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Today I got an email forwarded to me from one of my colleagues addressed to the CEO of one of our clients. The email is from Brian Conness, and account executive at Network Solutions. Clearly a sales pitch, in his email he explains to our client that “I don’t know if you are aware of this or not, but over 40,000 times per month people search on Google for “cell phone san antonio.” (I’ve attached a pdf of Google’s keyword search to show you.) If someone does this search, [your company] doesn’t come up at all.” He goes on to say “40,000 is too big of a game for you to not even be a player.” It is also fair to mention that little did Conness know that the client is currently undergoing a major online transformation, complete with SEO/SEM/SMO strategies, so while he is correct about the client not being readily found for several keywords and phrases in their markets, we are going to be rapidly changing that. Here is a shot of the file he sends using the Keyword tool within the AdWords system:
Google Keywod Tool Screenshot
Quickly, I assess the fact that this is a tool for paid searches, and doesn’t accurately represent the organic search traffic, which was indicated in the email. Secondly, the match type is set to broad match, which means any combination of “cell phone san antonio” could have made up his 40,000 number. If you actually set it to exact match, the results are much different, as seen below:
Google Keyword Tool Screenshot 2
Wow! We went from 40,000 searches a day to somewhere between 73 and “not enough data” – across the entire US, which is not representative of the client’s market. Good thing the tool gives us some much better suggestions to go after below the unfavorable results we got above. Also, it’s not a bad idea to see if any of these are similar search volumes on the organic side as well.
The point is that it’s always good to know what kind of data you are getting from prospective vendors, where it came from, and what it means. Perhaps it would have been more appropriate for Mr. Conness to send an email to the client measuring the commercial buying intent, or probability to purchase, for a host of keywords or phrases, and how Pocket could be bidding on those words while their competitors are not. Maybe then the CEO would have been more interested.
