Keyword Research

Many site owners often overlook the most obvious place to get keywords. Your own website. I'm not just referring to keywords people use to arrive at your site. Rather, searches users are making within your site.

This especially works if you have a larger site — ecommerce or a large editorial site. You will have a lot of data to work with and many opportunities to learn about how people are using your site and keyword ideas you'd never think of otherwise.

I'm assuming you already have a search function in your site. I'll show you how to set it up in analytics and use the data effectively.

Check How Your Site Does a Site Search

You're going to need the URL parameter your site uses to track site search.

For example, the site I'm demonstrating this on, looks like the following;

See the search paameter?

/search.php?search=search+example

where "search example" is the keyword typed.

The parameter is "search" (hint: if in php its after the question mark)

Set It Up in Analytics

Head over to your analytics profile.

Go to the Admin area. Click on Profile settings

How To Use The Data

I'm going to show you how to best access this data for keyword research. We're going to do this within analytics but you can also export the data for further use.

First - View the site search keywords

If you've never done this before, its best to zoom out at least six months.

We're going to apply a few different filters to the data. (You could do this with advanced segments too for a more "permanent" filter).

This first filter says "show me words that get searched more often but then most people immediately leave my site. (You may have to play with the numbers specific to your metrics). These are the words you want to build new content around.

And may get something like this;

OR you can do sort of the opposite. Say "show me words that get searched a lot but where people stay on the site. Again, the exact number will depend on the behavior of people on your site.

Take Action

Either way, you'll have a list of keywords you can take immediate action on.

• Highly searched words where people leave = create the content!
• Highly searched words where people stay = keyword research and optimize around those words.

There's many tools available out there to run a keyword frequency analysis. Some are free, some are paid. But there may be reason and benefit to having the control to run your own reports. I'll show you one way to do this!

Create your .sh Code

Start by cutting and pasting this into your test editor;

#!/bin/bash

input=$1

IFS=$'\n'
# for keyword files...
if [ -e "$input" ]; then
	cat "$input" | sed 's/ /\n/g' >> tmp
	for word in $(cat "$input" | sed 's/ /\n/g' | sort | uniq); do
		count=$(grep -c "^$word\$" tmp)
		echo -e "$count\t$word" >> tmp_o
	done
	cat tmp_o | sort -hr
	rm tmp tmp_o
# for web pages...
elif [[ "$input" =~ "http://" ]]; then
	# check if links is installed. found solution at 
	http://stackoverflow.com/questions/592620/check-if-a-program-exists-
	from-a-bash-script
	type links >/dev/null 2>&1 || { echo >&2 "This script requires 
	'links' but it's not installed.  Aborting."; exit 1; }
	links -dump "$input" | sed -e 's/ /\n/g;s/\(.*\)/\L\1/' | sed 's/\W//g' >> tmp
	for word in $(cat tmp | sort | uniq); do
		count=$(grep -c "^$word\$" tmp)
		echo -e "$count\t$word" >> tmp_o
	done
	cat tmp_o | sort -hr
	rm tmp tmp_o
fi

Save this as a file — anything will work, such as keyword.report.sh

Run the Script

Open up Terminal in your Mac

You can run the script in two ways — either by file or by URL.

• By File

  bash keyword.report.sh keyword.file.txt

  'keyword.report.sh' is the name of your .sh file and 'keyword.file.txt' is the name of your file with the content in it you're analyzing.

• By URL

  bash keyword.report.sh http://quicksprout.com

  Again, 'keyword.report.sh' is the .sh filename and then you just put the URL! Easy!

I bet you have a killer list of keywords and data now! Now your site is fast, crawlable, semantically correct, and you've got the best keywords. Time to target and create content that will attract links while you sleep.