Do you think the # of searches/mo is distorted by business owners?

by ryanjm
5 replies
Question for those of you who have experience getting local businesses ranked highly for various search terms:

Do you think the number of local searches/mo that the Keyword Tool quotes is distorted by business owners who are searching for their own business in order to check their ranking?

The reason I ask is that I've had a business ranked top 3 (and it's first as a local result with the map pin) for a term that supposedly gets 400/mo, but so far it seems to only average around 1 hit per day for that term, which would obviously only be 30/mo. That seems really low to me, although it's a home building business so it should theoretically increase quite a bit around Jan/Feb/Mar.

Still, I have a hard time seeing it hit anywhere near 100-150 that you would expect a top 3 local site to do. So could it be a lot of local business owners just looking themselves up, rather than customers who are actually looking for a home?

Random question: The site is crushing the rankings on Yahoo/Bing, like top 5 for a dozen terms, yet it gets barely any traffic from those sites. Do they just suck? I thought I read something about Bing having 20% of the search market or whatever, but we get almost no traffic from them.

Thanks for any insight.
#business #distorted #owners #searches or mo
  • Profile picture of the author redlegrich
    According to Market Samurai you should expect about 40% for the number 1 listing. In this case that would be 160 searches. The fall off to #2 and #3 is to about 10~13%. At 10% that's 1.3 searches a day. Not far off what you have now. There is a big difference in #1 and #3! So, while lumping together your comments about a top 3 position getting 100-150 searches that's not likely to be the case for # 2 and # 3 combined.

    I would find it very hard to believe that business owners searching for themselves and clicking on their own sites impacts this at all. I think they have better things to do with their time. The vast majority have no idea where they rank. Those at the top know it and don't need to keep checking.
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  • Profile picture of the author ryanjm
    Yeah but those market samurai numbers are overall. So for instance when I search for "lyrics to britney spears circus" I only need to click 1 place to find my info. However, when researching a builder people aren't one-stop shopping.

    When I was trying to get my site to rank I would check the rankings daily (not click, just run the search) for months.
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  • Profile picture of the author ListenTalkLess
    Well i don't think so.
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  • Profile picture of the author krzysiek
    I don't think the business owners are impacting it at all, but also another thing you might need to consider is that the Google KWT gives wrong information (at least from what I have found, and many others on various forums). It seems Google, can, at times, say a search term gets much more hits than what it really does.

    And on the contrary, some people have reported certain keywords that apparently get no hits using the Google KWT actually turn out and get a decent amount of traffic.
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  • Profile picture of the author David
    Originally Posted by ryanjm View Post

    Question for those of you who have experience getting local businesses ranked highly for various search terms:

    Do you think the number of local searches/mo that the Keyword Tool quotes is distorted by business owners who are searching for their own business in order to check their ranking?

    The reason I ask is that I've had a business ranked top 3 (and it's first as a local result with the map pin) for a term that supposedly gets 400/mo, but so far it seems to only average around 1 hit per day for that term, which would obviously only be 30/mo. That seems really low to me, although it's a home building business so it should theoretically increase quite a bit around Jan/Feb/Mar.

    Still, I have a hard time seeing it hit anywhere near 100-150 that you would expect a top 3 local site to do. So could it be a lot of local business owners just looking themselves up, rather than customers who are actually looking for a home?

    Random question: The site is crushing the rankings on Yahoo/Bing, like top 5 for a dozen terms, yet it gets barely any traffic from those sites. Do they just suck? I thought I read something about Bing having 20% of the search market or whatever, but we get almost no traffic from them.

    Thanks for any insight.
    As far as I know the G keyword tool only shows stats on what people are paying for adwords, not what the general population is typing in.

    I've found you can get a site to rank, but if their industry tanked, you can't expect ranking to equate to traffic. In this case ranking provides credibility and the opportunity for traffic.

    What snippet Google garners from the copy on the page has to be provocative, best case scenario is for that snippet to also have a call to action and you can see some traffic from that.
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    David Bruce Jr of Frederick Web Promotions
    Lawyer Local SEO - |

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