📘 This article provides examples of content reporting according to performance evolution.
Overview
RealKeywords facilitates tracking your content performance over time with simple reports. You can easily identify where you lost or gained traffic, including category-level details, and find content to improve or add based on this performance.
The following examples demonstrate opportunities for content optimization based on historical queries:
Comparing Annual Performance
In our demo environment, we want to see our keyword performance over the last year compared to the previous year to determine where we are gaining or losing traffic.
On the RealKeywords Overview page, look at the first chart.
Choose Last Year and Previous Year from the date selector, then click Apply.
Select the Compare periods option to display the previous year’s data on the chart.
Click the tabs above the chart to add Unique Keywords, CTR, and Average Position to the comparison:
Evaluating Performance by Section
The example above shows your keyword performance evolution from year to year. If you have an enterprise site, seeing this comparison within specific sections of your site (i.e., segments) may be more beneficial. Your segmentation is typically set up as part of Botify onboarding; contact your SEO Success Manager (SSM) if your project doesn't have segments.
To see RealKeywords charts filtered for a specific segment, select the segment name at the top of the page. In this example, we have filtered our reports to show keyword performance within our Articles segment:
Target Precise Keywords
Use Keyword Groups to target longer, more specific keywords (i.e., long-tail keywords) for higher rankings on relevant searches. Keyword Groups enable you to analyze related keywords at scale within minutes.
To target precise keywords:
Applying a Keyword Group Filter
The following example uses a common Keyword Group to capture questions searchers ask about particular keywords. This Keyword Group is typically set up during Botify onboarding; contact your SSM if your project does not have segments.
To apply a Keyword Group filter:
With the Last Year and Previous Year periods from the previous example still applied, click the Keyword Groups link at the top of the Keywords Explorer to filter the report by the Questions keyword group.
Select the Questions group, then click Apply. This updates the RealKeywords reports to show the evolution of question queries over the compared period.
In our example, notice the drop in impressions and clicks over the compared period. This indicates your site answered these questions at one point and is a good signal to investigate whether your content needs to be refreshed to better match search queries.
Creating a Keyword Explorer Report
To find where you have lost impressions, create a Keywords Explorer report that compares your performance of the queries driving the most impressions.
To create a Keyword Explorer Report:
Navigate to RealKeywords > Keywords Explorer and apply the following filter to show only the search queries where the number of impressions decreased over the compared periods: Impressions Diff Impressions between Periods - Value < 0. See how to apply a filter in the clip below:
Add a column for Diff Impressions between Periods - Value. See how to add a column in the clip below:
The results show the queries driving the biggest loss of impressions year over year. While you may want to refresh your site content for the queries with the biggest losses, you need insight into the demand for these queries to determine the value of this effort. Since searchers may not be looking for the content the way they once were, because the content that was important at one time may no longer be important or relevant, you may not get the ROI you expect with only this data. If you have your Semrush data integrated with your project, follow the next step to add this key metric to your report.Add the Semrush Search Volume column to your report and sort the column by the greatest volume, as shown in the clip below:
Notice the change in the original search queries. Use this data to find where it is worth investing resources to drive your evergreen content optimization. The combination of Google Search Console, SiteCrawler, and Semrush data in RealKeywords lets you predict the ROI from optimizing this content more precisely since the reports are based on your existing performance.
See also: