Google Out of Traffic?

The more big keywords I rank for, and by big I mean 2-3 words with competition in teen millions, the less traffic I see Google having. Recently I talked about why you shouldn’t go for big keywords, and one of the reasons I gave was misreported traffic by keyword tools.

Well, the more I look, the less traffic I see. Here’s an example. “How to make money” vs “make money online”, the first should get approximately 3 times more traffic than the first, according to Insights for Search. I won’t go into how much traffic keyword tools report on that one, but if they were true, I’d be a millionaire. Suffice to say that “make money online” gets about 2000 searches a day and that’s it.

So comparing the two, we get 3x times traffic from “how to make money”, which should result in 6000 searches, right? Wrong. As much as I love Insights for Search it’s far from perfect either. There’s pretty much the same amount of traffic for both keywords, i.e. 2000 searches per day or 4000 across both of them.

Now here’s the punch line, Google’s keyword tool reports a combined 20,000 searches per day. That’s some difference.

The moral of the story is that Google isn’t as big as it makes it seem, not on niche level at least. So when you do SEO, choose more targeted keywords which are easier to compete for, can get you more traffic faster and the traffic is a lot more targeted and converts better.