In our last blog post, we provided some background into the Google Search Analytics Report—a handy set of data that we recommend to anyone looking to better understand their website performance and search engine optimization success. What we said at the time, was that Search Analytics can actually provide some useful direction for your content marketing campaign. In particular, there are three ways in which it can be helpful; it allows you to:

• Look for patterns that show higher-than-average click-through rates, and build on that success.
• Look for new, competitive themes and see what you can do with them.
• Find topics that have worked well for you and augment them with complementary content.

Today, as promised, we’re going to hash out each of these three strategies in a bit more detail, and hopefully provide you with some inspiration for using the Google Search Analytics Report to its full potential.

Build on Your Success

Here’s the first approach. Keep an eye open for keywords which have high click-through rates (high relative to your other keywords) based on middling or even low impressions, but an average position that’s toward the bottom of the first search engine results page—perhaps even into the second. What this data tells you is that the content here is relevant, that people are going out of their way to find this content - even doing the unthinkable, reading beyond the first few Google search results for their given query!

This keyword analysis can provide you with some ideas for new blog topics, or for some content themes that you can develop more fully; you can even recycle some old content that got a lot of click-throughs, perhaps presenting it in a new, fresh, or better-optimized way.

Explore New Themes

The second approach is to explore some new themes that are popular and competitive, and to make a play for them. Here, you want to find keywords where your website ranks well and gets some significant search impressions, but the click-throughs leave something to be desired—basically, the inverse of what we laid out in the first approach.

What these results indicate is that you’re either not presenting sufficiently compelling/optimized copy, or it’s not as applicable to the terms being searched.

Going through these assets and ensuring well-optimized meta descriptions and HTML title tags can help. You can also use this data to redirect your approach to content generation for certain topics and themes.

Augment Existing Content

Our third approach: Find content that’s working well and augment it with complementary content. Basically, what you’re looking for here is some really solid keyword performance—something you can try to exploit with new, but related, content. Anything with more than 100 search impressions per month, or a click-through rate of more than 10 percent, surely qualifies for this approach.

These are keywords that already do well, so the actionable point here is to simply make note of the topics and keywords that seem to resonate with your users and to develop more content along the same lines—not duplicating the same piece over and over, but fleshing it out with content that supports or expands on it.

Google’s data isn’t something to neglect; if nothing else, it provides direction for your ongoing content creation. For help with creating content, or simply interpreting this data, give us a call at enCOMPASS today.