Keyword Research Concepts
Keyword Popularity (Volume)
Keyword Popularity one of the easiest to understand yet most misunderstood concepts in Keyword Research. Simply it's the number of searches performed during a certain period - per day, per week, or per month. That's the easy part to understand.
What many people don’t understand is that this is only a relative indicator. If one tool says that there are 1246 searches a month for a particular keyword, that doesn’t mean this is an exact figure. You cannot then say with any sort of accuracy that during the past month throughout the whole Internet there were 1246 searches for that keyword.
What this figure means is that in the chunk or sample of data that was grabbed from this particular search engine during this month that keyword was found 1246 times. Sometimes this really is all of the searches that were done on this search engine, other times this is just a portion of all the search queries. The only time we could ever be sure that there were 1246 searches done a month would be if the sample data were taken from every single search engine on the Internet. No tool does this - not even close.
Let me clarify further. Wordtracker is one of the leading Keyword Research companies. It has a sample size of about 2 million queries a day while Google alone has about 200 million a day. When you then throw all the other search engines into the mix, you quickly realize that 2 million searches fall well short of the hundreds of millions of actual searches a day.
So does that mean that you can look at the search volume you find in these tools and multiply it by 200? Well, this is a very good question, and one that doesn’t get asked often enough. There is no simple answer, as it will depend on the tool. Many will “adjust” their results so you don’t have to do multiplication, while others will give you only the literal results, and some multiplication will have to take place. Whatever tool you get, it’s worthwhile asking this question.
Keyword Research tools use only samples of data. This means that we cannot assume that our list is 100% correct. It’s really just a best guess based on the chunk of data we have.
To demonstrate this point, take a look below at the differences between the five major keyword data sources for the top 10 terms related to “fly fishing”. If they were all accurate, you would expect them all to produce the same 10 top popularity results. However, as you can below, the tools all say different things. These results emphasize the fact that these tools are guides. They are not absolute truth and the results they bring you should be treated with some suspicion.
Word Tracker
fly fishing
fly fishing alaska
fly fishing equipment
fly fishing gear
alaska fly fishing
alaska fly fishing trip
fly fishing reels
fly fishing canada
alaska fly in fishing
fly fishing in alaska
Overture
fly fishing
fly in fishing
fly fishing trip
fly fishing gear
colorado fly fishing
fly fishing vacation
montana fly fishing
fly fishing in colorado
fly fishing equipment
fly fishing reel
Keyword Discovery
fly fishing
fly fishing equipment
fly fishing gear
michigan fly fishing
fly fishing reels
fly fishing rod
fly fishing alaska
fly fishing reel
fly fishing and tying journal
fly fishing tackle
Keyword Intelligence
fly fishing
fly fishing knots
fly fishing flies
fly fishing tips
oregon fly fishing guides
fly fishing gear
fly fishing supplies
fly fishing rods
oregon fly fishing guide
fly fishing reels
Web CEO
fly fishing
fly fishing vacation
fly fishing equipment
fly in fishing ontario
fly in fishing
fly fishing instruction
montana fly fishing
fly fishing gear
pennsylvania fly fishing
new zealand fly fishing
The data pulled from Overture (Yahoo! Search Marketing) is also less than perfect for other reasons. In fact in many ways it is worse. The tool actually combines words to give a search result. For example, let’s say that one person searched for “bikini girl”, another person searched for “bikini girls” and yet another for “girls bikini”. These searches would all be combined by the Overture suggestion tool, which would tell you that the three people all searched for “bikini girls”, which is obviously not the case.
This is especially highlighted when you look at the meaning of the two searches “bikini girls” and “girls bikini”. The meanings are completely different, but according to the Overture (Yahoo! Search Marketing) suggestion tool they are the same query. However, in reality one is likely to be performed by a guy looking for some free eye candy, while the other search is likely to be made a young woman looking to spend some money to look good at the beach. I know which one I would rather be targeting as a business owner.
All this negative talk might be getting you a bit discouraged about Keyword Research. Don’t fret, it isn’t all bad. What it means is that we must use our heads a little more, and realize that Keyword Research provides us guidelines.
Firstly, you can get a rough indication of the search volume and fairly safely conclude that the actual search volume is going to be greater when you consider traffic across all search engines.
Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, you can get a relative indicator. By relative indicator I mean it allows you to be able to compare one keyword with other keywords in the same group of data. For example, you may find that “rugby union” is 30% lower than “rugby league”, or “cake recipes” is 100% higher than “cake recipe” (except if you were using the Overture suggestion tool due to the way it combines phrases).
Even though the actual volume isn't exactly correct, by being able to compare relatively you can still get some amazingly powerful information.
Article Series
This article is part 1 of a 2 part series. Other articles in this series are shown below:
- Keyword Research Concepts
- Different Tools, Different Reasons
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