiser competition (which can be *partially* relied on for Result count - we'll find out later)
- pics/snaps/photos/pictures
A reasonable amount of searches are for variants of photos/pictures alongside the bar name
What have we learnt from this?
With a little digging, Analytics has given me a wealth of information (and ideas) about my visitors, what they're looking for and how I can provide it more closely. Here's the next steps I'll be taking:
- Chat Room Optimisation
I'm not ready to invest more time in the City Chat Rooms yet (fool's errand without more traffic), but I can at least optimise AdSense on those pages for visitors that arrive on the empty pages (ahh... the sweet smell of clickthroughs in the morning).
- Venue Search Trend Optimisation
The [Venue] + [City] phrase combination is a no-brainer, I'll be optimising for this phrase on all the venue pages
- Picture Keyword Variant Optimisation
I'm going to optimise for these keywords, but given the current lack of images on the site, I've had a cunning idea for using Google AJAX search to display (almost) related images when a user hits the page.
- Keywords Ripe for the Taking
The last take away from this exercise is the High Volume/Low Competition keywords Google has suggested. I'll look into these in more detail in a future post. Subscribe to the RSS feed so you don't miss out.
Coming Next Time: Let's Take A Look At Our Competition...