When you evaluate the effectiveness of your keywords, you cannot look at the granular most level. Some of your keywords will not have the statistical significance in volume and conversion that will allow you to make a confident decision. This is why it is very important to look at your SEO strategy from a high level.
SEO Lift Measurement
SEO Analysis based on conversion is great, but you may have situations where a keyword had 5 conversions with 10 visits and a conversion rate of .500% which is highly misleading. This is exactly why we measure the Lift in SEO, as it normalizes the traffic volume and the conversion for each keyword. Below is an example of a Lift Measurement report.
SEO Brand Effectiveness, Brand Lift
In Google Analytics, Omniture, or WebTrends you can segment your keyword reports by branded and non-branded terms. This will allow you to split your report and see which sets of keywords branded or non-branded provide you with the most acquisition, engagement, and conversion.
To make this report more valuable, you will want to measure the lift of each keyword group. For long term evaluation of your company brand, you will want to trend the number of branded keywords and the number of branded visits to your site. This will provide you with an idea if your brand share of voice is improving in the online market.
SEO Long Tail and Short Tail Keyword Lift
Another way to segment your keywords is by long tail and short tail keywords. This can be done with a regex in Google Analytics or advanced segments in Omniture and Webtrends. The goal is to see how the shorter terms perform vs. longer terms.
After you have created these segmented reports, you want to calculate the lift from each group. In many cases the short tail keywords tend to be more branded while the long tail keywords tend to be product or service focused. This mostly depends on your products or services.
Conclusion
These strategies are fundamentally sound and will work for any business, or E-commerce website. There are many strategies 312 Analytics can form by analyzing the lift of your keywords, and their effectiveness. One of the more interesting things we do is create custom analytics reports with these metrics and provide you with a strategy to measure and optimize your keywords.
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