If you have a website or are publishing an article online, you can increase your chances of people finding it by carefully choosing keywords to use both in the domain, folder path, and page content. One tool to help with this is Google Adword’s Keyword Planner. As a trivial example, let’s say you are building a dictionary website. You could buy a domain name that has the word “dictionary” in it or you could use the word “dictionary” in your page content. Or, you could use a synonym like “lexicon”. If you enter both words in the Keyword Planner, you’ll see the average monthly search volume for those words. In addition, Google will offer keyword ideas. As you can see in the screenshot below, many more people search using the term “dictionary” than they do the term “lexicon”. You can also see the competition level in the Competition column. However, that’s for if you want to pay Google to place your link at the top of search results. In the example below, the competition is low for both keywords.
Now, since “dictionary” is a popular term, you can expect more competition with respect to organic (not paid) search results. As you can see below, there are 4.32 billion results for the term “dictionary” and 3.05 billion for “lexicon”.
Of course, you’re not going to just write “dictionary” in your website content. You’ll probably write something like “Chinese – English dictionary” or “Spanish – English dictionary” which will have different average monthly searches and search results.