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What search terms lead people to your site

By Becky McCray

Melanie Grace Guthrey asked,

You speak a lot about finding the terms people search online in relation to our town/business. Is there a particular way or site you recommend for doing this research?

It’s a great question. How can we know what words and phrases people search that lead them to our site? The answer is in your website statistics or analytics package. Most of the time when a visitor types a word or phrase into a search engine, the search engine passes that keyword along to the page they click on. And your statistics package records it. (When the search engine doesn’t pass it along, your statistics package will record something like, “not provided.”)


Not sure if you have statistics? They may be built in already. If you have a blog, look around in your Dashboard area. For Blogger users, you want to look for the “Search Keywords” section. It looks like this:

The most widely used statistics package is Google Analytics. It’s free, and can be installed on any website. In Analytics, you have to go to Traffic Sources, then Organic to see keywords:

If you don’t have statistics installed on your website, you want to fix that today. If you’re not comfortable copying HTML code, get a tech savvy friend, or get back with your website developer for some help with it.

The Big Limitation
The big limitation of statistics packages is they can only collect data from people who actually visit your site. You never know about potential customers who never make it to your site. To find out what those folks might be thinking, re-read How do you get found in search results?

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About Becky McCray

Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.
  • Zoom Towns: attracting and supporting remote workers in rural small towns - December 10, 2020
  • In an economic crisis, spend your brainpower before your dollars - November 25, 2020
  • Video: How to fill empty car dealership buildings for the holidays - November 6, 2020
  • How has 2020 changed the challenges rural small towns face? Tell us here - October 20, 2020
  • The Idea Friendly Method to surviving a business crisis - October 6, 2020
  • Join me for the Rural Renewal Symposium online Oct 13 - September 26, 2020
  • Cheap placemaking idea: instant murals - September 11, 2020
  • Refilling the rural business pipeline - July 7, 2020
  • Huge vacant buildings: grants to renovate? - June 9, 2020
  • Economic self defense for small towns  - June 7, 2020

November 9, 2011 Filed Under: marketing

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Comments

  1. Kelsey says

    November 15, 2011 at 11:29 pm

    I get the Google Analytics keyword report sent to me every Monday so I know what people are searching for to get to my site.

  2. Jonathon (d2ianalysis.com) says

    September 12, 2013 at 8:12 pm

    Search terms can provide owners some useful insights about customers. Using this data to deliver targeted content, such as on landing pages, can improve conversion rates and make paid search and other digital marketing efforts more efficient. It’s a great way to differentiate from competitors who are still directing customers to the home page.

Trackbacks

  1. MBR: SMB Idols, What Customers are Searching for & Executing Plan C | Owner Nation says:
    July 18, 2014 at 10:18 am

    […] What search terms lead people to your site – Do you know how your customers find your site on Google? What keyword drives the most visitors? If you are interested in finding this out, check out this quick read from Small Biz Survival. […]

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