Keyword Tool Estimator vs. Real thing

[mjd081]

Hey everyone,
Long time lurker, first time poster. First and foremost, thank you to everyone on here for the insurmountable amount of helpful information posted on this site. It has helped me a lot and I appreciate it.

I was wondering if you guys could give me an idea with how accurate the Google Keyword Tool is with estimated monthly searches? The reason I ask is that I have a site that is ranking #2-4 for a keyword that receives about 600k searches a month, but am receiving very little traffic from it (the website mentioned is not the site in my profile). Is the estimator incorrect about the amount of searches/month, or is it something else?

Any help is appreciated, thanks fellas.

[SEOEnlightenment]

The traffic may not be 100% correct (she said with tongue in cheek) as experience often shows the traffic ratio to be only 10% of expected more often than not.

[highbids]

Have you found an accurate way to find out the real searches.

Originally Posted by mjd081

Hey everyone,
Long time lurker, first time poster. First and foremost, thank you to everyone on here for the insurmountable amount of helpful information posted on this site. It has helped me a lot and I appreciate it.

I was wondering if you guys could give me an idea with how accurate the Google Keyword Tool is with estimated monthly searches? The reason I ask is that I have a site that is ranking #2-4 for a keyword that receives about 600k searches a month, but am receiving very little traffic from it (the website mentioned is not the site in my profile). Is the estimator incorrect about the amount of searches/month, or is it something else?

Any help is appreciated, thanks fellas.

[UMS]

Originally Posted by mjd081

Hey everyone,
I was wondering if you guys could give me an idea with how accurate the Google Keyword Tool is with estimated monthly searches? The reason I ask is that I have a site that is ranking #2-4 for a keyword that receives about 600k searches a month, but am receiving very little traffic from it (the website mentioned is not the site in my profile). Is the estimator incorrect about the amount of searches/month, or is it something else?

I can guarantee you with 99.99999% certainty that when you checked the search volume for your keyword in Google Adwords Keyword Tool that you were looking at the default "broad match" results.

You need to check the "exact" match results to get a much more realistic idea of actual search volume.

[shuvo]

Yeah I agree with UMS.Check the box of "Exact" from left after making the first search and It will give a good idea although still not the 100% accurate result but close to it.

[mjd081]

Well, that's depressing. Thanks for the help guys I really appreciate it. I definitely wasted a whole lot of time optimizing for keywords that get no traffic. The site I was referring to is a little niche site I recently built, llcorinc.org, and from the keyword "llc or inc" there were 600k searches, but only 260 exact searches... How can there be that much of a discrepancy?

[WebCEO Official]

The name of Google's tool - estimator - says for itself.

[cpacashman]

How accurate is SEO PowerSuite for research.

[JSProjects]

The estimator is just that, an estimation. It's disappointing to see that there's such a difference between exact & broad searches for your term though. This is why I don't even use phrase matching. Only exact.

If you want a true look at the amount of searches you can always create a really terrible ad in Google Adwords for your term. At most you'll spend a few bucks but you'll get a realistic #.