{"id":23464,"date":"2014-03-19T07:00:06","date_gmt":"2014-03-19T14:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.eigene-homepage-erstellen.net\/?p=23464"},"modified":"2014-03-19T07:00:06","modified_gmt":"2014-03-19T14:00:06","slug":"keyword-research-w-google-wmt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eigene-homepage-erstellen.net\/blog\/seo\/keyword-research-w-google-wmt.htm","title":{"rendered":"Old School Keyword Research with Google Webmaster Tools"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

“Not Provided” is old news by now, and most SEOs have learned lots of different keyword discovery strategies. There are costly solutions like mining paid traffic and using third party tools, or just plain complicated tactics like correlating ranking data with organic landing page traffic. These are all great and people absolutely should continue using them, but it seems like no one is talking about the most accessible solution out there: Google’s Webmaster Tools.<\/p>\n

While the data in it hasn’t always been the greatest (Ian gave his opinions about Webmaster Tools’ reliability<\/a> a few months back), Google rolled out a fairly quiet update<\/a> at the beginning of 2014, and started giving us “exact” impressions and clicks (more on those scare quotes in a minute). So let’s go over what Google is giving us with this free tool.<\/p>\n

Why is Webmaster Tools so great?<\/h2>\n

For a couple reasons. First, WMT is dead easy to install. In fact, if you have Google Analytics installed, you just need to set up a profile<\/a>. If you don’t, there other options like uploading a single file<\/a> or adding a single line of code<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Second: it’s free. I use SEMrush<\/a> all the time and the data it gives is invaluable. But I am also lucky enough to work for an agency that pays for my subscription. WMT gives you great data that you wouldn’t be able to get for free anywhere else.<\/p>\n

Lastly, it tells you how Google is crawling and indexing your site. If there’s a problem or you get penalized, this is how they’ll tell you about it. It also gives you information about how your site is being displayed in search results, lets you submit a sitemap, and much more.<\/p>\n

For now, though, let’s just focus on the keyword part of WMT.<\/p>\n

Where is this Keyword Data?<\/h2>\n

The section you’re looking for is called Search Queries<\/b>, which you can get to from the Search Traffic<\/b> section of side navigation or the main dashboard. In there, you’ll see two tabs.<\/p>\n

The first tab is Top Queries<\/b>, which is basically the raw list of keywords that drove traffic to your site, sorted by Impressions, Clicks, CTR (click thru rate), and even Average Position (which, surprisingly, is usually accurate). Using the filter option, you can filter by search type (Image, Video, Mobile, Web, or All) along with region and amount of traffic. The default for the search filter is “Web” but, for the most comprehensive data, I recommend switching that to “All.” Unfortunately, you’ll need to do this every time you navigate away from this screen.<\/p>\n