Overture gives a monthly estimate as to how many people search for a keyword, but this has been known to be inaccurate. So, in order for us to get a better feel on how accurate/inaccurate the Overture tool is, can some of you tell us the following info (w/o giving away the keyword): 1) The # of searches per month that the Overture tool reports for that keyword. 2) The ACTUAL # of searches your site get from Search Engines per month for that keyword. (just SE's) Here is mine for: 1) Overture reported 49,000 searches per month, or 1600/day for March 2006. 2) I get on average just 400 visits/day, and am listed #1 in Google for that keyword. So, I get just 25% of the actual Overture estimate.
just because you are number 1 in the serps doesnt mean that you are guaranteed a click, i know 90% of the time when i do a search, i always look straight to the 3 or 4th place, go down the page then go back upto numbers 1 and 2. most people might not be like me, but to get 25% of traffic from teh estimate is pretty good.
I agree 100%. Because you are number one that really doesn’t mean people will go straight to your site. They might find that the site listed 3rd or 4th has something more appealing that draws their attention away from yours that is in 1st place.
Sites listed 2nd 3rd might have a more compelling description and people click them ahead of yours. Also, some people will click on the Google ad/s at the top.
I understand people don't always click on the #1 result, but the reason I started this thread was to see how other people are doing. How does the estimated # of searches in Overture compare to the amt of traffic u get from SE's from people searching that keyword?
I cheked one phrase that I'm ranked #1 on MSN and Yahoo for. Overture tool shows 124 searches per day in April and I got 21 clicks per day that month so that's about 17% of the searches according to Overture.
The only way overture info should be used is to make a guesstimate of the popularity of a word/words compared to other phrases, as if everything is coming from the overture source they will be relative to each other. So say you have 'room' for one more keyword, use overture to compare some keywords against each other but to not take the values themselves as the bible. I developed a tool which uses overture and Google data which works on this idea of not relying on anything specific but just using data available to use in a overall comparative manner to select keywords, not to judge how many visitors you will get if your in pos #1,#2 etc. I'm pretty sure the new google trends can be used to compare search volumes for different words, might only be the med-high volume words, so this would perhaps rule out the usefulness of trends to the average joe webmaster.