Let’s take hypnotherapy as an example. The reason that’s on my mind is that I’m now helping Sarah Joy with her new hypnotherapy website, http://SarahJoyHypnotherapy.com.

Sarah is a clinical hypnotherapist with a decade’s experience in the profession. She used to live and practice in the UK but has recently moved to Western Australia and now practices in Kalamunda, near Perth.

While helping Sarah, one of the questions I wanted answers for was… Which is the best term to use to describe her work? – hypnotherapy or hypnotherapist? They are very close, and both are accurate, but as it turned out these have two quite different search volumes.

Hypnotherapy has 368,000 monthly searches

Hypnotherapy has 60,500 monthly searches

Clinical hypnotherapy has 2,900 monthly searches

Clinical hypnotherapist has 1,300 monthly searches

Now how did I find that out?

Easy. I used the Google keyword tool.

You can get to it either by clicking this link https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal or typing “google keyword tool” into Google and it’s going to be the first result. I know which one is easier to remember, eh.

Once you’re at the site, you simply type in the words you want to compare, one per line.

Before you fill in the captcha thingy to prove you’re human, it’s a good idea to untick the “Use synonyms” box so you only get the data you need. Like this…

After Google delivers you the results, you can click on the words at the top of any column (the column header) to sort the page’s data according to the figures in that column.

In this case, I wanted to know which term gets the most searches. So I clicked on the words Local Search Volume — and hey presto, it’s sorted to give us the phrases with the biggest local search volume at the top.

(By clicking the column header again, the sort direction is reversed… putting the least searched for terms at the top of the list. Not that you even need to do any sorting when you are comparing only a few terms but when you are involved with keyword selection for a larger batch of results, this click-to-sort thing is mighty handy.)

As you can see, there are more than TWICE as many searches for one term. If you plan to put your site in front of a bigger search audience, that’s the term to choose. And we did.

- Written by Gary Harvey, http://PageOneWithGary.com

Search Volume: Finding Out How Often Your Keywords Are Searched For is a post from: Page One with Gary. Reprinting is welcomed. Please include these end notes. Make More Sales | Affordable SEO Service