SEO can be intimidating for a lot of people. But one way to get over that is to look at how it’s working (or not) on your site. By looking at real examples, SEO will make more sense to you and you’ll understand how to use it for your own nefarious purposes.

One of my favorite features in Google Analytics is the keywords area—it tells you what people typed into a search engine that eventually led them to your site. The reason I think it’s so interesting is because you’re getting some information from a site that isn’t yours—the search engine—and how it connects to your site.

Which means you can answer the following question (asking questions is imperative!): what are people searching for that they wind up on my site?

Sometimes it’s exactly what you want them to be searching for and sometimes it’s something totally random. I did my due diligence on SEO when I started blogging, but I guess I didn’t do enough because I got visitors coming to my personal-finance site (The Writer’s Coin) that were looking for totally different pieces of information.

Let’s take a look at the top three keyword results from the past 30 days:

I already addressed how lucky I was with the first keyword in How a Book Review Accidentally Got Massive SEO Traffic. So let’s take a look at the second term. If you click on it and then go to the “Landing Page” dropdown, you’ll be able to see which page this keyword drove traffic to.

It happens to be a post about the different types of home loans you can get: PMI vs. Piggyback. That page has the right title tag, URL, description tag, etc. If all this is Greek to you then please go over Google’s SEO Starter Guide—it’s a great way to get introduced to all this stuff.

But if you take a quick look at the page  you’ll also notice something else: “piggyback loan” is in the copy three times and two of the times it’s bolded. The bolding doesn’t do much but it does tell search engines that whatever is bolded is important.

From a very basic point of view, I did everything right on this post. If you search for “piggyback loans,” I am the very first hit (on Google anyway). Well done.

(FYI: Please don’t bold everything—it’s annoying and doesn’t factor into Google’s algorithm that much)

But what about the following keyword: “bed bath and beyond return policy”? I’ll admit it: I got lucky on this one. I just wanted to share my story of returning a Wok at the store and ask out loud how it is that the store can turn a profit if people come and exchange things whenever they want to without a receipt or paying a fee or anything (hint: customer loyalty).

But what I didn’t know is that there is a HUGE amount of interest in BBB, their coupons, and their return policy. People can’t believe it or they want to read other people’s stories before trying it for themselves. So I lucked out because my post happened to land in a slice of keywords that’s very active.

As I’ve said before, this is the kind of thing you want to do on purpose with every post. But sometimes you need a little luck to see how effective it can be.

What types of keywords are you seeing in your Analytics profile? Are they relevant to what you’re site is about? Do you wish it was other pages getting traffic instead of the ones that are? Share your thoughts in the comments!

A few months ago, I started to notice a trend in the data for The Writer’s Coin: there was one keyword that was getting the lion’s share of the traffic. I was thrilled that something I had written was not only getting picked up by Google, but was also ranking high on the search results page (this was an assumption based on the amount of traffic I was getting).

After all, that’s the ideal result every time you publish something:

• Users find it useful or entertaining
• The search engines pick it up
• Search engines deemed it important enough to show high up in the search results page
• You get massive, relevant traffic

My traffic wasn’t massive, but it was the biggest keyword (by far) in terms of driving traffic:

You’ll see that “hot flat and crowded cliff notes” was the most popular keyword, getting almost twice as much traffic as the #2 keyword.

Awesome, I thought, my review of Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded was so fantastic that Google decided it was worthy of being placed high up in the search results page!

But was that really the case?

Sure enough, run a search for those keywords and you’ll see my post at the top (#1 baby!) of the results page. But you’ll also notice something else (red circles are mine, not Google’s):

The words “cliff” and “notes” were totally accidental. It was a coincidence that I happened to include them in a piece of content that was also a review of a popular book.

So when people search for the book and then “cliff notes,” which I guess happens a lot since people are lazy and don’t want to read the full book, my review comes out on top.

Ideally, this is the kind of stuff you do on purpose to drive relevant traffic to your posts, but it’s interesting to see how accidents like these happen from time to time.

The analytics gods were smiling down on me the day I wrote the review. Part of me wonders what would happen if I worked “cliff” and “notes” into all my book reviews, but that would be cheating.

So What?

These kinds of “unintended consequences” happen all the time, but you can only take advantage of them and learn something if you know they’re happening—and that’s why it’s so important that you have someone monitoring your web-analytics data. It doesn’t matter if it’s someone internally or a consultant—just make sure someone is paying attention.

This post was included in the Book Marketing Blog Carnival