You know what your blog is about, right? Maybe you don’t. As in any other human venture, we often see ourselves differently from the way others see us. Even if you have admirable perspective on your micropublishing predilections, you might be curious to learn Google’s opinions on the matter.
Jonathan Fields at Career Renegade recently wrote about the Google External Keyword Tool. This free keyword tool reveals the search phrases or keywords Google associates with your website. While most of us might enjoy this exercise just as a lark, the information this tool reveals can be useful because it identifies the terms Google is ranking your site for.
Note that your site may be ranked for a myriad of keywords but most of these can be lumped into larger terms. For example, Nature Blog Network ranks for the following terms:
social networking (5), social network (5), blog (62), nature (14), blogging (9), blogs (10), bird (5), Miscellaneous keywords (32)
See how a number appears in parentheses after each term? That represents the different keywords comprising each term. Drilling down further, the 5 terms grouped under “social networking” are social networking blogging, social networking, social networking websites, social networking sites, and social networking blog.
So, does Google see your blog as you see it?
13 Comments
I gave up on google ranking a while back.
Keywording got so complicated.
I’m just glad when I see that people find me via their searches and hope they found what they were looking for(cause they rarely ever leave a comment, sigh).
But looking at that Site, maybe I should try to get into it and learn more.
Mh.
Maybe.
One day
But thanks for the article anyway
Printer cartridges. Why am I getting printer cartridges? :-S
Interesting. Google clearly sees Wrenaissance as a bird blog, which does ease my mind that I picked the right NBN category.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t mind printer cartridges. My site ranks for hunting. HUNTING!!!!
Why? There’s not a single picture of me with a gun on the site. Not a single dead animal. Not even a duck blind or decoy. No animals were harmed in the making of this blog.
Maybe you mentioned that bad ol’ hunters too many times, Wren
I couldn’t get that program to spit out any information on my blog.
I figured I’m too stupid and gave up again
Interesting tool. I ranked highest by far with “bird” and next was “birds”.
This is interesting. I just put in my root address, and didn’t check off the box for linked pages. The list of terms it gave me were:
venus flytrap (6), fly trap (5), pitcher plant (5), plant (21), plants (14), Miscellaneous keywords (19)
Clearly it’s picked up on my pitcher plant post (the most recent post). Although I never once spoke of venus flytraps.
Checking the linked pages box, I get a few extra terms:
venus flytrap (6), fly trap (5), pitcher plant (5), plant (28), bird (20), birds (17), plants (15), mushrooms (5), Miscellaneous keywords (41)
It’s still very heavily biased by my front page, though. It’s definitely rather eye-opening.
I’m not sure y’all are interpreting this tool exactly right… My understanding is that it’s a tool for generating adword keyword ideas. I.e., when you hit “get keyword ideas” the tool scrubs your site for the most common words & phrases it sees (hence the “bird” and “flowers” keywords all over), then runs them through some synonym generators, and gives them back to you with general search rankings for each. The idea being that you will look at the list and then use these keywords for adword advertising to drive traffic to your site.
For example, I’m sure the synonym generators are what came up with “venus flytrap” from “pitcher plant” on Seabrooke’s site.
Long story short, it’s not giving you the search phrases that people are using to find your site, rather, it’s generating some keywords that MIGHT drive people to your site.
For example, taking Seabrooke’s blog again, I would bet that mixed search phrases like “kingston birds” and “ontario cicadas” are the more likely type of keyword combos that people are using to find her site.
I wonder - does Google have a tool to show you the actual search phrases that led to a clickthrough to your site? That would be very interesting.
Good point, Randomtruth, and looking at it again I agree with you. I had noticed there was a spot to check off if you wanted to add keywords to your site, but hadn’t really put two and two together. Still, it does provide you an interesting summary of keywords that it thinks might be applicable to your site based on its review of your content.
I don’t know about Blogger, but Wordpress has a feature on the stats page of the dashboard that gives you a list of search terms that people came to your blog by. I assume these are Google traffic, though it doesn’t actually indicate where the search was being done. I always have very long lists for each day’s search traffic. I’m afraid my posts probably only satisfy half the searchers (for instance, I only ever mentioned the Hercules beetle in passing, but get a lot of traffic from it). Today’s so far (and it’s only 1pm) looks like this:
eastern milksnake
north american mammal carries young one
loud insects in georgia
eastern milk snake
50 legged bug
do female bumblebees have stingers
urushiol
laminate floor going grey
snake
dark brown caterpillar smooth toronto
hercules beetle
site:flickr.com horse woman
yellow bellied blackbirds ohio
temperate forest
large water beetles of north america
milk snake
blue jay bird
effect of yesterday’s eclipse on nature
moth traps
make a moth light trap
wild basil shrub
wild giant stump mushroom
whitespotted sawyer boring
snake images
salamander for water
three-pronged leaves with red stems & st
types of moths
colourful moths uk
scarabé hercule
pelidnota punctata
brown spider
bluet damselfly
another name for aquatic
do copivaleria grotei moths bite?
weevils in bird seed
what does a snapping turtle egg look like
blood sucker bug
red stuff coming from puffball fungus
wildlife and their habitat
frogs in stokes county
wrigglers feeding mosquito
stuffed bird
milk snakes
carpenter bee nest
earwigs in ontario
stick insect metamorphosis
red snakes
blue jay wing
snakes of ontario
high up in a tree
That’s great stuff Seabrooke. Wish Blogger had that feature.
You can see from your list how much more specific people need to be to find your site - i.e., “bird” may be a common keyword, but I bet if you type it into Google, you won’t find your site until page 4,752, meaning that no one will ever find your blog with just that word.
You can pretty much assume that 80% of these searches are coming from Google since that’s their approximate search marketshare. The rest come from the rest, with Yahoo in the far 2nd position.
Btw - you can glean some valuable info from these lists, especially, if you can collate them over time (weekly, monthly, etc.). For example, you might see a frequent query that you can leverage to drive people to your site. I.e., if “hercules beetle” shows up consistently, you might think about writing a post on them to satisfy those searchers and thus push you higher up the “authority” ranks (while maybe attracting more readers too). Or, you might see phrases that make sense to use in your posts, or even add to older posts that are non-transitory articles (relevant and valuable long after they’re posted). And, as mentioned, you can see how general/specific the queries are that send people to your site. The more and more general they get the better, because it means that your blog is moving up the “authority” ranks in Google. Looking at your list, it appears you’re becoming a bit of an authority on “milk snakes,” which is probably why the extremely general keyword “snake” is driving traffic your way. Well done!
If you want to know how Google ranks your site on various keywords, sign up for Google Analytics. It can substitute as a stats program for Blogger since Blogger lacks its own stats page. According to that, my most popular keywords continue to be related to the beautiful birds meme from a couple years ago.
The AdWords tool assigns me these keywords: bald eagle (22), bird feeders (20), bird feeder (12), bird watching (11), bald eagles (6), bird house (6), bird (40), eagle (11), birds (31), eagles (5), birding (10), blog (7), Miscellaneous keywords (19). Not bad.
Too funny! I get a lot of wildlife, animals, bird suggestions which are all good, but I also get a bunch about how to get back together with an ex. I’ve sometimes written about exes in my more memoirish posts, but I’ve never written about trying to get back together with one. Meanwhile lots of stuff I do write about a lot such as books, writers, ecology and environmental groups don’t get mentioned at all.
bird watching (6), drinking bird (5), bird (42), birds (21), birding (14), binoculars (6), Miscellaneous keywords (8)
That’s not half bad, really.
Thanks John! I hooked up Google Analytics and it’s perfect. Shows you all the full search phrases that people are using to find my blog, and breaks down all the traffic in very understandable ways. And all for free! NBN should definitely be promoting the use of this.