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Honestly?
For obvious keywords I reckon that as much as half the searches could be made up of Keyword Ranking tests done by all the people trying to rank highly for that keyword.
It’s really clear when you start drilling down to less frequently searched phrases and the you see a REALLY weird phrase pop out as searched for 50-150 times.
Many of these number have to be an automated search …
As much as half I think is a but of a drastic estimate in my opinion but I guess a good number of the searches are keyword queries for SEO purposes. But I think about 20-30% can be discounted for certain terms and then you can expect about 70%-80% of that traffic if you´re number one.
I agree that if you drill down and see “golden dolphin play now casino viagra” is not a natural search.
There are many different reasons that keyword suggestion tools are inaccurate. I will cover what I consider the most important skewing factors for Overture and WordTracker. Getting an understanding of why things get skewed will let you more accurately gauge the true number of searches behind any given keyword:
Overture:
This is the most susceptible to artificial search inflation. Hypothetical: Suppose you decide to compete for the keyword online casino gambling. You check it every day (30 searches a month). But your other 50+ competitors are also checking their ranking daily. That is over 1,500 searches a month done that would never produce a single sale. So if overture claims there are 2,329 searches a month, over half of it could easily be non-sense.MatchDriver: singulars and plurals are for the most part counted together, so when you look up the term casino and casinos, they show the same number of searches, but really each term contributes a percentage of the traffic to the number you see. There is also a type of quirky broad matching, where overture alphabetizes the word order of some searches and lumps various searches together. You can do search for MatchDriver to get a more detailed idea of what it does.
For WordTracker
This tool gets its data from a wide array of different small engines. It takes the numbers it gets from these, and adjusts this for the sample size of Google. This does not work because they do not have a large enough sample size to be accurate. In other words, if a small SEs get 10 searches of any given keyword, and those have 1/200 the traffic of google, they will have to multiply that 10 by 200 making their prediction 2,000 searches per month, but if two more people would have made more searches on those small SEs, then their number would be 2,400! Not very accurate.Best Regards,
Nicolas Johnson
Gambling Wages Assitant Affiliate Manager
MSN Messenger nicolas_1875 at hotmail dot comSome good info there, Nicholas!
I agree, that if that´s the way Wordtracker arrives at their numbers then they are pretty rubbish. That´s why I´ll stick to the free tools.
All these assertions that you´re making though should be made under the assumption of a fiercly competitve/frequently researched market such as gambling in the US or UK. If it was the same industry in Denmark for instance I would assume that the terms and volumes would be much more accurate.
It’s impossible to know exactly how much traffic you will receive from a keyword position. First, the data is taken from Yahoo, so how do you translate that to Google? Second, the number of people that click on your link is dependent on what your title and description says. That said, I’ve seen usability studies that say the number 1 ranked site gets clicked about 35% of the time, down to the #10 ranked site being clicked 2-5% of the time.
That said, I’ve seen usability studies that say the number 1 ranked site gets clicked about 35% of the time, down to the #10 ranked site being clicked 2-5% of the time.
Interesting. It will also depend on the quality of your competitor´s sites. If you are competing for a deserted market like underwater basket weaving and the top spot is the only site that has real content whereas the other 9 only have superficial forum questions, your click through rate will increase exponentially.
As has been mentioned, estimating the volume of keyword traffic is probably impossible or near impossible at best.
