First and foremost – before measuring keyword performance, you need to check if you are even showing up for your top keywords. Your top keywords will be a critical aspect of your site’s performance. It is extremely important that you are correctly doing SEO to ensure that your site can do as well as possible. All that aside, measuring and analyzing how well your keywords are performing is an essential component to every SEO campaign. One of the best ways to do this is through Google AdWords. In AdWords, you can easily download statistics on keyword performance by going to the Campaigns tab, then clicking on the Keywords tab. From there you can hover over each keyword and see all its information, as well as the keyword’s Quality Score. Similarly, you can find keyword performance metrics in Google Analytics, by going to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels > Organic Search. Below are a few key areas to examine when trying to determine how well a keyword is performing:
- Sessions
- Bounce Rate
- Pages Per Session
- Average Session Duration
- Click Through Rate (In Adwords)
Using this information, you can fairly easily determine which keywords are benefiting you the most. Understanding how a keyword performs in different metrics and what each of those metrics means will allow you to know which of your keywords are providing you with the most traffic and the most benefit. For example, if a keyword has a very high bounce rate, that means that people who search for that term aren’t finding what they wanted when they come to your site. It’s probably not a relevant keyword. If the number of pages visited or duration of visit seem too low, then again, people probably aren’t finding what they hoped to find on your site when they searched for that keyword. Having this kind of information tells you which keywords are working, and which to optimize for to improve your performance.
