Is the Adwords Tool always right?

[JimmyRed]

I didn't want to make another "I'm on the first page but am getting no traffic thread" but I'm flat out of ideas of whats happening.

My site is ranking first page for a 33000/month keyword and only getting 1 to 2 hits per day. Weirdly though, I get about 6-8 directs, and that was from the instant I bought the domain.

I thought maybe it was because I wasn't ranking in the countries where the searches come from. A majority (~40%) is from the UK, where I rank at 8. Every other country I sit at 6-7. (And no I wasn't still logged in to google )

I thought maybe I had misread the phrase/exact data. Nope - 27000 phrase and 22000 exact.

My only other thought is that those 33100 are are a total of all the people searching for "mykeyphrase random other words" or things like "how to mykeyphrase", where I don't rank.

What's you guys experience with this?

[judelive1986]

I really don't have any idea about that, I just think of a keyword and sometime I use marketing samurai to find my key word..I haven't encountered this kind of problem yet.

[keenstyle1]

What's the URL?

[JimmyRed]

mykeyphrase.com

Got real lucky

[SEOArbiter]

Do you have Google Analytics setup? Is it not showing any traffic from that keyword?

I think you mentioned you were ranked 6 or 7. Remember, the vast majority of clicks goes to the 1st position, then #2 and #3.

Are there local business results or video results? If so, that means less clcks as well.

It could also be the keyword. Maybe people search the keyword and then refine the keyword even more.

Plus, your search result could simply not be enticing enough. Although, if you have the keyword as the domain name that should help the CTR a lot. I'd check the title, maybe try making it more user-friendly to entice more clicks and put your keyword at the end.

It's hard to say unless you post the site and keyword.

[InternetMarketingIQ]

It's just an estimate and it depends on if you are looking at exact phrase or broad search.

San Diego
San Diego Hotels
San Diego Restaurants...

You probably already know that San Diego would be counted 1 time for each occurrence.

AOL did research on clickthroughs and #1 was good for about 44% if I recall. By the time you drop to #6 on the first page you are looking at about 5-6%.

Now you have to factor in how good your own Title and Description tags are.

So I'd expect more traffic than what you are getting... but maybe not as much as you expected.

And if the niche is even remotely popular... there are a lot of automated queries hitting those keyword phrases.

[JimmyRed]

Good points.

I think it's mostly due to InternetMarketingIQ's first point. If you select exact match for "San Diego", does a "San Diego Hotels" search still count towards the number you get?

edit: Never mind I just did my research. So exact means just that (who would have thought). No other search terms are included in the result. My exact is still 22000/month, which I am seeing no results from, yet with my site that has 6000exact/month, where I rank 6, I get a lot more hits.

[ShopZipCode]

Having the right keyword for your site is really important, so you better take some time figuring this one out.

[dburk]

Hi JimmyRed,

As InternetMarketingIQ pointed out there was some AOL data that was accidentally exposed that revealed the average CTR for a large number of searches. That data revealed that nearly half of all searches are abandoned without any search result listing receiving a click. And while 44% of those who clicked, went to the listing at position #1, this represented only 23% of the total search volume. The positions below #1 received a much smaller share of the remaining clicks.

Your particular keyword is much more general in nature than most keywords and is likely used in examples not intended for real searches. A keyword that is used as a stand in for an unknown keyword is liely to have a substantially higher abondonment rate. I imagine that is why you are seeing numbers a bit lower than typical CTRs for a more specific keyword.