Vernon Chalmers SEO

Both Impressions and Occurrences will be available in Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) and have an important role in understanding  visitor intelligence data (impressions) versus the website's actual current keyword count (occurrences).

Keyword and it’s Occurrences

When content is added via pages, blogs and URL’s Google will ‘count’ them all in its Index and provide you via GWT with a dynamic list of the top 200 keywords. This is handy when you are working towards optimising 10 – 20 keywords across the website or various articles over a period of time.

How to analyse keywords in the best possible way? From the Main dashboard in the GWT of a specific site the Keyword section is towards the middle right. You will immediately be provided with the 5 top keywords and when you click on More will be presented with the top 20. At the bottom of the 20 will be an opportunity to look at the next 20 and so on.

Significant of the first 20 keywords will be that they should contain most of your top keywords that you are working towards. Clicking on the individual keyword will provide you with the Occurrence rate of the physical times of how often the keyword is listed by Google. Every keyword will have an Occurrence rate and will be a value ranging from 1000’s to 10’s.

Objectives (what to do)

• Ensure pre-defined keywords of up to 10 to 15. More / less in priority of importance (as we discussed during training)
• Prepare / curate / edit content (and H1 or H2 heading tags / blog post headings where possible) to conform to your pre-defined keywords
• At the same time get a good idea of the current status of the keyword display in GWT of the existing content of the site
• Higher occurrence rates are always better and my own rule is that the top 5 keywords should at least a minimum of 1 500 each (this could take months to achieve, but with disciplined copywriting will be possible in a few weeks)
• Your top 10 keywords should eventually all be above 1 500 each with the top three above 5 000 each

Why a high Occurrence Rate is so important
To be competitive in a mature online market one of the few things you can do is to increase a high volume of your top 10 keywords. It should always be an objective to increase the top keywords more and more (organically over time). Google will update the occurrences of the top 200 keywords every 7 to 14 days. So important to look at GWT regularly to get a good ‘feel’ of how your content / keywords are stacking up.

Impressions / Search Queries

On the top left of the GWT Dashboard is the section named ‘Search Queries’ The main terms here will be:

• Queries  - The actual search word / term / phrase the visitor is typing into Google
• Impressions – how many times your website is appearing in Google (ranked from number 1 to about 200 or even further afield)
• Clicks – the actual click-through to your website

This window will show you the Impressions / Clicks / AVG position of the last 30 days

As with the Keywords you will get a brief summary of Search Queries - Click on More from the main Dashboard screen to enable the Search Query Graph and a current list of Queries versus Impressions, This graph is dynamic and will be updated every two to three days.     

As said before – you have no real control over Impressions (of how people is searching), but the intelligence gathered from this Search Query main window is very important to learn how visitors are finding your content (in relation to your own various keywords / and also your competitors keywords).

Objectives (what to do)

• To regularly look at the query / Impressions and the Average (Avg) position of the first page of the Top Queries window
• To learn from above how the visitor is finding your content by means of studying the various Queries and the actual Clicks
• Get a good feel for the Avg positions of the various Queries
• With above knowledge be able to make adjustment in keywords (ie more of a current keyword or bump up a keyword that is far down the top 200 list)

The Average position
This is the average position of where your specific term is seen by Google in the search by the visitor. The number i.e. 4 is the average number from the top (not the page it is on, but the actual rank on the page from the top) over a 10 – 30 day period of where it appeared when the visitor typed the exact keyword phrase in. The most important thing here is to determine how certain phrases are bringing in traffic to your website.

Impressions 
A high impression rate does not guarantee a high click-through to your website – it only shows the relative position of the search query in relation to how many times your website / page URL appeared in Google at the time of a specific visitor search. The objective will be to try an increase the Click-Through Ratio of how many times your URL’s appear in the search engines versus how many times a visitor actually click through to your site / content / article.

Click-Through Ratio – CTR
Impressions over clicks. Higher is better and is a ratio that should increase over time if you are able to increase your occurrence rates of primary keywords. Do not expect higher CTR’s than 20 to 30%. Low is not necessarily bad – it only means that you should consider increasing the keywords (or not). It will all depend on the overall landing page strategy for the website / client. This could be to fill out a form / make a phone call or do an onsite purchase. 

Conclusion
The only way to master this / and to apply it for the success and growth of more visitors to your website is to regularly look at these areas. Be prepared to experiment. It is important not to change your top keywords within a three to six month period, but first ascertain that they are the best (most popular / describe your content the best) and then gather as much information from GWT to enhance your copywriting. There are no quarantines that visitors will click on search queries with your links in, but this is exactly why organic SEO is such a delicate and longer-term objective. In building my own four to six websites I have seen the increase of visitors over time by speding substantial time within GWT.

Copyright © Vernon Chalmers June 2011