Domainers – be careful when using keyword tools in January
If you are using Google’s keyword tool to check keyword demand, remember that by default it checks the previous month. Since demand for many items spikes in December, using this tool in January can provide greatly inflated results.
For example, I was just checking availability for ‘chocolate gift tower’. Google’s keyword tool showed 720 monthly searches in December. However, expanding these results by selecting ’show all columns’ reveals that the term gets about half that amount of searches on most month’s of the year.
I decided to purchase ChocolateGiftTower.com anyway, but now realize that demand for this product won’t really begin to ramp up until the second half of the year.
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Checking trends for keywords apply to all the months of the year. Some “travel” domains for example have higher trends during the summer months.
Definitely, although I’m sometimes guilty of just checking the last month’s figures when reviewing many domains.
If you are using keyword tools to evaluate possible domains purchases, it’s also good to be aware of the ’summer effect’, especially August – when keyword demand for most phrases takes a dive. Of course there are exceptions – such as ‘back to school’ related queries and last minute travel searches.
If you use the new keyword tool the figures given are rolling 12 month averages, not only that, but if you download them you get the monthly values for the last 12 months.
The new tool is available from a link at the top of the existing tool if you log in to Google.
I guess you should always double check those stats with Google Insights. And don’t forget about Valuate.com