By Eric Van Buskirk
This word cloud of popular keywords by search volume was created using a dataset we at SEMrush have access to internally. What’s the big deal about analyzing top searched keywords? I challenge you to find this data. Search volume is an extremely difficult metric for our developers to compile. It’s a secret sauce, but it’s also not something that just starts with “most popular.” 
To find the most popular, we have to calculate search volume for 4,000,000 in the USA and our internal data tables let us analyze after the raw data is brought together.
There results I found of the top 1000 is nothing short of a “shocker” from my keyword-geek POV. Most unfortunately, I assumed the “P” word would win out by far. Craigslist? Huh? Yes, people like to search for craigslist terms in many different ways and they do this a LOT! Is it the most popular website? No. Currently it ranks as the website which gets the tenth most visits from search according to the SEMrush Rank.
Clearly, people know Craigslist. 31 of the top 1000 searches contain the brand name. They know the “channels” in the website—they have precise ideas about what they can’t find. The many types of searches used for Craigslist may say something about the familiarity and loyalty for their site.
If this logic is correct—more variations of searches for the same term mean people know more about it than other brands or ideas, generally, what does this say about the other winners in the top? The “P” word is very high, and people have many ideas what they want to find in that arena. Google is actually higher than I’d expect. If someone is searching for variations of Google, they are probably looking for Google properties beyond just Google Search. Although, if they do a search in Google, it is logical that they want to find out more about Google. Lottery and weather? They are certainly staples of life in the US (Next project is to correlate these top searches between countries).
Below is the top TEN thousand.
The game changes, and again if your are a keyword geek you should be floored by how popular variations of “Craigslist” are! There are many variations including “university” and I saw this with my research on Twitter for words found in account names. People love to mention particular “universities”. There is fierce loyalty behind them. “Games” and “Login” jump in prominence. You tell me? There’s a lot to infer by these word clouds. Please leave comments about what stands out for you.
