Interesting day that made complete sense to me. Ed posted two videos on how to use Google Trends to test the viability of your umbrella phrases. Here’s the gist. By using a search phrase where the traffic is known, the umbrella phrase can be compared against it to see if the traffic is higher or lower. So, in this example, the known search term is “male yeast infection”. That phrase yields about 500 searches a day. When our umbrella terms are compared against it, you can easily see if there’s a market or not.

Why is this important? Well, it appears that Wordtracker is not always a good indicator of the amount of traffic you will get from ranking well on Google. Even though Wordtracker might say a phrase gets 300 searches a day, Google Trends might show it gets less than 250 (meaning it won’t even register on the Google Trend display).

Bottom line? Comparing the umbrella phrases against Google Trends, you should only pursue those phrases that show > 100 searches a day in Google. If you can’t meet that, move on. If you don’t move on, you’ll waste tons of effort and will not see any organic search traffic.

When doing my research using the methodology above, none of the seven phrases I’m researching looked good. None of them were over 250 searches a day and looked more like < 100. So, I guess it’s back to square one.