Looking up What People Search For

What Is on the Keyword Research Screen

Open Keyword Research from the menu down the left of your dashboard. There is a second way in from the Rankings screen: the link Research what people search for, at the foot of the Keyword Tracking panel. The screen is three things down the page:

1. A boxed line naming the country every figure below it describes, and whether that came from your own setting or from our guess at your address. Read it before anything else — how often a phrase is searched differs enormously between countries.
2. Keyword Search Volume Lookup. The box you type into, labelled Phrases to look up — one phrase per line — and the Look up button. The figures come back underneath as a table.
3. This Month’s Lookups. Everything you have looked up this billing period, newest first. Click one to open the figures it returned. It is not there until you have run your first lookup.

A lookup is one press of Look up, however many phrases were in the box — up to 100 of them. The line beside the button keeps both counts in view: how many phrases you have typed, and how many lookups you have left this month.

What a Lookup Tells You

Type in phrases and get back how often each one is searched in a month, roughly what advertisers pay for a click on it, and how contested it is with advertisers. It is bought data, from the same source Google’s own advertising tools draw on.

The obvious use is deciding which phrases deserve one of your 50 tracked slots. The less obvious one is finding out that the phrase your trade uses is searched by nobody, and the one your customers use is searched constantly.

Check the Country First

The Keyword Research screen names the country it is using at the top, and says plainly whether that is your setting or our guess from your web address. If it says guess, go and set it — where to search from.

How Many Lookups You Get

100 lookups a month

They are included with the subscription and reset each billing period. If you watch more than one site, the lookups are shared across all of them — working out what to target is one job, not one per site. The screen shows how many you have left before you use one.

Up to 100 phrases in a single lookup

One lookup is one submission, however many phrases are in it — so paste the whole list at once rather than checking phrases one at a time.

Reopening past lookups is free

Everything you looked up this period stays on the screen and costs nothing to open again. It does not come out of your lookups for the month.

Reopened lookups show the figures as they were when you ran them, not today’s. That is deliberate: they are a record of what you decided on, and a record that quietly updates itself is not a record.

Reading the Figures

• Searches/mo is how many times the phrase is searched in a month. It is an estimate and a rounded one. Treat the difference between 40 and 50 as noise and the difference between 40 and 4,000 as real.
• Cost per click is what advertisers pay. It is the best single clue to whether a phrase is a buyer or a browser — nobody bids much on idle curiosity.
• Ad competition describes how contested the advertising is, not how hard it is to rank. A phrase can be cheap to advertise on and still have five established sites ahead of you.

A low volume is not a reason to dismiss a phrase. Ten searches a month for “emergency boiler repair Saturday” is ten people with a real problem and a wallet out; ten thousand for “boiler” is mostly homework.

Turning a Lookup Into Tracking

Nothing here starts being tracked on its own. When a phrase looks worth following, add it on the Rankings screen under Keyword Tracking, and it is looked up from that night onward — choosing the keywords we track.