Keyword research has been a bit
of a guessing game because no one has had hard data on the numbers delivered by
Google until this week.
Google has modified their external AdWord keyword research
tool so that it now shows search numbers for the previous month AND the
average per month volume for the previous 12 months.
Until this change was made, that
tool was an interesting toy that left you guessing because it didn't show any
hard numbers.
This change is HUGE.
One of my mentors pointed out
that data hit the streets within the last 6 months that revealed that the
number 1 position in Google for any search term nets you approximately 45
percent of the clicks from organic searches on ANY phrase.
Let's say a phrase is searched
100,000 times a month. You would receive about 45,000 clicks if you had the 1st
position in the organic results.
The percentage of the visitors'
received drops as your position in the SERPs drops but the percentages are
constant across ALL search terms.
Now that hard numbers have been
revealed, you know EXACTLY what kind of traffic you can expect for any given
phrase you research BEFORE you actually start testing it and optimizing for it.
Note: I've read on an article written by Jerry West on John Cow's blog that his actual data
(as reported by Google Analytics) is showing the results displayed on the external AdWord keyword research
tool are inflated by a factor of 2. I do not doubt Jerry's data but I've
noticed no two stat gathering programs record the same data even from the same
source at the same time.
The numbers shown on thee Google
AdWord keyword research tool also show PPC users which phrases will fail BEFORE
they spend a penny testing BECAUSE they have the actual search numbers to work
with.
My experience in organic search
results has taught me I receive more traffic faster when my pages target
keyword phrases that have fewer than 100,000 competing pages. An associate of
mine uses PPC and her results have shown her that PPC needs a large number of searches
to work for her.
Anyone that fails now that hard
numbers have been revealed has to blame their ads, website content and their
inability to use the powerful tool Google has just given us.
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