Understanding the strength of your keywords is an important aspect of your site. Keywords are, of course, the primary way that unknown traffic will reach your site. Therefore, it will be worth your while to conduct a full-scale analysis of every aspect of your keywords, including where your strengths lie, and where you fall short.
There are several important components to analyzing your keyword performance. If you go through them systematically, you should end up with a good picture of where your keywords stand in terms of strength. To make the process easier, you should consider using a rank tracker.
Here is a breakdown of the primary factors involved in determining keyword strength.
Keyword difficulty
As the name suggests, keyword difficulty (otherwise known as “SEO difficulty” or “keyword competition”) is a measure of how difficult it is to rank a particular term within Google's Organic Search results. It is ranked on a numeric scale and words are given a score (Keyword Difficulty Score or KDS) from 0 to 100.
The results of keyword difficulty searches can be ranked according to different groupings. For example:
Very easy – 0-20 – Words that give a company the best possible edge when included in its website because competition is very low.
Somewhat easy – 20-30 – Words that would be somewhat competitive but which are also utilized by the competition in some form.
Moderate – 30-50 – Words for which there is fair competition. Including these words in your site would require additional content that is unique, better backlinks, etc in order to make your page stand out.
Of course, keywords by nature are something that the competitors in a given industry all tend to use, so it is difficult to get a really low score. Some experts say that getting a difficulty rating of below 70 is actually considered good. In order to stay competitive, you’ll need to combine your keyword efforts with other aspects of your site.
Criteria for measuring keyword difficulty are as follows:
- Relevance – The relevance of your keywords is the degree to which they correspond to search queries. An important element of your keyword relevance is that they are determined by your page’s content and should be independent of your backlinks.
- Conversion value – Keyword conversion value is a value placed upon keywords that have high conversion rates within pay-for-click ad campaigns. A very good conversion value is considered to be over 10%.
- Competition – The competition value of keywords is a measure of how much different companies within the same industry are using the same keywords. A low competition value means that a given word or set of words is not being used by many industry competitors and therefore has a low competition value.
Additional factors
There are also aspects to your site as a whole that play a role in your keyword strength. These include the following:
Page and domain strength
Page authority – Page authority is defined as the value that search engines give to a given page. PageRank is the metric that is used to measure this, and it is determined by a number of factors, including content, navigability, etc. Page authority is ranked from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating greater authority.
Domain authority – Domain authority is a value given to a domain based on its relevance to the industry it represents. The greater the relevance, the higher the domain authority. Domain authority is also based on a 100-point scale with 100 being the strongest.
Content quality – Content quality, although more difficult to measure than other metrics, is also a factor in keyword difficulty ranking. The best indicator of content quality is engagement or time spent on a given page. The greater the amount of time that site viewers spend on a page, the greater its content quality.
Overall search volume
Another factor that plays a role in your keyword strength is overall search volume.
What is search volume?
Search volume is a metric to analyze keyword performance that is defined as how many people are searching for a particular word or phrase within a specified period of time.
How is search volume measured?
Experts generally agree that high search volume results include 100-1000 searches per month or more. However, it should be kept in mind that many individual words are too general to indicate the success of particular sites. Therefore, further specifying search terms will result in more relevant results for a given site.
For example, “yoga wear” might bring about a high volume of results because the term is relevant to many different companies all selling yoga wear. If you want to get an accurate assessment of keywords that are relevant to your company in particular, you might narrow your analysis to “form-fitting yoga tops” or even look at a brand name. For this, use keyword tracker software.
Search volume queries – how long and for what purpose?
Searches can take place for different periods of time for different purposes. For example, if there is a political event or some major global occurrence taking place and you’re interested to know how much traffic it receives, you might search for keywords related to it during the week of its occurrence.
For example, “Starbucks Union Strike” might be a search that could be conducted at and around the period in which this strike might take place. To assess how long the strike remained in the collective consciousness of a certain segment of the population, you might look for statistics covering the month or even the year following the event.
Similar searches can be conducted for products or services over time to assess their changing degrees of popularity.
How can you determine search volume?
Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner both have the capability of conducting search volume analyses. You can also use a professional rank tracker service to save yourself the time and effort of going through the process yourself, and also to assure yourself of accurate results.
Interactions
Another thing that you should include in your keyword analysis is “interactions.” As the name suggests, interactions refer to the various ways that site users interact with a given site. They are broken down into a number of different categories, so that your analysis can determine many different aspects of the way that site visitors navigate a given site.
The following are included in the category of interactions:
Organic click-through rate – Organic click-through rate is a specific formula used to assess the amount of traffic on any given site. It is considered organic if it is the result of non-paid keyword usage on a site, rather than paid ads. If your click-through rate is high, that is an indication of a good interaction rate.
Direct Traffic – Site traffic is broken into two different categories. Organic traffic is traffic that comes about as a result of searches, whereas direct traffic is people’s going to a site directly. Direct traffic is considered an important way of measuring site activity.
Pogo sticking – Pogo sticking refers to traffic that is bounced around between different sites with various degrees of frequency. The higher the frequency, in general, the higher the level of pogo sticking. If a site is determined to have a high degree of pogo sticking, its rating is consequently downgraded.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is another factor to consider in determining your keyword strength. What this refers to is the number of people who look at one page on a given site and then move away from it. The reason this metric is important is because it indicates an overall weakness in the site. The higher the bounce rate, the greater viewers’ tendencies are to navigate away from a given site upon initial viewing. Most bounce rates are between 25 and 70%.
Bounce rates are often approximate and can be difficult to measure accurately, because they take into account both the point at which a viewer entered a given page and the point at which that person left it. Because windows are often closed rather than navigated away from, analytics tools sometimes have difficulty determining the precise point at which a page was left.
In order to improve your bounce rate, keywords and content need to be adjusted so that they are as relevant as possible to the searches that lead viewers onto the page. Analytics can be employed over successive periods to determine the degree of improvement in bounce rate.
Geographic location
Analytics tools can also assess the strength of your keywords by analyzing the strength of your geographic keywords. Geographic keywords are words that describe physical locations, or things associated with different locations. This can include both countries and cities, as well as languages, currencies, cultural terms, etc. The keywords for the particular city you target can be found with the help of a local rank tracker.
If it is determined that your use of geographic keywords relates poorly to your target audience, your geographic keywords rating will be low. For example, if you are selling beachwear and make references to the mountains on your site, that is a poor representation of geographic keywords.
Remember, strong keywords mean a strong site
If you go through the steps of figuring out your keyword strength and subsequently beefing up the areas you need to improve, you'll find that you have a much-improved site overall. Remember also that the process needs to be carried out regularly for continued high results as contributing factors are subject to constant change.
