Fire up Google® Analytics, folks. It’s time to make some money!
One of the best things about owning an online business is that the direct path to you is found via keywords. Every visit to your site leaves an important trail of visitors who drop important keywords along the way. When you type words on your site in the form of product descriptions or content, you will invariably rank for keyword terms or phrases that you weren’t expecting to. Even better, there are hidden opportunities in these keywords, both in expanded advertising efforts and product lines.
The first place to start is with your orders—the people who actually bought from you. If your shopping cart software (such as nsCommerceSpace™) tracks referrers, then you’re in luck. Peruse your referrer reports, or individual orders for the referring URLs. Usually, it’s easy to spot the keywords a shopper used to get to you in these URLs, but if not, click on the referring URL to see what the shopper saw when they got to your site. If these are new keywords for you (i.e. not keywords you were actively targeting), add those to your PPC campaigns and SEO marketing efforts.
If you’re using Analytics, it’s still easy to mine keywords. Simply navigate to Traffic Sources > Keywords, and click on the “visits” column header. This will give you the keywords with the least amount of visits. Why is this important? It’s important that you find ‘long tail’ keywords, here.
Long tail keywords are keyword phrases composed of three or more words that collectively are more specific than a single keyword. Long tail keywords are more likely to convert to sales than shorter, more generic keywords because there is less competition for them. Generally, the more specific the search, the closer the searcher is to the act of purchasing a product or service.
REAL EXAMPLE
We recently studied a company who used this approach to start manufacturing an entirely new product line. For years they manufactured leotards and other dance costumes, but through their Analytics mining they found that customers were coming to them looking for liturgical dancewear. Based on the amount of traffic these keywords brought to them, they began making an entire line of this type of dancewear.
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