Google Search Volume Disparities
-
Hello,
I have been researching search volumes for awhlie now for key terms related to my industry, as well as working towards better rankings for those terms that have higher search volumes using on-page optimization, external link anchor texts, etc. The only tool I use for this research is the Google keyword tool.
Today when I was looking at the keyword difficulty for a particular term (first time I
had used this tool in my SEOMOZ account), I saw how the search volumes are listed for both broad and exact match from Google's API. As I said I've based my strategies around results from Google's keyword tool, but now I see that, for a particular term that I have been focused on, there are 15,000 searches for "broad" match and 91 for "exact" match. I just checked the keyword tool at Google and there is apparently no way to set a keyword up to search for its "exact" match search statistics. Is this only available using their API?I'm on the floor here. Does this mean I've been optimizing for a term that has less than
a hundred searches a month as opposed to 15,000? If so, can anyone here reccommend any search volume tool that can deliver a higher degree of accuracy so I can make better
judgements regarding how I will spend my time and effort regarding SEO (and in fact,
to some degree, my budget for PPC)?Any help provided will be much appreciated.
Mike
-
Glad it helped Mike. Lots of theories and beliefs about long tail. What I've found on several client sites is follow these rules to increase the number of long tail phrases you're found for each page:
- Designate two primary phrases, 2 or three words each
- Designate two or three highly related secondary phrases, 2, 3 or 4 words each
- Seed the page Title & h1 with the two primaries
- Seed the URL with one of the primaries
- Integrate each of the primaries into the content area descriptive text at least twice each in exact match sequence.
- Integrate each of the secondaries into the content area descriptive text at least once in exact match sequence.
- Use partials of those phrases at least once each in the content area descriptive text
- Of course the more content you write, the more you can seed phrases, but only where it makes sense to readers.
- Write the content in a high quality way that really sounds human
- Tightly group pages of content based on phrase relationships
When I follow these guidelines, I typically see 30% or more increase in total phrases a site is found for. Of course it's not exact science since there are so many factors in SEO. But doing it this way, where the content really comes across naturally written can result in exponential long tail phrases you didn't intentionally try to focus on figuring out beforehand.
-
I found the section in the keyword tool were you can select the match type. I use firefox/mac however and it does not show up unless you first enter something into the "include terms" section there in that left hand column. I noticed on firefox/pc it is there automatically. Thanks for pointing that out to me. Analytics has always been a weak spot in my efforts, I shall work on that. Thanks for the advice and the quick response Alan.
I also need to learn more about long tail phrases and their implications for SEO. Can you recommend any good resources that could tell me more about that?
Mike
-
mreisbeck
In the Google Keyword Tool screen, below the "categories" choices, there's an option box on the left sidebar to choose broad, exact, phrase or a combination of those.
That being said, every situation is unique - so what Google reports as a low volume exact match may be highly valuable if the majority of people searching for that phrase do so in broad phrases or "long tail" phrases. So don't be so quick to completely discount a phrase just from that data. What do your visitor conversion statistics tell you? Call to action and conversion tracking data is vital in helping make the best decisions in this kind of situation.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is 11k-30k search traffic too high for a small blog with low domain authority to compete for? Is competition all that matters?
Trying to decide on a keyword phrase for my next post. One of the two phrases I'm deciding between has 100x more traffic but the priority is wayyy higher and the competition is just one point higher (54 vs 53). I'm hesitant to write on a post that gets 11k-30k monthly volume however b/c it just seems like too much traffic for a small blog with a domain authority of only 18 to compete with. But if the competition is nearly the same and the priority is higher, should I go for it anyway? I generally go for things with lower traffic thinking I will be able to better compete. Thanks!
Keyword Research | | Omniafunction1 -
Has the keyword planner search volume metric gone crazy?
I use the search volume found in keyword planner to score and weight my keywords in a similar way as Rand showed us in this WBF. This week I've found that in many cases suddenly the singular and plural version of the keyword have the same search volume. This seems crazy to me as singular and plural is not the same, the intent is different but more importantly they behave very differently from each other when looking at their track record in Adwords (impressions, clicks, conversions, CTR, CVR etc...all different). For example, here's a screenshot of 4 keywords (singular and plural versions of 2 phrases) with search volume captured a couple of months ago. Now here's another screenshot of the same keywords taken from Keyword planner today. Any ideas why this would be happening? Does it makes sense to you? It just seems buggy to me. Thanks!
Keyword Research | | E_F0 -
Tag usage based on Google keywords
We are making a site that will be a database of publicity stunts. We used the Google Keyword tool to find a bunch of words related to this. The term itself has similar keywords such as [pr campaigns]. And also there are some derivative keywords as [bad publicity stunts], [famous publicity stunts], [celebrity publicity stunts]. Each bringing in 20-50 monthly searches for the exact term. Some concepts appear slightly differently such as [famous pr stunts] and [famous pr campaigns]. We'd love our pages to appear on as much of these keyword searches as possible (overall we expect about 3k-4k searches /month on exact matching). And we're planning to use these keywords as a our taxonomy for our post tags. That way the keyword appears in each stunt page AND there is a page for each type of publicity stunt. As a general policy, what would be the best way to write our tags?
Keyword Research | | davhad
1. 'crazy', 'famous', 'bad'.
2. 'crazy publicity stunt', 'famous publicity stunt', 'bad publicity stunt'
3. 'crazy publicity stunt', 'famous pr campaign', 'bad marketing stunt' Thanks for sharing your expertise.0 -
Google Keyword Tool Category Selector
Has anyone developed any useful techniques for using the category selector in the GKT? Perhaps in conjunction with a site URL. Always looking for something better
Keyword Research | | waynekolenchuk0 -
Is there a pro tool or google service that I can use to see which sites rank for certain terms? Without having to first identify the url's?
For example I want to see the top 20 sites in order of ranking for top keywords in my industry. Without having to know in advance the url's.
Keyword Research | | CURT-208170 -
Rank list of keywords by searches per month
Hi I would like to rank a list of keywords by searches per month in google.com.au, How could I do this?
Keyword Research | | Adsau0 -
Keywords in google's webmaster tools
how heavily do the list of keywords in google's webmaster tools reflect your ranking for those keywords? For example see this screenshot: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/39497/Screen shot 2011-06-04 at 7.22.31 PM.png we are a self storage company, and our first two keywords in google's webmaster tools are storage and self. the problem is nobody searches for self storage (from my keyword research). most people search for "storage +cityname" like "storage toronto" for example. so i guess my question would be this: would it be effective to change all the instances of "Self" on our website to "Toronto" or other city names to try to push the city names higher in google's webmaster tools keywords rank?
Keyword Research | | adriandg0