Let’s Talk About a Hero

Who’s the Hero?

This week, I’ll be discussing Keyword Hero, an app offered through Google. Apps like Keyword Hero are part of the Google Marketing Platform Partners, and these partners offer various solutions for businesses needing specialized tools to assist with their digital marketing needs. These apps can cover some aspects that other Google-based platforms, like Google Analytics, cannot cover in depth.

It is not secret that more and more companies are prioritizing digital analytics in their overall marketing strategy, including the incorporation of keyword research. But not all companies know how to analyze keywords effectively. According to Medium, an online news source, these are the top 10 most common mistakes companies make when choosing keywords:

1.     Not understanding keywords in general

2.     Not understanding the company goals

3.     Not utilizing the right methods to locate keywords

4.     Failing to utilize the correct keyword search software

5.     Sticking with only one set of keywords

6.     Lacking keyword quantity

7.     Not implementing comparative methods among keywords

8.     Misunderstanding the needs of the customer

9.     Not doing enough research into how search engines process and rank keywords

10.  Lack of statistical feedback and interpretation (Yu, 2018).

As a marketer, seeing positive results from your paid search efforts is the ideal outcome. These results are the fruit of your labor. But organic search (non-paid traffic) is also great! Organic search allows marketers to see the volume of customers reaching their sites through prior knowledge of the brand and/or company. These are your company’s fans!

“Among all the ways people reach your site, organic search traffic sends many of the most valuable visitors to your business. That’s because organic search attracts people who are specifically looking for the products or services you offer, and gives you the opportunity to show yourself as “the best answer” through targeted content and messaging. This opportunity means that, of all your visitors, those attracted from organic search may be the most likely to become customers, so it is important to have a strategy in place for reaching them” (Top Reports for Analyzing Organic…, 2014).

One platform where marketers can really scrutinize their organic search is through Google Analytics, most discernibly through Keyword reports. Google Analytics can sync up with Google Ads for paid search as well, so both paid and organic search keywords can be analyzed in the same place. This is another a convenient aspect for marketers, and another reason Google Analytics is a go-to tool for them.          

Starting in 2011, Google Analytics (GA) started taking away some results from organic keyword data, a sad time for marketers as is being revealed through some research. “Whilst [marketers] still had Webmaster Tools to see what search queries [their] websites were ranking for and which terms were generating clicks, measuring any kind of engagement and conversions was nigh on impossible…” (SEO Tools, 2018). Webmaster Tools is now called the Google Search Console, and it helps marketers and webmasters analyze how their SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) are performing. Then, the Google app called Keyword Hero stepped in to fill this void and provide a solution. This is truly a hero marketers not only needed, but deserved. (Hopefully Batman fans enjoyed that a bit.)

Keyword Hero essentially puts organic keywords back into Google Analytics. Marketers are also able to view semantic clusters, brand vs non-brand, and CTR, among other additional features. How does Keyword Hero pull this keyword information? A variety of data sources, including   data points from browser extensions, are used, along with a method that matches Google Analytics organic search with the most probable keywords. Here’s a more detailed explanation of how all of this works:

“The Keyword Hero fetches data from your Google Analytics account and computes the keywords for your organic sessions. After the keyword matching process, the Hero uploads the data to your newly created Keyword Hero Property inside your Google Analytics account. It will not only contain all keywords for your organic sessions but also further valuable information, such as a brand detection, a state of the art keyword clustering, the CTR of your link in the SERPs, the position in the SERPs, etc.” (Keyword Hero, 2017).

But just how important is SEO and keyword research?

As of a publication on October 7, 2018, Wordstream reported “Google now processes over 2 trillion search queries per year, or 5.5 billion per day” (Da Cunha, 2018). Marketers might think they are using the right keywords, but they do not really know until they analyze them. Wordstream states the most important areas where keyword research is most important is in SEO, to fuel your content strategy and for paid campaigns (2018). At times, keyword searches will come in the form of questions. Marketers must ask if these are questions that they can solve, or if they can come up with and post content better suited to support these questions.

Let’s look at a brief example of a real-life use for Keyword Hero.

Case Study: How to See Average Search Engine Ranking Position in Google Analytics

One benefit of using Keyword Hero is being able to see where specific keywords are in ranking order. Marketers can see a succinct list of keyword performance through position rank, giving an inside look on what customers are wanting information on most. By pulling these reports frequently, marketers can see any changes in consumer wants through their most searched words or phrases.

Here are the steps to pulling this information in Google Analytics with the Keyword Hero tool installed:

(Sharma, 2018)

(Sharma, 2018)

(Sharma, 2018)

(Sharma, 2018)

Again, the ability to use apps like Keyword Hero in Google Analytics is very convenient for marketers, as they can work through a lot of their analytics needs in one platform only.

Conclusion

Lastly, I’ll leave you with a sales pitch of sorts. These are the 9 reasons companies should invest in organic search traffic:

1.     It brings in highly qualified prospects

2.     It is a sustainable approach (an organic traffic strategy will take time to implement, but the results will be ever-lasting)

3.     It is cost-effective in the long run

4.     It gives you a competitive edge (if you dominate search results, it’s easier to dominate your market)

5.     You get to plug the holes in your marketing strategy (ROI shines through in SEO, but this should not only be the marketing practice in place. However, things such as content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, etc. should also serve your SEO strategy.)

6.     It gives you a share of the greatest marketing asset.

7.     It brings in regular and more engaged visitors

8.     It gives you higher credibility

9.     It is an excellent method of brand building (Farkas, 2018).

Hopefully the sales pitch worked. Think about it! You can’t know whether your keyword strategy is working or not without actually…well, putting in the work. Use Keyword Hero to help better understand the status of your organic keyword search.

 

References

Da Cunha, M. (2018, October 7). The Big, Easy Guide to Keyword Research for Businesses. Retrieved November 3, 2018, from https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/08/09/easy-keyword-research-guide

Farkas, D. (2018, January 2). 9 Compelling Reasons To Invest In Organic Search Traffic. Retrieved November 4, 2018, from https://theupperranks.com/blog/organic-search/

Keyword Hero. (2017, October 23. Retrieved November 3, 2018 from https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/partners/company/5107647938297856/gadp/5629499534213120/app/5707702298738688/listing/5634387206995968

SEO Tools. (2018). Retrieved November 3, 2018, from https://superb.digital/seo-bristol/seo-tools/

Sharma, H. (2018, October 31). New tool to get organic keywords data back in Google Analytics. Retrieved November 3, 2018, from https://www.optimizesmart.com/keyword-hero-get-not-provided-keywords-back-in-google-analytics/

Top Reports for Analyzing Organic Traffic. (2014). Retrieved November 3, 2018, from https://megalytic.com/blog/top-reports-for-analyzing-organic-traffic

Yu, R. K. (2018, June 27). 10 Mistakes Companies Make When Doing Keyword Research. Retrieved November 4, 2018, from https://medium.com/swlh/10-mistakes-companies-make-when-doing-keyword-research-b079cbf27e8f