I just learned something new today. After writing the post on long tail keywords, I tried to do more reading on keywords in general. What I discovered was quite surprising, though. I have always been a Google fan. Despite the fact that they are way too harsh on paid posts (at least in my opinion) I think that they still deliver pretty good products. So I thought that the Google Keyword Tool would be really good and useful.
According to Smackdown, though, it is not really that useful. How so? Here is an excerpt from the post:
Recently there was a bit of a hubbub surrounding Google’s Keyword Tool External (the keyword suggestion portion of AdWords that was made public a couple of years back). It started when a few people, like Barry Schwartz from SERoundtable, noticed that the tool was showing specific numbers for search terms instead of just green bars. Even though at first the numbers only appeared intermittently for people, the official Inside AdWords blog reported the change as a permanent one later that night.
The problem is, however, that those numbers are meant for people doing research into PPC traffic. The numbers shown have very little to do with what people actually search on using Google.com. I learned this the hard way about a year and a half ago, when I decided to try and use AdWords (the internal tool, the one that would actually show me estimated clicks based on position) to pick keywords that I might want to try and optimize for. I identified 3 phrases that I figured would be fairly easy to rank for (which they turned out to be). According to Google, being in the top 3 ad spots (which is as narrow as Google will estimate) I would get an estimated 141 to 180 clicks per day from all three phrases combined. Since natural serps get a slightly better CTR than ads usually do, I figured I would be golden if I could SEO my site to the top for those phrases. Not a ton of traffic, but with the conversion ratios I had on that site for targeted traffic, it would be more than worth it to spend the effort required to get those three phrases to the top.
What does this mean for us? Perhaps we shouldn’t rely too much on this tool then. Maybe Word Tracker is better? Share your thoughts on this?
8 Comments to "Google Keyword Tool May Not Be Really Useful"
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What I noticed is that the counts it shows are way higher than the counts the other tools show. By a factor of 10 in many cases. Does this mean the other tools were not accurate?
I use the SEOBook keyword tool. It gives a little more info than just google. I’m not sure if it is any better or worse than the adwords tool. But I do use this information for finding long tail keywords.
DT
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I think the number estimates have to be better than the old green bars. At least you can see a difference between all the maxed out keywords now. As a free tool, the adwords tool is not bad. I think giving estimate numbers over graphical display is an improvement.
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Interesting take. There is a lot of STUFF and some of it not worth the time.
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