Domaining MBA Monday: Search Volume and Search Results Are Two Very Different Things

Domaining MBA Monday

Hello, TGIM, and welcome to Domaining MBA Monday. Today I wanted to talk about a topic that extends well past Domaining and applies to anyone in the affiliate marketing, lead generation or search space in general. It is a common point of confusion which is why I’ve decided to dedicate an entire post to it, I’m talking about the difference between search results and search volume.

I regularly get emails from people offering me domain names and claiming that they could have tons of traffic if developed because of the number of search results the term gets. They are missing two key things:

  1. Just owning an exact-match domain does not mean you will rank well for that term – that takes a lot of time and hard work for competitive terms.
  2. The number of search results is different from the number of people searching, i.e. search results are different from search volume.

What you care about is search volume which will tell you how many people are searching for a given term on Google in a given month. For example, the term “car insurance” gets 135,000 exact-match local searches. Make sure to always use exact and not broad match. If you don’t know the difference, read this.

On the other hand “really cool amazing car insurance” gets less than 10 searches a month. However, if you search for “really cool amazing car insurance” on Google you’ll find 41.5 million results. So, many people get confused, go out and register domains like ReallyCoolCarInsurance.com and then email a zillion people telling them they have a domain with 41.5 million searches. See the difference, searches are very different from results.

So next time someone tries to convince you that they have an amazing exact match domain that could make you a small fortune, first remember, just buying an exact match domain won’t instantly grant you great rankings, that times time and money in most cases. Second remember that search volume and search results are two very different beasts.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton