Keyword Difficulty search volumes - frequency?

[crackingmedia]

Hi, first post on the Moz Q&A forum.

The Keyword Difficulty tool reports "Bing Search Volume (Exact Match)" for Local and Global, but nowhere can I see what frequency these numbers are for.

Does this mean daily, weekly or monthly? I cannot find that anywhere in the moz pro documentation

Thanks in advance for your help with this.

Peter

[carlod]

Hi Peter,

From memory (and unless Moz have made changes) they are monthly search totals. Unless you're specifically targeting Bing users though I suggest you check the keywords against Google Keyword Planner (free). Double checking in Google will help confirm this (they should be in the same ballpark).

Let me know if that helps

Carlo

[Peterli]

Hi Carlo and Peter,

Thanks for the reply.  That can certainly be the case and you could be right  The totals are aggregates of monthly, however our tool might use a different schedule in terms of Bing returns.  This is simply a convenience we provide our users, since the keyword difficulty tool's core function is to show how difficult/competitive a certain phase/kw is, keyword volume is not a factor in our calculations and is done independent of keyword search volume.  You do have a great point about the Google Keyword Planner, unfortunately to achieve the volume and request we have to do, we would need the Adwords API which do not have access to at the moment

For the full story on our Adwords Adventures, you can read about it here:

http://moz.com/community/q/loss-of-google-adwords-api

In the meantime, we definitely recommend our users to check out Google's Adwords tool at: adwords.google.com since that is a free tool at the individual agreement level  I hope this helps!

Best,

Peter
Moz Help Team.

[crackingmedia]

Hi Carlo & Peter

Many thanks for your answers on this. My apologies as I thought I had replied to say thank you.

Just another question relating to this.

The search volumes are reported as "Exact Match Local/Global Volume (on Bing)", I understand that search volumes are now being calculated as on Bing because of restrictions Google have placed on access to their search volume data.

In this respect though we know that in the UK Google represents about 90% of total search volume with Bing providing about 6% (see http://www.superbsearch.co.uk/search-volumes-in-the-uk-google-vs-bing-vs-yahoo/)

So is there a way of estimating search volume on Google based on these percentages?

For example, if there are 13 exact match local searches for a keyword reported for Google, is it reasonable to estimate searches on Google as 13 / 6% (Bing) x 90% (Google) which equals 195 exact match local searches per month? This assumption/estimate is also based on the search keyword being relevant to a UK market and therefore likely to include no or minimal searches from other countries. Is that reasonable.

Any thoughts / feedback on this would be appreciated.

Peter

[carlod]

Hi Peter,

It sounds like you are asking whether there is a high correlation between Bing and Google searches. You could certainly test it out manually for your keywords and see if this ratio holds true over a 12 month period.

I would advise against it however as I know there are differences in user demographics and audience behaviour when you compare Bing to Google, which could lead to inconsistency across keywords . You don't want to make sourcing your data based on a ratio a habit, as doing so could come back and bite you in the long-run.

Here's an informative article from WordStream comparing Bing to Google in terms of behaviour and demographics.

Would be interested to hear your thoughts, as well as what Peter Li has to say about this

Hope that helps.

Carlo

[crackingmedia]

Hi Carlo

Thank you for your reply and a really helpful one at that. Very much appreciated.

What you say makes sense and I agree largely. I guess though that if Bing is showing 13 exact match searches per month then you can at least assume Google will deliver more and especially if targeting in the UK for a UK audience where the percentage of search volume Google enjoys is a lot more than Bing which seems to be more popular in the US whilst being a long way short of out ranking Google.

When providing some sort of expectation for customers who want their pages optimised then I think it is reasonable to give them some sort of metric. It's wise of course not to inflate that too much because of the reasons you have outlined, but maybe an uplift based on having a 50% market reach (rather than the UK's 90%) for Google would still be a conservative estimate?

Of course search volume does not equal click volume which is important for customers to understand. An estimate of 42% clicks from searches for a number 1 ranked site is a number I have heard, with that number decreasing the lower the page ranks on the first page. I don't know if that is accurate but it sounds reasonable.

Thanks again,

Peter