How to Find the Organic Keywords Driving Lead Conversions

In content and search marketing, we often have websites with many pages. We work with agencies that have clients with thousands of pages. And search drives a lot of their traffic. They know it derives conversion, but until SaturnOne, it was hard to impossible to see what the keywords contributed.

Your blog had hundreds of articles and a call-to-action (CTA) to a landing page. Popups across your website also drive traffic to the landing page. Or serval landing pages, which is also very common. Of those hundreds of content pages, which ones draw traffic that converts the most for a given landing page?

Have you thought to ask? Have you tried to get that data from Google’s tech stack with GA4, Tag Manager, BigQuery, and Looker Studio? If you did, I bet you gave up. I spent a few hours trying, and I even asked ChatGPT. The best I could do was a many-step manual process. But that even required several manual decisions and best guesses as to the pages driving the best traffic with a traffic flow diagram. (See the outline of this below for the brave.)

SaturnOne to the Rescue

You can also use the “Organic Google Search Keywords That Convert” tool. See the video below on how this works.

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With this tool, you can use sitewide conversion points or specific landing pages.

A few simple steps:

1. Select a landing page or conversion point
2. Select the “Top” number of content pages you want keywords from
3. Press the button “Find Top Keywords For Entry Pages That Convert.”

Here is what happens when you do:

1. All the visitors that convert are pulled for the period selected – from our analytics database.
2. We correlate those to users who entered the site from a Google search (organic), regardless of their entry page.
3. We order these pages by count and select the “Top” number you selected.
4. Call the Google Search Console API to get the click-through and keywords for each page during this period.
5. We correlate and combine the data.
6. Present in the report. Top pages and keywords.

Value of Keywords Driving Conversions

If you have read this far, you have an idea of the value. 

Almost all keyword tools give you search volume and competition for them. Then, you create content from your selected keywords, hoping to rank. These tools will show your rank, as will Google Search Console… though harder to use.

What SaturnOne gives is actual evidence of the keywords driving leads. Not just traffic but leads and conversions… that you choose to analyze. 

This shows:

1. The actual results of your work. Often from many months.
2. What keywords are actually working. And do you want to keep working on them to maintain your lead flow?
3. The ones that are not working become apparent in practice, not just theory.

Google Analytics, Tag Manager, and Search Console

The steps below assume you have Tag Manager set up properly to define conversion events. Be warned, it is manual and could take hours to get similar results as SaturnOne’s tool.

Step-by-Step Guide to Find Top Converting Content Pages and Keywords

1. Identify the Conversion Events in GA4

• Step 1: Go to GA4 and ensure your conversion events are properly defined. For example, if a lead conversion is marked by submitting a form on a landing page, ensure this event is tagged and marked as a conversion.

2. Segment Conversion Events by Organic Search Traffic

• Step 2: In GA4, navigate to the "Conversions" report, where you can see all events marked as conversions.
• Step 3: Apply a segment to isolate conversions that originated from organic search. This can be done by creating a new segment where the session source/medium is exactly "google/organic" or by filtering the report for organic search traffic.

3. Trace the User Journey to the Conversion Landing Page

• Step 4: To understand the paths taken to conversions, use the "Path exploration" tool in the "Exploration" section of GA4. Set the conversion event as the endpoint and look back at the path users took to get there.
• Step 5: Focus on the segment of users who converted from organic search. You may need to adjust the lookback window to ensure it covers the one-week period you're analyzing.

4. Identify Top Content Pages Leading to Conversion

• Step 6: In the "Path exploration" tool, analyze the pages that appear most frequently before the conversion event for the organic search segment. These are your top content pages contributing to conversions.
• Step 7: List the top 10 content pages based on their frequency and path to conversion significance.

5. Use Google Search Console to Find Keywords for Each Page

• Step 8: With your list of top content pages, head over to Google Search Console.
• Step 9: For each page, use the "Performance" report, filter by "Page" (input the URL of your top content pages one at a time), and set the date range to match the week of analysis.
• Step 10: Look at the queries report for each page to identify the top keywords driving organic traffic that resulted in conversions.

Additional Tips

• Ensure you're looking at the correct date range that matches the week when the 100 leads were generated.
• The process may involve a bit of back-and-forth between GA4 and Search Console, as you'll be identifying pages in GA4 and then switching to Search Console to find the associated keywords.
• Remember, the "Path exploration" tool can also help identify not just direct but also indirect paths that led to conversions, offering insights into the user journey.

By following these steps, you will have a clear understanding of which content pages are driving organic search conversions and the keywords associated with those pages. This insight is invaluable for optimizing your content and SEO strategy to focus on high-performing keywords and content types.

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