I'm trying to gather some data together at the moment across some of my SEO sites to compare the traffic they are getting for their targeted keywords compared to what is predicted by Keyword Discovery.

So far, the results seem to show that you can exceed the predicted traffic from Keyword Discovery if you have high placings in Google. This isn't unexpected really given the limitations of the data that KD has to work with and the predominance of Google searches.

However, I have come across an interesting anomaly, which shows you the importance of brand, even online. It's well known to us as an SEO company that manay of our sites get a lot of traffic for their own company name. That makes perfect sense - unless you have a really memorable domain name (and even then sometimes not) people will search for you.

But what is really surprising is that for company name searches, where the company has a no1 ranking, the resultant traffic can be 3-5000% higher than the predicted traffic. Of course, these people are looking for you specifically, so they are more likely to click on the top option than the normal drop off down the page would suggest. And company name searches probably slightly defy the ability of Keyword Discovery to quantify it, but even so these are amazing results. I suspect also that they are more likely to be returning visitors (I talked about this in my Google Analytics blog earlier).

So if you can get your visitors to remember your company name for the next time they want your services, you are on to a big traffic driver. Just try and make sure you are no1 for your own name!