Lots of people use the Overture Keyword Tool to estimate search volumes and get ideas for additional keywords to target. I went there over the weekend to do a few domain searches. I felt that it would be a good way to measure "brand strength" or get some idea of the number of type-ins a domain might be getting.
Some of the results that I found were staggering, others sobering, and some were rather funny. I typed in the URLs for most of my sites and only one of them had a meaningful count - about 500.
Then I decided to type in google.com and was blown away with one of the highest counts that I have ever seen - 8 million. Then Yahoo returned almost 9 million... hmmm... what does that tell you?
NPR is smart to own both the .org and the .com because the .com gets a lot of type in traffic.
The IRS should have registered the .com because somebody else is probably making money hand over fist on that domain. Hopefully it's a US company paying taxes. I bet it fools a lot of visitors with the patriotic banner. Also the hotdog stand at treasury.com looks like you could buy a bond there. (Don't run out and try to register the .com for a bunch of government agencies. I already looked and even the most obscure were taken years ago and have a big block of ads on them. Some do a pretty good job of spoofing the government.)
The most interesting find was to see that fafsa.gov gets massive type-ins to a dead URL... Those guys need a redirect on that URL. The .com gets a lot of traffic too and is occupied by a site that looks like a stoggy old .gov and probably fools lots of parents and students.
I was talking with Rand about this and he says.... "One thing to note is that the search box has become the primary method of navigation for many users - they use it instead of the actual URL box on their browser. Some even have the browser URL hidden, so the only way they can navigate is via search engines. They know exactly where they want to go and use the search box to get there." Surprise to me. I guess I am too old to type a URL anywhere but in an address box. lol
OK.... I hate to tell you this Rand, but nobody is looking for RandFish.com. nobody is searching for egol.com.. and nobody is looking for MattCutts.com either. I thought that all of the Cuttlets would have cranked it up to five digits at least. More people are looking for BlackHat.com than are looking for MattCutts.com. Honest, go look for yourself.
If you have read this far you either have time on your hands, find this topic interesting or are procrastinating an important job..... So, go on over to the Overture Keyword Tool, type in a few of your favorite URLs and let us know if you find anything interesting. Maybe you can see how many type-ins your competitor is getting. Warning... don't type in anything naughty because you might pass out when you see how many people are looking for that stuff.
Domination.. Count Search Term 108 scott fish
EGOL: I enjoy your writing and your topics.
I looked up my site and the other sites that make up the top 6 at Google for my industry.
My site had 50. The range is 213 to 29 for the other 5 sites. I felt good about all that since we are a single entity and the others are all chains representing between 10-30 different operations in cities across the country.
Then I looked at direct visits to the site in Feb. In excess of 2,000. Y visits- about 600. Y visits for my URL...where the heck are they?
What gives with this tool?
Something else struck me on the information. Ever since Y went on its own, my site has been #1 at Y for probably 90% of the time. I get good traffic from Y for the number 1 industry phrase, which fortunately is my url; keyword1-keyword2.com
So I think some of that is a Yahoo branding thing, since we show well there and pick up a lot of traffic on a combination of searches for the main keyword phrase and name branding.
But now...as you suggested I've wasted enough time here. LOL
Dave
On second glance. I got irritated. I checked my logs for Feb. not a single visit for the url from Yahoo.
There is a big difference between 0 and Overture reporting 50 searches.
WHERE DOES THERE INFORMATION COME FROM?
Really amazed not only by reading the post also by reading the comments. My gosh again the same words "unknown remain as big oceans................"
Very interesting indeed. However, there is one more explanation to the phenomenon of typing the URLs into the search box that none of you has mentioned so far - and as somebody who's had some experience with mobile surfing I can shed some light on this one. I am not sure about Yahoo as I have only tried it with Google, but in order to access non-WAP pages you have to use something that adapts them to your mobile device - in my case, it was Google (would be really interesting to see the data similar to EGOL's Overture research from Google - and maybe then compare it to the percentage of mobile phones that come with Google as a default search engine. BTW this can account for the younger users who type URLs into the search box. This is exactly the way how I got to Threadwatch - I typed it into Google's search box, then I knew a link from Web Professor's profile would lead me to his site, then I knew there was something some place else with a live clickable link to my other destinations - but it all started with a search in Google, there was no way to avoid it.
As for the Cuttlets not creating a major case for mattcutts.com searches - well consider what kind of audience that is - mostly SEOs or people somehow related to this industrry - aren't we likely to remember the URLs we often use? (Or, according to my theory, we don't use mobile devices much yet ;-) )
I find it very interesting to watch over the shoulder of people to see how they use the internet. Its surprisingly common to see them load up IE and start typing a url and not realise the cursor has jumped to the google search box rather than the address bar. A large number of companies are installing google as the homepage on all the PC's and this make people think that google is the internet.
What's your take on the difference between a query of searchenginewatch and searchenginewatch.com? Looks like they are snooping with some of the .com variants?
400 searchenginewatch
742 searchenginewatch.com 384 hostname searchenginewatch.com 295 link searchenginewatch.com 68 link searchenginewatch.com site searchenginewatch.com 59 linkdomain searchenginewatch.com 52 site searchenginewatch.com 35 free hostname movie picture searchenginewatch.com site story 27 alltheweb domain searchenginewatch.com
You are dead on EGOL, this is a great method for gathering competitive intelligence data. I typically put together a matrix of competitors' domains, their branded terms, and product names and track the search demand in a few tools. Once you got a handle on the numbers, it's interesting to watch how other marketing channels influence the numbers over time.
Rand, it also amazes me the number of people who search for a URL rather than typing it in directly. Maybe I'm wrong, but I never viewed this as a thing the young folks were doing, rather I assumed that it was older, less tech-savvy individuals. This also aligns with search demand numbers I have seen for client domains. Businesses targeting those under 25 rarely have significant search demand, but similarly marketed and sized companies that target baby-boomers always seem to have lots of searches for their URLs.
This data is supported by web analytics. Looking at one day of data;
- brandname is the most popular keyword - brandname.com is second - www.brandname.com is seventh
I have used the Overture Keyword Tool extensively in the past to develop my PPC keyword list across all PPC engines. The most successful keywords have in turn influenced our Organic SEO strategy.
Speaking of the naughty keywords that people search for, you don't want to know what emerges for an innocent search for 'job'.
110 - seomoz (most all of those are navigational) 400 - searchenginewatch (also navigational) 46 - threadwatch 97 - seobook 913 - create a site (granted, that may not all be for cre8) :) 2999270 - ask jeeves (that butler's still got it) 4452 - toysrus.com
If you have access to Hitwise's database tool, you can see that for big brands, navigational terms are driving a huge amount of traffic - disney, espn, nbc, ebay, etc.