SEO

I learned a cool trick you can do to get calculate the number of terms that are in keywords for organic searches to your site. You can use this to determine, say, if there are more people signing up that found your site using a 3 term search.

- Go to Traffic Sources - Keywords
- At the bottom put in this regex in the 'Find Keywords' form: ^(\W*\w+\b\W*){3}$
- Click GO

This will give you keywords that have 3 terms in them. Change the number at the end of the regex to get the stats on terms with 1,2,4,5... etc. I don't recommend doing this for a large amount of time on a lot of keywords. This will also not account for .'s or -'s.

Here's some output of my stats from the last month:
Terms Visits Pages/Visit Time Bounce %Forum Register
1 6461 1.88 0.56 74.37 0.17
2 85241 2.22 1:23 67.76 0.71
3 153216 2.24 1:40 67.26 0.45
4 118181 2.03 1:32 67.61 0.34
5 76239 2.02 1:40 68.06 0.33
6 42497 1.84 1:27 69.77 0.25
7 25110 1.88 1:36 69.59 0.25
8 15045 1.82 1:34 69.76 0.19
9 9109 1.77 1:29 70.83 0.1
10 5619 1.8 1:37 69.6 0.12

So this tells me that people are finding what they need when using 3 keywords, but are registering more when using 2 keywords. At 1 and >8 they are not finding what they need at all. 1 keyword is mostly misspellings and flukes in my case anyway. If you have a lot of 1 keyword searches with high turnover you're doing something right! This also tells me that I need to work on getting more people to sign up!

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Cell Phone Forums | Car Dealer Forums

Very interesting data. I appreciate you posting this trick. I hope other vBSEO users consider checking their own site data. This certainly relates directly to the long tail of search, which is how vBSEO optimizes forums on a full thread by thread, page by page basis.

The result is, rather than simply trying to rank for a bunch of hand selected *perfect* terms, forums harvest traffic from literally hundreds or even thousands of keywords.

Now, for certain, the traffic volume reached each month for any one keyword may not be *huge*. However... due to the sheer multiplicity created by having thousands of terms, deliver trickles of monthly traffic, it really adds up... or rather "multiples up".

I enjoyed your analysis of the data, regarding member conversions and bounce rates.

At 1 and >8, you described them as "not finding what they need at all". This is likely to be expected since single keyword searches (1) are likely to be very vague, whereas high multiple keyword phrase searches (>8) are likely to be super specific.

Vague searches (1 keyword) do not accurately reflect what the searcher really wants. Although your site may be a match, only the user knows what they are really looking for, which could be hundreds of different variations from the key term.

Super specific searches (>8 keywords) are the searchers attempt to specify exactly what they are looking for. If your site ranks for this many terms, you would expect it to be fairly accurate. However, we know from our own experience with search that some terms have more than one applicable meaning, other terms are used very frequently without bias for the niche (think human names), and some terms are so generic they show up on many different types of sites. These complications *could* certainly help contribute to lower conversions for these multi-term searches.

Another possible explanation is that they can easily click "Back" to review the rest of the highly accurate search results. Having so many accurate results at their fingertips may mean that they spend very little time focusing on one site in particular. They may be quickly able to extract the information they require from multiple sites, and then move on.

Is it possible that these might be your most fertile ad clickers?

It's very interesting that queries with 2-5 terms are show to do best (with optimum at 3).

It would also be interesting to follow up this investigation. Specifically:

• Do these numbers stay consistent or vary depending on the site niche?
• What are the characteristics of pages that are attracting the 3 keyword search traffic? Are there any commonalities that might indicate how to optimize your pages to harvest 3 keyword search queries?

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Joe Ward / Crawlability Inc.
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Joe, thanks for the lengthy analysis. I was about to go to bed when I wrote that last night. hah

So yeh, you're absolutely right.

One stat I might throw up later is the actual number of different terms. The 'visits' could be multiple hits from the same user, like you said, clicking back, checking other sites, and then coming back again. This seemed to happen a lot on my site with the 3 term searches.

If you actually look at my keywords, the one on top is 'cell phone forum(s)' Another popular one was 'lg voyager review'. People searching for 'cell phone forums' signed up more often then any other keyword. Being that the name of the site is specific and that's exactly what they wanted, higher turnovers would be expected.

2 word keywords seem to have an influx of signups because these include any file names. (whatever.mid is two words) Users know exactly what file they want and have to sign up to download an attachment. Another factor for me is '_whatever_ forum', or '_whatever_ ringtone/wallpaper'.

I noticed a lot of the 8+ keywords were borderline sentences. At that point it seemed that these people didn't properly know how to use a search engine, and the pages they found just happened to contain a lot of the same keywords (minus filler words, such as 'the', 'and', 'with', which are counted)

I wish there was a way to measure outbound clicks on ads. (in my case adsense, vibrant, chitika)

Actually - the number of total keywords generating traffic is a hugely important metric for vBSEO users. When vBSEO kicks in, we expect this number to grow significantly (i.e. the thread by thread optimization focus, long tail SEO).

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Joe Ward / Crawlability Inc.
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6X Traffic - $1400 in One Day with vBSEO! Imagine What the vBSEO Patent Pending Technology Can Do For You.