The Overture Keyword Assistant Tool, Highly Inflated Impressions, and Ghost Traffic

Websites that rely on search engine traffic rely heavily on detailed keyword research to reach their target audience. Whether the resulting information is used for PPC, SEO, or featured ads is beside the point. Simply put, if you want to explode search traffic, you need accurate data on the number of searches performed for each particular keyword.

Some companies outsource keyword research to a specialized company and others do it in-house. Regardless of who does the research, a large number of people will primarily use the information provided by Overture’s Keyword Wizard as the basis of their project. I have been of the opinion for some time that the data Overture provides is often inflated, especially for top keywords. I’ve recently been running tests to determine the accuracy of the Overtures data in an effort to test my suspicions and see how big of a problem the problem really is. The results so far are far beyond what I expected.

SEO research

About a year ago I created a new website focused on VoIP phone systems (www.ip-phone-system.co.uk). The website was built to rank high on Yahoo for the search phrase “Phone System” and other keyword phrases. According to Overture, the phrase “phone system” has 350,066 searches performed every month in the UK alone. The website is currently on the first page of results on Yahoo.com and in the top three positions for Yahoo’s UK-only search.

With the keyword tool reporting this number of searches and the websites position, you would expect the site to receive a high volume of traffic. But to put it simply, it doesn’t. For example, in the last two months, the site only received three hits from people searching for “phone system.”

This test is not concrete because most phone system searches could be done on another engine Overture gets its results from, such as MSN. But you would have to agree that it is not very likely. Especially when you consider that the site ranks in the top three positions for the search phrase “phone system” on MSN.

Overture’s keyword tool pulls its results from a number of sources, with Yahoo and MSN being the biggest in terms of traffic. The site has a large number of top three listings on phrases that seem to produce high traffic, eg IP phone, business phone system, office phone system, etc. however, it only receives a very small number of visitors.

ghost traffic

So what is the cause of the large number of impressions that the tool returns? I can’t say for sure, but I can certainly name a few things that could significantly contribute to the effect. I’m also going to try to coin a phrase here and call the phenomena “Ghost Traffic” which simply means non-genuine traffic or searches done for reasons other than actual genuine interest in finding a site related to a particular topic of words. key. I strongly believe that the two examples below affect Overtures data and contribute to ghost traffic.

1. Manual SEO position check

People who manually check search results to determine the position of a website. Search phrases that are perceived to be high yielding traffic will, in theory, have more people optimizing and therefore more people manually checking their positions. More people manually verifying their positions causes the number of impressions to inflate (ghost traffic). This is self-perpetuating; As more people check the results, they inflate the number of impressions, causing even more people to target the phrase and manually check their positions, etc. etc. etc.

I’m sure this is affecting Overture’s keyword suggestion tool significantly enough to cause many sites to go after ghost traffic. I also believe this is the biggest contributing source of ghost traffic. Many webmasters manually check their rankings every day and some even more so.

Automatically generated pages compiled from SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages)

Spam sites that collect keyword-rich content from the SERPs. These sites will automatically query search engines for the top-ranked keywords (probably researched via Overture’s keyword suggestion tool). Sites automatically copy search engine results pages that are heavily focused on keywords. Quite often, these sites will automatically generate tens of thousands of pages, all focused on a select number of keyword variations. These keyword-rich pages are usually buried quite deep in the site because they have no value to human visitors. Each page will link via rich anchor text and then pass relevance to one of the parent pages via an anchor text link.

The idea behind this SEO trick is simply to produce large amounts of optimized content that links to favorably. Some of the programming that goes into this type of lab can be very clever, while others are very basic. The problem is that virtually every page that is generated or regenerated influences Overtures data, unless the developer is using an API key (which is unlikely).

Conclution

This is very concerning to me as there must be a lot of people who base all of their keyword research campaigns on Overture data. This can make your entire marketing campaign focus on nothing more than Phantom Traffic. So what can be done to avoid targeting phrases that consist mostly of ghost traffic?

Well, first of all, it is wise to use a mix of data sources. Wordtracker provides similar data to Overture, but it is collected from different sources. Comparing the two data sources can sometimes highlight ghost traffic. If you see keywords with extremely high number of impressions, ask yourself if this is credible. Common sense can help a lot in this game.

Personally, I have always advised clients to target the sub keyword phrases first, and once the rankings are achieved, focus on the next sub keyword phrase. If you smartly select sub-keyword phrases that include your primary keywords, you’re optimizing for the primary keyword at the same time.

Example

A good example of this is the sub keyword phrases, “web design Manchester”. The company I work for currently appears on the first page of major search engines for this phrase. The top phrase is “web design” and it is also being optimized at the same time because the words are contained in “web design Manchester” (we are currently ranked 11th on Yahoo UK for the search phrase “web design”). The search phrase “web design Manchester” is also one of our best performing keywords because it is highly targeted. Anyone searching for that term is specifically interested in web design in the Manchester area.

Optimizing in this way has several benefits. Firstly, secondary phrases should be less affected by Phantom Traffic and the number of impressions you see should be similar to the number of genuine searches performed. Side phrases also tend to be less competitive with fewer people optimizing specifically for them (this isn’t always the case though). So getting to a traffic generating position is easier and faster, resulting in faster ROI.

Once enough sub-phrases are optimized to rank well for the main keywords. The campaign will already be attracting targeted traffic and will therefore cause much less pain and effort if the primary keyword is heavily affected by Phantom Traffic.

The other advantage is that most of the time the subphrases are more targeted and the traffic they bring in tends to convert much better. I have personally seen this over and over again. Sites that have low traffic but enjoy a 1/3 conversion rate because the traffic they receive is extremely specific secondary keyword phrases. These websites often outperform sites that receive ten times the amount of traffic from the main keywords. However, it all depends on the details and what works for some may not work for you. As mentioned before, common sense goes a long way in this game. Just don’t get caught up in ghost traffic.