For any content that you expect to be useful in making it findable in search engines, you are going to create a list of all potentially relevant search terms.
Start with a basic list of words and then try to expand it further, using, for example, the following methods:
- Brainstorm: what words can you think of on your own to describe your content?
- Do audience research: see what words your target audience uses, for example on social media, in emails to Radboud University, etc. Approach colleagues who have contact with customers to ask how their customers word things, for example in an email, chat, or at the counter.
- Do a competitive analysis: what words are being used on related websites?
- Review your Web statistics.
- Use tools to generate new ideas.
Also include synonyms, spelling variants, and misspellings in your list if they are used by your target audience (for example, not just "master's degree program" but also "master's degree program" and "master's degree program"). Only later will you start selecting from these.
View your web statistics
In Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics), under the menu item "Behavior > Site Search > Search Terms," you will find an overview of terms that visitors entered into your website's internal search function.
Moreover, under the item 'Acquisition > Search Console > Queries you will find a report showing the search terms that visitors entered in search engines, after which they found your website. You can also see the average position of your pages in the search results, and how often your page was shown after a search, along with the click-through rate (CTR).
Remember, these are terms on which your site is already (somewhat) findable! However, the report does give a rough indication of how your visitors formulate and spell their keywords and with what bias they are looking for information.
This means that this report is also very useful to check afterwards whether your efforts are effective. As a baseline measurement, see how many clicks you are getting in via (related clusters of) organic keywords. See if you see these numbers increase over time. Don't focus too much on the average position or individual keywords, but look at more global results and the actual effect, such as the increase in visitor numbers and conversions through organic search results.
The Queries report comes from our Google Search Console account. Even more information is available in this account than is imported into Google Analytics. For example, you can also get information about the landing pages that visitors landed on after clicking on a keyword, and also filter the keywords by landing page.
Would you like this additional information, or is your Google Analytics account not linked to our Google Search Console? Then send a request to [email protected] to receive a printout of the search terms used to find your site. Please include the url of the site/pages in question and the desired time period.
Use tools to generate new ideas
Google search engine
When you simply go to Google.co.uk, and type in a word in the search box, Google gives you suggestions based in part (not just!) on how often other visitors use them:
Keywordtool.io
At http://keywordtool.io/ you will find a good search tool. All you have to do is enter a keyword and then several suggestions for alternative terms appear. These suggestions are based on Google's auto-suggests, but more comprehensive and in an easy interface. For a complete overview of all the data, you need an account.
Google Ads keyword planner
This tool is part of Google Ads. It is suitable both to get additional ideas for search terms and to get an indication of the number of times the word is entered into search engines, compared to other search terms.
To log in, you need a Google Ads account. Within the university, we have several Google Ads accounts. You can also create a new account yourself just for this, but if you spend no to little budget, the results shown will be less specific compared to the results in accounts where a lot of budget is spent.
You can then log in at https://adwords.google.com/. Navigate to Utilities > Keyword Planner > Find new keywords with a phrase, website or category.
Enter one or more similar words. The keyword planner will then show you a list of the words you entered, followed by an indication of search volume. Below that, you'll see a list of suggestions of terms that might also be relevant.
Note that search volume is not an indication of expected visits to your page. Use the numbers only for comparing terms against each other.
Have you already deployed a Google Ads campaign? Then, of course, you can also analyze it to see which words visitors used to find your ads. To do so, go to your campaign, 'keywords' tab and click on the 'details' button. Choose 'Search terms > all'.
