When you use Google Analytics and try to find what organic keywords your users searched for before they clicked on your search result, you’ve probably ran into these dreaded two words:
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Google Analytics doesn’t like revealing which keywords people searched for that led to organic traffic. The reason is twofold:
1) There are privacy-related issues. The more long-tail the keywords get, the more easy it will be to identify individuals. That comes with legal headaches for Google, which the company will want to avoid.
2) If you as a marketer know the exact keywords you rank for, why would you still want to spend money on those? At the very least, you could reduce your keyword bids if you know you’re in the first position for a specific keyword anyway. Google relies on its advertising revenue though, so from a business perspective its not the best choice to let marketers know for which keywords they are performing particularly well.
You, as a marketer, obviously want to know though. You want to know which keywords convert well, which keywords you don’t have to target via content or via ads, which keywords you missed in your keyword research you could optimize better for.
Fear not, there are a few options.
The well-known option: Google Search Console
You might not use it, but you’ve certainly heard of it. Google does in fact provide you with a free tool that helps you understand how Google crawls your page. The Google Search Console has a couple of useful features you should look into if you want to optimize your SEO efforts. You can re-index certain pages you just updated, you can see which pages Google has trouble with, but most importantly: you can get an overview on which keywords users searched for where your site showed up.
Google Search Console is a powerful free tool that shows a lot of data and insights about your website. But its biggest limitation is that you get no information on your competitors who like you are jostling to be number one in the search results.
Ranking in Google means competing against other websites for the top spot. If you don’t understand the competitive landscape, there’s no way of knowing where you fall short or what you should do to improve rankings.
The secret option: Keyword Hero
The Search Console is a great option, but you should be aware of this one as well.
Keyword Hero is an awesome company which uses AI to connect your landing pages with keywords. It attempts to understand your pages in a similar fashion to how Google identifies topics and keywords you could rank for.
Using the logic of its algorithms, it attempts to reverse-engineer which keywords people clicked to reach your page.
It integrates natively into Google Analytics (awesome!). And thus is able to split up your (not provided) section into keywords you actually rank for!
It’s genius. And it works incredibly well.
Because guess what. It not only integrates with Analytics. It also integrates with your Search Console. So it knows exactly which keywords you are ranking for.
Keyword Hero uploads the data back to a new Google Analytics property, allowing you to analyse your new data set in a familiar setting without interfering with your original data.
The tool provides super-specific performance metrics for your organic keywords, letting you monitor their performance over time.
You can view sessions, conversion rates, revenue, and way more for each keyword.
Of course, the data that you see is not 100% correct – only Google knows the exact data. But with Keyword Hero, you can at least get close to the real result!
