3 SEO Nuggets Under Your Nose

I was rummaging around in Google webmaster tools yesterday scratching up the surface of search queries like a chicken looking for a tasty grub. I found one, a 4500 searches a month keyword that we are not ranking for. The search queries tool in WMT provides you with the last 90 days of search data related to your site. Unlike Google Analytics it will not only clicks to your site but also how many times you actually appeared in search. The last couple of weeks I have been watching a ridiculous phrase rise in our data; Video Marketing SEO. Read yesterday’s post to see why I think it is ridiculous. It occurred to me though most people won’t go through these steps to find those tasty keyword morsels adrift in the search soup. Here’s what I do under Search Queries in Webmaster tools.

1.  Initial Selection

Google gives us an impressions column. It is notoriously unreliable though. Look at the numbers below,

yesterday SEO Melbourne was 4,500 and today it is 5,500! These are estimates obviously. The other thing you will notice is they are all factors of 10. Google also reckons here that SEO Melbourne gets as twice as many searches as SEO. Highly unlikely. In fact Google trends will tell you a very different story. Why? These numbers are specific to your site, Google trends is looking at a much larger data set. I begin by clicking the impressions so I can sort by volume.

2. Rising or Falling

One of the nice things about the search queries tool it can give you an indication how your SEO efforts are trending even if you are not seeing it in your analytics yet. This is the graph from a client’s account.

Over a 90 day period the search impression traffic has nearly doubled. This resulted in a 20% growth in actual clicks but we can see the potential is much greater. To get those impressions turning into clicks we need to get them ranked higher.

3. SEO Keyword Growth

You can only use this feature if you are looking at at a time frame of 30 days or less. I can tell from this that there has been infinite growth in the phrase “Sensis SEO” because I rank no.3 for it off a post I wrote a few years back. Apparently we’ve seen a 5614% growth in the phrase search engine optimization video. Well I certainly have a few of those.

Currently we rank 87 for that so lots of potential for growth! Just on that image above there is approximately 10,000 clicks a month I am missing out on. In my experience it will probably be only 10-205 of that number but it is still growth. 🙂