Analyzing Google Adwords Keyword Selector Tool Traffic Estimator

For anyone interested in doing business online, knowing how many individuals search for a specific keyword is crucial. If I’m selling kids shoes online and only 100 people search for it on Google, then most probably I’m not going to succeed – even if my site is ranked at the top. I’ll be lucky if 10 people out of those 100 buy my shoes.

To know how many people search for a specific keyword, there are many tools available. But the most trustworthy one is Google’s Adwords Keyword Selector Tool. Because it is pulling the data from its search engine.

In the SEO community, it is common knowledge that Google’s Adwords traffic estimation tool is at best inaccurate. But no one really knows how Google measures these numbers. According to Google, it is “averaging” each month’s search volume across its search engine platforms. But for a long time I’ve been suspicious that these numbers are not real. So, finally I decided to conduct a test.

I selected six websites that we have access to their Analytics data and are ranking within the top five positions on Google search results – world-wide – for somewhat competitive keywords. The tables below illustrates my findings.

The first table are the keywords in Exact format. Which means we’re only looking at Google’s traffic for these keywords when the exact phrase is searched for as well as the traffic for the same keyword:

The following table are for the same keywords but this time using the “Phrase” selection. In other words, the searcher could have used the same phrase in conjunction with other words:

As you see the number of people visiting the site is much less than the number of monthly search volume (Traffic Estimate) regardless of whether we searched for “Phrase” or “Exact” keywords.

It is less likely that less than 10% of those searching for any given search querry are going to visit the top ranking sites.

Therefore, my conclusion is that the Traffic Estimate is blown out of proportion. 

But by how much?

Looking at the numbers, we can say that these numbers are blown out of proportion by 3 times and up to 100 times depending on the search query.

Where is the success in SEO?

Another important factor is that we’re able to generate a few times more traffic to our clients’ sites than the total search volume for their main keyword(s). For example, doctorjennifer.com’s main keyword is Minneapolis Orthodontist. But this keyword only receives 58 searches each month (if that was accurate). On the other hand, the site is receiving over 1,000 hits through organic search results. The reason is that we are not just focusing on the MAIN keyword. We work on a pool of different keywords related to each site/business. Doctorjennifer.com for instance has over 100 keywords we’re targeting.

For those clients that care very much for having that top ranking placement on Google for their main keyword I have to say that that is not so important compared to being ranked for many of their keywords that may not be as popular.

In other words if our client is not ranking at the top for Minneapolis Orthodontist, they’re just losing a very small fraction of the search volume; however, there are 50 other keywords (Minneapolis Children Orthodontist, St. Paul Invisalign, Best Orthodontist in Eagan, etc.) that the client has a top five ranking. The site is going to get traffic and business from Google generated through secondary keywords.

We measure our success by the number of targeted visitors who find our clients’ sites using their keywords – main keywords as well as secondary keywords.

Keyword Translation – How Effective Is It For Your Multilingual Website?

How good is keyword translation for the localization of a website? Assuming you have a good translator. The response is simple: In the vast majority of the cases, plainly lousy.

Last week I had some international keyword research request for a customer. I got 45 keywords from the customer, and was requested to find the corresponding keywords in French and German. Now, while I do not usually offer the website translation into these two languages for quality reasons (though I have a degree in German & finished the French high school), keyword research is a different story. I performed the translation of the keywords, then just for double-checking I paid some native language colleagues to also translate the same keywords. No big surprises, my translation was correct, but they came up with 3 different keyword translations for German and 4 for French. Good, so I had some more. Unfortunately, 5 of the English keywords had the same translation in German, so I had to discard them.

So I had the plain translation of the keywords, and I went to see how suitable they were for the search engines. I checked first the German keyword translation. Disaster! Of the 40 translated keywords, not less than 22 (over 50%!) had absolutely NO searches. The rest amounted to some 255,000 searches/month, but unfortunately 99% of those searches were based on just 11 of the translated keyword. I attach below the table, obviously with the keywords removed so as not to impact my customer.

German keyword translation and associated search results.

Now, I was paid for keyword research, not for translation. My research found some 86 additional keywords, with a total local search traffic of 309,000 searches/month. Disregarding the low traffic keywords (as this customer is not a newcomer that needs to scrape the bottom of the barrel), I ended up recommending a total of 46 keywords for main targeting, with a total local traffic of 458,000 searches/month. Of these, just 24% were the direct translation of customer-provided keywords.

Are these keyword translation results an anomaly? Well, let’s take the second set, this time translated into French. Of the 44 translated keywords (some were repetitions, but we got alternative translations), fully 30 of them (68%!) had ZERO searches! Even worse, for the remaining 14 keywords there were a measly 40,000 searches/month, with 5 keywords taking 91% of those searches! I show the table below, again with the keywords in question removed.

Search results of direct French keyword translation

The results were truly amazing. Perhaps there was no market for the products of this company in France? Of course I had to do the keyword research to find out. I eventually found additional 147 keywords directly related to this market, with around 400,000 local searches/month. After removing the non-commercial keywords and low search traffic ones, I eventually recommended a total of 58 keywords, with a total local search volume of 351,000 searches/month. Of these, only 5 keywords with around 10% of the total traffic came from the translation of the original customer keywords.

Summarizing the used translated keywords:

Keyword translation search results

The usefulness (or lack of it) of the translated keywords becomes more evident in the following table:

Translated vs. used keywords

It becomes evident that the translation of keywords in the original language does not necessarily provide useful keywords in the target language. But it is more interesting to see the local search results for the different localized keywords:

Localized keyword search volume

Thus, the results of this exercise show that the direct translation of keywords is usually not providing the necessary SEO juice. This is consistent with my professional experience, but I am slightly surprised that the German translation actually achieved such high results.

Basically, what happens is that a translator is not necessarily knowledgeable in SEO, and may not be capable to identify high-search terms that one could target in his localized web pages. And to target barely 10% of the possible keywords is -to say the least- a waste of money if you are going to translate your website. Thus, you need someone that is capable not only of translating the website, but also who can do the necessary keyword research that will allow you to target the whole destination market and make your website translation a success.

Quick tips: How To Select a Good Long Tail Keyword

Long tail keywords are the key to short-term success.  A long tail keyword with little competition and significant traffic means immediate success. But one thing that people don’t realize is that there is more than just low competition and traffic.
In a previous post about keyword basics I explained already that a long tail keyword consists of a sequence of keywords that contains the master keyword. Thus, instead of targeting “widget”, you target “long blue modern widget”, or something similar. But what most people don’t realize is that at the same time its targets all substrings and all words inside this long tail keyword.
Long-tail keyword
I am always surprised to see that people do simply not understand how valuable this is. For example, take the long-tail keyword “foreign used cars for sale”. It has a global monthly traffic of just 480 searches. But do you realize that the individual segments constitute keywords of their own? “foreign used cars” has 3600 monthly searches,  “used cars for sale” has 1.5 million, “cars for sale” has 6.1 million, “used cars” has 11 million, “foreign” has 16.6 million, “cars” has 151 million and “for sale” has 185 million global searches/month. So this measly long-tail keyword targets in reality over 372 million searches/month.
Now, it is true that words such as “cars” have a ferocious competition. But while you build up your SEO for this long tail keyword, you are also improving your ranking in the searches for “foreign used cars”, which is much more achievable. And also for all other keywords that I have mentioned before. That it’s a very long shot? For these high-competition keywords, yes. But that needs not to be true for other search terms.
So, when you select your long-tail keyword, ensure the following:
It has low competitionIt has significant trafficIt contains inside other related keywords that also have low competition and significant traffic
Select this kind of long-tail keyword, and you will see how your SEO effort multiplies itself without doing anything else – because every single time you will be promoting all those keywords at the same time!

Analyzing Google Adwords Keyword Selector Tool Traffic Estimator

For anyone interested in doing business online, knowing how many individuals search for a specific keyword is crucial. If I’m selling kids shoes online and only 100 people search for it on Google, then most probably I’m not going to succeed – even if my site is ranked at the top. I’ll be lucky if 10 people out of those 100 buy my shoes.

To know how many people search for a specific keyword, there are many tools available. But the most trustworthy one is Google’s Adwords Keyword Selector Tool. Because it is pulling the data from its search engine.

In the SEO community, it is common knowledge that Google’s Adwords traffic estimation tool is at best inaccurate. But no one really knows how Google measures these numbers. According to Google, it is “averaging” each month’s search volume across its search engine platforms. But for a long time I’ve been suspicious that these numbers are not real. So, finally I decided to conduct a test.

I selected six websites that we have access to their Analytics data and are ranking within the top five positions on Google search results – world-wide – for somewhat competitive keywords. The tables below illustrates my findings.

The first table are the keywords in Exact format. Which means we’re only looking at Google’s traffic for these keywords when the exact phrase is searched for as well as the traffic for the same keyword:

The following table are for the same keywords but this time using the “Phrase” selection. In other words, the searcher could have used the same phrase in conjunction with other words:

As you see the number of people visiting the site is much less than the number of monthly search volume (Traffic Estimate) regardless of whether we searched for “Phrase” or “Exact” keywords.

It is less likely that less than 10% of those searching for any given search querry are going to visit the top ranking sites.

Therefore, my conclusion is that the Traffic Estimate is blown out of proportion. 

But by how much?

Looking at the numbers, we can say that these numbers are blown out of proportion by 3 times and up to 100 times depending on the search query.

Where is the success in SEO?

Another important factor is that we’re able to generate a few times more traffic to our clients’ sites than the total search volume for their main keyword(s). For example, doctorjennifer.com’s main keyword is Minneapolis Orthodontist. But this keyword only receives 58 searches each month (if that was accurate). On the other hand, the site is receiving over 1,000 hits through organic search results. The reason is that we are not just focusing on the MAIN keyword. We work on a pool of different keywords related to each site/business. Doctorjennifer.com for instance has over 100 keywords we’re targeting.

For those clients that care very much for having that top ranking placement on Google for their main keyword I have to say that that is not so important compared to being ranked for many of their keywords that may not be as popular.

In other words if our client is not ranking at the top for Minneapolis Orthodontist, they’re just losing a very small fraction of the search volume; however, there are 50 other keywords (Minneapolis Children Orthodontist, St. Paul Invisalign, Best Orthodontist in Eagan, etc.) that the client has a top five ranking. The site is going to get traffic and business from Google generated through secondary keywords.

We measure our success by the number of targeted visitors who find our clients’ sites using their keywords – main keywords as well as secondary keywords.

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