How to find new niche keywords that will convert using Google Analytics

There are several available tools on the market to help you find new keywords. Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker, and the Keyword Tool from AdWords will literally give you thousands of keywords with search volumes plus all kinds of other fascinating metrics.

But how can you pick the ones that are specific to YOUR business? Which ones will actually work?

There is an option in Analytics that is seldom used, but contains a wealth of information if you’re searching for new keywords that can produce measurable results. Log into Analytics and try this technique:

1. Go to Traffic Sources > Search Engines
This option contains all the search engines directing traffic to your site.
2. Click ‘Google’ (or whatever search engine you would like to analyze)
At the top, you see Show: total | paid | non-paid and the Segment: has a drop down button.
3. Select ‘non-paid’ in the Show section and ‘Keyword’ in the Segment section.

What do you see?

Yep, these are the actual queries being typed into Google that result in a conversion on your website (non-paid). Go ahead and sort it by the Goal or Visits – you can quickly evaluate exactly what keyword terms people are typing in to convert. You can get more data from looking at the weblogs too, but this is a nice workaround, especially if you don’t have access to that data.

What else?

If you sort it by Visits, you’ll quickly see what keywords are NOT appropriate for paid search campaigns. Lots of visits and no conversions can show keywords that will waste money and seeking out new negative terms to implement can easily improve the quality of conversions. Use the filters at the bottom and expand the list to 500 – there is plenty of info there to analyze, but at least it’s all relevant to YOUR site and not based on search volumes for the entire Internet!

How to find the best ones for AdWords?

Exporting this report to a spreadsheet will give you further analysis via sorting and using the formula that converts the percentage of goals to visits. *Keep in mind you can only export 500 at a time, so if you have 1000’s of keywords, you’ll need to select ‘Go to 501’ and export the second (and third-1001, fourth-1501, etc..) wave of 500 keywords.

The simple calculation is multiplying the number of visits by the percentage of goals to get the actual number of conversions for the specific keyword. Plenty of those keywords have a 100% goal conversion with one visit and one conversion. These are good, but it is better to shoot for the ones that have 5+ visits and a 20% conversion rate because they have a better chance of having the volume required by Google to gain an impression.

Little used keyword phrases that have already converted on YOUR site are about as relevant as you can get. Filtering down to specific keywords and implementing these new phrases into your paid search campaigns will greatly benefit your share of impressions, clicks, and lower your cost per conversion if done correctly. Good luck maximizing your keyword lists and getting the most conversions at the lowest cost!