"4000" not same as "4,000"

Don't guess what people will search for, look at your logs!

[Mohamed_E]

A major part of my site deals with hiking those mountains in New England that have an elevation of 4000 feet or more. Hence major keywords for me would include "four thousand footer", "4000 footer" plus many permutaions (footers rather than footer, with one or more states either spelled out or abbreviated).

I always realized that "4000" is not the same as "four thousand" in the world of Google, just as "NH" is not the same as "New Hampshire", all of which makes optimizing very interesting :) But it never occurred to me that "4000" was not the same as "4,000" until yesterday.

By serendipidy I had used roughly equal numbers of each, as well as a few intentional "Four Thousand" strings.

Today I looked at the logs that my free logging service gives me. They are very imperfect, but in this case absolutely clear. This month I had ZERO searches for either "4,000" or "four thousand" in any form, with lots and lots of searches for "4000"! So I will keep just one of each of the unused forms (just in case) and replace all other occurrences with the very popular "4000".

Incidentally, I am not the only one to use the keywords that nobody searches for :( Searching Google for "4000 footers" (the keywords that people use) gave only 2,350 matches, while searching for "4,000 footers" gave a whopping 16,700 matches!

Conclusion: Even crummy logging software beats guessing what people will search for!

[JamesR]

One way to test these kinds of theories is to compare the SERPs at Google and other SEs. Google does give different results for 4000 [google.com] and 4,000 [google.com]. Thanks for sharing that info Mohamed_E