Why Do Some Keyword Research Tools Seem So Inaccurate

March 7, 2009 by Breakaway
Filed under: Niche Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

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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.

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