Hello all! First post here and hoping someone can help me out

We bought a domain that is comprised of, according to Google Adwords, a set of moderately competitive keywords. For simplicities sake (and the fact that I don't know the privacy rules here yet), let's just say the set of keywords is "forum master" and the domain we bought is forummaster.com. Now, according to Google Adwords, the keyword set "forum master" gets around 120,000 search queries per month.

We've had a placeholder homepage on forummaster.com complete with meta keywords, description and title along with keyword rich paragraphs throughout the page. The placeholder page is to get the site in the search engines and being indexed while we are working on building the store itself.

Google has begun to crawl this site and about two weeks ago, we noticed that we're already on the second page (#12 to be precise). We've been keeping a steady eye on this and we've stayed on page two the whole time.

However, I'm looking at Google Analytics that I have on that site and I barely see any traffic coming in (only a few visits per day). So, what does this 120,000 actually mean? We'd expect having this many search queries per month on average that being #12 in the list for a couple weeks that we'd get a lot more than 5 or visits a day. We have a few other domains that we're considering buying, but we're trying to figure out what gives here first...

Thanks!

Google has begun to crawl this site and about two weeks ago, we noticed that we're already on the second page (#12 to be precise). We've been keeping a steady eye on this and we've stayed on page two the whole time.

So situation normal here then. New pages/sites have always appeared highis up in the SERPs for the first week or two, sometimes it lasts for a month.
Then when the page content and the link weighting have been analysed it will drop back to it's realistic position.

So, what does this 120,000 actually mean?

Not very much. It's NOT an absolute figure, it's an extrapolation from the collected data over the previous few days/weeks. And it isn't from actual click data it is only from search queries.

We'd expect having this many search queries per month on average that being #12 in the list for a couple weeks that we'd get a lot more than 5 or visits a day.

Nope. In fact 5 visits a day from what is probably a random phrase you have plucked from somewhere is pretty good going.
Keyword research is not an exact science, it is a balance of experience and guess work. All "tools" are skewed in some way or another by automatic tools and people doing "ad checks". So the data should be treated as a starting point and your SEO/SEM used to further refine the research and focus the otimising/marketing.

The only keyword data you can be sure of is your own site logs.

Originally Posted by trbothead

the keyword set "forum master" gets around 120,000 search queries per month.

Originally Posted by trbothead

So, what does this 120,000 actually mean?

Part one explains part two. The 120,000 is searches - not guaranteed visits to your site regardless of where it ranks.

Pretend you're one of those people who searches for that phrase. Statistics say you are more likely to click on result 1 than 2. More likely to click on 2 than 3 etc.

You're on page 2.

For some searches, people will venture to page 149 (think about desperate people searching for pirate copies of software). For others, the very first result will suffice and everything else is redundant (e.g. who sang "you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave").

Also, think about what makes you click on a link in the results. The snippet (site description that appears underneath your link) - is it working? Is it a click magnet? Does it attract or repel people.

The chances are, appearing on page 2 of the SERPs is not doing you any favours.

So the data should be treated as a starting point and your SEO/SEM used to further refine the research and focus the otimising/marketing.

Thanks for the clarification. I had a feeling about the site ranking high in the SERPs at first then dropping later but wasn't sure. Still though, an average of 120,000 search queries performed for this set of keywords per month and less than 5 visits a day? I understand that search queries != visits, but I guess it's just surprising to me that the visits are actually this low.

If 120,000 means something, then the way to enjoy it is by having your site on top of the list. You've mention that you're somewhere on the 2nd page? This means almost nothing of the 120,000 expected visits. Most of the searchers only considers the top 5 results on the SERP, (for me it's enough to identify the most relevant result for my query), some may look at the rest on the list on the first page before trying another query. And only a little percentage of the searchers go through the rest of the pages. Having this facts, you may need to do hardwork on your SEO activities to get your site on top.

the 120,000 figure from adwords is meaningless as it includes all language domains etc, the majority of searches for that term will go to first page sites anyway. the 120,000 is only an estimate anyway google doesnt give away the real figures!