Using Google Analytics for Keyword Research

In this tutorial, I will use GA4 (v4.0 which was released in later 2020). Hence please do not get confused if you find some pictures (of GA in this post) with different options.

Google Analytics 4 dashboard
Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics (GA) is a powerful tool for understanding the behaviour of users on our sites. But it is not limited to this. The data provided by GA can be used to increase our traffic and engagement drastically.

We know that Google Analytics does not provide keywords data like Search Console. Now the question arises, how can we actually make Google Analytics work like a source for keyword research?

Well, let us begin. First, you must upgrade your GA to GA4 because the upgraded version of Google Analytics is far more powerful and provides more data than the previous version.

In the Google Analytics go to:

Engagement > Pages and Screens

Make List of Top Pages

Here you will find a list of all the pages which get traffic organised on the basis of their popularity. Most of the times, top 100-top 500 pages constitute 50% of the traffic of any medium-sized site.

Top Pages of a website in Google Analytics

Export the data in .csv format.

Export data in Google Analytics 4
Source: Google Analytics 4

Using titles as keywords for keyword research

Now that we have a list of top pages of our site. We need to use the titles of these pages for more ideas and keyword research.

Copy the title of the 1st page and search it in google. You will get keywords suggestions in People Also Ask section, Q&A on Google section and related searches section.

Copy all the relevant keywords on which you think you can write content and save them in a new list.

Organise these keywords in a meaningful and chronological order and use them to:

  1. write new articles.
  2. create forum topics and provide relevant answers.
  3. make a course and use all those keywords as lessons.

Keywords from Site Search

If you have a search box in your site, people my be searching for topics but you don’t know because by default GA4 does not provide search terms directly. These search terms are crucial for our growth because they tell us what our users are searching for on our website.

On one of my websites, on an average basis, more than 500 searches are performed daily. So tracking and using them for creating content is very important. Here is a video which will guide you to enable site search terms tracking in your GA4.

Creating Internal Links

After writing any type of content on these keywords, its time to insert their link in other posts which relate to it. This way, we can build a strong internal-linking structure and increase the engagement.

Imagine, if you write an article and give it a link (as anchor link) from a post which is getting traffic! If 5% of your users click on that link you will be getting free page views without any effort.

Here is an excellent example of internal linking strategy

Using Anchor links for engagement in SEO

This article has 15+ internal links! With so many links, the CTR increases to 30%-40%. Just think, if we have 100 daily visitors on a page in which we have inserted 15 links and if 40 visitors click any of these links, we will be getting 1200 page views a month for free from a single post!

Did you get the idea?

Use phrases & sentences as anchor text

Remember that we should not ask the user to click on a link (e.g. Click here to learn more). Instead, we should insert link to a phrase or even a complete sentence (as in screenshot above). Such anchor links have more possibility of getting clicks.

Using the Strategy for Other Pages

Once you are done with this, its time to move to the second most viewed page of your site. Search its title in Google, find related keywords and use them to create new content and put a link to these pages from ranking pages.

This would take some time, however this strategy is very strong because in addition to the organic traffic, internal movement of users (from one page to other) will increase your page views drastically.

Moreover you never run out of ideas and have enough strategies for content creation for years.

Using Traffic Acquisition for Keyword Research

The next important method is to use Traffic Acquisition data for keyword research.

We know that for almost all bloggers, Google is the main source of traffic. However that does not mean that we should totally forget other search engines out there.

Here is the screenshot of my Bing Webmasters.

Screenshot 2021 01 10 at 09.41.10
source: Bing Webmasters

On an average, I get around 700 daily clicks from Bing and page views often range between 1.3k-1.5k which means that around I get 40k monthly page views from Bing!

Hence, these search engines do help our site grow. Moreover these search engines do not have severe impact on our ranking as Google search updates have.

I assume that you have added your site to Bing Webmasters, Yandex Webmasters and Baidu Webmasters.

Go to Google Analytics > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition.

Here you will find all the major source of your traffic. Make a list of these search engines and do keyword research on them and include the keyword data to your content or forum.

Conclusion

There are hundreds of ways to use the data from Google Analytics. That requires efforts on your part. Explore each and every section of GA4 and see what data get from there and how can we use them for SEO, Keyword Research, Engagement and Generating Revenue.

You can use Google Skillshop courses to master Google Analytics. These courses are easy and very useful.

Screenshot 2021 01 10 at 09.51.36
Google Skillshop