Low-Hanging Fruit: How To Identify Keywords That Just Need A Little Help

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Want to find traffic-converting keywords that your website is already ranking relatively well for, but can rank even better for with just a small push in the right direction?

1.) Go into Google Analytics, select “Keywords” under Traffic Sources, view only “non-paid” keywords, and filter out keywords that don’t convert or convert poorly by your website’s standards.  Furthermore, filter out keywords that have too few visits to weed out really low search volume keywords.

In the example below, we chose > 0% for our conversion rate minimum and our minimum amount of visits as 10.  Our conversion rate bottom is likely on the low side (only requiring 1 conversion) and our visits minimum might be a bit on the high side – every website will have their own “sweet spot” depending on the amount and quality of their visitors.

2.) Export the output of the above exercise to a CSV file and run all of the keywords through rank checking software to obtain your website’s rank for each keyword and the landing page that is ranking.  With a program such as Rank Checker, you can export the results of the rank check to another CSV file, which you can then merge with your original analytics CSV file that will become your master spreadsheet.

3.) Sort the data in your Excel document by rank and throw out all of the keywords for which you rank #1.  Now you have a solid list of converting keywords that require a bit of link building and/or on-site optimization, all sorted by rank.

4.) Run the keyword list through the Google Keyword Tool to obtain the search volume for each keyword.  You may need to do this more than once if you have a long list, since the tool only allows you to run 100 keywords at a time.  Export these results to a CSV file and merge it into your master spreadsheet.

5.) Add any other decision-helping metrics you’d like in order to assist you with prioritizing these keywords.  I’m partial to the SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty Score in order to give me an idea of the level of competition I’ll be facing for each keyword.  SEOmoz also has a pretty exhaustive list of places to get keyword research data.

The more information you can import on to your master spreadsheet, the better of a tool it will become for selecting keywords.

Some keywords on this list might be too competitive to have success with easily, and some might be so long-tail that they may not be worth your time, but there should be a big chunk in the middle that are fairly non-competitive, but certainly worth going after as a handful of high quality links  and a few on-page tweaks would probably do the trick.

6.) Prioritize your keywords with concern to traffic, competition, conversion performance, and your current rank.

7.) Get started!  Optimize your website, create targeted content, and build high quality links.

Anthony Mangia is the President and CEO of Mangia Marketing, an NYC SEO Company. He has more than 5 years of experience helping companies, both small and large, achieve their SEO, Paid Search, Social Media, and Affiliate Marketing goals. Follow him on Twitter at @Aignam.

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