SEO Search Phrases in Google

When originally planning out to write 50 or so posts about “SEO”, the top 5 phrases that were “relevant” to Google’s Adwords Keyword tool were:

1. SEO Basics
2. SEO Tools
3. What is SEO
4. SEO Companies
5. Small Business SEO

But today, the list changed about a week+ after I started this series of SEO blog posts.  It’s now:

1. What is SEO (which was 3rd)
2. SEO Tools (which stayed at #2)
3. SEO Software
4. SEO Book
5. Learn SEO

“SEO Basics” was displaced to #11 with “SEO Companies” being displaced to off the top 800 relevant keyword phrases for “SEO” and “Small Business SEO” now listed #51.

As I mentioned in the previous post about “SEO Companies” at the end, the Keyword Tool seems to pump out suggestions and data inconsistently depending on the day you search for the keyword(s) you want relevant ideas as a response to an initial one you punch into the tool.  I’m thinking it may be because they do update the database frequently and search behavior changes daily.  However, I thought the data was based on more history and didn’t change as much as it recently did.

I was planning on blogging about “small business seo”, but now will possibly wait until after the 50th post to do that.

For today though, I thought we would simply examine the number of searches from a broad and also an exact basis.  Again, for the folks who are new to the Keyword tool, “broad match searches” mean: The sum of the search volumes for the keyword idea, related grammatical forms, synonyms and related words whereas “exact match searches” mean the search volume for that keyword idea.

For example, there are approximately 9,140,000 searches on the phrase “what is seo” around the globe in the “broad sense” whereas it’s only searched EXACTLY 12,100 times globally with the 3 words in a row: “what is seo.”  That’s just a tad bit above 1/10th of 1% of the searches in the broad sense.  So, if you were expecting 9+ million searches or a significant portion of that number for ranking #1 for the phrases “what is seo”, you would be in for a nasty surprise.

“SEO Tools” is searched 165,000 times a monthly globally in the broad sense, but exactly 33,100 times a month [exactly] searched “SEO tools.”  This [exact] vs. broad difference is much better in terms of less discrepancy between the two numbers, but it’s still just 20% of the broad amount of searches.  So, again, you would be in for a bad surprise hoping for the larger number.  And if you narrow it down to just U.S. searches, it’s only sought after approximately 6,600 times a month in America.