Estimating Search Volume An Impossibility?

[94501]

I use Moz's handy Keyword Difficulty Tool to get a relative feel for difficulty and traffic and specif competition.

At the same time, my experience is that a term may show a local (U.S.) search volume of, for instance, 30 visits and in the end produce hundreds of visits for position #3. This is of course accomplished through the miracle of all the other searches the page may be judged by Google to be relevant for. Hundreds at times and some times few if any.

Here is my two part question:

• What tools or steps do you use to get a better handle on this on the front side of going for a term?

• What tools or steps do you use to broaden the meaning to related terms/searches over time?

Thanks... Darcy

[GlobeRunner]

Darcy,

For whatever reason, Google really doesn't want to give us the keyword search data that they have. However, Microsoft is actually taking a different approach, where they give us the ACTUAL search numbers, and even will predict it in the future. If you have access to MSN AdCenter, you can get that data. I prefer to use the Bing Advertising Intelligence to pull the data into MS Excel and then crunch the numbers from there. You can start with a keyword list from Google AdWords, put the data into MS Excel, and then get the real numbers of queries right there in Excel. Then, you can calculate possible Google search queries by multiplying by their current market share percentage.

[JaneCopland]

Hi Darcy,

What are you using to determine how many visits you get from a particular term? Google is no longer showing the vast majority of referring keyword data, so I just wanted to be clear on how you're determining how many visits a term brings (I assume you are looking at the total organic traffic to the page, hence mentioning related terms).

[94501]

Hi Jane,

Thanks for the message. I look at it like the page has to attempt some particular term that is probably part of some galaxy of meaning, but then what that url produces is the measure... not what that particular keyword phrase produces as that is impossible to say and no doubt includes a variety of related search terms.

So, if one uses Moz's keyword tool and it shows Bing/exact/local volume is 32 visits for "zesty pizza sauce," which I then target and get to #3 (made up example), maybe I get 10 visits, maybe I get 100 visits, maybe I get 1000 visits per month on that url.

How can I get a better insight into this on the front side before investing the time/effort?

Thanks... Darcy

[JaneCopland]

Hi Darcy,

I see what you're saying.

My former company did this internally - the process we used was for competitive analysis, but it did provide an estimated traffic score for ALL the relevant keywords in a niche or an entire market. I wrote a little about this process at the beginning of this blog post, so you might find it helpful for a general idea on the subject. Sadly they do not provide this tool for external use: http://www.ayima.com/seo-knowledge/competitive-backlink-analysis.html

So - we were estimating the amount of traffic a site could expect to receive in the pizza sauce market by doing the following things:

1. Using the Google Adwords tool to compile a list of between 50 and a couple of hundred relevant terms in the market
2. Downloading those terms and their estimated monthly search volumes
3. Looking at where our chosen site or sites ranks for all of the terms. We stop crawling rankings after 30 results because no site is likely to get traffic from a lower position than 30th
4. Assigning a probable click-through rate for each ranking the site has. That is, the site should receive around 25% of the predicted monthly traffic for a term if it ranks first for that term. I think we were using 10% for second, 6% for third... we got these figures both from our own data, taken from a lot of client ranking and traffic data, and from leaked search engine click-through figures
5. The end result is a traffic score, which you see in the second column on the chart in the blog post I link to here
6. Done across every term in the market, for every ranking site, we have a list of the strongest performing sites in any one market. The post's example is housing in the UK

HOWEVER: this has proven to be NOT an exact science by any means for true traffic. The use of these reports was more to compare sites' visibility to each other: it's not likely that rightmove.co.uk received 315,000 visits from organic search in the month we ran this report. However, findaproperty.com probably did receive around 80% of rightmove.co.uk's organic traffic based upon their difference in visibility. The actual numbers could well have been lower or higher.

Unfortunately, this is the best method I know of for looking at traffic potential across an entire market. SearchMetrics does a similar market share job as Ayima's internal tool, but again it is for the purpose of site performance review rather than keyword traffic prediction.

[94501]

Hi Jane,

Wow, lots of great ideas in there.

Wow also, that sounds like a lot of work for my situation, as I'm dealing with a very large number of pages and possible terms for a community site that is about a lot of things and has a lot content.

If there aren't enough hours in the day to do that kind of analysis on the amount of stuff I have to deal with, what about the second part of my question... any tips on broadening the ranking possibilities for the related terms on that one url?

Thanks... Darcy

[JaneCopland]

Hi Darcy,

Are you asking how to better optimise the page for terms related to the core keyword? Just trying to be clear on what you're needing with that.

If that's the goal, I would use the Google Adwords keyword research tool to find related terms. If you haven't seen the interface yet, a query will bring up hundreds of related terms ([pizza recipes] brings up 801 related searches, but you'd need to do a quick sort through to get rid of terms with very low search volume or terms that aren't really relevant):<a> http://i.imgur.com/9TIhZRv.png</a>

I'd then manually review the page / section of the website for opportunities to write about or expand on the most valuable terms, and use the page grading tool within Moz Analytics to take a look at how well the pages are optimised for each high-priority term you choose.

Cheers,

Jane

[94501]

Hi Jane,

Thanks for asking for a clarification.

To me it seems like search has progressed from being more of a word game, how high one can rank on pretty much the one term, to a meaning game. In the meaning game, one might be going for "zesty pizza sauce." but in the end the page will hopefully produce for dozens or hundreds of related terms. If one is using adwords and finds hundreds of related terms, how best to broaden the pages appeal to that large number of other terms? I've already given up on having easily available/accurate insight into estimating what a url might do in total, short of the in-depth (and excellent) process you explained.

As an aside, I wonder how the keyword difficulty tool could be made more useful for all those related terms.

Thanks! Cheers,

Darcy

[JaneCopland]

Hi Darcy,

If one is using adwords and finds hundreds of related terms, how best to broaden the pages appeal to that large number of other terms?

Generally, Google is quite good at understanding semantics, related terms and meaning, and can deduce (for example) that "zesty pizza sauce" might be a good page for someone who searches for "spicy pizza sauce", even though the two aren't exactly the same thing. For instance, take a search I did this morning: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=iphone+holder+for+car&oq=iphone+holder+for+car&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l2j69i60j0l2.324j0j9&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8

The first two results have "mount" boldened instead of "holder", because in this instance Google understands that although I searched for "holder", "mount" is the same thing.

To add to the likelihood that Google will pick up a page for relevant terms, you need a decent amount of text content (nothing crazy, but let's say a hundred words or so describing the pizza sauce and its ingredients, including "spices" or similar related terms to the adjectives like "spicy" you'd also like the page to be relevant for).

There is no great return in trying to make one page rank for absolutely everything. Taking another example, SimplySwim's competition page ranks for [racing swimwear] (http://www.simplyswim.com/departments/PopularSearches/CompetitionSwimwear.aspx) but its home page ranks for the similar query of [training swimsuit]. Whether you are looking at just one page for a wide range of queries or multiple pages should be decided on a case by case basis, but a good rule is to decide whether some terms are synonyms or similar enough in meaning / intent to make one resource suitable for a user. In the case of zesty versus spicy, perhaps. Training versus racing swimwear, no.

[94501]

Hi Jane,

I really appreciate your taking the time to go over all this with me. Thanks, again!

Cheers... Darcy