Search Terms, Competition, and Keyword Metrics

It actually brought up something that has been on my mind for a long time: What is Keyword Popularity?

Never one to be accused of being concise, here are my comments to that post. Yes, I do realize some points are bit off-topic. But hey, when you're on a a rant, there's no time to be focused!

Dan,

I'm glad you've written the last two posts.

Often in this industry I get frustrated with the focus on rankings for “popular” keywords as a measurement of success. Recently, I was putting together a case study for a new SEM brand for my company and felt compelled to include the rankings achieved for certain keywords. To some degree, I felt they should not necessarily be included (although they were great) because they did not express actual acquisitions but “potential” for acquisitions.

I think the focus on rankings as a measure of success is going to be one of the things that leads to client disillusionment with this business. As clients begin to say: “So what? Where are the conversions?” the reliance on ranking as a measure of success will begin to look more and more empty.

Why? Rankings are worthless if they don’t lead to conversions. Example, one client we’ve be talking with had been using 1P (uggh) and showed me a ranking report and that’s when it really clicked for me. I asked the client “what does this mean to you? What does it mean to your business?” No answer was given.

How does this tie into this post? Both of your metrics calculations are based to some degree on “Popularity”. As more people enter the search marketing business I believe that popularity measured as “the number of searches in a given month across all search engines” is becoming more and more skewed.

One reason, as you said “determining the true popularity of a search term is impossible, but there are tools that let us make a reasonable estimate.” Often some in this business will simply rely on keyword tools (of which there are only a few) to determine what exactly is a "popular keyword".

While keyword tools, etc are great as a starting point, I think the reliance on these tools by people in this industry is creating a false sense of what keyword popularity actually is. I wouldn’t be surprised if more that a third of the searches performed on search engines for certain terms are performed by people checking their ranking for certain terms deemed "popular" by these tools. They’re providing a false sense of what is actually a popular keyword.

I was just discussing my theory of keyword popularity with the owner of my company and he likened keyword popularity determination to the stock market. Imagine a stockbroker is convincing all his clients to buy a certain stock because he believes it will be “big” and go up in value in the future. As a result of his efforts, he creates a demand for the stock and it does goes up in value because of the purchases he has made. What results is that the stockbroker by creating the demand for this stock pushed up the market value of this stock.

I am still of the school that believes the most relevant keywords are mined from the log files of sites after they have been optimized for their target industry. Great web site search engine optimization will increase the keyword pool of industry relevant keywords for any site. Interestingly enough, I find that the terms that lead to the greatest acquisitions are not the ones deemed “popular”. (I’ve actually been testing keyword tool generated popular keyword acquisition, vs. log file generated popular keywords acquisitions.).

In the end it will be those in verticals with access to log files across their market that will know what true keyword “popularity” is and/or those in this industry that can figure out what the true margin of error is in “popularity”, that will be the most successful.