Keyword Tool - Help using it for keyword research

Why is it suggesting 'solicitor' is a good keyword?

[Philiboy]

Hi,
I'm using the keyword tool to research keywords for organic SEO.
I'm saving results in an excel spreadsheet and then narrowing down the data to keywords which have local search volumes of Local monthly searches greater than 1000 and competition either medium or low so that I can find good keywords for organic SEO. This is with match type EXACT. Some of the suggestions are very surprising e.g. 'solicitor' with local monthly searches 8100 and Medium competition.

I'm doing this analysis to generate keyword ideas inputting a large number of seed keywords for an important project, and I'm worried that I am not going to get reliable results. E.g. I do not believe that the competition for SOLICITOR is medium. Surely its a very highly competitive keyword?

If anyone can help me gain confidence that I am going about things the right way (or put me on the right track if I am doing something wrong), it would be greatly appreciated.

[brotherhood of LAN]

the word 'solicitor' on its own is probably not very competitive because it's not a very targeted search.

If it was 'find [specific] solicitor in [locality]' then that would be much more targeted and probably convert much better for relevant services.

[Philiboy]

Thanks brotherhood of LAN. I note however that if you search for Solicitor Google says there are about 29,200,000 results where "divorce solicitor" gives About 396,000 results. I want to find keyword terms which have medium to low competition in terms of how many sites are optimised for the keyword (combined with relatively high search volumes) and Google is not very helpful when it suggests 'solicitor' making me wonder how reliable the rest of the keyword analysis results are. Or am I misunderstanding something fundamental.

[brotherhood of LAN]

The "results returned" number shown by google is not very accurate and probably isn't the greatest indicator of competition for a keyword.

allintitle: is something you might want to use to gauge which pages are actively targeting a page rather than coincidentally containing the words on the page.

[Philiboy]

OK. So I get About 885,000 results for allintitle:solicitor 170,00 results for allintitle:divorce solicitor (both UK only). I think this confirms that solicitor is a very competitive keyword (plus commonsense has told me that all along). I'm still curious why Google adwords keyword tool is claiming it has medium competition (I know its an adword stat and not organic search), and should I, on this basis, give up trying to find good keywords for organic search using this method?

[brotherhood of LAN]

I couldn't comment on the effectiveness of your process, I don't do much with adwords & CPC other than gather data, I'm sure someone else can offer suggestions.

I'm not entirely sure (to even guess) why the keyword is only marked as medium, I see 10 ads when I search for it (from the UK).

[lucy24]

Obvious question: Is this aspect of google region-specific? If they're throwing in the whole English-speaking world the numbers will be severely skewed, since the professional term "solicitor" is not used in the US.

(For comparison purposes I tried "barrister". Mercifully they did not assume I mean "barista", but that's about as far as it went. Most hits are personal names.)

[Philiboy]

Lucy24, I set it to Locations: United Kingdom

[Philiboy]

By the way, I just tried Lawyer with my location settings set to All Countries and it cam back with Medium Competition (same for United States). So I'm baffled because common sense tells me these should be highly competitive keywords.

[topr8]

>> So I'm baffled because common sense tells me these should be highly competitive keywords.

but the word medium in itself is meaningless.

if there are only 3 values: high, medium and low then the 'spread' is still not known are each 33.3% so to speak or are they different.

also the words competitive and value shouldn't be compared... for instance imagine this year's hot xmas toy, whatever it may be - it will for sure be mega competitive, however if it retails at £20, then the top value clicks will reflect this.
however a less 'competitive' word may be more expensive because there may be less bidders interested but their bidding limits may be much higher and therefore the cost/value of those keywords may be higher.

- just a thought.

[Philiboy]

My understanding is that the competition is indicative of how many people are bidding for that keyword irrespective of bidding price (and I am doing my research for organic SEO). Also the spread of high, medium and low has the same ranges of values i.e means the same no matter what keyword you analyse. So I should be able to use the same filter (e.g. low competition keywords which have local search volumes greater than 1000) for all my keyword analysis for a given website. Its not as if 'low' has one meaning for one keyword and another meaning for another. If the filters yield too many keywords and I want to reduce my list to less competitive/higher search volume keywords, then I can adjust them (because when you export the results you get percentages for competition and not just 3 different values low. medium, high). Or am I wrong? I'm not sure why bidding price is being brought into this discussion.

[topr8]

>>I'm not sure why bidding price is being brought into this discussion.

because quite possibly a 'medium' or 'low' competitive term as defined by the number of bidders, could well be more intensively competitive in real terms (eg bid price or organic seo effort) than the highly competitive search term (as defined by number of bidders)

consider the following theoretical cases:

we all know that certain cancer keywords have received huge publicity and are perceived to be of high value, hence they become hugely competitive (in terms of numbers) for people trying to rank for them, in terms of numbers of people trying to rank both organically and with adwords - hence they are marked as highly competitive, yet a lot of these bidders do not bid that high nor do they make that much effort organically as the returns are not as high as once thought. (perhaps because a lot of bidders don't know how to maximise the traffic)

then imagine a small niche that virtually no-one knows about, such as space flights to mars, now most people don't know about them, but 3 or 4 people do, and the commissions/profit in selling tickets are enormous and they all know it and have access to it - thus adwords are low competitive because there are only 4 bidders, but the actual adwords price is very high as these 4 bidders bid very high as the profits are so vast, ditto the money spent on organic search.

... thus imho, it is not just the competitiveness (volume) that is important, but how far that and hard that 'volume' are willing to push ... this manifests in how hard it is to rank organically for such a keyword.

if this makes no sense then i'm happy to keep my thoughts to myself!