The Search Report

The first stop for an SE specialist is bound to be the Search Report.  Here is how to make the most of this report:

Note: Although the term 'key phrase' is a more accurate description of the data this report shows, the term 'keyword' is used for the sake of brevity.

Set up Campaigns and Revenue Tracking

To make the most of the Search report, you should set up your campaign and revenue tracking first, if relevant.  This will provide much more data about keyword performance, as well as allow you to distinguish between organic and paid search visitors.

Create a label to distinguish organic from PPC

Once your campaigns have been configured, you can go into the quick labels tool and create a label for 'Traditional search vs. PPC'.  With this label created, you can see specifically which keywords are are the product of your SEO efforts vs. those that have come from pay-per-click advertising.  You may gain interesting insights by comparing how these sets of keywords performed.  If you get roughly equal numbers of visitors from organic and PPC, you may want to consider backing off from the advertising and see if your PPC isn't just cannibalizing your organic results.  In other words, you could be paying for traffic that you could have gotten for free.

Note the top 50 keywords

Keywords are listed in the order of frequency for all search engines combined. The first thing you'll probably notice is that several of the top keywords are variations on your company name and domain.  That is very typical, and to be expected.  You can pretty much look past these and move on to the more interesting keywords a few spots below and throughout the rest of the top 50.

Look for patterns in the words

Chances are you'll start to find some patterns in your results very quickly.  The same word will appear in several different phrases.  Certain themes may emerge.

Look for surprises

You may find some phrases in the list that you wouldn't expect.  These searches may represent opportunities that you can pursue further.  Or they may indicate that you need to refine your website content to further focus your message.

Look for patterns in the color coding

The color coding aspect of the report is designed to allow you to focus in on key information quickly.  The general pattern should be from darker blue colors at the top-left of the report to lighter blues at the bottom-right.  Look for high color contrast areas within this pattern.  For example, if you see a light colored box amidst the  dark colored boxes under Google, that means that other search engines are contributing a disproportionate number of those visitors.  That probably means you are not well optimized for that keyword in Google.

Expand your keyword list for 'long tail' information

Once you've got a good sense of the top 50 keywords, you may want to expand your list to include the 'long tail' of miscellaneous keywords that visitors searched on.  You can do this by clicking on the 'More rows' link at the bottom-left of the report to pull up the Display Options dialog.  Most website with significant traffic will have thousands of keywords, and you can set this number as high as you need it to go (OK, there is a a hard limit of 500,000, but come on...).   When you've expanded your list you'll see a lot of the same patterns and a lot more surprises.

Note the top 10 search engines

Once you've looked over the top keywords in general, notice which search engines are sending you the most traffic.  Search engines are listed in the order of most visitors sent.  Almost without exception, Google, Yahoo, and MSN will be the top three referrers of search traffic, representing the vast majority of your traffic.  Are you getting any other traffic from second-tier search engines like LookSmart, Kanoodle, and Miva?  If not, it might be worth looking into why not.

Expand your search engine list

If you are getting a substantial number of visitors from your tenth highest referring search engine, you may want to expand the number of search engines displayed.  To do this you'll need to click into the Display Options dialog through menu or toolbar (there is no link directly to that) and increase the number.  ClickTracks reports on about 100 search engines, so you could be getting little bits of traffic from many different sources.

Evaluate the quality of keywords

You can evaluate the quality of keywords by looking at various other metrics other than just number of visitors.  By clicking on the metrics icons at the top of the page, you can find out things like if visitors who searched on a given keyword stayed a long time on the site, viewed a lot of pages, or made a lot of purchases, among many other performance metrics.  By clicking on the pivot symbol in the column heads by a search engine icon, you can pivot this report to display all of the metrics for a given search engine in on view.  This report can then be sorted by column, so you can see keywords in the order of time on site, revenue generated, by ROAS, etc.

Hint: if you want to see this type of sortable breakdown of keyword metrics for all search engines combined (instead of for a single search engine as this report shows), go to the Site Overview report and click on the 'In depth' link by the top search keywords.  This will open the data dissection report with all the same metrics, only for all search engines combined.

Explore specific keywords

Evaluating the quality of keywords doesn't stop at this report.  You can also create labels for specific keywords and see how visitors who searched on that keyword navigated through the site in the Site Navigation report.