A guideline for finding domains with type in traffic?

[rush1]

I realize that this will vary greatly depending on the niche, length of the domain, and other factors, but generally speaking, what is the minimum amount of search traffic that you look for before you decide to register a domain?

Example: if a keyword gets 1,000 searches a month, how many type-ins can you generally expect if you own the .com of that keyword? 5 a month? 50 a month?

 

[DotWeekly]

1 in 6 use direct navigation is my guide.

A little bit of advice (if you develop)... the higher amount of searches, the more competition. The lower amount of searches, the less competition.

I personally put focus on the lower searched terms because it's easier to rank Good in SE's. I like at least 300-500 searches a month for an exact term.

 

[john_karr]

Thanks!

 

[InsanerDomainer]

Direct navigation varies an awful lot though. For instance I have two .com's that both get 3600 exact keyword searches/month. One of them got over 200 hits a week as soon as I registered it, with no backlinks. The other one still gets almost nil. About one a day on average.

I'd like to figure out what really makes the difference. The obvious difference between those two is that the successful one is two words, while the unsuccessful one has four.

 

[WordWalker]

1 in 6 use direct navigation is my guide.

A little bit of advice (if you develop)... the higher amount of searches, the more competition. The lower amount of searches, the less competition.

I personally put focus on the lower searched terms because it's easier to rank Good in SE's. I like at least 300-500 searches a month for an exact term.

Isn't it the total number of published pages that make it more (or less) competitive?

If I have a term with 1,000,000 exact searches per month, but only 2,000 published pages that contain the exact keywords I'm searching for, that's a tremendous opportunity.

If you have 300-500 exact searches with 500,000 published pages, it's going to be difficult to get good placement.

See the 5th comment down at this link from Mark for a good overview of the process.

 

[InsanerDomainer]

Isn't it the total number of published pages that make it more (or less) competitive?

I'll agree with that. I have about 70 websites on Google Webmaster Tools, they mostly have poor pagerank (I'm working on that, lol), and it tells me that the top search queries are mostly things like very specific copyrighted names or illegal activities "how to crack DVD's" and that kind of thing. It's consistent with your logic because those are things that have high search volume and a relatively low number of search results.