How to Find new keywords with Google Analytics | SEO Basics 1

Finding new keywords

You will always want to be alert to new keyword opportunities. This is the
“expansion” phase of your keyword development. New products and product
model numbers will become new keywords as they are released to the market. New
technologies create new keyword opportunities at an ever-increasing pace. New laws
create new keyword opportunities as they are passed. Stay on top of these keyword
trends and you’ll further edge out your competitors.

Eyeing the competition

One way to find new keywords is to keep an eye on your competition. What
keywords are your competitors utilizing for the important pages of their website?
Is your competition advertising new products and services? If so, it may mean that
they’ve found a micro-niche within their market that you can harness as well.
You can also use one of several keyword spying websites. The website Spyfu
(http://www.spyfu.com) touts itself as a resource that empowers you to “spot new
SEM/SEO opportunities and outsmart your competitors.” That’s a fitting description.
Spyfu gathers pay-per-click data on millions of websites and lets you discover what
keywords your competition is employing in their pay-per-click campaigns. While
the free version offers a peek, the paid version offers more data and more depth of
features. As an alternative, the service SEMRush offers the same capability.
Another great spying tool is Google Alerts. Google Alerts is a free tool with which
you can “monitor the web for interesting new content.” Here’s how it works:
you enter a query term. When Google discovers new content that includes that
query term, you receive an e-mail. This free service is great for monitoring your
competition: simply enter the name of a competitor’s website, and you’ll receive an
e-mail each time they publish new content on their website, or issue a press release.
The keyword tools we’ve described above in this Article, Google’s SKtool,
SEOArticle’s keyword tool, and Wordtracker’s free keyword tool, all present variants
of keywords when you employ them. Use these tools to continually expand your keyword lists.

You may also encounter new keywords simply by analyzing your existing website
visitor data. Google Analytics, the popular website analytics software, records and
stores the actual search queries by which your visitors found your site.

Finding new keywords with Google Analytics

Google Analytics records and stores entry keywords for most visitors to your
website. An entry keyword is simply the search query used by a visitor that was
referred to your site by a search engine. Visitors referred to your site by a third party
website that isn’t a search engine do not have entry keywords, so no keyword is
reported in Google Analytics. Google Analytics is principally designed to record and
analyze visitor behavior on your website, but it has many secondary purposes, such
as helping you expand your keyword list.

To see the entry keywords for your website, and the corresponding volume of
visitors for that keyword, log in to your Analytics account. From within Analytics,
select Traffic Sources on the left navigation bar and then select the submenu item
Keywords.
In the main table, you will see a list of the entry keywords that your visitors used to
get to your site. But perhaps you are wondering, “How does that help me, these are
keywords for which I am already ranking?” True, you must already rank for these
terms for them to garner a visitor. However, Analytic’s list of actual entry keywords
will nearly always include unanticipated variants of existing keywords. If it’s a
variant that you’ve missed initially, you might be ranking on page 5 or 6 of the search
results. Google Analytics gives you the opportunity to find those supplemental
variants so you can introduce them more prominently into your keyword strategy.
Google Analytics shows you the entry keywords by which visitors found your site.
Some of these keywords will represent unanticipated variants of keywords for which
you already rank.