10

Jul

Google Finally Shares Actual Search Volume Numbers With the Rest of Us

Posted by: Jeremy Reither

For anyone doing business online, it’s important to know what “keywords” or “key phrases” to focus on when building or marketing your website. These terms are what people are searching for. On the internet, if you know what people are searching for, you know how to attract them to your website.

Google’s Keyword Tool has always been a great way to find out what keywords and phrases people are searching for. You just put in a keyword or phrase, and Google tells you (1) what other terms might be related, (2) how much competition there is for those terms, and (3) the relative search volume (how often people search for those terms each month). The latter two were each indicated by a green bar. The bar was smaller for low search volume; bigger for larger search volume. While definitely not exact, it has always provided invaluable information for people doing search engine marketing (SEM), or designing websites with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind. But Google just recently decided to give us what we’ve really needed – actual search volume. Actual numbers!

So, who cares? Isn’t the little green bar enough? Well, if your key search terms are “babysitting in Provo” or “Trenton Pizza” – both low competition, and low volume – you might not care so much. But as you get into more competitive arenas of search – like ‘auto insurance’ (see image) or ‘debt consolidation’ it becomes a game of inches…every bit of information helps

It’s interesting to note that Yahoo!’s keyword tool (no longer publicly available) provided search volume numbers for some time. But Yahoo!’s search volume as a search engine is only 10% of Google’s, and doesn’t reflect nearly as broad a range of users. Google is no doubt the defacto search engine for 85% of the internet. Having a little more visibility into the inner workings of that search engine can only help those of us who are actively seeking ways of eeking out every last bit of traffic from a search campaign. Unless of course it just invites more competition. So, let’s just keep this between you and me, ok?

Check out some other keyword tools we blogged about some time back.