I’m going to be whipping up a spreadsheet based on these values you put out there to quickly plug in the search competition and the # of searches to quickly return a ballpark value. If nothing else you could use these values relative to one another to help you decide between what site to market next, etc… but my guess is this is a lot more accurate than many would believe.

Thanks for the excellent post!

Also, local results along with Google’s News and other items affect things. A lot of that wasn’t a factor when the AOL data leaked.

–David

Great stuff!

Michael

http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/ranking-reports/ (not mine)

If anyone knows of any other good tools feel free to post below.

Log out – then search to see how good your SEO skills really are.

@terek – the Google Adwords Keyword Tool is reporting 18,100 local (English >> United States) and 40,500 global exact monthly search volume for me, not 200k. Also, I’m seeing you as #5 in G. If you take (40,500 * 0.545) * 0.0492 you get 1,086 expected clicks. If you do the local you get (18,100 * 0.545) * 0.0492 you get 485 expected clicks.

I’m thinking it’s probably better to go off of English, United States local volume since global seems to be a bit inflated and flaky. I’ve tried quite a few after Ty’s comments, and doing it that way seems to produce more accurate results.

Excellent post, and this is the sort of stuff that domainers should definitely be talking about.

There are a couple of other things that I think are worth mentioning about exact match searches:

1) As far as I’m aware, every separately viewed page of results is logged as a single exact match search, so hard to find niche areas have inflated figures – ie people searching look at multiple SERPs pages in an effort to find what they want, generating multiple exacts match searches from one session.

2) Often terms have more than one entry in the exact match search data, so this should always be checked. For example, as you pointed out, [mini sites] gets 1,300 Global exacts, but this needs to be added to [minisites] which gets 720 Global exacts – giving a total of 2,020 Global exacts matched searches for the term overall.

3) The percentage of clicks returned per position is heavily altered by Google sponsored links, shopping links, video links etc. This can mean a number 1 Google organic position can return as little as 5-10% of the available traffic – as these other entries grab the traffic equivalent of the first couple of slots.

4) Global exact match search data often varies from country to country. I’ve often Twittered Global Exacts to be told that the Global figure is appearing differently in different countries. (This obviously points to the fact that the figures are not absolute and should be treated with caution).

5) Finally. Exacts match search figures are very susceptible to ramping – any automated query for a term will appear in the figures (and this can be done deliberately), so it’s worth checking the keyword tool data against related terms, Google Trends and common sense before purchasing a domain off the back of them, especially if it’s a substantial purchase. I’ve seen a **lot** of very unlikely terms with enormous exact match volumes, often where the increase appears in the Volume Trends for no reason a month or two before a domain is offered for sale.

I’ve been developing based on Exact Match for a while and have collected quite a bit of comparative data between traffic and Exact Matches… so apologies for the long reply – but wanted to expand on some of the points naturally arising from your post.

Keep up the good work!