When digging into the site analytics to determine the performance of your SEO campaign, be careful not to get so keyword centric that you lose sight of the overall impact of your efforts. Often times when we are link building for specific keywords, it’s easy to judge the effect by reporting the traffic and conversions directly brought in from that exact phrase. However, a much better indicator is to use keyword sets to show the impact across any variation containing elements of your keyword, so as to capture short and long tail keywords that alone may only bring in 1 or 2 visits, but together account for the vast majority of traffic and typically convert at a much higher rate.
When pulling data for a keyword set, simply use advanced filters pull results containing the main piece of your keyword, meaning the word(s) that sets it apart from other keywords. Here are a couple filter variations:
In this example, when targeting both “graphic design services” and “graphic design agency”, the main part of the keyword that you want to track is “graphic design” as that will tell you whether or not your campaign is working, plus you may find in the results that “graphic design company” is the real winner. Just make sure you separate “graphic” and “design” so that you capture all variations.