Analytics Blog
Why are Term Clouds in Google Analytics so Special?
Well, many of us Google Analytics Consultants performing SEO analysis provide stakeholders with data visualizations because they simply and instantly tell the story of what is going on in large/complex data sets.
Previously, this type of visual analysis required manual integration with the edWordle word cloud tool.
Now, in Google Analytics Version 5 there is a new report view called “Term Cloud“, which is easily accessible within almost all of the “Traffic Sources > Incoming Sources” reports.
Wait…What the Heck is a Term Cloud?!?
Term Clouds, commonly referred to as Word clouds, display words based on their frequency. Basically, words that are bigger in the cloud appear more often. Check out the examples below that make this much easier to understand.
How to Access the “Term Cloud” View
Within the “Search” reports and the “Adwords > Keywords” reports you can change the view from the default “Data” view to the “Term Cloud” view.
After you change the view from the default “Data” view to the “Term Cloud” view, it is recommended that you change your date range to 90 days for improved data analysis reliability.
Term Cloud SEO Analysis Examples
How well is your site driving non-branded, targeted keywords?
The ultimate goal with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to increase the top of your sales funnel by bringing new visitors to your site. After you perform keyword research to determine where the search query opportunities exist based on volume and relevancy, you will have a target list of primary and secondary keywords.
Before you optimize your site, and at least on a monthly basis as you optimize, it is a good idea to measure how well your site is or isn’t driving people to your site via these targeted terms. The “Term Cloud” view is a perfect tool to analyze and share this data with management and other non-technical users.
The following Term Cloud examples represent aspects of SEO analysis we perform for SEO audits and reports, which will enable you to gain key insights into your SEO performance.
Term Cloud Analysis showing Good SEO
If your website SEO is working well, then you should be receiving a large volume of broad to long-tail keyword traffic that doesn’t include branding like your company name, as in this example below.
Term Cloud Analysis showing Weak SEO
In this example, Branded keywords are the only terms that have prominence in this Term Cloud used to analyze the organic keywords that are driving traffic to this site. Even if your brand awareness is extremely strong, you should still see targeted keywords stand out from the keyword noise.
Which Keywords are Bouncing?
Below is an example of using the “Term Cloud” view to identify your worst performing keywords. Just change the Keyword drop-down (highlighted below) from “Visits” to “Bounce Rate.” Then you can find your worst performing keywords like we did which is highlighted in red below.
Be aware that low visit keywords can throw off the quality of your analysis so we recommend that you use the search filter to include visits with a significant volume. In this example, we only included visits greater than 100.
Which Keywords are Driving the Highest Quality of Visitor (measured by pages/visit)?
Hope you enjoyed this tour of the new Google Analytics Term Cloud view and how to use it to improve your website SEO analysis.
Keep an eye out for more posts on how to use and benefit from all the new enhancements in Google Analytics Version 5. Especially, the forthcoming post on how you can now use events for Goals.