Wouldn’t it be great if you could somehow spot those SEO opportunities on your site which were low effort and high value? Well this post gives you a few ways you can do that! Sweet.
I’m going to be digging around in the recently released search queries report in Google Webmaster Tools:
Step 1 – Gathering The Fruit
The first thing we need to do is gather all the fruit (aka keyphrases). So within GWT select search queries and select just “web” queries and in this case I’ve selected “United States” since that’s the main target market for SEOmoz. The more we can narrow this down the better data we get, if we leave image search etc in there and leave countries like Serbia in there the less accurate our data will be:
Once we have filtered the data we then want to download the data to Excel:
Step 2 – Identify The Low Hanging Fruit
Once we have the data in Excel we can do some monkeying around to get some meaningful insights. When you download the data you will be presented with a lot of dummy data like this:
So I run a find and replace on the following two items:
- Find “<10" and replace with 1
- Find “-” and replace with 0
Be sure to only run these over columns B,C,D to avoid stripping out anything from your queries column in A!
Now, once we have this data it will depend on the number of impressions and number of keyphrases how exactly you want to slice the data. Analysing the data for SEOmoz I found that selecting all avg positions that were not equal to 1 and impressions over 200 gave me a sample set of 97 keyphrases to look at which wouldn’t take very long at all to whiz through and look at. If you have more time or if you have more keyphrases you might want to get a longer or shorter list.
As I mentioned this gives me a list of 97 keyphrases for the SEOmoz site. Let’s take a look at what some of those opportunities are!
An Example: SEOmoz’s Low Hanging Fruit
In this post I not only wanted to show you how to get the data but also to give you an insight into what kinds of actions you could take and what sorts of keyphrases you might look at so I ran the above process for the SEOmoz site and found the following low hanging fruit. Bear in mind that there weren’t that many really easy wins in the data since SEOmoz generally has fairly good SEO (unsurprisingly!). Still, it gives you an idea of the thought process.
Keyphrase: SEO | Ranking: 9.4 | Impressions: 49,500 | Clicks: 590
Ranking URL: https://moz.com
Now, I’ve shot myself in the foot a little here by picking a keyphrase which isn’t really a low hanging fruit, it’s actually a highly competitive keyphrase! That said, it’s useful information to have. Without having rank tracking set up for the site it instantly tells me that SEOmoz are highly competitive for this term, especially as some of the sites that rank above them are Google and Wikipedia. That said, there’s room for improvement. Maybe time for some more badge-bait Rand?!
Keyphrase: Social media marketing | Ranking: 7.9 | Impressions: 8,100 | Clicks: 320
Ranking URL: https://moz.com/article/social-media-marketing-tactics
Again, this is a highly competitive keyphrase but one which I feel SEOmoz could perform better for. The current ranking is working ok for them but could certainly improve dramatically if they could shift the ranking from 7.9 into the top 3. Digging around we see that the page is linked internally from every page in the navigation with good anchor text and it has a total of 255 root domains linking to the page so there’s clearly a fair amount of work already done here. That said, I feel like there’s an opportunity waiting since SEOmoz links out to lots of other sites from here and most of those blogs will likely link back to the SEOmoz guide if there was a nicely written email. Incidentally, if you’re looking for a link from SEOmoz and have a top notch guide for one of the sites which doesn’t have any resources attached then get in touch! So long as you link back to the page 😉
Also, BONUS TIP – while researching backlinks in this space I stumbled across the fact that Amazon authors can get links from Amazon.com check out Darren Rowse on Amazon and then compare to Rand Fishkin on Amazon and you’ll see that Rand has missed an opportunity to get blog posts imported and hence get clean followed links from Amazon. Sweet!
Keyphrase: What is seo | Ranking: 3.9 | Impressions: 1,900 | Clicks: 210
Ranking URL: http://guides.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization (Note here that this URL isn’t reported in GWT, it’s the old beginner’s guide URL which now redirects but the same keyphrase stands).
Here, I see the answer being a little easier than the above keyphrases. The term is less competitive and the title of the page doesn’t even mention “what is seo”! My actions would be to reword the title tag to be “What is SEO? The Free Beginner’s Guide to SEO from SEOmoz” and to mention “What is SEO” on the page at least once (currently it only mentions “what is search engine optimisation” and although Google knows they’re the same phrase I’d still like to see the exact phrase on the page somewhere). Also, there is no navigation link on the site to the beginner’s guide so slipping a few links into the next few blog posts with the anchor text “what is seo” will help boost the rankings for that phrase.
Keyphrase: Free seo tools | Ranking: 4.2 | Impressions: 480 | Clicks: 73
Ranking URL: https://moz.com/tools
The term “seo tools” is fiercely competitive but the “free seo tools” term seems like it would be a lot easier to go after, in fact SEOmoz is one of only 2 of the top 10 results which doesn’t mention the term free in the title tag of the page. This could be rectified easily and in addition to that the page doesn’t even mention “free seo tools” on the page. Personally, since this is something people search for I’d be tempted to re-design the page to add a “Free SEO Tools” sub-header to differentiate between the free and PRO tools. That way it’s a good user experience and also gets the phrase on the page.
Keyphrase: Keyword research | Ranking: 19 | Impressions: 110 | Clicks: 12
Ranking URL: https://moz.com/blog/10-steps-to-advanced-keyword-research
Note here that the impression numbers are so low because the page is ranking 2nd page. Not having a page ranking in the top 10 here is a mistake for SEOmoz I think (sorry, I mean opportunity!). The correct page is clearly the page on keyphrase research from the new beginner’s guide and the best way to make that page rank is to throw some more internal links to the page. Currently there are basically no internal links to that page except from other beginner’s guide pages. Linking to it from elsewhere should be able to get that page ranking. One idea to help get internal links to pages of the beginner’s guide would be to automatically link to the keyword research page from any blog post within the keyphrase research category. That way it would essentially get more deep links internally to the individual pages of the beginner’s guide.
A Data Warning
A warning here that I’m still not sure how much I trust this impression and click data. I wrote a post over on Distilled about how the reported numbers are way out from analytics numbers. To be honest, if I was doing SEO full-time for SEOmoz I’d like to think I’d have better resources of keyphrase research, ranking data and visitor numbers but using Google’s webmaster tools search queries report can be a nice quick way to identify keyphrase opportunities for a site which you’re less familiar with or for which you don’t have these things set up.
