Keyword research and actual Google traffic

[kidder]

Maybe I'm doing things wrong but I've created a couple of sites recently, exact match 3 word domains so they are a perfect match to our product. The domain names are also the volume search term as reported by Google KWT. We have the number one ranking for the search term and the traffic levels are nothing like what is being reported by Google KWT, in fact the better volume and I mean 3 times the traffic is created by another term when checked in the KWT reports very few searches.(its probably more logical)

Main Term = [135,00] monthly searches returns 20% of traffic
Secondary Term = [1600] monthly searches returns about 65%of our daily traffic and we are not even in the top position.

Conclusion - Google seriously inflates its search volumes for what reason I am not sure. Maybe its a few reasons...

[tedster]

Well, one term is inflated for you but the other is deflated, right? The one big factor I've found using the Adwords tool is that we're seeing search volume, and that's not click volume. On some query terms, as many as 40% of searchers will click on nothing at all!

So take that 135,000 monthly searches and assume the worst - it only generates 81,000 monthly clicks. Then a #1 ranking is probably in the area of 35% of that, or 28,000 per month. Is that still way off?

It might be - I've seen examples where it is. But not usually when I'm sure to check [exact match]. The default is [broad match] which is not very useful for organic research.

[kidder]

Less than 100 unique visits per day total traffic. Maybe 20 of them match our domain so its a long way off the mark. And yes its exact match and I've checked and rechecked the volumes over a few months to make sure it was not some sort of error.

[tedster]

That's one the most extreme examples I've heard of. Even taking the worst case options, it's still off by a whole order of magnitude. Have you checked that search term in WMT for impressions and click-through numbers by position?

[kidder]

That is something I have not done as yet, I'm getting the volume data for AU so perhaps that is a factor.