Pool billiards which word do you use

I ran into an acquaintance who asked what do you do with your free time? My response is that I play in a few pool leagues. My acquaintance Say’s What? I say you know, shoot Pool Billiards.

Sometimes people immediately think about swimming, gambling or a car pool when they hear the word pool. In order to save time and confusion, my normal response would be I play pool in a league, do you play pocket billiards?

The two words don’t look or sound natural together like that. They do however kind of go hand in hand. While doing some key word research, I found out that the phrase pool billiards, typed just like that was searched 20,144 times last month.

This sounds like a pretty large number and it is quite a few searches. This is a small number however compared to the monthly searches performed last month on the keyword billiards, which was 416,838.

Wow that is pushing a half million searches for the single word billiards.

Billiards Parlor came in second with 95,546 searches for the month. If we put those top 3 together we are well over half a million monthly searches and that is only on those 3 keyword phrases.

We played in a championship match the other night in one of the APA teams that I play on and one of my team mates said that playing pool is on the decline. I am not sure if it is on a decline or not. There are however quite a few people searching for pool and billiards related material, information or products.

I wrote this article because I see these two words together all the time. They don’t sound natural but they kind of go together in a funny way.

If you hear someone say, I am going to play pool, you know pocket billiards. (sounds acceptable)

Guy Say’s I’m going to play pool billiards. (doesn’t sound natural)

I guess since over 20 thousand people type these words into search engines in a month, that they must be a legitimate search phrase. (Marketers would call this a short tail keyword phrase.)

Well now that I got this off of my chest, I guess it’s time to shoot some pool.

To your run out success.

Ted