Hi all,

I don't know very much about this subject so if these questions are obvious to you I apologise.

I had a company on the phone trying to sell me their services to guarantee me top rankings on Google for certain keywords, during the conversatio they were able to tell me how many times a combination of keywords had been used in a search from Google. This info would obviously be very usefull in trying to target customers, Is it available anywhere?

for example, if I sold plastic toy ducks (I don't) it would be good to know how many times the following keywords were searced on

1/ Yellow duck
2/ Plastic duck
3/ Bath duck
4/ Yellow Ducks in Northern Ireland
5/ Toy ducks

etc, etc

Does this question make sense, I've tried searching for the info but no luck.

Thanks

Jim

Google do not publish the number of searches for each and every keyword. The company you were talking to were quite simply lying. The closest you can get is the Zeitgeist http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html which give you a list of the most popular searches.

Also, nobody can gaurantee to get you to a certain position on a certain keyword. There are many other scams that such companies get up to. Google pubish a guide for webmaster on how not to get burned by bad SEO. http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html

There are some tools that can be used to estimate the number of searches on some keywords. Overture has a tool that you can use the get an estimate of the number of searches on Yahoo for a particular phrase. It doesn't give the actual number of searches but it does give a guide to which keywords are more popular than others. It can be inferred that what's popular on Overture is also going to be what's popular on Google.

Here are links to the overture tool and wordtracker...

http://inventory.overture.com/d/sear...ry/suggestion/
http://www.wordtracker.com/

and a tools that looks at both of the above at the same time...

http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/su...ywords=hosting

Website Hosting & Design | Classic Web Development

The only way to obtain the number of imperssions for a given search phrase on Google is to conduct an adwords campaign for the keyword. The company in question was probably using Overture's keyword tool and estimating how many more searches would be made on Google. If the Overture network accounts for X% of search traffic and Google has a Y% share then you can estimate the traffic for Google but it would only be an estimate.

Both available tools (Overture Term Suggestion Tool and Google Adwords) are unfortunately highly unreliable...

How is Google Adwords unreliable?