Accuracy of Wordtracker UK?

[GuerrillaIM]

Hey Guys,

I'm noticing lot of keywords showing higher search volume in UK than in the US on word tracker. For instance keyword: "Management training"

UK: 1,596 searches
US: 62 searches

Are these right or is word tracker wildly unnacurate? It seems like the majority of search terms im looking at today have much higher UK search values, it has me perplexed as UK's population is much less than US.

Thanks

[impact-productions]

For that exact phrase, Google has 14,800 searches per month UK, and 60,500 searcher per month US - so it looks as though Wordtracker is inaccurate.

It is still surprising that the UK search volume is as high as a quarter of the US search volume, considering the much greater size differential between the two countries. I guess that says something.

[kenj]

I have occasionally come across these blips in the UK section but in the main they are a good guide.

For an offline business dealing in hard goods wordtracker is very good indeed. You can search by county and product

e.g. "Beds Surrey" and find out what local searches are. Then you can place very specific pages based on these local searches

Ken

[GuerrillaIM]

Impact productions, where are you getting those figures from?

[Rezbi]

Originally Posted by impact-productions

For that exact phrase, Google has 14,800 searches per month UK, and 60,500 searcher per month US - so it looks as though Wordtracker is inaccurate.

It is still surprising that the UK search volume is as high as a quarter of the US search volume, considering the much greater size differential between the two countries. I guess that says something.

Not necessarily - google is not the search engine wordtracker uses.

[impact-productions]

Originally Posted by GuerrillaIM

Impact productions, where are you getting those figures from?

From the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, results filtered to English UK and English US, and exact phrase matching - then just reading off the search figures.

Rezbi, yes there might be some strange idiosyncrasies based on the search engine Wordtracker uses - maybe it's just used exclusively by UK residents wanting to train to be managers - but I think it unlikely that the figures are 100% representative of the population as a whole.

[mald]

Hi, my name's Mal Darwen, and I work for Wordtracker Customer Service - I hope that the following can shed some light on the subject:

There are probably a few reasons for this, including that it might be a more common search term over here. Other factors could include the fact that the datasets cover different timespans - US is 160 days while the UK is 365 days.

It is also possible that someone in our UK data catchment is checking their rankings on Google, which would push the figures up. So, it's always worth checking what the competition is like for a particular phrase, and in this case it does seem to be pretty stiff.

it is rare for people to use our tool exclusively. Many people engaged in SEO use a combination of tools, and to be quite honest, it can take some time assessing different tools and methods before one finds a combination and a way of working that suits.

Many people also install analytics software into their sites so that they can see what keywords bring traffic to their sites, and this can be another good source of information. The important thing to remember is that whatever tools are available to set up your optimization, the only real measure of a keyword's effectiveness is live testing.

do feel free to mail us at support [at] wordtracker.com if this raises more questions!

best,

Mal