Measuring organic keywords referring traffic to a given web page

Every now and then, it’s good to report on the keywords that are referring users to a given page on your site. Let’s say that you optimized a page for [blue widgets], are now ranking for the term, and you want to see if it’s driving any traffic.

Google AdWords lets you measure your PPC keyword traffic easily, but it’s not so obvious how to do the same for organic keywords in Google Analytics. Let me show you what I think is the best path to setting up a report.

Report on organic key phrases used to get to a given web page

My organic SEO work has focused on taking a single web page and optimizing it for a key phrase or two. I’ve wanted to take a given page and see what keywords searchers have been using to get to that page. If the page is ranking well for a given key phrase and my reporting shows no traffic generated by that phrase, then it would be an indicator that I’d probably want to try something else (or figure out why no one is clicking to get to my page)!

For example’s sake, let’s say that I’ve optimized my blog’s home page for the key phrase [chris peters]. (Imagine that!)

How to set it up in Google Analytics

There are many different ways to approach reporting on your metrics in Google Analytics, so let me show you the best path to take in reporting on organic keywords.

Once you’re in your site in Google Analytics, click the Content link in the left navigation.

Next, click Content Drilldown.

If the page you’re interested in reporting on doesn’t appear in the Content Performance area, go ahead and search for the folder name in the Find URL search box at the bottom.

Once you’ve found the page you want to report on, click on it. (Note that if you’re reporting on the index page of a section (index.html, index.php, home.aspx, etc.), you will need to click the actual backslash “/” link to pull up the correct page.)

You should be on a report called Content Detail: [Your URL here]. There is a drop-down called Analyze that defaults to “Content Detail.” In that drop-down, select “Entrance Keywords.”

On the Entrance Keywords: [Your URL here] report, click on the Show: non-paid link to the right underneath the main graph.

At this point, you will see a list of keywords searchers have used to arrive at a given page, along with traffic metrics. If you look at my example, you’ll see that I’m pulling a decent amount of traffic for my name. (Considering that not too many people are looking for me.)

If you would like to automate this particular report, you can click the Email button at the top of the report to have it sent to you daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly.

Keep in mind that Analytics allows a limited number of automated reports, so you may end up in a situation where you’ll want to prioritize which reports you want to automate.

Caveats to organic keyword reporting in Google Analytics

Caveat #1: Inconsistent links on your site

Unfortunately, if you have multiple links on your site that point to the same content, you could have a problem with getting to the metrics that you want.

For example, if you have links on your site to each of these

• /products
• /Products
• /products/index.html
• /products/

then those URLs are going to show up separately in Google Analytics. This applies to mixed case variants.

The best way to avoid this problem is to go through your site and use a consistent linking convention. I prefer all lowercase with a trailing slash, as in <a href="/products/">Products</a>. If this is too painstaking, you may just want to see which version of the URL that Google search results are sending users to, for starters.

Caveat #2: Keyword reports in Content area aren’t just for a single URL

Content reports in Google Analytics behave a little strangely. When you report on keywords for a particular page like this, it doesn’t just show you keywords that caused the user to land directly on that page from search engines.

So if a visitor searched for your company name and somehow ended up on the target page, then that keyword is counted in this report. If you see anything that doesn’t make sense in your report, try searching for that word and seeing which page does come up.

Just a couple things to keep in mind.

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