I was doing keyword research for a client yesterday.

Rather than trust any one keyword source, I used a few.
1. The free Google Keyword suggestion tool, to see how many searches happen in a month, and how tough the competition is.
2. A dummy AdWords campaign. Throw heaps of money at it, and estimate the number of clicks possible.
3. A paid keyword database. One of the most high profile keyword sources, with a relatively costly monthly subscription.

The variations were stunning. The paid database was under-estimated by multiple orders of magnitude. (This was for Australian figures). Apparently the figures come from deals with ISPs, select SEs and panel samples.

Given that the future was unreliable, I thought I’d try the past.

Went to Google Keyword Suggestions, and looked for the phrase “choosing a dog”.
Google suggested 1300 searches last month. (although the average is 1000/month)
I have number 1 position at Google for that phrase, so I went to Google Analytics to see how much traffic they sent me last month, specifically from Google. I got 284 hits, which was pretty nice. It also meant that position 1 at Google got me 21% of their searches last month. Not bad for MyDogSite.

Tried it with another keyword, to see if that was a fluke.
Google Keyword Suggestion tool said that last month, there were 6600 searches for “Halloween Australia” in Australia. I went to Google Analytics, and looked at my stats. Last month I got 521 hits from Google for that one keyword. Again, it was number one for the keyword at Google for most of the month, so that equated to 7% of the traffic. For interest, that was www.halloween-australia.com, so it would look pretty relevant to searchers.

For fun, I tried one last search, on a smaller scale - for “David Jones Christmas windows” (I’m a Christmas junkie). Google said there were 36 searches last month. I got 4 of them. So 11% from position 1. Small scale, but it’s a niche. (See my Christmas Australia site).

Now the paid tool, whose name I no longer want to mention, said that I should have received 7 searches all year, for “Choosing a dog”. That’s a little different to Google’s figures of 1300/month, and my actual 284 hits.

They have a disclaimer that the figures cannot be comprehensive, and are meant for comparing to other keywords, relatively. Fair enough. But those figures are out by more than an order of magnitude. They’re just misleading for my purposes.

Yep. We are no longer subscribing to that service. The free Google tool has won.

I have a site I advertise on Google AdWords.

It’s expensive, so I only pay for around 6-7 clicks per day. And I get annoyed when people spam those clicks.

Yesterday I had a business proposition entered in my request-more-information form.

They were trying to flog me the latest google backdoor secrets offer, promising they could get me Google traffic for a lot less money, beating the system, and buying their product. They apologetically were sending me to a free website at GoDaddy - with ugly free ads at the top of their splash page.

They tried to make out that it was a business approach.

Give me a break guys. Could there be anything less inspiring that what you did?

You clicked on my Google Ad, costing me money.
You don’t have a proper website.
You didn’t use the correct form on my website.
You didn’t research me.

My ad already has a 15% CTR, enough conversions to keep me happy at a small scale, has great relevance between the 4 keywords I chase, against the ad title, content and domain. I’m a Perry Marshall accolyte.

You’d better be pretty sure that you can improve my stats. And next time, try to get a proper website up, if you’re selling Google secrets.

That was the most laughable moment of my inbox yesterday.

I’ve dabbled with Google AdWords advertising for personal sites on a small budget over the years, with a fair bit of success. My most targetted traffic I get for around 6 cents a click, and has been as low as 3 cents. It’s very targetted. So I keep it chugging along.

About two weeks ago I thought I’d experiment with a more expensive area - the “work from home” field. Clicks are pretty expensive if you want to rank well - even $1.50 for an extremely targetted ad and landing page rarely gets page one results.

Based on conversion cost, it looks like being worthwhile so far. Money I’ve spent has been completely recouped with interest.

But the spam has been oppressive.

My goal was to get people to enter their contact details, so I could follow them up. I had an autoresponder in place, but would additionally contact people personally. I have a contact form to collect details, so I don’t expose my email address.

It was an old site I hadn’t touched for years. It wasn’t ranking on search engines for my preferred words (given that I hadn’t maintained it), so it wasn’t getting any traffic.

So now I am paying for traffic.

And I appear to be paying for abuse and obscenities.

Over half the paid traffic contains profanities. People who have clicked on my paid ads at Google, purely to enter their obscene descriptions, linking back to their obscene sites.

It’s hard to tell at this point whether it is automated traffic or not. But if it is, the fact that robots are visiting sites advertised on Google AdWords, and I am being charged for it, doesn’t seem right.

I validate server-side for valid email addresses. Most seem to be a .ru email address.
But it gets my goat that Google doesn’t seem able to prevent this.

I’ve emailed Google to see what the procedure is. Surely they should allow chargebacks for obvious spam sent through paid links.

I wanted to be able to recommend AdWords as a good way of generating leads for this field. But I have to hesitate, knowing that they would be receiving filthy responses.

I do get spam from other sites I own, even those with captcha systems to validate input. But none of them receive the obcene spam I get from the work from home keywords.

Would love to know what others are experiencing.

Just launched today in Australia.

It’s very cool seeing photos of your street. Gee, my hedge looked neat!

Our photos were obviously taken at Christmas time - there was Santa Claus and a reindeer on our roof.

Despite this, when I showed my high school son the photos, he immediately ran outside to wave at the camera.

I won’t say anything about his hair colour….

A mate was twittered about the results on Cuil for a search for lolcat. Note that it wasn’t a search for lolcats plural. Just lolcat singular.

You’d think that would be worksafe. But it’s not.

The fact that Cuil displays an image next to each website in the results list, can lead to nasty surprises.
They need to have some kind of reporting and instant removal of unpleasant images.
I would not be happy for my kids to see the image returned.
It’s not for the official lolcats site - icanhascheezburger.com. It’s a different site. No need to mention it. But it’s adult.

On a related note, I can imagine people experimenting to see how they can control the image that is displayed next to their website. Getting a shocking image displayed could be a kind of linkbait - traffic attention-seeking.

As with all search engines, SEOs will be attempting to reverse-engineer the algorithm, to see how they can get their results at the top. Yet another area for people to specialise in. It will be interesting to see how much traffic Cuil gets. Fairly negative feedback so far.