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 love these business rules, from Yanik Silver.

34 rules for the maverick entrepreneur. Running a business can and should be fun.

http://www.maverickbusinessinsider.com/

I was looking for a plastic film to protect my iphone.

One of the guys at work said not to use the third-party pack of five, available at the Optus shop across the road.

So I went to see what else they had.

The only other offering, was something called Maclove. A plastic film that also had various decorations, and matching wallpapers you could download from a site.

Given that my temporary film, cut from the package the iPhone ad come with, was wearing out, I chose the Maclove. $10.

Got it home, and for the life of me, couldn’t peel it off.

I hate the risk of breaking things, particularly “hardware”, so I went to see if there was a website. Yes, to show me how to peel a sticky cover off. I just didn’t want to rip the wrong part.

Google showed me maclove.eu.

It sucked. Check out this screenshot:

The Flash dropdowns completely covered the one part of the page I wanted - how to stick it on.

So I peeled off the sticky bit, and held the cover in my hand. The bit with the decorative feature.
Strange, it wasn’t adhesive.
Did I put it on wrong?
What I have would be useless without the hard case (that I bought separately), to hold the film in place.

Am I having a blonde moment?

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.