Google search console can be used to find the keywords that you can target to optimize your search rankings. The most effective approach is to find the keywords where a website has a high number of impressions, low number of clicks, but relatively high ranking (position 10 and higher).
These are the low-hanging fruits of search engine optimization: your website is already ranking quite high for these terms but you're not getting any clicks because you're not at the first 3 positions. If you identify these keywords and double-down on optimizing the content to rank a few positions higher, you are guaranteed to get results fast.
The challenge here is in identifying the keyword combinations and topical clusters that you should target based on the Google search console's tables. And this is where the InfraNodus tool for keyword analysis can be very helpful.
In this article, we describe how it works step by step.
Step 1: Find the Low-Competition, High-Volume Keywords
A good place to start is the Google Search Console for your website or product. Google Search Console shows how often the keywords that eventually lead users to your website get shown and clicked on.
The most basic, but quite efficient approach is to target those words where you have a high number of impressions but low number of clicks as well as a relatively high position in search results. You can then create articles, content, and backlinks that will target those keywords in order to bring the number of clicks up and attract more audience to your website / product.
In the Google Search Console, choose the last 3 months as the period, then tick the boxes to show the CTR and Position columns:
Then apply search query filters:
1) CTR (click-through rate) < 3% (because you want below average clicks)
2) Position < 10 (because you want 1-st page positions as you have the highest chances to push your results to the top there
3) Sort by Impressions (so you see the high-volume search queries at the top)
Step 2: Find High-Potential Keywords and Topical Clusters using InfraNodus
Now, instead of reading through all those results, you can simply copy the text in the table and visualize it as a graph in InfraNodus.
InfraNodus will build a knowledge graph where the keywords are the nodes and co-occurrences are the connections. Then it will apply network science metrics to identify the keywords that have the highest influence and modularity algorithms to identify topical clusters you should target:
For instance, in our case, we can see there are 3 major clusters:
- text / network visualization tools
- obsidian graph view plugin
- ai thematic analysis
You can click on the nodes to see the specific search queries that correspond to these clusters:
Actionable insight: we now know that we should target those topics and keywords specifically as we have a relatively high number of impressions on the 1st page for those combinations, but a low click-through rate, indicating that if we move a few positions up, we can dramatically increase our CTR and positioning for these search terms in Google.
Step 3: Increase Your Presence for those High-Potential Search Queries
Now that we identified the keyword combinations and topical clusters that where we have a high chance to rank better, we can double-down on the content that promotes our website for those search queries. That means two things:
a) creating more interlinked content that talks about those topics and
b) building external links from other websites for those search terms
For instance, for the first cluster, Obsidian graph view plugin, we can perform a private Google search (to avoid personalization bias) and see how easy it is to for users to find our content:
While our website is not in the first results, it is actually linked to from the 2 out of 3 search results and also from the 2 out of 3 videos that are shown on Google. So in this case, a good strategy is to visit that one Reddit page that is shown 2nd in the search results and add a link to our website there, so even if the user ends up on Reddit, they can still click through to our site from there.
For the second cluster, "text visualization tools", the situation is much worse: our website is shown 4th in the search results and according to many studies it's only getting 20% of clicks it could have, so it's imperative to push it higher:
Some opportunities here are:
1) Create and publish a YouTube video "the best text analysis visualization tools" where we make a comparison of the different tools available in the market.
2) Create an article comparing different text visualization tools and publish it on the website to push it up in search results.
3) As "text visualization tools" is a popular query, it could also help to publish articles that compare our product to other visualization tools (e.g. InfraNodus vs VoyantTools).
Step 3: Advanced Keyword Analysis of Google Search Console Data
Now that we have a general idea about the keyword combinations we should target, we can perform a more comprehensive analysis for the keywords that we should target in our content strategy. The main objective here is to
1) extract more information about the topical clusters our content already ranks for on Google and to
2) identify other potentially interesting keyword opportunities (high impressions, high position, low CTR rate)
In order to do that, we will export the whole table from Google search console as a CSV file and then import the file in InfraNodus.
We will choose the "Top queries" and the "position" columns as the columns to analyze. This means that the graph will be built from the queries (keyword combinations). The position is a number, so it won't be added in the graph itself, but it will be used by us as a reference to find low hanging fruits in our analysis (keywords that rank higher than 10 position in the search results).
And the "clicks", "impressions", "CTR", and "position" columns as filters. InfraNodus will create quantile buckets from those values, so we can use them later to filter the graph by selecting several filters at the same time and looking at intersections: e.g. high number of impressions and low CTR rate at a high position.
Step 4: Identify the Main Topical Clusters for Your Website
InfraNodus will show a graph of the most influential keywords, their relations, and topical clusters. This is essentially how Google sees our website:
This graph can be used to identify the main topical clusters for our website:
1) Text analysis
2) Graph visualization
3) Keyword research
4) Web scraping and SEO
5) Word generator
6) Product review
7) Competitive intelligence
These are the topic clusters that InfraNodus can potentially rate better for in Google search results. They are calculated using the community detection algorithm, which means that the more long-tail keyword combinations in this topic your website shows up for in Google search results, the more influence the topic is going to have.
The lower is the topic and the less influence it has, the lower is the range of keywords it shows up for on Google. This means that while Google shows your website in its search results for this topic, the variety of different keywords used is lower, so it would make sense to expand the coverage of this topic, explore it in more detail, and add more specific niche content that would cover it.
For instance, from the data above, we can see that "competitive intelligence" and "product review analysis" are the existing clusters, but they only have 2% and 1% relevance, which is an indicator that we should double-down on those topical clusters and make sure there's more content linking our website to those topics (various use cases, tool comparisons, etc).
Actionable insight: target those topical clusters and build authority in each of those topics by linking the pages in this topic to each other other both within the website and from external sources. Focus on the topics that have low % of relevance as they
Step 5: Target High-Volume, Low CTR Keywords for Quick Results
We can apply the filters and see where we get a lower click-through rate (below the standard 3%):
As we can see, there's a lower click-through rate for ai text analysis and network graph visualization.
Let's apply another filter to see for which of those keywords we rank on the first page. For that, we toggle the intersections option (so we only see the keyword combinations that have ALL the filters selected) and then additionally choose the tag with the number of impressions between 200 and 1700 (we don't want to aim for the highest number of impressions yet as these might have highest competition):
We can confirm that ai text visualization and network graph visualization are high-potential keyword combinations because they get a decent number of impressions but our CTR rate is low because they are shown too low in the search results pages.
We can change the filter to show the maximum number of impressions (above 1700) with the same low CTR and we get a direct insight on a specific keyword combination we should target to get the most results possible:
As we can see, "network visualization tools" has more than 1700 searches but gets a very low number of clicks because its average position on the search results page is 9.76. If we manage to move it higher, we could get at least ten times more clicks (with the CTR of 3% if it's in the first positions), thus immediately delivering many more visits.
Actionable insights: Target "network visualization tools" search query by creating more content on this topic and linking the articles to each other and also from external resources. Improve "ai text analysis" positions by adding more content on ai text analysis tools.
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Try this approach with your own website at https://infranodus.com
If you don't have Google search console data, you can use the acquisition insights or keyword research reports from your favorite web analytics software (such as AHrefs or SemRush).
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