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The TM Trademark Symbol - Is it relevant to keyword research?

by Steve Hines
2 replies
Hello all,

I've received a lot of help from this forum, but have always been hesitant to start a thread or get more involved - well that ends tonight.

I have a strange keyword research question.

I was looking at the search queries for one of my sites today to see which ones were getting the most action. Curiously enough, the phrase that gets the most activity includes two instances of the trademark symbol (subscript TM).

I've always heard that the TM symbol and the Registered symbol don't factor into keyword researches or SERP placement. However, this query is showing up in the most common keyword searches for my site. The identical phrase, without the TM, also shows up, but it does not get as much action.

My theory would be that people are going to one website, finding a little information on the product and then copy/pasting the description, along with the TM, into Google to do further research.

Can some of you weigh in on this and let me know if this is really something or just a fluke? Interestingly enough, when I put the keyword phrase in question into Google's keyword research tool it shows no returns for people using the phrase with the TM in it. But the keyword shows over 2,000 impressions and a few hundred click-thrus to my site on webmaster tools.

Anyone?
#keyword #relevant #research #symbol #trademark
  • Profile picture of the author JohnMcCabe
    Just a quick guess here...

    > I think your theory is probably right. People are doing a copy/paste and getting the TM in the description.

    > You are also likely right about Google not counting the symbols when tracking queries. There is a difference, though, between the letters "TM" in subscript and the special character.

    > While the symbol may not be factored in when doing keyword research, it is obviously being recorded as a search string.

    > Another possibility is that some of those hits are coming from other search engines. Those searches obviously wouldn't show up in Google's keyword stats, right? So G by itself might not have enough of those searches to show you results using the KW tool, you are seeing them in your site stats.

    Of course, all of the above is just a guess...
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    • Profile picture of the author Steve Hines
      Hi John,

      Thanks for the reply. Those are all great points and the answer you gave, although a guess, is very helpful.

      I am going to run some tests using some of my sites to see if optimizing for some keyword phrases that include the TM symbol will result in better traffic for the phrase.

      If there are people out there doing the old copy/paste directly into Google to get more information about products and services, chances are they are pretty far into the buying cycle, so it may turn out to be a good decision to optimize for these kinds of phrases.

      I'm going to test a bit and see what happens.

      Thanks again for your reply. Good to meet you.
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