One of the biggest problems all internet marketers face while doing keyword research is that most depend on Google and the information they provide via their keyword tool.
Many newbies and even experienced marketers take those numbers as is and they fail to realize that in most cases, the true search numbers are much lower than the numbers you will see with Google’s keyword tool.
As far as I know, this problem can’t be fixed by using the typical keyword research tools such as market samurai, as most of these tools use the Google database.
However, there is a way for you to find out the true search volume of any keyword or keyword phrase and I am going to share it with you. As far as I know, this method is the most accurate one you can use and I am sure that by the end of this post you will agree with that claim.
All you need to do in order to get the real search volume of any specific keyword is to simply run an Adwords campaign for that keyword only.
When setting up the campaign you should follow this “rules”:
- Don’t target the Content Network. We only want the search volumes of the search network so make sure to focus the campaign only on that.
- Be sure to bid high enough in order for your ad to appear in the first page. It doesn’t matter on what position in the first page, but it must be among the top 7 positions in order to appear in the first page.
- Use bad Ad Copy. If you didn’t figure it out yet, running the campaign will cost you money. You will be paying for every click so in order to minimize costs you should try to use bad ad copy so the clicks will be at the minimum.
- Run the campaign for a minimum of 3 days. It is better to let the campaign run for a full week as this will provide you with better and more accurate search volume numbers, but since you will be paying for every click on your ad, you may want to save some money and run it for only 3 days.
After the campaign is set and live, all you need to do is to take the number of impressions you received and that is the true search volume for that specific keyword.
If you ran the campaign for 3 days than multiply the impression count by 10 and you will get a much more accurate search volume estimate than the numbers you see with the Google keyword tool.
If you want even more accurate numbers than run the campaign for a full week and than multiply the impression count by 4.
Keep in mind that after you get the results, this will not be the number of visitors you will get to your site. What I mean is that if a keyword has 1000 exact match searches a month, than don’t except to get 1000 visitors to your site if you are ranking number one in Google.
The following image will demonstrate the estimate traffic each position on the first page of Google search results will get by showing the click distribution:
This method is not new and it is being used by many SEO companies and internet marketers in order to find the true search volumes for specific keywords. Although this method will cost you money to implement, you should think about how much money and time it can save you.
If you will trust the numbers you see while using the Google keyword tool there will be a good chance that you will target a keyword that will not get any traffic. You will only learn this after going through the entire process of setting up your website and getting it to number #1 on Google.
If done right, this method shouldn’t cost you more than a few bucks and in my opinion it is more then worth the time and money it can save you.
So, what do you think? Did you know about this method? Do you know about a better way to find out keywords true search volume? Feel free to share your thoughts by commenting.
I strongly believe in search engine traffic than direct traffic. And making revenue only through the traffic i obtain via Search Engines. Thanks for the great article by the way.
Robin recently posted..WP Robot Discount Code 91 Off from 220
Ok this method is ok but the trick here is to load Long lists of longtails, thousands of them, on [exact match], that way your impressions show the actual keywords.
If you use this technique on broad match it wont really give you anything useful.
The other thing is that having done this, and found some terms you want to actually optimise on, it is worth running targeted campaigns just on your target ist of keywords to see which convert, then go after the money makers rather than the traffic bringers…
Jez recently posted..Google De-Values Links
Hi Jez.
I don’t see it the way you do. What I meant is that after you have done your keyword research and you found a specific keyword phrase you want to target, than you can run an Adwords campaign in order to truly estimate the search volume that keyword phrase will get.
If I understand you correctly, doing this using thousands of longtail keywords will cost too much and I don’t see how that is useful.
The method I use is to find specific longtails, or trafficked terms you have missed in your initial KW research.
By bidding low so you appear at the bottom of the page, you do not attract too many clicks and so you do not spend too much.
This is really an alternative to using broad match on a generic term, where your impressions will show under the high level term. By loading longtails on exact match you can get a better picture of exactly which terms are getting the impressions.
If you just want to exact match the stuff you already know about you can do that, but you wont find anything new.
KW research tools are very limited, none of them are very accurate, none of them really allow you to drill down into the longtails.
Jez recently posted..Google De-Values Links