Find your money keywords

A keyword that brings a thousand visits and no sales is worth less than one that brings ten visits and three orders. This guide finds the second kind.

Time: about 20 minutes · You need: key event or ecommerce tracking (a paid plan), and a few weeks of data

Before you start

Without key event tracking there are no conversions to sort by. If you do not have it, skip to step 4.

1. Sort by results, not by traffic

In the app: open the Overview and click the conversions or revenue column header in the keyword table. Click again to reverse the order.

In Google Analytics: open the Keyword Hero report through View in Google Analytics. Remove the landing_page secondary dimension with its x, so each keyword is one row. Then click the conversions or total_revenue column header.

The Keyword Hero report in GA4 sorted by conversions, with revenue per keyword alongside.

In this flower shop, “buy flowers” leads on sales and on traffic. “flower bouquet” and “roses” convert far better than the generic “flowers”.

2. Read the pattern, not the top row

Look across the top twenty for what the converting keywords have in common. Two patterns come up again and again:

Transactional words. Keywords with buy, order or price convert at several times the rate of informational ones. The search intent column in the app marks them with T.
Specific products. In the example, searches for bouquet spent more than twice as much per order as searches for single flowers.

Each pattern is a content decision: write for the transactional query, and build the page for the visitor who already knows what they want.

3. Drill into one landing page

Pick a landing page with high revenue and look at every keyword that reaches it.

In the app: open the Landing Page report.

In Google Analytics: keep keywords as the primary dimension and landing_page as the secondary. Edit the filter and add the condition landing_page exactly matches your page, keeping medium = organic and source = google. Choose Apply, then sort by conversions.

Keywords for the /roses landing page in GA4, sorted by conversions.

A keyword with few sessions but a conversion is worth a second look: it may rank poorly for a term that sells well. Check its position in the search_position_dimension column.

For deeper splits, such as transactional against informational keywords, export the table to a spreadsheet.

4. When there are too few conversions

Small sites and new setups often have too few conversions to rank keywords by. Use a signal that happens more often:

An earlier step in the funnel. Add to cart or begin checkout instead of purchase. Mark it as a key event and track it.
Engagement. Sort by engagement rate (engaged_sessions divided by sessions) or by session duration. Both tend to move with conversions, and even a little data shows the trend.

Check it worked

You have a short list of keywords that convert well above your average, and a note of which pages they land on. Those are the keywords to protect, and the patterns to write more content for.