Google SEO Tip#3: How Much Traffic Do You Think is Generated by Marketers Searching for Their Own Target Keywords?

Matt Cutts: Real interesting question.  I think it probably is not all that much and I’ll give you a reason or two for that.

Number one, take a look at how many people follow me or Danny Sullivan on Twitter or people that subscribe to my blog; the numbers that you end up with are about 50,000. So 50,000 people follow Danny, about 50,000 people follow me, about 50,000 people read my blog.

So what’s that telling me is whether you look at any popular blog, SEO related there are 50, maybe 100,000 people that are interested in the SEO aspect of things, but compared to the millions and millions and millions of people who are searching every day that’s still a relatively small percentage.

The other thing is that the AdWords keyword tool and I think a lot of the tools within Google can do a pretty good job of stripping out queries that look sort of artificial, that are repeated, or come too fast or for whatever reason looks like bots.

I think that even if we don’t strip those out, it’s relatively minor effect, but I think that we do strip those out relatively well. Now, in certain fields like the query search engine optimization may be a little bit skewed by people checking the rankings or various things like that.

But as soon as you get away from those head queries, more towards the tail, I think that they’re relatively accurate and I don’t think that they’re that skewed by the various search marketers and SEO’s and rank checkers and bots and all that sort of stuff.

So it might not be perfect but I think to within a relatively good percentage that stuff should be quite accurate.

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