Why Do Some Keyword Research Tools Seem So Inaccurate
Thank you all so much for voting on the Which Keyword Research Tool Do You Use post. If you haven’t voted yet, please do!
In response to that post, I received a DM on Twitter from @bluelynxmktg, (not a Twitter Auto-DM, thank God). He asked about me alluding to Google’s Keyword tool, and if it overprojects the search numbers one may try to use for niche marketing research.
Instead of bashing Google’s Keyword Tool, or any other keyword tool, I am going to offer reasons as to why I think these tools are inaccurate.
1) The sites use only a small sampling on searches when projecting numbers. If any of the tools can have the biggest sample with which to make estimations of, it’d be Google’s Keyword Tool, because they own the largest share of searches on the internet. Everyone else, simply has a subsection of all of the searches, and has to estimate and scale up to get an average search volume.
Neilsen TV ratings do the same thing. Only a small number of cable boxes are calculated, and then they make an estimation of how many millions of viewers there are, based on those boxes. This can be problematic, if there are issues with scaling up.
2) Seasonal trends can be tricky. Travel niches can be subject to various search volumes, depending on the time of year. Snowboarding niches obviously have much higher search volumes around the winter time. Whereas beach niches have higher search volumes in the months leading up to and during the summer. Depending on how your keyword tool calculates seasonal niches, the numbers may be way off.
3) Search engines don’t share their data. This also leads to more guessing of numbers, than hard facts. Since the search engines are competing, they wouldn’t want to give away their search numbers, especially if a certain subsection of society tends to use one search engine over another.
4) The #1 search result doesn’t get all of the traffic. People tend to forget that just because you are #1, doesn’t mean that you will get all or even most of the traffic. It’s been estimated that #1 only gets about 45% of the total search volume. There’s usually the others in the top 10, plus various advertisments that can be clicked on. So if a keyword is estimated to receive 45,000 searches a month, the #1 search result may only see 20,000-22,000 of those searches.
5) The keyword or target search result is too new. Typically a keyword research tool updates every month. If the keyword you’re trying to target is for a new product just released or an incident that just occured, ie: “blackberry storm” or “heath ledger overdose”, it’s unlikely that the traffic sample for the previous month is accurate.
There may be other reasons. If you can think of any others, please post them in the comments. Also, please subscribe to the newsletter or our RSS feed to see the next post in this series, How to effectively use the Google Keyword Tool to find keywords.
Which Keyword Research Tool Do You Use
I have an upcoming post about keyword research for niche marketing, and I want to make sure I am not just preaching to the choir. I know there are multiple tools out there, and I also know it’s important to do your keyword research using multiple tools, and one may be wildly incorrect with regards to a certain type of search, or individual searches.
That was the problem with one of my sites when I first started. It’s #2 for it’s main keyword right now, which one of the keyword research tools said had like 1000 searches a day, when in fact, I maybe got 2 visits a day (and for being #2, that’s horrible.)
So, please help me to see where my visitors and followers do their keyword research:
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Aim To Rank For Long Tail Keywords
When new bloggers start out writing about their favorite topic, they are excited and just writing away. They then start to investigate why they don’t really have much traffic, and they start learning about search engine optimization (SEO). So, they start targeting their main keyword. Let’s say it’s a blogger writing about his debt, and how he hopes to end his debt through blogging. He starts to target the keywords “debt management.” After doing some SEO basics, and maybe a little bit of link building, he still is frustrated by not being in the top few pages on Google for “debt management” so he starts to give up. Instead of giving up, he should aim for long tail keywords.
His problem was that he was trying to blog about a keyword that many people are competing for. When there’s a lot of competition, it’s harder to rank higher in Google, therefore less visitors from Google. So, how can this problem be solved? By using long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are groups of keywords that are not too common when they are by themselves, but when they are grouped, they will be able to draw more customers to your website. Also, since those groups of keywords aren’t as popular, then it will be a lot easier to rank higher in the search engines. And since you’ll be targeting a fairly specific set of keywords, the people searching for those keywords will be more valuable customers since their search results will be laser targeted.
So how do you find long tail keywords for your site? The first step is to dive into your site statistics. Most statistics programs show you the keywords that were used to find you in the search engine. Start looking at some of the longer phrases that were used to find your site, and then write an article about that topic specifically. Also take a look at where you stand in the search engines already for those phrases. That will give you an idea if you really need to target that phrase with a few pages about that topic, or if one page will do. Make sure that you link to this new page from a couple of your other pages and external pages, using that long tail keyword as your anchor text for the link.
Another way is to use a free online tool from Google. (You can find it at: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) You can search for the generic term that you want to use and it will often give a nice long list of popular searches, with a rough estimate of how many searches a month. (To see a more accurate monthly search volume, change the “Match Type” from “Broad” to “Exact”. Try searching the term “debt management” to get an ideas of long tail keywords.
The thing to remember when targeting long tail keywords is the value of small things when multiplied. Sure, it’d be awesome to rank first for a keyword that gets 300 searches a day. But, that will be a little bit harder. If, instead, you focus on 10 long tail keywords with 30 searches a day each, you’ll still get about 300 visitors to your site, but it’ll be a lot easier since you’ll probably rank higher for those keywords since they are long tail, and therefore less competitive.
