Matching Keywords With Landing Pages

December 18, 2009

I was recently asked via Twitter (follow us @lunametrics) how to use Google Analytics to match landing pages with exact keywords sending traffic to those pages.

Simple enough, but first, let’s talk about why you would want to do this in the first place:

1. If you haven’t yet started optimizing a site, you can get an idea of which keywords the pages already get traffic from.

2. To check that the organic keywords sending traffic to a page are the keywords that you’re optimizing or link building for. It’s always good to measure your efforts.

To match your landing pages with the keywords used to get to those pages, it’s become much easier to do with the recent release of the new Google Analytics features – specifically Secondary Dimensions. Start off by going to the Traffic Sources report, and from there go to the Keywords report.

keywords report

If you’re only interested in organic visits (which, for this example we are) then be sure to click non-paid.

non-paid

Then, all you have to do is click the Secondary Dimension dropdown menu and choose Landing Page. It’s really that simple.

2nd dimension

2nd dim 2

Tip: You’ll get a lot of branded keywords showing up at the top, mostly landing on the homepage. It helps to filter these out of your results using the keyword filter (Filter Keyword: excluding [insert branded term here]).

keyword filter

BONUS: For you analyst ninjas, the fun is just starting. Set it to show 500 rows and export your keyword/landing page report as a CSVfor Excel file. Now you can sort and organize the list any way you want.