If you spend any time doing SEO or PPC you're bound to have spent time in Google Analytics pouring over keyword data. However, if you're like me and mostly spend time doing product development, keyword data can be a bit foreign.
Sure you might crack open Google Analytics and take a peek at traffic sources, major keywords or trending data.
However, if you take a closer look at your keyword data you might find a treasure trove of information you can use right away to improve your product or site.
Usability Flaws
When a user can't figure out how to use your site guess what happens? They turn either to 1) your help forums or 2) Google.
To find these issues you'll need to dig deep into your keyword data. I always toggle "show rows" to 500 so I can see as many keywords as possible at one time.
Then just scan quickly over keywords to see what might indicate a usability flaw in your application.
For example, keyword #317 in the Zapier analytics account is "Zapier guid." At first I didn't recognize what "guid" was so I thought perhaps we have a spelling typo somewhere and misspelled "guide" with "guid."
On closer inspection I realized we had a form field for our Evernote Integrations called "guid" that was confusing users.
We quickly changed the label so that users weren't confused about form. A five minute fix.
New Feature Ideas
If your site has been around for a few months and has a decent amount of content it's probably starting to rank for some long tail keywords. Check your keyword data to see if people are finding your site by asking questions (i.e. "how can I...." or "does this do...." or "where can I....").
Using this method I can see that Evernote Jira Integration is one of the most popular integrations that we don't yet support. Guess what we'll do next?
New Product Ideas
Similar to new feature ideas you can also find completely new product ideas using the same methods as above.
What to look for is any keywords that might demonstrate a pain point in the market. For instance I notice lots of people finding our site searching for a bug tracker with Google Calendar support. One might conclude that a bug tracker with a better calendar system baked in could do quite well.
Wrapping it up
The key to doing this sort of research is patience. You need be willing to scan potentially thousands of keywords to find some gems. The good news is it doesn't take much more than a few minutes to scroll through a page of 500 keywords so you can cover ground quickly.
You also don't need to do this all the time. I only dig deep into keyword data once every few months, but each time I do I find something that can help us out.
These are just of a few of the tactics I use to find product development ideas in keyword data. If you have any more please share!
