SUBMIT 2.0

The Google Keyword Suggestion Tool is a free tool that gives you keyword suggestions. For instance, if you type in “widgets” it gives you other suggestions that contain the word widgets, based on searches people have done, such as dashboard widgets, weather widgets, free widgets, etc.

I’ve always assumed that the suggestions are a full list taken from things people searched for in Google. So Google would show you every widgets keyword, up to a max number.

But I just discovered that it’s only a partial list even if the max number has not been reached.

Here’s an example. I put these two keyword phrases into the tool:
jasmine
waltraud

(A little background first: Waltraud is the first name of an artist who makes a doll called Jasmine.)

The results I got back showed me 150 results. The first two were the words I typed: jasmine and waltraud.

The other 148 were all related to jasmine: jasmine tea, jasmine plant, paul jasmine, etc. There were no other results related to waltraud.

I reasoned that maybe it only shows me 150 results and it makes sure the actual words I typed are part of them, but then it fills up the other 148 slots with suggestions from first word I typed, jasmine.

It makes sense, sort of. After all, 150 is a nice, round number.

So then I changed my keywords to:
jasmine doll
waltraud

Now I got back 86 results. There were 31 results relating to waltraud including:
waltraud klasnic
suzuki waltraud
waltraud reiner
waltraud hanl dolls

This still follows my assumption. Now that I narrowed the jasmine search to be jasmine doll, it didn’t have 150 words to show so it filled up the remaining slots with results based on waltraud. I can still understand this. It makes sense if it is showing me all the waltraud results along with all the jasmine doll results and there really are only 86 total.

So then I refined the search even more. I typed in just waltraud hanl (Hanl is the artist’s last name). This time I got back 7 results including:
waltraud hanl dolls
waltraud hanl doll

Hmm, that’s interesting. Google does know about a few more waltraud results. It’s interesting to note here that “waltraud hanl doll” was not a result I got back when I searched for waltraud and jasmine doll together.

Why not? From my first search it’s clear that Google can return 150 results. So when I got 86 results for jasmine doll and waltraud, why didn’t it include “waltraud hanl doll” and give me more than 86 results?

I have no idea. Could it be that the more general your search, the more likely that Google will only show you results that got more impressions?

I did one more test, typing in both the specific terms jasmine doll and waltraud hanl.

It gave me results for both, but it did not give me all the terms it would have if I had typed in each term separately. Just jasmine doll gave me 24 results, and just waltraud hanl gave me 7. But when I put them both into the text box, I got a total of 13.

Maybe it is relating the two? Maybe it is giving me results it thinks are related to both?

If that’s the case, putting in jasmine doll and red widgets should give me back different jasmine results than typing in jasmine doll and waltraud hanl. And it did: 10 jasmine results and 7 widget results.

But you’d think since Waltraud Hanl actually is the artist of the doll, I’d get more results by searching for them both together than for two things that are totally unrelated like jasmine doll and widgets, not less results.

Interesting.

So the lessons I’ve learned from this little experiment are:

* Don’t assume the keyword tool is showing you everything that was searched for.
  * Do multiple searches when you use the tool-the more detailed, the better.
  * Don’t search for more than one thing at a time.

Source: Ezinearticles

Filed under: Google