Here is a very helpful way to determine if you are selecting the right keywords. What you need to do is determine which keywords are driving visitors to complete the objective for that keyword.
Let’s make this simple. Suppose you are a vocational school. The objective with new site visitors might be to convince them to fill out an online form for an advisor to contact them. What you need to do is determine which search keywords are driving the most contact form submissions. Using this valuable insight, you can begin to focus optimization efforts on search keywords that are proving to be valuable and even gain a better idea of what types of search keywords are most beneficial. You can see how this can become complex if a website has multiple objectives.
Without going into too much detail, Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that allows you to do this very thing (among many other amazing things). In Google Analytics, you can setup a goal which can in turn be connected to search keywords. In fact, this goal could be tied to a number of things such as email campaigns, external referring pages and even operating system.
It may seem daunting, but with a little bit of effort (or a phone call to Thrivalytics) you can improve your business considerably by making sure that you are selecting the right search keywords.
Thanks, Dustin. This was an easy and helpful read. I may have to give you a call and take advantage of the SEO consultation!!