Today I was doing some analysis for a particular client that was suffering from some keyword cannabilisation and we needed to work out how to overcome the problem. I wanted to do some analysis on the page’s history as they had quite a lot of historical analytics data. I actually stumbled across a handy little report that I thought would benefit the wider community, especially when you are working with your SEO strategists.

What I discovered is that we can determine which pages had the best performance for particular keywords on particular search engines. Obiviously the ones that the highest amount of traffic or are preferred by the search engines would have the highest rank. Also if any of those pages have changed over time, we can analyse what words were driving traffic previously compared to the current. And most importantly for the SEO analysts out there, they can see whether the same page is choosen across all the major search engines and if not, figure out the difference between them.

Let’s take it step by step shall we?

The GA Report You Need to Build

OK, before we can analyse some data, you need to have some of the new features of Google Analytics available under your account, namely the Pivot tables. What exactly the pivot tables do is out of the scope of this post, we just need the feature to do proper analysis of the data.

So firstly, bring up your standard generic Keyword Report that is generated by default.

Then we start to segment the data, so with the new second drop down in the keyword column we can select “Landing Page” to bring up the most used landing page for that particular keyword. Then we need to move across to the icons on the right hand side of the screen to select the “Pivot Report” option, which will then make available even more drop downs to segment the data.

We now want to Pivot by: and select source, for the various search engines. As you can see our data, whilst filled with numbers, is now a lot more interesting. For bonus points and even further analysis, you can Show both visits as well as Bounce Rate.

Your Report should now look something like this:

Example of how your report should look

So What do you do with this data now?

So from this data we can look at the performance of particular pages as well as their main search traffic drivers.

In the screenshot above we notice that “cars” was our best performing word but here is the most shocking news: none of the traffic came from Google! How many reports have you seen that could provide you with that insight. Now I know this is a highly unique situation, but it clearly shows my point – without this level of segmentation, we could never know that, or even worse, assume it came from Google in the first place.

The actionable item I would be presenting to my client is that whilst we have managed to drive a significant amount of traffic for this keyword, the next task for our SEO team is to make sure that we start ranking for that keyword in Google. How they go about that is up to their strategy they have set in place.

But I have another trick up my sleave, I want to see the history of this keyword and page combo over time.

The Keyword/Landing Page/Referrer Report

So we have our keyword – “cars” and our landing page, now lets track the history and see if this page ever ranked in Google.

Go back to our original keyword report, before our fancy segmentation and you should be able to click on the keyword in the report, which will take you to a keyword specific report, with a generic overview.

Now we need to pull the history, in this case I am going to take the last 12 months of so of data, you should be able to go up to the calendar in the top right of the screen and adjust the dates, very straight forward. And since im pulling monthly data, I press the Graph By button and change it to monthly numbers.

Then on the drop-down I select Landing Page to get a list of all the landing pages that have ever been used by that keyword. Then the final piece of data that really makes this report pop is changing the secondary drop down to add the Source so we can see the search engines. So you should end up with something like this:

Keywords/LandingPage/Source

What this report tells us?

Well it shows us that this keyword really did not start performing for us until July, almost 6 months after its creation. For that small period of time, the search engines jumped around a little bit picking a few different pages, but Yahoo really locked that page in. Interesting Google never thought that page was worth anything at all, and that is something our SEO team needs to address.

What should you do now?

Well the ball is really into your court. You have your list of keywords and their performance. If you feel they are not working for you as well they should, then this report can help you present your case to your relevant SEO team in order for them to understand the issue. These reports can all be saved and scheduled as well for future reporting. And you might have noticed we didn’t even discuss the other metrics in this report such as bounce rate and time on site, that is a whole other ball game.