Day 8……Revisited

freekeywords.wordtracker.com a bigger hoax than General Tso’s chicken.

If it isn’t chicken then what is it? If Wordtracker isn’t an accurate measure of traffic, what is it?

I searched over 40 terms in Wordtracker and made separate files for the search results from each term. I kept telling myself, do the search, update the spreadsheet and save the results but DON’T PASS JUDGMENT!I couldn’t help it. The wordtracker results seemed promising. Even after the Google competition exercise I was encouraged to see very little competition in my key niche markets.

Then like Hiroshima, Ed and Rob dropped a bomb that rocked me to the core. The wordtracker results are inaccurate?! What? How can this be?! Does that mean all of Dan’s work developing Wordtracker produced another useless web application!?

Of course not! While Google Trends and the “male yeast infection” benchmark are much more accurate for determining expected traffic from Google (which will turn out to be our key source of traffic, I’m sure) Wordtracker is still very important.

So then what was the point of Wordtracker? If you didn’t put your entire list of potential umbrella terms for each niche market through the Google Trend test, you missed the point. Wordtracker gave you a list of potential umbrella terms for your markets. That’s it…nothing more, nothing less. Do not worry about traffic rates reported in WordTracker.

The final and definitive answer to whether your umbrella term will produce enough traffic is Google Trends. That’s right, here I go again disagreeing with Ed and the gang.

The only criteria you should be concerned with are:

Google Search: Less than 30,000, preferably less than 25,000
Google Trends: greater than 80-100 average daily searches (a graph at least 1/5th as high
as the bottom graph line or 1/5th as long as the English language line
***when compared to “Male Yeast Infection”***

It doesn’t matter if Wordtracker only reported 2 searches a day, if you Google Trends search shows greater than 80-100 average daily searches you will generate enough traffic to be successful.

Let’s examine where this challenge is going so we can better understand what happened today.

Broad Phrase: A person searching for speed reading types speed reading into his search engine of choice. It returns 85 million results! Only the websites on the first page will most likely get trafficked so the other 84,999,990 websites fight to make it onto that page because about 2200-2400 people type some form of speed reading into Google every day! So if you have the time, money and resources to make it onto that first page it could pay off handsomely.

Phrase Match: The exact term “speed reading” only return 1.41 million websites and is search 1000-1500 times a day. Notice now both the competition and the number of searches declined by narrowing your search terms. Less competition but also less traffic.

Word tracker cannot differentiate between Broad phrase and Phrase match searches therefore its data is not accurate enough for our purposes. It also returns more than just Google search results. We are specifically focusing on Google for a reason. Remember, start small and grow big.

This is where Google Trends comes in. However, Wordtracker DOES give you more ideas for your Phrase match. See how they work together!?

So ideally, you’d like to get into a phrase match where the Google competition search returns less than 25,000 webpages and Google Trends shows at least 80 searches a day. Then you target that phrase match, picking off the competition 1 by 1 as you make your way to the top of the Google search for your phrase match.

From there you can use that success to begin utilize other SEO techniques to get more traffic from broad phrase searches and begin working your way through the 1.4 million. The key is that you already have a base of traffic from your phrase match searches.

So it may not be chicken but it tastes so damn good I don’t care!

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