Greg Parke said:

I recently went backover the MMM video about using the Google keyword search tool, and I noticed some changes. John used "Bob Dylan ........." for a lot of examples. I tried using some of the same examples, and got back extremely different results than John did, the search results were much, much higher.  It appears Google has changed things a bit with how their searches work. I found that by adding the word "list" after the keyword phrase in quotation marks ( "Bob Dylan lyrics" list ) made quite a difference. The search seemed to be a lot more defined, with the amount of results more in line with what John originally got when the videos were made.

Any comments on this? Am I doing something wrong, or are there any more changes I should be aware of? I'm also wondering if any of this has affected any of the paid programs for keyword searches? 

Hey Greg,

Not sure if you are referring to search volume or competition. You referenced both. Search volume is still approximately the same, with some variations because of things happening in real time, such as performances, etc.

I checked the competition volume, and you're right. Something has changed. I'm going to look into this more but Google is changing their algorithm regularly. They made a major change a few months back and they have made several recent changes to the Google.com page recently as well. Everytime they change something, search results change.

Here is what I think is happening (totally a guess right now). I think that Google used to mostly exclude social pages and now they are including social sites in the results, as there is a new social search option under the "more" tab on the Google search page. That may be throwing off results dramatically.

If you search the keyword term "Bob Dylan albums", which is one I used in the example, it returned just over 9000 competing sites. Now it's over 440,000. HOWEVER, if you just select "blogs" and "news" from Google's options it equals a little over 23,000. Which is still more that it was but it's on par with what one might expect given that the example was done last year. That might be one way to go if you want too use the same criteria in MMM.

Another thing you can use is the intitle search. To do that you would just search intitle:"your keyword". That will only give you the competing pages that have the keyword you are competing against in the title itself. This is a pretty accurate gauge on your REAL competition. Unfortunately I have not used this tactic myself to say anything categorical on the criteria you should use, but Christine O'kelly from OnlinePRNews.com (who is an SEO expert) suggested 7000 might be the max she would sue with a press release. My feeling is that this would be a good benchmark for article marketing as well.

I'll look into this further and when I have more info I'll give everyone an update.

NOTE* I have been using the same criteria laid out in MMM and have still been finding plenty of viable keywords. I did notice it was getting tougher, but the criteria in MMM still do work. But as pointed out, it may be about time that I changed those numbers/techniques up. I'll also talk to Market Samurai and see what they have to say.

Thanks for raising this issue Greg.

Greg Parke said:

Yeah...leave it to me to throw some gas on the fire! Thanks for your response John. I'll be waiting to see what you and other members of the forum come up with. Right now I'm going to kick back with another cocktail after a rather grueling gig! I got to spend over an hour competing with a "nice" heckler who pretty much f**ked my afternoon. Where the h**l was security anyway?!

Man do just want to jump off the stage and beat the crap out of hecklers. That's the worst. Sorry you had a bummer of a gig.