If you’re carrying out SEO, you want to make sure that the effort you’re putting into optimising your site is working as intended.  This doesn’t just mean regularly checking where your site is appearing on Google for your chosen keywords.  It should include analysis of the pages that those target keywords are driving traffic to, and whether the users that land on those pages are actually converting once on your site.
Ideally, you’ll want to find out whether your target keywords are driving traffic to appropriate pages across your site.  To do this, you can use Google Analytics to explore which keywords are driving the most traffic to your site in more detail.  Furthermore, by setting up a custom report to track the behavior of users referred to your site via organic search, you’ll be able to analyse your keyword performance in greater detail – for free!
The report contains three tabs of highly relevant information around the keywords that are driving visitors to your website through organic search.  This report is completely free, and you can download it by clicking on the following link when logged in to your Google Analytics account.

Download Your Free Keyword Analysis Report

keyword conversion report

Targeting

This first tab of this report, which I have called ‘Targeting’, will break things down by placing the page title and keyword side-by-side. The four metrics you’ll see are:
• Unique Visitors
• Goal Completions
• Goal Conversion Rate
• Avg. Page Load Time (sec)
The aim of this tab is to look at the landing page that is being served for each of your organic keywords, and analyse each pages performance. For the vast majority of companies, branded keywords often have the highest goal conversion rate, because the searcher is specifically looking for their company and is therefore far more likely to convert than a non-branded searcher.

Engagement

The second tab, which I have labelled ‘Engagement’, will tell you how effective each landing page is by analysing the following six metrics:
• Unique Pageviews
• Pages/Visit
• Avg. Time on Page
• Bounce Rate
• Percentage Exit
• Goal Conversion Rate
You may then want to analyse bounce rate by keyword. Keywords with an abnormally high bounce rate may need to be reconsidered, whilst keywords with high conversion rates may present an opportunity to target and drive more visitors that are more likely to convert once on the site.
keyword conversions

Revenue

The third and final tab is primarily for transactional/e-commerce sites, as it measures Revenue. This part of the report will only work if you have e-commerce tracking enabled in Google Analytics, and will tell you how much money your target keywords are bringing you based on 3 metrics:
• Revenue
• Per Visit Value
• Ecommerce Conversion Rate
This report will pull through any keywords that are driving traffic to your site through organic search. However, it can easily be tweaked to filter out any branded keywords, so that you can simply focus on all non-branded traffic. To do this you’ll need to add a filter to the report, which will exclude any keywords related to your brand.

Creating a non-branded keyword report

Firstly, you’ll need to click the edit button on the report, and will then need to scroll down to filters section, and add a  filter, which I’ve highlighted below.

analytics filkter
You’ll then need to insert the following snippet of text into the filter, and replace ‘INSERT BRAND’ with your actual brand name and any variations:

INSERT BRAND NAME|INSERT BRAND NAME VARIATION 1|INSERT BRAND NAME VARIATION 2

The pipe symbol (|) used above is a form of Regular Expression (RegEx), standing for ‘or’ in this instance.
Once you’ve added this filter, you should then see a report that only contains non-branded keywords, which is a good measure of the amount of traffic you’re generating from searchers who may not already be aware of your brand.
The keyword analysis report is just one of a number of Google Analytics custom reports that we set up for our clients to monitor the SEO work we provide, and I personally find it one of the most useful.  As always, please feel free to ask any questions or simply let me know what you think of the report by using the comments below.

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