In an effort to educate and challenge people to test their knowledge and skills in the field of website optimization, SEO Specialist launches a twenty question quiz.
The SEO quiz contains questions about what matters to improve search engine rankings in Bing, Google and Yahoo and takes around 7-8 minutes to complete. Even people new to website optimisation techniques can participate after reading the company’s straight forward and detailed SEO guide.

London, United Kingdom (PRWEB) October 31, 2011

Many people in marketing, sales and management positions enjoy testing their skills and are often up for a challenge.

The latest free product from SEO specialist allows anyone to quickly test their skills in website optimisation and possibly learn a little more about it as well.

While the well-liked SEO School is to be considered as a more comprehensive and educational resource, the SEO quiz can be seen as a more playful way of learning SEO. Both resources complement each other in a useful way. By reading SEO school first, anyone can prepare to take the SEO quiz challenge.

So, is it all about a challenge or why do SEO specialist launch the SEO quiz?

Markus Jalmerot, founder of SEO Specialist answer: “Quizzes can be a fun way to start or finish the week. It’s an opportunity to challenge a friend while hopefully learning new things about website optimisation”.

He continues: “An SEO quiz can be an excellent way to test what have been learnt in SEO Specialist’s guide to SEO. Every business with a website should let their marketing manager read the SEO school and take the SEO test. It’s free way to improve a business search engine marketing knowledge which can lead to better and smarter website decisions.”

Examples of queries in the SEO questionnaire include what keyword selection is and the difference between mid tail and long tail keywords.

Why do the SEO Quiz?

A few good reasons to do the quiz is to challenge a friend, test your own knowledge about website optimisation and to see if you are updated with regards to the latest changes in the field of SEO.

About SEO Specialist:

SEO Specialist is a London based SEO company, established in 2011. For those new to search engine optimisation, the comprehensive SEO school can be helpful. SEO services offered include multilingual search engine optimisation, pay on results SEO, pay per click solutions, link building services, SEO copywriting and other a wide range of other SEO services. SEO Specialist focus on performance based services, giving risk free investment opportunities for website owners.

###

For the original version on PRWeb visit: www.prweb.com/releases/prweb2011/10/prweb8917368.htm

Article source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/10/31/prweb8917368.DTL

Gnosis Arts Media Group has launched a service that will let you receive notifications via SMS when certain keywords are mentioned on Twitter. The Social Listening Tool lets you receive up to 3 message alerts per day to let you know when someone uses a keyword you want to track in a tweet.

You are limited to using 3 keywords while beta testing takes place and the limit of 3 daily texts for up to 3 keywords has been put in place in order to reduce overage charges and ensure your phone does not constantly buzz every time that someone tweets a popular keyword you’re tracking. Although the tool is free to use, standard messaging rates will apply if you do not have an unlimited texting plan.

The SMS alerts that are sent to your phone include a link to a Web page with the 20 most recent tweets that mention the keyword you’re tracking, to help you keep up to date with the conversation that’s taking place around a keyword.

While this tool might not have too much value for popular keywords and trending topics given its limitations (for instance, you’d probably find it very difficult to keep up with all of the conversation that’s taking place around the Occupy protests, whether or not you’re using this tool), it might be a valuable, easy way for people such as small business owners to find out when people are talking about their company on Twitter so they can respond quickly to any issues while they are on the go.

The fact that the tool uses SMS alerts is interesting, as it allows anyone with a mobile phone to utilize the service. This means that you don’t necessarily need a smartphone to keep up to date with the conversation around a certain keyword on Twitter. Indeed, SMS is still a popular method for tweeting — one of the first versions of the Twitter website placed an emphasis on tweeting via SMS, while the company rolled out an update last month that lets you post photos by text message.

With that in mind, the Social Listening Tool seems to be an simple, no-frills service that will keep anyone in the loop about what’s being discussed around a certain keyword. You can check out the tool now.

Article source: http://www.scribbal.com/2011/10/twitter-app-lets-you-track-keywords-by-sms/

My Google Reader is a mess, I’ve been meaning to go in there and clean things up so I can get a better outlook of the tech news I might possibly write about. Now that I have found APPY Geek, I may just ditch my “tech folder” as a way to stay on top of the latest news.

Simply put, APPY Geek is a tech news only aggregator. It searches for technology-related news worldwide using its “TagNav” system (searches the web using tech tag words) and delivers it all in a nice package to your iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, or Windows Phone. You can find news via top news stories, All news, a keyword search, or a myNews section that lets you organize news that you find most important.

A very cool feature to find news included a tag cloud that you can manipulate to find news related to that keyword/tag, or long press the title to find out more information about the tag like viewing related news/topic in APPY Geek and elsewhere on the web.

In myNews, there is a banner-like section that cycles through the top news stories in the myNews section in addition to showing all the categories/articles you’ve saved. At any time, you can share news via Facebook, Twitter, or email. As with most free apps, there is the typical ad banner firmly attached to the bottom of the screen, but that seems to be par for the course for fee apps, and I must say that APPY Geek and its ability to quickly deliver tech news to your smartphone is worth dealing with the ad banner.

APPY Geek definately will give my (and maybe your) RSS reader app a run for its money. For more information and to download, visit the APPY Geek website.

Article source: http://appscout.pcmag.com/aggregation/289941-appy-geek-just-the-tech-news-on-your-smartphone

Just because your SEO campaign is experiencing hiccups doesn’t mean you aren’t a good SEO practitioner. Certain situations like this force you to look at the alternative factors that can affect SEO success.

When you work within the agency world, managing SEO campaigns will make you privy to a host of several different situations. Some of these are good and some are bad.

For those who work in this space, you may very well agree that when SEO is working, clients love you, and when it’s not, they starting calling you a lot more. I would love to say that I am the world’s best SEO and have never seen a down-trending month of organic traffic, a dip in organic sales, or user behavior hitting the dumps. But I won’t, I will however admit, and those in all walks of SEO (agency/in-house/site-owner) should typically agree, there are good months, great months, fair months and *gasp* bad months.

The focus here is on enduring the bad months. For those of you hell bent on white hat SEO and creating search engine friendly sites it is all but a punch in the face when you look at analytics daily, MOM or even YOY to see a loss in traffic. The rankings are there, how did this happen?

The same goes with organic conversions. The traffic is still there, why did the conversion percentage fly south?

We’ve all been here several times, scratched our heads, and sometimes even banged it against a wall, resulting in more than a few headaches trying to find out why tried-and-true SEO methods aren’t working. Despite this self-inflicted mental abuse, most of these dips aren’t the fault of the SEO. These are in fact caused by several different factors which the most frequently seen are listed below.

And as a disclaimer for the FDA, I am not stating in my column title that I can cure SEO pain, only that I can provide relief.

We can sum up the success of most SEO campaigns as the collaboration of rankings and traffic working together with usability and conversion optimization to form the end goal of a conversion. While we could write a dozen books on the last two elements, I will leave exact science of that to the usability gods such as Tim Ash and to the conversion optimization gurus such as Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg. What I do want to touch on are the quick-check items to understand unfavorable SEO data.

The Rankings are There, the Traffic is Not!

• Find the top referring organic keywords for the past few months. Apply them to Google Insights. Is there a seasonal/economic/media related trend for these keywords you are unaware of? For example, your reliance on “buy red dog leashes” is down after Casey Anthony is seen walking her dog with a red dog leash. OK, a bit extreme.
• Review impression vs. CTR data in your Google Webmaster Tools account. Have impressions decreased while your average rankings have remained stable?
• Run your top campaign keyword terms through the Google AdWords tool, export and review the by-month breakdown of search volume trends. This is something you want to pay attention to if your client is selling ice cream cones in December.
• Has your client made changes to SERP specific elements, title/meta/page-name without telling you? A quick change of enticing title element text and description to “Acme Brick Company”, ”Welcome to the homepage for Acme Brick Company” can do a number on click through rates.
• Do you have analytical tracking code on all your site pages? Run a tool such as Analytics Checkup. You never know when the client or dev team could have mistakenly dropped tracking code from important pages. Another beacon that may show this problem is a MOM Landing Page or Content comparison in analytics.
• Are the rankings really there? Relying on a keyword ranking report can be deceiving. Rankings fluctuate continuously and other SERP factors also come into play. For example, you may still have that 4th place listing but through manual review you can see that images are now displayed via universal search and your listing just got pushed under the fold of the page.
• Don’t just look at the rankings, look at the landing pages. If you have top ranking page that is now 404ing awaiting SERP elimination in the next crawl you can have a ranking that isn’t driving traffic. Remedy this in the future with a custom 404 page to hopefully retain visits.

The Rankings are There, The Traffic is There, but Where are My Conversions?

• The likely culprit here is that someone has adjusted the analytical goal URLs, match type, funnel URLs or through site maintenance has dropped the conversion tracking code.
• Are you attuned to your client’s promotional schedule? Not checking the site often makes it hard to see that an important call to action may have expired, been removed, etc.
• Has your client recently removed main and sub-navigational links? Alterations to the click-path can leave visitors disconnected with the previous well performing conversion funnel.
• The traffic is there, but is it the “right” traffic? Your recent blog post may have provided a lot of heavy bounce traffic while your usual top converting terms may be trailing this month due to various reasons listed above.

While our industry serves us a plethora of other situations, these are the typical issues you’ll see on a day-to-day, month-to-month, and even year-to-year comparison review. While you are likely to see even stranger predicaments, these are the quick checks you should review to avoid data review headaches.

Join us for SES Chicago 2011, the Leading Search Social Marketing Event, taking place November 14-18. SES Chicago will be packed with sessions, keynotes, exhibitors, networking events, and parties. Learn about PPC management, keyword research, search engine optimization (SEO), social media, local, mobile, link building, duplicate content, multiple site issues, video optimization, site optimization, usability, and more.

Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2121275/Agency-SEO-Pain-Relief

Gnosis Arts Media Group has launched a service that will let you receive notifications via SMS when certain keywords are mentioned on Twitter. The Social Listening Tool lets you receive up to 3 message alerts per day to let you know when someone uses a keyword you want to track in a tweet.

You are limited to using 3 keywords while beta testing takes place and the limit of 3 daily texts for up to 3 keywords has been put in place in order to reduce overage charges and ensure your phone does not constantly buzz every time that someone tweets a popular keyword you’re tracking. Although the tool is free to use, standard messaging rates will apply if you do not have an unlimited texting plan.

The SMS alerts that are sent to your phone include a link to a Web page with the 20 most recent tweets that mention the keyword you’re tracking, to help you keep up to date with the conversation that’s taking place around a keyword.

While this tool might not have too much value for popular keywords and trending topics given its limitations (for instance, you’d probably find it very difficult to keep up with all of the conversation that’s taking place around the Occupy protests, whether or not you’re using this tool), it might be a valuable, easy way for people such as small business owners to find out when people are talking about their company on Twitter so they can respond quickly to any issues while they are on the go.

The fact that the tool uses SMS alerts is interesting, as it allows anyone with a mobile phone to utilize the service. This means that you don’t necessarily need a smartphone to keep up to date with the conversation around a certain keyword on Twitter. Indeed, SMS is still a popular method for tweeting — one of the first versions of the Twitter website placed an emphasis on tweeting via SMS, while the company rolled out an update last month that lets you post photos by text message.

With that in mind, the Social Listening Tool seems to be an simple, no-frills service that will keep anyone in the loop about what’s being discussed around a certain keyword. You can check out the tool now.

Article source: http://www.scribbal.com/2011/10/twitter-app-lets-you-track-keywords-by-sms/

Guest post written by Pawan Deshpande

Pawan Deshpande is CEO of HiveFire, producer of Curata online content curation software. You can read more on this subject in his free e-book.

Pawan Deshpande: Staying relevant.

The battle for top billing on the search results page is fierce – and sites with fresh, relevant content are the ones that come out on top.  Sounds like an easy formula, but maintaining SEO performance is often easier said than done.  As any marketer will tell you, continuously creating, publishing and promoting original content is no small task.  That is why many are turning to content curation tools that help find, organize and share content online to ensure that their site is constantly delivering updated, highly topical, keyword-rich content – making it a natural winner in the battle of Search Engine Optimization.

SEO performance is top of mind for most marketers in today’s digital world. Most marketers I speak with want to know how simply generating content is going to propel them to page one of the search results. It is important for marketers to understand that generating content is not the only thing about curation that will translate into better SEO performance. In an excerpt from my company’s new e-book, here is a list of ways that content curation allows you to fight above your weight class in the battle for first page results.

• Optimizing for short-tail keywords: The content you curate for your chosen topic will automatically include the most popular search terms within your area of interest.  The quantity of references to those key terms across a wide range of content will help boost your search standing
• Increasing the opportunity for inbound links: As readers and other industry publishers discover the value of your content, they will link to you as a trusted resource. In addition, sources you’ve curated may link back to you.
• Increasing update frequency: Curated sites are typically updated on a regular basis. Search engines actively reward up-to-date sites by indexing them more often than less current ones.
• Properly tagging and categorizing content: Search engines love well-organized content. Curation platforms help you arrange your content so it’s useful to visitors and attractive to search engines.
• Creating sub-topic landing pages: Bump your content to the top of refined searches by creating highly-targeted landing pages built around specific sub-topics or content attributes (author, location, keyword, etc.)
• Integrating long-tail keywords: The diversity and depth of content on a well-curated site naturally incorporates many key long-tail keywords that help to drive niche-targeted traffic.
• Helping you identify trending keywords: As a topic matures, new keywords emerge. Your curated content will help you recognize these patterns and you can use what you learn to optimize new content.

Marketers are finding that curating content on their site is producing results.  Just take Bob Meyer president and co-founder of MPS Connect as an example. “Every search that is in our market niche, we’re on the first page at least once.,” he says. “This is huge for us, because we see a 10 percent growth in page views per month and a big part of those new visitors come from Google searches.”

As most know, the reason SEO performance is so important to marketers is because the easier a site is to locate on a search engine, the more Web traffic that site will get.

“Companies that blog get 55 percent more traffic,” Marta Kagan, Hubspot Director of Brand and Buzz, explained in a blog post called “12 Mind-Blowing Statistics Every Marketer Should Know” that the more you blog, the more pages Google has to index, and the more inbound links you’re likely to have.  “ The more pages and inbound links you have, the higher you rank on search engines like Google – thus the greater amount of traffic to your Website,” she writes.  The same logic applies to content curated sites.

Content curation tools that allow for both curation and original content, however, are imperative for the SEO success formula. Content Marketing Institute Editor Gary Kim puts it in basic terms. “You won’t be successful if all you do is produce your own content,” he says. “No matter how many talented people write for you, there are many other writers out there publishing great content elsewhere.  Why wouldn’t you want to produce a product that includes all the best content by all the best writers?”

Consistently producing the best relevant content will without a doubt send a site to the top of the search results. It is important to also note, however, that those who click to the site and see well-organized and continually updated content are encouraged to come back and will view the site as a valuable resource. Best of all, sites that have the right mix of curated and original content have a better chance at capturing the attention of prospects who are actively seeking information on the topic of which the site is about.  A curated site is easily turned into a lead generation tool through SEO and the ability to provide multiple touch points for the target audience.

Content curation is a game changer when it comes to SEO performance.  The process of finding, organizing and sharing content practically guarantees placement on page one of the search results.  Marketers who are curating are seeing improvement in SEO and using those results to evaluate their content curation efforts.  VP of Marketing at Aternity Donna Parent puts it simply: “We are very pleased to be listed organically on the first page of ‘end user experience’ with our site. That was a key goal that has been sustained since earlier this year (so about 6 months after implementation). This was and remains a key metric for us and proves the value.”

Article source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2011/10/31/winning-the-seo-battle-through-content-curation/

Guest post written by Pawan Deshpande

Pawan Deshpande is CEO of HiveFire, producer of Curata online content curation software. You can read more on this subject in his free e-book.

Pawan Deshpande: Staying relevant.

The battle for top billing on the search results page is fierce – and sites with fresh, relevant content are the ones that come out on top.  Sounds like an easy formula, but maintaining SEO performance is often easier said than done.  As any marketer will tell you, continuously creating, publishing and promoting original content is no small task.  That is why many are turning to content curation tools that help find, organize and share content online to ensure that their site is constantly delivering updated, highly topical, keyword-rich content – making it a natural winner in the battle of Search Engine Optimization.

SEO performance is top of mind for most marketers in today’s digital world. Most marketers I speak with want to know how simply generating content is going to propel them to page one of the search results. It is important for marketers to understand that generating content is not the only thing about curation that will translate into better SEO performance. In an excerpt from my company’s new e-book, here is a list of ways that content curation allows you to fight above your weight class in the battle for first page results.

• Optimizing for short-tail keywords: The content you curate for your chosen topic will automatically include the most popular search terms within your area of interest.  The quantity of references to those key terms across a wide range of content will help boost your search standing
• Increasing the opportunity for inbound links: As readers and other industry publishers discover the value of your content, they will link to you as a trusted resource. In addition, sources you’ve curated may link back to you.
• Increasing update frequency: Curated sites are typically updated on a regular basis. Search engines actively reward up-to-date sites by indexing them more often than less current ones.
• Properly tagging and categorizing content: Search engines love well-organized content. Curation platforms help you arrange your content so it’s useful to visitors and attractive to search engines.
• Creating sub-topic landing pages: Bump your content to the top of refined searches by creating highly-targeted landing pages built around specific sub-topics or content attributes (author, location, keyword, etc.)
• Integrating long-tail keywords: The diversity and depth of content on a well-curated site naturally incorporates many key long-tail keywords that help to drive niche-targeted traffic.
• Helping you identify trending keywords: As a topic matures, new keywords emerge. Your curated content will help you recognize these patterns and you can use what you learn to optimize new content.

Marketers are finding that curating content on their site is producing results.  Just take Bob Meyer president and co-founder of MPS Connect as an example. “Every search that is in our market niche, we’re on the first page at least once.,” he says. “This is huge for us, because we see a 10 percent growth in page views per month and a big part of those new visitors come from Google searches.”

As most know, the reason SEO performance is so important to marketers is because the easier a site is to locate on a search engine, the more Web traffic that site will get.

“Companies that blog get 55 percent more traffic,” Marta Kagan, Hubspot Director of Brand and Buzz, explained in a blog post called “12 Mind-Blowing Statistics Every Marketer Should Know” that the more you blog, the more pages Google has to index, and the more inbound links you’re likely to have.  “ The more pages and inbound links you have, the higher you rank on search engines like Google – thus the greater amount of traffic to your Website,” she writes.  The same logic applies to content curated sites.

Content curation tools that allow for both curation and original content, however, are imperative for the SEO success formula. Content Marketing Institute Editor Gary Kim puts it in basic terms. “You won’t be successful if all you do is produce your own content,” he says. “No matter how many talented people write for you, there are many other writers out there publishing great content elsewhere.  Why wouldn’t you want to produce a product that includes all the best content by all the best writers?”

Consistently producing the best relevant content will without a doubt send a site to the top of the search results. It is important to also note, however, that those who click to the site and see well-organized and continually updated content are encouraged to come back and will view the site as a valuable resource. Best of all, sites that have the right mix of curated and original content have a better chance at capturing the attention of prospects who are actively seeking information on the topic of which the site is about.  A curated site is easily turned into a lead generation tool through SEO and the ability to provide multiple touch points for the target audience.

Content curation is a game changer when it comes to SEO performance.  The process of finding, organizing and sharing content practically guarantees placement on page one of the search results.  Marketers who are curating are seeing improvement in SEO and using those results to evaluate their content curation efforts.  VP of Marketing at Aternity Donna Parent puts it simply: “We are very pleased to be listed organically on the first page of ‘end user experience’ with our site. That was a key goal that has been sustained since earlier this year (so about 6 months after implementation). This was and remains a key metric for us and proves the value.”

Article source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2011/10/31/winning-the-seo-battle-through-content-curation/

Keyword research is becoming more and more important as marketers see the value of having this information before, during, and after marketing campaigns. This knowledge especially takes on more meaning when it comes from your own website data. Let’s look at some solid methods for identifying top performing keywords.

Using Google Webmaster Tools to Identify Keyword Impressions

Google’s Webmaster Tools is sometimes an overlooked resource that can help marketers as they work on improving their websites. It can also be a great tool for learning more about keyword impressions and segmentation data.

Before you begin gathering these insights, make sure you have an account with Webmaster Tools and that it is verified. If you need help, please refer to Webmaster Tools Help on verification.

Start by visiting the dashboard of the site you wish to examine and click on “Your site on the web.” Then click on “search queries.” Immediately you will see your list of keywords sorted by the number of impressions as you can see below. This impression data is one piece of information you cannot currently get from Google Analytics. This adds one more piece of the puzzle to understanding how keywords are performing on your website.

If you wish to segment this list of keywords by type of search, location, or traffic, you can click on the filter button near the top to bring up another window that allows you to break down the data by – let’s say mobile smartphone users in the U.S. With these filters you can identify top performing (and worst performing) keywords for each segment. Those that are not performing well might be opportunities. They may be performing poorly due to lack of optimization. If so, get in there and optimize to get them performing better or discard them if they are not driving the right traffic, which can be determined through Google Analytics.

Tip: You can select different dates to see performance over time. Additionally, export the data to Excel to help you with data manipulation.

Using Google Analytics to Identify Top Performing Keywords

Google Analytics allows you to take your research further and provide more granularity with the results. To get started, you need to insure you have Google Analytics installed and tracking, preferably for at least a month or longer. If you need help getting Google Analytics installed, please read this post.

To find the keyword data we are looking for, first navigate to “traffic sources.” Then go to “sources,” then “search,” and finally “organic.” This report shows you the organic search traffic for your site by keywords as you can see below.

The beautiful thing about this report is that it shows you your top performing keywords by the number of visits. To then see if your visitors stayed long enough to look around, you need to glance at the bounce rate for each keyword. A higher bounce rate indicates your visitors did not like what they saw when they landed on your site and then bolted. A lower bounce rate indicates more of your visitors lingered around. This in combination with the number of visits paints a pretty clear picture on keywords that drive traffic to your site and are working for you.

To check keyword performance, you can look at the conversion tab. You again need to have your conversion goals set up in advance. With this setup you can find top performing keywords that are not only driving traffic to your site but are helping you reach your goals.

Keyword Segmentation With Google Analytics

Next let’s look at breaking these keywords down by segments to see what we can learn. To start, click on “advanced segments” near the top as you can see below:

Let’s start by selecting “new visitors” and “returning visitors.” Then click “Apply.” This will show us how effective your organic keywords are at driving new and repeat traffic to your site. You can do this for other segments as well like paid search traffic.

You can also create custom segments. To get help with creating custom segments, you can read this post on Google’s Analytics Help site. As you can see above, I have created custom segments for Twitter and Facebook traffic. It helps if you can isolate just the traffic and see how your keywords perform from each of these sources.

Another one of my favorite custom segments is branded keywords. This will help you to focus on how well your branded keywords are performing compared to the rest of your campaign.

Important update: Google has incorporated SSL for search on Google.com for users that are logged in. Why this is important is that Google will not pass the keyword search term for visits from users that are logged in. The visit will show up as an organic search but there will be no keyword associated with it. This is being done in the name of improving data privacy. Right now this represents a small percentage of traffic but may increase. More details are on the Google Analytics blog site.

There are many good keyword tools out there that provide great insights into general keyword performance but nothing is as good as looking at your own data. Don’t forget to add these methods for finding and tuning keywords and keyword performance to your keyword research processes.

Download ClickZ’s free Political Video Advertising resource and find out why political advertisers are using video, get tips from digital political experts, learn key video ad terms, and more.

Article source: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2120689/tips-identifying-performing-keywords

Keyword research is becoming more and more important as marketers see the value of having this information before, during, and after marketing campaigns. This knowledge especially takes on more meaning when it comes from your own website data. Let’s look at some solid methods for identifying top performing keywords.

Using Google Webmaster Tools to Identify Keyword Impressions

Google’s Webmaster Tools is sometimes an overlooked resource that can help marketers as they work on improving their websites. It can also be a great tool for learning more about keyword impressions and segmentation data.

Before you begin gathering these insights, make sure you have an account with Webmaster Tools and that it is verified. If you need help, please refer to Webmaster Tools Help on verification.

Start by visiting the dashboard of the site you wish to examine and click on “Your site on the web.” Then click on “search queries.” Immediately you will see your list of keywords sorted by the number of impressions as you can see below. This impression data is one piece of information you cannot currently get from Google Analytics. This adds one more piece of the puzzle to understanding how keywords are performing on your website.

If you wish to segment this list of keywords by type of search, location, or traffic, you can click on the filter button near the top to bring up another window that allows you to break down the data by – let’s say mobile smartphone users in the U.S. With these filters you can identify top performing (and worst performing) keywords for each segment. Those that are not performing well might be opportunities. They may be performing poorly due to lack of optimization. If so, get in there and optimize to get them performing better or discard them if they are not driving the right traffic, which can be determined through Google Analytics.

Tip: You can select different dates to see performance over time. Additionally, export the data to Excel to help you with data manipulation.

Using Google Analytics to Identify Top Performing Keywords

Google Analytics allows you to take your research further and provide more granularity with the results. To get started, you need to insure you have Google Analytics installed and tracking, preferably for at least a month or longer. If you need help getting Google Analytics installed, please read this post.

To find the keyword data we are looking for, first navigate to “traffic sources.” Then go to “sources,” then “search,” and finally “organic.” This report shows you the organic search traffic for your site by keywords as you can see below.

The beautiful thing about this report is that it shows you your top performing keywords by the number of visits. To then see if your visitors stayed long enough to look around, you need to glance at the bounce rate for each keyword. A higher bounce rate indicates your visitors did not like what they saw when they landed on your site and then bolted. A lower bounce rate indicates more of your visitors lingered around. This in combination with the number of visits paints a pretty clear picture on keywords that drive traffic to your site and are working for you.

To check keyword performance, you can look at the conversion tab. You again need to have your conversion goals set up in advance. With this setup you can find top performing keywords that are not only driving traffic to your site but are helping you reach your goals.

Keyword Segmentation With Google Analytics

Next let’s look at breaking these keywords down by segments to see what we can learn. To start, click on “advanced segments” near the top as you can see below:

Let’s start by selecting “new visitors” and “returning visitors.” Then click “Apply.” This will show us how effective your organic keywords are at driving new and repeat traffic to your site. You can do this for other segments as well like paid search traffic.

You can also create custom segments. To get help with creating custom segments, you can read this post on Google’s Analytics Help site. As you can see above, I have created custom segments for Twitter and Facebook traffic. It helps if you can isolate just the traffic and see how your keywords perform from each of these sources.

Another one of my favorite custom segments is branded keywords. This will help you to focus on how well your branded keywords are performing compared to the rest of your campaign.

Important update: Google has incorporated SSL for search on Google.com for users that are logged in. Why this is important is that Google will not pass the keyword search term for visits from users that are logged in. The visit will show up as an organic search but there will be no keyword associated with it. This is being done in the name of improving data privacy. Right now this represents a small percentage of traffic but may increase. More details are on the Google Analytics blog site.

There are many good keyword tools out there that provide great insights into general keyword performance but nothing is as good as looking at your own data. Don’t forget to add these methods for finding and tuning keywords and keyword performance to your keyword research processes.

Download ClickZ’s free Political Video Advertising resource and find out why political advertisers are using video, get tips from digital political experts, learn key video ad terms, and more.

Article source: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2120689/tips-identifying-performing-keywords