Forum Moderators: open
[adwords.google.com...]
The AdWords tool, with the new Expanded Broad Matches, gives a list that's surprising congruent to the list generated by Overture tool, and much more granular and useful for SEO. Used together, while they're not perfect, they're a much better combination, I think, than what we've had before.
It would be ideal, of course, if the Google tool gave us numbers, which would make it easy to mesh the three lists it provides... ie, More Specific Keywords, Similar Keywords, and Additional Keywords to consider. Without numbers, though, it takes some work to integrate the three lists.
Each of the Google lists, as far as I can tell, seems to be in roughly descending order of search frequency, at least on terms in a heavily searched area with a broad demographic.
The quality of the Google suggestions was really good... corresponding to lists in this market area that had taken me several days to compile. It was as if I did a lot of research using Overture and searching on the web to come up with all the synonyms and relevant targets, and then lumped them together and sorted them numerically.
I found it's possible to go through an Overture list that is combined and sorted this way and to clean it up considerably by comparing with the Google results. The Google sample size provides a degree of confidence that I haven't had before.
There were some gaps here and there that I couldn't account for... and I've only used the tool in depth in this one market area. And you have to enter a lot of different key phrases to generate different overlapping lists... and it's time consuming.
Haven't quite figured out how to systematize it better than this. Would appreciate thoughts.
I'm also wondering whether others agree that these lists are in descending searched order.
Each of the Google lists, as far as I can tell, seems to be in roughly descending order of search frequency, at least on terms in a heavily searched area with a broad demographic.
Yup, I believe so.
The Google sample size provides a degree of confidence that I haven't had before.
But Google isn't showing you everything there is. I was told that the actual sets are much larger than what we are being shown, so there's a limit being set.
You may experience broader results if you set the "country" selector to All Countries, and set the "language" selector to "All Languages."
Some of my campaigns are set for all languages and countries, so this gives you a broader set of "keyword suggestions" to negative out, for terms you may not be targetting specifically.
Overall, it's a good discovery tool.
I found a whole new set of mispellings and phrase combinations that way.
While this is an excellent way to find out what words other webmasters are using, it doesn't exactly tell us what the general public is searching for.
So my question, am I completely of base here?
So my question, am I completely of base here?
Two of us who've posted here think you are... ie, we think that the lists are based on search frequency, not on Google's page index....
Each of the Google lists, as far as I can tell, seems to be in roughly descending order of search frequency, at least on terms in a heavily searched area with a broad demographic.
Yup, I believe so.
If you think about it, it doesn't make sense that it would be otherwise. Expanded Broad Match matches to searches, not to the Google index, so the lists need to be pulled from search information.
I also see that the order correlates with the Overture stats. When there are multiple lists, though, with more granularity than Overture provides, I'm trying to figure out the easiest way to blend the multiple lists together in some kind of order. Without numbers attached indicating search frequency, this is hard to do.
Expanded Broad Match matches to searches, not to the Google index, so the lists need to be pulled from search information.
Sorry, I was referring to the "More Specific Keywords" on the left. I completely agree w/ your reasoning behind Expanded Broad Matches. Now I just have to do some digging to see if I can find any more info about the left column.
The phrases in the left column just seem too natural for me to believe that they are what Joe Schmo uses to search. I'm used to seeing "widget blue fuzzy" in my logs and OV and not "blue fuzzy widgets", even though the latter is the natural way one would word the phrase.
Added:
Ok, I just went back and used some less targeted keywords w/ the Keyword Sandbox. Now I do see a couple of inversed searches I was referring to above, and that was the reasoning behind my idea. Thanks for showing me the light; I always took the Sandbox w/ a grain of salt before. Now if only we could get search counts, as was mentioned.
BTW, just give me a quick slap if I'm straying too far from the original subject of this thread. I'll be happy to go back into lurking mode.
I'm used to seeing "widget blue fuzzy" in my logs
When ever i see "unnatural" language hits in my log that match O's weird keyword ordering I just assume 99% of the hits are from someone using an automated rank checking program and the O keyword search tool list.
