SEOenthusiast

Today’s article is a guest post from Kevin Lenton. Kevin works with companies to build and maintain their online relationships with clients, as well as prepare content geared at high conversion rates. In his spare time he enjoys playing the harmonica – an activity he’s been involved in since the age of 12.

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Most are well aware of the power and benefits of installing Google Analytics to find out who is coming to a website. Many are even aware that you can see exactly what keywords are being searched for to find that website. There are not many out there however, who are aware of the fact that you can use that data to skyrocket your traffic numbers.

If you follow the steps in this guide, you will see a significant traffic boost. The beauty of this strategy is that it is often limitless (depending on how big the market is for any given website). This is also a strategy that works no matter how much traffic you are currently getting. The only requirement is that your website is getting some sort of traffic from search engines. It works best if you are getting 35+ visitors per day via search engines. The more traffic you currently get, the easier this technique will be to implement.

There are dozens of different options for bringing a website live these days. If you are serious about your website/blog and increasing the traffic, you have to prepare for achieving that goal. If you are on a low grade hosting plan, be aware of the consequences associated with going that route. You do not need anything extreme, but a simple plan from a good web hosting provider will suffice. That way, you do not have to worry about your site going down or some sort of security issue arising. The traffic is not going to skyrocket over night, but it is better to switch hosting servers when your site is getting less traffic versus more. There is always that risk of a small downtime when you change servers.

The idea behind this strategy, is that you will be analyzing your current traffic data, to figure out new pages that should be added to your website and/or blog. There is a lot that can be seen from looking into this data. Sure, it is nice to be able to see the keywords that people are searching for and how many visitors you are getting each day, but what good does that do if you are not utilizing the data you are looking at? Depending on the traffic level of your website, there may be dozens (or even thousands) of keyword phrases that are bringing traffic to your website. Many of these are long-tail keyword phrases.

Taking a look at the list of keywords in question, along with where you currently place for those keywords, will allow you to further target them. If you are ranking fairly well for many of these keywords on accident, imagine what you could do if you actually tried to rank for those same keywords?

The theory behind this strategy is simple. Your job is to find keyword phrases that you already rank for (on accident) that bring you traffic. The key is to find phrases for which you rank below #1. If you are already ranking #1 for the keyword, then there is no point in taking this strategy.

The first thing you must do is login to your Google Analytics account and access your keyword data.

Find your way to the dashboard of the website for which you are attempting this strategy.Click on Traffic Sources on the left hand side of the page.This will expand and give you more options. Click on Keywords.On the bottom right hand corner, you will see an option that says Show Rows. Choose the option to show 500 rows.

You should now have a large list of keyword phrases from which to choose. From there, you can scan through and see what keywords are bringing traffic to your website. Additionally, you will be able to see how many visitors have come from each specific keyword phrase. You want to find a keyword phrase that looks like it is bringing in a few visitors and also was not something you were targeting on purpose.

As an example, notice above a list of keywords from a website. The keyword that was chosen was olay return policy.

This keyword brought decent traffic as is.This keyword was not something targeted to rank for.The current ranking is not #1 (it is #5).We do not have a current page revolving around this keyword.

Notice above, that the circled result is where we are currently ranking. Also notice that the page really has nothing to do with olay return policy. If we build a page all about olay return policy, we could easily rank #1 for this keyword phrase.

In the example, the page that currently ranks is an Oil of Olay Skin Care Review page. An option would be to build an additional page added on to this review called Oil of Olay Return Policy. Optimize the page around the keyword phrase olay return policy, and it should rank #1 fairly easy. This is what could be called a low hanging fruit.

According to available click distribution data, there is a significant difference between the 1st and 5th listed ranking results on Google. While approximately 45.46% searchers click on the 1st result when searching for something in Google, only 5.00% click on the 5th result. While this is just a study based on a lot of different variables, and there are far too many involved to get an accurate number, there is still going to be a lot more action from the first result versus the fifth.

In theory, if you were to go off the above study, then olay return policy could yield approximately 73-75 visitors per month if our page ranked #1 instead of #5, where it currently brings in 8 visitors per month. It is likely that the number would be much lower, however there would still be a significant increase in traffic. The numbers above would tell us that traffic could potentially increase more then 900%, at least in traffic from that specific keyword. If you were to rinse and repeat this process with 10 keywords in total, all similar to the example described above, then the numbers would quickly add up.

It is not possible to calculate an exact rate of traffic by analyzing your current traffic. In the example, the percentage of clicks may perhaps be significantly higher than normal, because the results listed above #5 are all irrelevant and do not give the user what they are looking for. They may even notice that right away within the results, and skip straight down to #5. Who knows what the variables could be with your website, but they are worth looking at. Really take your time with your keyword data to figure out the perfect keywords to target.

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A big thanks goes out to Kevin for writing a fantastic guest post!

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