Hey, Katherine Griwert here for a content & coffee with Brafton. If you’ve been feeling a little lost ever since the disappearance of keyword data from Google Analytics reports, you may find new data in Webmaster tools helps you find keyword insights. Watch the video below, and read on.
Google updated its Webmaster tools to provide a list of the search terms that drive the most impressions and clicks for a particular page. To find the report, you go to the pages tab in Webmaster Tools’ search queries report and click the arrow next to any one the top URLs for a list of keywords pointing traffic to that page.
It may seem like Google’s giving keyword data back, but this isn’t evidence that we should revert back to a keyword-centric content culture. Using the tool to explore top click-driving phrases, I’ve found a lot of keywords our content marketing team is not even trying to optimize for. While these insights can be a helpful way to refine a core keyword list, marketers should look more closely at the trend or idea behind the phrases rather than get hung up on words themselves – especially if some obscure queries crop up.
In some cases, I’ve found multi-word search phrases with a high click-through rate aren’t even used in consecutive order on the pages earning traffic. But the page is answering the question we can guess the original searcher wanted answered. And we can use these phrases to create more content around those topics.
It may seem like Google’s giving keyword data back, but this isn’t evidence that we should revert back to a keyword-centric content culture.
This added Webmaster Tools data is a great opportunity to understand how users are discovering pages, and get an insight into the searchers’ intent. Exploring which words give a page the highest impressions and clicks in search, and comparing them with the metadescriptions we offer searchers, and the overall insight on the page, is a great way to do a quality check on how content addresses the searcher.
This update won’t ease the sting of ‘keyword not provided’ for marketers who were using that Analytics data to find particular phrases the drove the highest volumes of traffic, or the highest-converting organic traffic. But having this insight at the page level gives marketers another opportunity to succeed in search with content that hits on the topics users want.
You’ll find more information on building content around keywords as concepts on Brafton.com. Thanks for tuning in, and happy content marketing.
