When you look at the keywords that are sending traffic to your site, what do you see? Are they highly targeted keywords demonstrating that your traffic is qualified? Or are you getting less targeted traffic from visitors who are searching for more general keywords?

Let’s compare a few keywords to demonstrate the difference.

Traffic searching for “buy Monet print” is highly targeted. These are visitors who are looking to purchase a product from a vendor who sells Monet prints. If someone is searching for “Monet”, this does not necessarily mean that the visitor has intentions of buying anything, but perhaps is just looking to learn more about Monet.

The less targeted traffic might not be coming in with an interest to buy what it is that you are offering, and perhaps are simply looking for information or education on a topic.

In an ideal world, we would separate this traffic into different buckets. By doing that, we would be able to separately track those visitors who search for a very general keyword, who might be less targeted, from the more highly targeted traffic who are searching for more long tail keywords.

Averages are messy. We don’t just want to know what our average overall site conversion rate is based on all of the traffic we get. We want to know what our conversion rate is for those visitors who are highly targeted, separately from the conversion rate for those who are less targeted. This will really help us understand how we are truly performing with the traffic that has real motivation to buy what we offer.

Most web analytics and tracking software don’t make it simple for you to separate all your traffic into these buckets. It’s much easier to determine what needs to be fixed if you can look at the performance of the entire buying process based on keywords which tells us level of intent and motivation.

Are you segmenting your search engine traffic based on the intent of the keywords?