Using the content report section of Google Analytics you can pull a report that shows which landing pages drove organic visitors to your website. To take things a step further you add a secondary dimension as “keyword” to see which keywords drove visitors to those landing pages that your content report is displaying. If you follow this method, you should have a report that shows all of your landing pages and the keywords that each landing page was found with. The data will also show how well the visitors performed through metrics like time on site and average pages per visit.

Whether you plan on doing some pay per click marketing or organic SEO marketing or both, you need to do a few things that will help the search engines take a liking to your website and its pages. The first thing you will want to do is get all your keywords in order and figure out how many keyword groups you are going to be working with. Each keyword group should be comprised of many keyword phrases that are very similar to each other.

Forming your SEO strategy the right way from the get go is crucial, using historical data in Google Analytics is a great way to make educated decisions on which keywords to optimize your site for. If you delve into your Google Analytics reports you can find out which keywords you are already ranking for that just need a boost in position and you can also see which keywords are resulting in more transactions. Finding out which keywords are providing you with transactions and healthy visitors can help you get an idea as to which keywords you should try to optimize for.

There are many ways to get your keyword groups together but I would like to show you a way that I have developed which will help you save a LOT of time. I first developed this technique while working on a large budget E-commerce SEO campaign for a company that sold parts for boats.

Once you have your keyword groups set, you are going to want to focus on getting your category pages put together in a way that makes the search engines rank you on the top few spots when people search for your products. To ensure that this happening you will need to do a few things. Starting from the top of a landing page to the bottoms of one, there are certain things that a search engine will look for when deciding whether or not to place you in the top ranking positions.

Images are not interpreted the same way to search engines because they do not have eyes, so it’s important to give your images an image alt tag. An image alt tag is simply a title of an image that the search engines can read; these are great places to sprinkle in some long tailed keywords. Make sure you follow the general rule of thumb and use relevant, natural and appropriate image alt tags throughout your website and web pages. For E-commerce sites, you are going to want to make sure that your CMS allows for image alt tag attributions and that you can control them on a individual product level. Make sure to cover your entire basis by giving each image a unique alt tag that contains a keyword. If you are using product intrinsic keyword strategy, this can help you rank well.

The first thing that you are going to want to do is choose a good meta title for your page. The search engines need to know what the page is about by reading the title so make sure you choose a title that is relevant to the page while including a keyword that you want to rank for. So if you are going to have a category page that has a bunch of featured “red shoes” your title tag should have the phrase “red shoes in it and so should your meta description.

The content on your site needs to also include the keywords that you want that page to rank for but you have to be strategic, you obviously can’t include 20 keywords in 2 paragraphs so make the most of your characters. A good tip is to use the plural form of keywords to cover both the singular and plural variation, Google search bots will count the singular version of a keyword in a title, description or body if the plural version is present. Another tip is to make sure you sacrifice the keywords that have low search volume instead of those with high search volume if you run out of room and have to get rid of a keyword or two.

Using social media is becoming more and more powerful these days, getting a big audience and promoting your products and specials is a great way to get some more business. On top of all that, using social media is something that is evaluated by the search engine algorithms, the way they see it if you are powerful enough to have a huge audience, then you are a industry leader and you should be displayed higher in the results as long as you are following all other search engine guidelines. If you spend the time to update your social media profiles with featured products or specials, there is a big chance that you will rank better and get some referral traffic that converts showing up in your Google Analytics reports.

Content is king when it comes to search engine optimization, so you want to make sure that every time you create content that it is very high quality and that it is optimized properly. The best way to get good content out there is by having a blog on your website that you update regularly. The blog should be updated on a regular basis with content that includes the basic SEO factors like optimized meta tags and content but also it should include internal links to your product pages when you use keywords that are related to your products. For example if you are blogging about shoes and you mention the phrase “red shoes” in your blog post then you should make that phrase a link to your product or category pages that are about red shoes. This is going to provide readers with a good user experience and the search engines will reward you accordingly.