Day 20, Some interesting observations and learnings

I'm now on day 20 of the thirty day challenge.

I have learned some amazing things. Most of my biggest revelations have come around keywords.

As you may know I only recently figured out the importance of and how to do quality keyword research. Until then I was just kind of winging it. Now I'm feeling all happy and proud that I'm looking for good quality keywords with good traffic and low competition.

Here's the catch. I still don't seem to be getting great traffic. what the?

Here's what I learned last week in the thirty day challenge. The traffic numbers given in your keyword research tools are generally NOT the number of actual visitors that keyword is getting. What? then what's the point?

I asked myself that too. That's when Ed trots out this great new tool created by one of the owners of wordtracker. It is completely free, and will tell you the approximate actual numbers of hits on a keyword.

They put this together by working with google trends and doing some pretty tricky stuff to figure out just how much traffic a keyword is actually getting. For all the details stop by the thirty day challenge

Here's what it means to me. I went back through my lenses and looked up the keywords using this new tool and it quickly became apparent why I was not getting the traffic I had expected, because the searches just weren't there.

This new tool is easy to use and makes quick work out of finding good keywords and then making sure they actually have the numbers it appears they do. It does make keyword research a little more difficult, at least finding keywords with the kind of numbers you want, but in the end it is totally worth it. I would rather take an extra 30 minutes to find a good keyword or three, than spend all the time it takes to build a lens and have it do nothing.

If you are building keyword related lenses I highly suggest you get over to the thirty day challenge and check out what Ed teaches about keyword research and pick up this new keyword tool.