• Marketing Land
  • Sections
    • MarTech
    • CMO
    • Social
    • SEM
    • SEO
    • Mobile
    • Analytics
    • Display
    • Email
    • Retail
    • Video
    • Home
  • Follow Us
    • Subscribe to Our Feed! Check out our newsletters! Join our LinkedIn Group
    • Follow
  • Marketing Land
  • CMO
  • Social
  • SEM
  • SEO
  • Mobile
  • Analytics
  • Display
  • Retail
  • MarTech
  • More
    • Subscribe to Our Feed! Check out our newsletters! Join our LinkedIn Group
    • Follow
  • SUBSCRIBE

Marketing Land

Marketing Land

Deep Dive

Facebook, Privacy and Cambridge Analytica

Email Marketing

Behavioral triggered emails beyond e-commerce

Events

Attend Marketing Land’s conferences

  • MarTech
  • CMO
  • Social
  • SEM
  • SEO
  • Mobile
  • Analytics
  • Display
  • Email
  • Retail
  • Video
  • Home
SEO

Get the most important digital marketing news each day.


The essential metrics to analyze for keyword research success

When it comes time to choose your target keywords, what data should inform your decision? Columnist Paul Shapiro shares some helpful metrics to look at when evaluating which keywords to pursue.

Paul Shapiro on March 24, 2016 at 1:25 pm
  • More
keywords-ss-1920

Brainstorming keyword ideas is great, but you won’t get very far if you’re not looking at the right metrics. After all, it’s the metrics — the objective criteria we use to make the data-driven decisions — that make search such an effective marketing channel.

But which keyword research metrics should I be considering? Isn’t search volume sufficient? Let’s explore.

Search volume

Average monthly search volume is the one metric that is universally used for keyword research. This metric is derived from Google’s Keyword Planner, a free tool intended for use with AdWords, and it forms a foundation for the popularity of a given search query.

Typically, one chooses the exact match type for a more precise representation of search volume for a keyword. If your business is regionally locked, make sure to specify a geography to get regional search volume.

Recently, Russ Jones wrote an excellent article on Moz discussing some of the issues with relying on Keyword Planner search volume. Jones found that search volume numbers are actually rounded to the closest of 85 “buckets” and that the 12-month average is also rounded to one of those traffic buckets. To get a more accurate 12-month average, one must segment monthly search volumes and manually average them.

Jones also found that the Keyword Planner doesn’t combine the search volumes of keyword phrases that are auto-corrected to a shared search engine results page (SERP).

russ-kw-planner

To get more out of the search volume metric:

  • Choose the exact match type.
  • If your site is geographically dependent, choose the appropriate region.
  • Manually average the last 12 months of search volumes, rather than relying on Google’s provided 12-month average.
  • Group volumes of keyword variants together.

Search volume over time

Another important keyword research metric that is often ignored is how search volume changes over time. Depending on your budget, it may not make sense to invest in content creation for a keyword that won’t capture traffic in a year.

To make this data more useful for decision-making, one would calculate a 12-month average search volume from one year to another, then boil it down to a single positive or negative number using the slope formula.

[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.



About The Author

Paul Shapiro
Paul Shapiro is Director of Strategy and Innovation for Catalyst in Boston. Paul loves to get down and dirty with innovative SEO strategies. He also enjoys watching old horror movies, programming, collecting ancient artifacts, and writing about SEO on his blog, Search Wilderness.

Popular Stories

100+ Questions You Must Ask When Developing A Website
My Top 5 Favorite Apology Emails
How to increase B2B form submissions through conversion testing
YouTube ads found on extremist content channels, reigniting company’s brand safety issues

Related Topics

AnalyticsChannel: SEOSearch MarketingSearch Marketing Column

We're listening.

Have something to say about this article? Share it with us on Facebook, Twitter or our LinkedIn Group.

Attend Our Conferences

Gain new strategies and insights at the intersection of marketing, technology, and management. Our next conference will be held:

April 23-25, 2018: San Jose

Oct 1-3, 2018: Boston

×

Attend MarTech - Click Here


Learn More About Our MarTech Events

June 11-13, 2018: SMX Advanced

October 23-25, 2018: SMX East

×

Attend SMX - Click Here


Learn More About Our SMX Events

White Papers

  • The Growth Marketer’s Guide to Email Metrics
  • Evolve Now To Personalization 2.0: Individualization
  • How Mature Is Your Omni-Channel Marketing Strategy? The Iterable Readiness Assessment
  • Media Rich and Fast: Best Practices for Optimizing Web Page Speed
  • Knowing What Works for Growing Sales Faster: A Retail Marketer’s Guide
See More Whitepapers

Webinars

  • Unifying Your Search and Social Ad Strategies
  • Customer Data Strategies & Identity Resolution: Best Practices
  • Omnichannel Personalization at Scale: How leading brands drive sales across channels
See More Webinars

Research Reports

  • B2B Marketing Automation Platforms
  • Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS)
  • Enterprise SEO Platforms
  • Call Analytics Platforms
  • Paid Media Campaign Management Platforms
  • Local Marketing Automation Tools
See More Research
MarTech Guide to Understanding GDPR
Sign up for our daily newsletter
Marketing Land
Download the Marketing Land app on iTunes Download the Marketing Land App on Google Play

Follow Us

© 2018 Third Door Media, Inc. All rights reserved.