If you are engaged in SEO and curious about which keywords are driving the most traffic to your website in Google, the SEO Quake team who brought you SEO Digger and now SEM Rush has recently added a new keyword tracking metric to their online arsenal known as “Trend Data”.

www.semrush.com adds Trend Data to SEO Tool

This feature highlights historical keywords and rankings for your domain allowing you to track new keywords as they appear as well as provides the ability to track the number of visitors resulting in hits to your site based on the top 20 positions in Google.

This graph compares historical data allowing webmasters to determine if relevance is tapering off for select keywords or stemming (and multiplying) encroaching on more popular keywords and key phrases. You can also add the analytics tracking code provided to your template to dial-in more specific data “outside of the click stream data used to estimate traffic patterns”.

One thing to keep in mind is that each website gains and distributes SEO ranking factors uniquely. So, just because your hearts intent is to rank for Keywords A, B and C and your website is optimally aligned for those keywords, you have vital internal links in place, a plethora of inbound links from other sites developed, your meta data is intact and yet that keyword is still taking its time to hit the top 10. Now, you can determine if those layers of relevance are augmenting other keyword clusters and pages instead of the intended target phrase and preferred landing page.

Each keyword and respective relevance threshold is a moving target, any time you (a) link to another page in your website with anchor text or an alt attribute / image or (b) receive another link from other sites, those signals are essentially voting for that page to be elevated for those respective keywords and keyword clusters.

Hence, often as a result of the way the site is structured, the most relevant and important page is not always dedicated to the appropriate or most suitable page for conversion. Add to the fact that each keyword and or ranking is “by the page” and this means if your champion page or preferred landing page is lacking any of the proper areas required for nourishment, then chances are that link flow and vital ranking factor has boosted another page in your website inadvertently.

Although these temporal rifts are correctable, the most typical reaction a search engine exhibits is to pass that ranking factor along to other areas of your website. In most instances this vital ranking factor flows upward to the homepage or, if you have PDF files or other digital appendages or assets can get pooled up and stagnate.

Ensuring that each page in a website has a “release value” or preferred (anchor text) link that allows that pent up link flow to normalize and contribute to the primary ranking factor for the select pages you originally intended is imperative for long-term rankings.

Otherwise a site has the tendency to apply pressure within and start to rank individual pages which may or may not have been intended as the primary landing page with a selected keyword or some partial piece of the link graph puzzle that holds it together.

Depending on how strong the site is, and how the links are structured determines which pages and their respective links get more link flow from the cyclical ranking factor moving throughout a site. As a result, it is common to see fluctuations in keywords as the site vacillates in an attempt to normalize itself based on the various on page and off page metrics.

Now, with the new feature from SEM Rush, you can track keyword stemming to determine how many keywords actually resulted in click-through traffic, which allows you to fine tune the optimization process even further.

If you are an SEO Service provider, this can provide an alternate report to show you how a campaign is performing outside of the areas you anticipate movement in. Keep in mind that each website gains relevance, rankings and rises and falls at its own rate. The only thing you can be sure of is for every action, there is an equal or greater reaction; however, you don’t always know what that greater or equal reaction is, unless you can measure it.

Now, with the Trend Data tracking code implemented from SEM Rush, you can peer into the rankings and results (as well as deep links) by viewing which page is ranking for what keyword and if the site is gaining or losing traction for the keywords in question.

Related posts:

1. SEO Tips for Using the Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool
2. Measuring Keyword Continuity by Tracking Empirical Data
3. How to Use Google Adwords Keyword Tool for Gap Analysis
4. SEO Ultimate 1.6 Adds All in One SEO Pack Importer
5. Hittail Long Tail Search Engine Monitoring Tool is a Hit for SEO