Most of you might not know this, but 70% of the monthly searches that are done on Google, ARE NOT searches for “the most popular” keyword terms…. The most popular searched terms every month like, i.e. “Charlie Sheen, Lindsey Lohan, Foreclosures, short sales, or real estate,” and just about anything you can think of, are only accounting for 30% of all the “Searched” traffic on the web! In fact, Google released a statistic back in 2009 that said, “Every month, 20% of the keyword terms that are searched for, are “BRAND NEW” – Meaning, every month 20% of the searches are “first time ever,” never before searched, “keywords and phrases.” Shocking is it? Well, it really shouldn’t be when you put some thought into it, and in fact, it should actually be a bit encouraging to everyone out there looking to get started with SEO… And here is why…

For a second let’s pretend were just a random “John or Jane Doe” searching and let’s also think about the many thousands of different search combination’s that can exist for any particular phrase you might think of : (again I’ll refer to “foreclosures” “short sales” or “real estate” as examples)

“Foreclosure sales and hot deals in the Houston, TX area”
“Short Sale and hot home deals in the Houston, TX area”
“Hot Real Estate Buys for a small price in the Houston area”

Now how often do you think John and Jane Doe searched for those particular keyword phrases? Well your right, not that often at all, but it’s these kinds of searches that you’re looking for to begin with anyway right? (we just read above that Google said 20% of all monthly searches are “first time searches”) Lets even take this a bit further, whoever did these searches above knew “exactly” what he/she was looking for and in the “exact” area he/she wanted it in, so this is an ideal “buyer,” wouldn’t you agree? If you were to target this keyword phrase list, you would obviously be targeting keywords that are not in (what Google calls) “high competition” at the moment… Which is all the more reason to target them! This also calls for the Google Keyword Search Tool (that I constantly refer to), and diving right in immediately to find words and phrases like this; Also, make sure that when you’re doing searches for those “hidden gems keywords and phrases,” as I call them, make sure you’re always keeping a very close eye on the “competition,” “searches per month,” and “cost per click…” When you couple all three of these together and you will have a great idea of whether a keyword is worth it or not.

In fact, Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz really does a great job of “visually” describing, during his SEO introduction video, what programmers refer to as “The Long Tail.” To take a look at it click here. If you watched the video, this will obviously make a lot more sense but in the video Rand describes, what I basically just laid out to you above, the “Google Searched Monthly World,” and the fact that almost 70% of it takes place on what we call “The Long Tail,” this means that the “most popular” monthly searches, that get 500K – 5 million + searches a month, are only accounting for 30% of all the searches! So the long tail refers to the keywords and phrases that are between 15,000-100,000 searches per month or even lower! These “rarely searched phrases” actually make up the VAST number of searches that we are going to run into month after month on the internet, and with 20% of the keywords always being new, it gives you all the more reason to be on your “toes” when it comes to battling this “SEO” world.

I really like Chris’s article on “tracking website visitors – your most important stats,” because not only is he totally correct in every aspect of that article, but if you’re not tracking your stats, you really don’t have a “feel” for the search terms that people are using to FIND YOU – My quote: “If you’re not tracking, your slacking”.  I recommend the same program as Chris “StatCounter” at statcounter.com and I would definitely upload this to any website I planned on “growing.” StatCounter not only allows you to track where the visitors came from, but it will actually show you the “exact” page, that they were on before they found you, as well as the exact “exact search term” that they typed into Google, Yahoo, Bing, or whatever search engine, that lead them to you… (Don’t believe me, go look for yourself, it’s FREE) I don’t even have to say it, I’m sure you can already see the HUGE POTENTIAL and BENEFIT to having a tracking tool like this. I love using StatCounter’s “Keyword Analysis” tool, and after a while, it will actually show you the phrases that are being typed the most in order to find your site – again, very helpful!

So as you can see, just with the StatCounter plug-in and the Google Keyword Search Tool alone, anyone that uses these properly can really get an “SEO” upper hand on their competition.

I really wanted to write this brief article just to give everyone all of those “useful, and eye-opening” statistics, as well as a little hint at the search terms that you should be going after, and of course how to find them.

Hopefully we can all draw some comfort out of this article knowing that even with those big “Giant Companies” like “Walmart, Amazon, Ebay, Overstock and so forth” running massive adword campaigns and SEO campaigns, we small businesses still have a FIGHTING chance to take our share of the marketplace! I’ll take that any day!

Thanks for being loyal Nerd Blurb supporters!

Regards,

Jeremiah

Chairman & CEO
The Nerd Blurb