Second Page Keyword Targeting

Which keywords should you target for a link building campaign?
How do you make sure that the work you’re doing is having an impact?
These are two fundamental questions to ask yourself in any link building campaign. It’s all very well blindly targeting keywords that your client wants to rank for, but far more sensible to spend a little time looking at what they’re ranking for already and seeing if you can give their rankings a little nudge in the right direction.

This is variously called “advanced white hat SEO”, “second page keyword targeting” or just “a damn good way of getting results.” You’ll need a few tools to get this set up and running correctly and a little patience to ensure that you’ve got enough data.

Initial setup

Firstly you’ll need Google Analytics running on your site. You’ll then need to set up a new profile and a few filters. There’s a really good post by the guys at Distilled on how exactly to go about setting it up, but in summary…

Create a new website profile in Google analytics.
Add a filter to your new profile as follows:

Filter type: custom, advanced
Field A -> Extract A: Referral: (\?|&)(start)=([^&]*)
Field B -> Extract B: Blank
Output To -> Constructor: User defined: $A3
Field A Required: Yes
Field B Required: No
Override Output Field: Yes
Case Sensitive: No

Next, go into your newly set up profile with the filter and set up a new advanced segment (again this is covered in detailed by the article on the Distilled blog) as follows:

Add a new segment
Select user defined value
Condition ‘matches exactly’
Value ’10′

You can then go into look at your traffic sources, keywords and non-paid keywords to see which keywords you are appearing on the second page of Google for. This is obviously of huge benefit to anyone wanting to know which keywords could do with a bit of an improvement, and a bit of link building around them, but how does one determine which keywords out of all the ones you’re on the second page for to target? And how do you report on it?

Targeting and reporting

In Google analytics go to:

[site name] [new profile name] > traffic sources > keywords > non-paid > advanced segments (top right of the page) unselect all visits and check your new advanced segment – whatever you called it.

Select 250 rows from the show rows dropdown.

Export the data as a .csv

Remove the date rows (approx 45) from the .csv

Search in the keywords for illegal characters like ‘ ? ! anything marked as #NAME? and commas

Go to the Google keywords tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordTool

Paste in your list of keywords, uncheck the ‘use synonyms’ box, and check the ‘don’t show new ideas’ box.

Get keyword ideas.

Change match type to exact in the results.

Download all your keywords as a .csv file

Sort by name

Sort your original list of keywords by name.

Match the two up together by pasting the data from the keywords tool list into the export from analytics – this will take some manual work as some keywords will have disappeared due to duplication of keywords from the list when running them through the keyword tool.

From the keywords tool list, keep the columns called estimated average CPC, advertiser competition and approx avg search volume.

In the estimated avg CPC column, perform a find and replace on £ and replace with nothing.

In the approx avg search volume column, perform a find and replace on ‘-’ and replace the minus symbol with nothing.

Calculating the best keywords to target

You’ve now got all the data you need to work out the best keywords to target. To find which terms are actually worth targeting follow these steps:

Add an autofilter and on the bounce rate column create a custom filter for bounce rate is less than 1. A bounce rate of 1 means that people who have come to the site have left straight away, so it’s probably not worth bothering with these keywords. Bounce rate is also a factor in Google’s ranking of sites, and again, a high bounce rate is not good.

Calculate your current percentage of the total search market. Divide visits by (approx avg monthly search volume x 0.7) =B3/(I3*0.7). 0.7 being 70% – approximately the number of people who click on organic search results. You’ll probably need about eight decimal places to see any numbers.

You will most likely want to cut off the number of keyword searches at around 20 – 30 as you don’t want to spend all your time on targeting every single keyword. I suggest using the ‘approx avg search volume’ as a good way of cutting off the number of keywords – for example, anything that is under 10,000 searches a month is not worth bothering with.

Measuring performance

The number of visits to your site is your baseline metric for calculating performance. If visits increase, your efforts are working. If not, you need to look again at your strategy.

Given that the idea is to move your keywords to page one from page two, your page two ranking filter will not work for tracking, so you’ll need to set up another advanced segment as follows:

Copy and paste the keyword terms you have selected from your work thus far into another worksheet.

Concatenate the terms together, exact match them and separate them by the pipe symbol (|) to create a huge regular expression. For example:

=CONCATENATE(A1,”|”,A2) on row two
=CONCATENATE(B2,”|”,A3) on row three

N.B. this regex does not match only the terms you’ve selected, it matches any terms containing the ones you’ve selected. If you want it to be specific, you’ll need to change your formulas, however a link building campaign will also see benefit to other related keywords, and not just those targeted.

Next create a new advanced segment in Google Analytics, and add source contains Google, then add an and statement of keyword matches regular expression, and paste in the text in the last row of concatenated terms you created.

This gives you a baseline for looking at the effectiveness of your keyword targeting – look at the total number of visits to your site from the target keywords segment. After internally linking to relevant stories using keyword rich anchor text, running link building campaigns, submitting to directories and so on you should see an increase in the number of non-paid visits from search.

You’ll also be able to monitor the increase over time in the numbers of visits to your site for the target keyword terms and show them on pretty graphs, thereby proving your brilliance in selecting the keywords you did.

Tags: blogging tips, Google Analytics, Link Building, SEO

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