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[Note:  Continued from the Keyword Competition sub-tutorial, part two of our Keyword Research Tutorial]

Keyword Popularity

The fourth question: popularity
Theoretically, this question should be easy to answer.  All we need are some stats of how many times people have actually searched for a given term in the past to get some sort of reasonable assessment of how popular a term will be in the future.  In reality, though, it’s not quite that simple. 

For starters, there is no central source of data which can provide us with statistics which relates to the internet as a whole.  Rather, we have to rely on various sources of data, each of which relates to a limited percentage of search traffic.  Secondly, not every organization is as forth-coming with their data as others.  For instance, Google offers relative data, but no actual numbers.  I.e, they will tell you relatively speaking how popular a keyword is, but they won’t actually tell us how many people searched for that term.  Thirdly, often times the data that is available is skewed for one reason or another (as is explained in our Keyword Tools Tutorial).  Finally, we aren’t really interested in how popular a keyword is in general, but rather how popular a keyword is in relationship to your product or services.  However, many keywords can be used to search for numerous, un-related products or services.  Take the phrase cell phone.  This is a rather popular term, with Yahoo Search reporting over four million searches a month in the Yahoo network alone.  However, not everyone is searching for the same thing. Some people are looking to buy a cell phone, some to rent.  Some people are interested in a cell phone plan, while others are looking for a cell phone directory.  Therefore, this number of four million is somewhat misleading as there are not four million relevant searches.  Of course, at four million searches a month that fact might not be so significant, but most keywords aren’t nearly that popular.  If, for example, a keyword has only 10,000 or 1,000 searches per month than this fact becomes more important.

Given the various problems with statistical data with regards to the popularity of a keyword it is worth while cross checking data from a number of sources.  Otherwise, these figures should be used as an approximation of the popularity of the phrase not as hard facts.  Also, it is worth noting the relative popularity of a keyword to other, similarly related keywords.  Often times there are closely related words which are both worth optimizing for.  If you notice that one phrase seems to be more popular than the other then it is most likely worth while to optimize for that phrase (assuming, of course, that there is no significant difference in the competition for that keyword).

Next tutorial:  How to build a Keyword List
Previous tutorial:  Keyword Competition

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This tutorial written by:
Moshe Morris
President of SEMBasics
Chief Research Analyst at Internet Marketing Initiative (www.internetmi.com)

The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.