How well do you know your target audience? And how well do you know if you are reaching them?
Our Market Research Team has helped several businesses throughout the state better identify their customers, website traffic, and more through our offered search engine optimization (SEO) reports. But we won’t just run the research for you, we’ll help you understand what it truly means and why it’s significant for your company.
Our Market Research Team of graduate students from Grand Valley State University (GVSU) put together a list of key terms that will help you understand your SEO report and connect the dots of how SEO fits into your business approach.
Definition of Terms from SEO Data Report
1. ‘Current Keywords‘ are the keywords for which a specific website is ranking right now. Those words are embedded in the content or in the anchor texts of the website.
2. ‘Competitor’s Keywords‘ are the keywords for which the website’s competitors are ranking but the website itself is not ranking. The website might or might not have those in its content. Most probably it doesn’t. Those keywords are could potentially help get better traffic and is something that maybe included in the website content if relevant.
3. ‘Potential Keywords‘ are the keywords that were compiled by our software for your client’s website to be incorporated into its content. Your client should be able to find some relevant words in that list.
4. ‘Keyword difficulty’ refers to an estimate of how difficult it would be to rank well in organic search results ( in Google or any search engine) for a particular keyword. The higher the percentage, the harder it is to achieve high rankings for the given keyword.
5. ‘CPC’ stands for Cost Per Click, and it refers to the average price in the selected currency advertisers are paying for a user’s click on an ad triggered by the given keyword (Google AdWords).
6. ‘Competitive Density’ refers to the level of competition between advertisers bidding on a given keyword within their PPC campaigns. Competitive Density is shown on a scale from 0 to 1.00 with 1.00 being the most difficult to rank for. The higher the competitive density the higher is the number of domains bidding for that keyword ( means more demand) and the more expensive is that keyword.
7. ‘Number of Results’ refers to the number of URLs displayed in organic search results for the given keyword in Google.
8. ‘Traffic Percent’ refers to the percentage of traffic driven to the website with the given keyword for the specified period.
9. ‘URL’ refers to the page URL that is ranking in Google’s top 100 organic search results. Click on any of the URL under the URL column and it should show you the landing page.
10. ‘Keyword Intent’ refers to the purpose of a search in a search engine. Intents can be read by the search engine algorithms to show the proper results and SERP features. Intent can be navigational, commercial, or informational.
11. ‘Search Volume’ refers to the average number of times users have searched for a given keyword per month. Our software ( SEMrush) calculates this value over the last 12 months.
12. ‘External Links’ refers to the total number of links on the source URL pointing to other websites.
13. ‘Internal Links’ refers to the total number of links on the source URL pointing to other pages within the same website.
14. ‘Intent’ refers to the purpose of a search in a search engine. Search engine algorithms read the intent to recommend proper search results and SERP results. In general intent can be Informational, Navigational, commercial, or transactional. This is the most recent feature of SEMrush ( the software that we use).
15. ‘Traffic cost’ is part of a subscription provided by SEMrush. Higher traffic cost means higher the demand for that Keyword. In simple terms, Traffic cost in SEMrush is an estimation of how much it would cost to bid on organic keywords through Google Ads.
16. ‘Authority Score’ Authority Score is the proprietary metric used to measure overall quality of domain and influence on SEO. The score is based on the number of backlinks, referring domains, organic search traffic, and other data.
Have questions about our market research or business consulting services? Connect with a Michigan SBDC consultant by submitting a request for consulting here.