During the last two Daily Golden Nuggets I explained how to measure the search engine results ranking of the keywords that people are searching for, but honestly, that ranking is not an indicator of how much money you have the potential to make, but rather an indication of how in-your-face your marketing is.A newspaper with a circulation of 7000 local residents is akin to the keyword visibility report I mentioned in the previous 2 Nuggets. How many people actually walk into your store as a result of that newspaper ad? You'd have to manually track the number. When it comes to online tracking of keywords, you can compare the ranking and impressions from Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) to the actual visitor numbers found in Google Analytics (GA).
You can find your keywords report within your GA account by clicking on the left navigation of Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic. By default that report will show you the last 30 days, just like the Search Queries report in GWT.
Looking over both of these reports for a real jeweler's website I see the keyword "Fancy Rings" appears on the GWT report with 110 impressions and an average ranking of 9.2. (Okay, the keyword is not actually "fancy rings" because I needed to hide the real designer's name while I wrote this.) GWT shows the number of clicks was less than 10.
Jumping over to the Organic report in GA I see the same "Fancy Rings" keyword showing 24 visitors scattered evenly throughout the month. Although GWT reported less than 10 clicks, the GA report of 24 clicks is obviously more accurate. In other words, Google Webmaster Tools is only reporting estimates, and sometimes those estimates are wrong because GWT only tracks Google, and not Bing or Yahoo.
Reviewing the numbers again, we had about 110 impressions in the Google Search Results with an average rank of 9.2. Of those 110 people there were 24 who clicked through to the website.
At this point you need to run a report in your point of sale software. You should look for all the sales of "Fancy Rings" during the last 30 days to see if there was any correlation between the days the visitors were tracked. It will be easy to measure online sales for these days, but in-store sales would have to rely on your POS reports and your own personal analysis.
In tomorrow's Daily Golden Nugget I'll explain how to filter the reports in Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools so you can understand a little more useful information.
