Using Traffic Statistics For Keyword Ideas

I am going to make a couple of assumptions in this article. Firstly, I will assume that you keep statistics of your traffic activity and secondly, that you understand the importance of creating website content around targeted keywords.On the first point, it is imperative for you to monitor where your website traffic is coming from and moreover, if it is coming from search engines, you should monitor what keywords people are searching for in order to discover your site. This can give you some great keyword ideas. For example, last week I noticed that a couple of people had found my site based on a keyword that was appearing at number 14 on SERPs. It was not a keyword I was targeting and in truth, I was ranked by chance.
Upon further investigation I discovered that this was actually quite a popular search term. However, if people visited the current page on my site that was connected to that search term, they would have been disappointed because it was not a good match for what they were searching for. The natural solution was to create a page focused around that search term so that it was a good match and of course, I tagged it with that same search term before getting it indexed by the search engines.
Within just a few days this new page was ranked at number 4 on the search results for that keyword search term. Now that the page was genuinely relevant, people visiting my site for that search term were sticking around. And there were plenty of visitors coming my way.
This brings me to my second assumption that I made at the start of this article; the importance of creating content around targeted keywords. The page that I created around the search term had zero backlinks pointing to it and within just a few days of it being indexed by the search engines it was prominent on the first page of the search results.
Increasingly, search engines are ranking website pages on content relevance and quality. That is, if your content is genuinely built around targeted keywords and it is of sufficient quality that people arriving at your site from that search term end up staying for a while, your website will be regarded as a good match for those keywords. This tells me that backlinks are becoming less important whereas good keyword research and targeted content creation are becoming more important from an SEO perspective.
Hopefully, in this article I have demonstrated how monitoring your traffic statistics is one method that you can use to help you fine tune your keyword research. There are other methods of course which I will be covering in future articles.
Simon runs the Global Affiliates website that is aimed at helping people build a successful affiliate marketing business and he also writes the DIY SEO blog that focuses on how people can handle the search engine optimization for their own websites.

View the original article here