Sat Jul 19, 2008

by Mike Moran

You've probably heard me advise marketers to "do it wrong quickly," allowing feedback from customers to help you improve your marketing. I am using feedback from my June 24th post on "Free Ways to Estimate Keyword Demand" (and a fortuitous announcement by Google) to improve the procedure I documented just a few weeks ago. (In case you're wondering, "keyword demand" is the number of searches on a particular search keyword done in a period of time, such as "3,000 U.S. searches per month for the keyword AAA Plumbing"—which you can use to help project the traffic you'll attract to your site from a search marketing campaign.)

You might recall that the Overture keyword tool was the old way to see how many searches were done in the U.S. on Yahoo! for a particular keyword. But then Yahoo! crippled that free tool, and we've been left with no way to project keyword demand, until Bill Hunt, my co-author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc. worked with his team at Global Strategies International to estimate keywords using Google's free keyword tool. The problem was that, even though Google allows you to estimate keyword demand for any country, not just the U.S. (YAY), the procedure we outlined was harder than a drunken game of Twister, with over a dozen steps to finally extract your numbers.

But we've gotten nothing but good news since that post. No sooner did the post go up did Tim Flint comment that he had found a far easier way to extract the same information from Google sans the drunken Twister procedure. After a little checking, it seems to pan out. But we still had one other worry, that this might have been a mistake on Google's part that would be retracted quickly.

But no. Not only is this no mistake, but Google subsequently confirmed that it's committed to offering what it calls keyword volume, which is extremely good news for us skinflint search marketers looking for a free tool. Armed with this newfound support, I've updated the keyword demand estimation procedure.

So, check out the updated free guide to estimating keyword demand. Give me your feedback. Maybe you'll help us improve the procedure even more, which would make me happier than a game of drunken Twister.

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