How to know what search terms people are using to get to your website–and increase traffic

You should know what search terms (keywords) people are using to get to your website. When you know, you can write content that matches the search terms. While at one point you could get this from Google Analytics, that is now difficult to impossible.

For information on using Google Analytics, see this post on increasing engagement and this post on increasing traffic.

But there’s another solution!

Before I explain, why would you want to know? Because you can tweak your pages to increase the amount of clicks you get. That increases your traffic!

Why I wanted to know

At EllenFinkelstein.com, I have a blog post that gets a huge amount of traffic. As in over 16,948 in the last 28 days. I didn’t do any SEO for it, so how did it happen? Sometimes, I think it just happened. But in truth, people asked me how to start a presentation, so I wrote a blog post. It’s called A good introduction/opener. As I’m writing this, it has 182 comments.

In fact, the title is pretty lame. It’s about starting a presentation, but “presentation” isn’t in the blog title. As it reads, it could be about starting a book! It could be about introducing another speaker! Way too vague. Yet this post gets more traffic than any other post on that website.

So I wanted to know why. What terms are people using to get to this post? And you should want to know what search terms people are using to get to your website!

The solution

It’s called Google Webmaster Tools. It’s free and will give you the search terms people are using to get to your website.

The first time  you get there, you may need to create an account and you’ll probably need to add your website. Follow the instructions to verify that you own your website by uploading a file. You can do this with an FTP program (I use FileZilla) or with the File Manager on your web host’s website.

Once you have everything set up, click your website’s listing to see a screen showing some statistics. To find the search terms, click Search Traffic, then click Search Analytics.

It will show you the number of clicks and search terms for your whole website. To find the search terms for one page, click Pages, then click No Filter, and then enter the URL of the page you want to check.

You can also set filters for queries, countries, devices, search type (Web, images, or videos), and dates.

Above the filters, check the CTR box to also get click-through rates.

Below, you see the screen when I filtered for my “A good introduction/opener” page. Below the stats is the list of the top search terms people are using.

What to do with this information

At the top of this post, you can see the click rate information. When someone puts “introduction” in their search, then the click-through rate for posts with the word “introduction” in the title is 12.33%. This blog post is so successful that I don’t want to make any changes (I could make it worse), but here are some simple things you could do:

• Change the blog title
• Change the URL
• Add keywords in your headings and text
• Add more valuable content

Look at your statistics and share what you discover in the comments! And remember that Sharing is Caring! You probably know people who could use this information, so use the Share buttons below to help them.