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Is the Google Keyword Tool Completely Wrong?

by ericwoo
33 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I recently went up in the search results for my main keyword in Google. The Google Keyword Tool showed that the search term has 9,900 searches per month. And this term is filtered in the Exact term and for the Local Monthly Searches (which I guess means USA)!

A few days ago, I realized that I moved to the first spot in google which is up from the 8th spot. I was so happy, so I checked my analytics and realized that I only got about 14 more visitors a day from my main term!

So I get a average of 22 visitors a day for my main term with the number one spot which google shows that it should be getting about 330 per day.

I even checked Wordtracker and it shows about the same data. I have double checked that google wasn't using my web history to display me as number 1 and checked with different proxies.

What is everyone's thoughts on the google keyword tool? Has anyone seen this type of wrong data?
#completely #google #keyword #tool #wrong
  • Profile picture of the author HunterSnake
    The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is roughly accurate. Google Trends and Google Insights for Search are also good tools to check out.

    If your search term is getting that many approximate searches monthly and you're hardly getting any traffic in the number one position, I'd inspect your title and meta description tags carefully. Those can make or break the deal, i.e. whether a person clicks or not.

    Also, try clearing your cookies and checking again to see if you're still #1.
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    • Profile picture of the author ericwoo
      Originally Posted by HunterSnake View Post

      The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is roughly accurate.
      I know and I never looked at it as being accurate in anyway but thats a huge difference when I only get 22 visits from a keyword displayed as having 330 per day.

      Originally Posted by HunterSnake View Post

      If your search term is getting that many approximate searches monthly and you're hardly getting any traffic in the number one position, I'd inspect your title and meta description tags carefully. Those can make or break the deal, i.e. whether a person clicks or not.
      I have already thought of this. Mine is by far better that most of everyones on the first page. Its sad to actually see some of the other ones. Their terrible

      Originally Posted by HunterSnake View Post

      Also, try clearing your cookies and checking again to see if you're still #1.
      have done that a few times and checked on other computers that haven't been to my site. I just think the keyword tool is falsely placing info out. Anyone else experience something like this?
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  • Profile picture of the author seoed
    exactly the same experience! google adwords tool is simply lying his ass off!
    I am at #4 for a keyword which should have around 27k impressions for exact match.
    Guess how much I get per day? 7 visitors! Adwords Tool, go to hell!
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    • Profile picture of the author HunterSnake
      Originally Posted by seoed View Post

      I am at #4 for a keyword which should have around 27k impressions for exact match.
      Most clicks go to the top sponsor messages or slots one through three. If one's needs are fulfilled, even though you're #4, chances are you won't get clicked. Are the sites above yours capable of fulfilling the needs of your target audience? If so, those sites are likely getting the traffic and there's no need for people to visit your site because their needs are fulfilled.
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      • Profile picture of the author ericwoo
        Originally Posted by HunterSnake View Post

        Most clicks go to the top sponsor messages or slots one through three. If one's needs are fulfilled, even though you're #4, chances are you won't get clicked. Are the sites above yours capable of fulfilling the needs of your target audience? If so, those sites are likely getting the traffic and there's no need for people to visit your site because their needs are fulfilled.
        I just went to the Google Traffic Estimator and typed the term in. It also confirmed that there is an Estimated Daily Click of 18 which makes sense with my analytics.

        I guess that now confirms which google tool was telling the truth. I don't understand how Google can be off that much. Does this make sense and how can we use the Keyword Tool to estimate traffic?

        I mean a term it shows is getting 9,900 per month when the number one spot is only calculated at averaging 660 per month. Thats crazy off.
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    • Profile picture of the author Lucid
      Originally Posted by seoed View Post

      exactly the same experience! google adwords tool is simply lying his ass off!
      The tool is accurate. Don't blame it if you achieve high rankings but get a low percentage of people clicking. That's not the tool's fault. As Hunter said, your title and description are not attracting the reader. Maybe they are thinking of something totally different like you are ranking for "wooden widgets" and selling round wooden widgets but searchers are looking for square wooden widgets.

      Eric, 22 out of 330 (assuming that's accurate, but you don't know for sure the actual number of searches) might be pretty good in your niche. That's almost a 7% click rate. Obviously you want more and you expect more but that might be the best you will get. Actually, a 25% click rate is about what you should typically expect in first position.

      You also don't know your position for each and every search. Most times you may be first but a certain percentage second, third or fourth.

      By the way, that estimated click tool is meant for Adwords but should give you a good idea for SEO as well. There are some industries where people just don't click as much and yours seems to be one of them.
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      • Profile picture of the author Shaunman
        Yeah it is a pitty that they can't make a 100% accurate keyword tool. Last month I had a keyword on position #4 that got 960 clicks, yet only 280 people searched it in a month according to Google's Keyword tool.

        I also have a keyword that has been bringing me in 100-200 people a month in spot #3 for over a year now and wordtracker says that 5 people search it.

        You just got to do the best you can and double check everything to get the best estimate.
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      • Profile picture of the author ericwoo
        Originally Posted by Lucid View Post

        The tool is accurate. Don't blame it if you achieve high rankings but get a low percentage of people clicking. That's not the tool's fault.
        Im still not sure. I still think its wrong because it doesn't make sense for this search term to have that much search traffic to begin with. I was surprised it had that much when I created the website.

        Originally Posted by Lucid View Post

        Actually, a 25% click rate is about what you should typically expect in first position.
        I always heard that the first spot had like the majority of clicks. Something like 70%, + or - 10%. I guess it depends on the amount of ads also.
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        • Profile picture of the author Lucid
          Originally Posted by ericwoo View Post

          Im still not sure. I still think its wrong because it doesn't make sense for this search term to have that much search traffic to begin with. I was surprised it had that much when I created the website..
          If you run Adwords campaigns and check the numbers in your account against the numbers reported by the tool, they are bang on. That is, if your impression share is 100%.

          So you think there would be LESS traffic for the term in question? Don't know what to tell you. You sound like my late father who would say "why are they building so many houses? There can't be that many people buying homes!" The math is simple. If there are 100,000 young people between 20 and 30 in a city of a million, all starting families in the next ten years, you will need to build houses and apartments for them to live in. There's a lot of people in the world all searching on all sorts of things. Just one in a million will result in hundreds of searches each month.


          Originally Posted by ericwoo View Post

          I always heard that the first spot had like the majority of clicks. Something like 70%, + or - 10%. I guess it depends on the amount of ads also.
          You heard wrong. The first spot does get the majority of clicks, all else being equal. It's not 70% across the board. It still will depend on your listing and how attractive it looks to the reader. Few will get that percentage even for the best of them. You'd be surprised how many people don't click on any links.
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          • Profile picture of the author ericwoo
            Originally Posted by Lucid View Post

            So you think there would be LESS traffic for the term in question? Don't know what to tell you. You sound like my late father who would say "why are they building so many houses? There can't be that many people buying homes!" The math is simple. If there are 100,000 young people between 20 and 30 in a city of a million, all starting families in the next ten years, you will need to build houses and apartments for them to live in. There's a lot of people in the world all searching on all sorts of things. Just one in a million will result in hundreds of searches each month.
            No offense Lucid, but I still wonder why you said this. Of course there will be a lot of people looking to buy houses. Thats a huge thing and people need that. Im talking about a small niche that I thought was huge according to Google's tools. I think you just have never picked a small niche before. I know there are thousands of other terms that you would never expect that get hundreds of clicks per day, but this just isn't one of them.

            My site does get about 150-190 visits per day overall but the main keyword (which is suppose to get all the traffic) only gets about 22 hits per day from Google. The more I think about it, thats a fairly good amount of traffic for this little niche.

            For now on, I'm going to judge the amount of traffic based on the Google Traffic Estimator and get an basic idea from the amount of clicks per day in the ads.
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  • Profile picture of the author HunterSnake
    Eric, can you share the URL of your site and the search term in question so I can take a look?
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  • Profile picture of the author Ryan6
    OP: Go into your Google Webmaster Tools and check how many impressions you have had over the past month for that specific keyword. I have been doing this for all of my sites that lie in prominent positions and have been noticing huge differences between keyword impressions vs the expected volume from the Keyword Tool. So yes I do think they greatly inflate the numbers.
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    • Profile picture of the author ericwoo
      Thanks Ryan. I never believed those stats in webmaster tools because they seemed way off as well. It maybe time to look into them again and figure out what Google tool's are actually true. So I did, but I have some questions. Stats first:

      My Webmaster Tools showed the month time frame of May 30-June 29. My first place ranking didn't appear during this time though so some of the info can't relate to my current number one spot.

      The impressions showed 4,400 and only 260 clicks. This was at the time when I ranked at the 10th and 8th spot (moved up later on). So I checked my analytics on that exact same time frame for the term and it showed that I actually got 321 clicks from Google. I understand its not going to be exactly perfect but it gives me a reason to not trust the data its displaying.

      Now my question: Is it recording an impression if someone types the term in, even though your on the second page? Because I saw similar type of data when I was still on the second page.
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  • Profile picture of the author Ryan6
    Hi Eric, it is just when an impression is made when you are in the top 10. What you can do is change the date to show just the past week and then just times that by 4. Some of the numbers have been way out when I have checked and I know that I have been ranking high. To make sure I log out and have opted out of personalised search, as well as checking rankings on a proxy. Nothing can explain the big gulf in numbers that they inflate. One minor thing is that the Keyword Tool also includes the searches taken for websites using a search engine "powered by Google", but this still shouldn't make a huge difference.
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    • Profile picture of the author ericwoo
      Originally Posted by Ryan6 View Post

      What you can do is change the date to show just the past week and then just times that by 4.
      Okay, I didn't see this since I glanced at it. I changed it to the last week and it showed I only had a 17% click thru rate. I seriously don't believe this for a number one spot.

      It showed 1,000 impressions and 170 clicks. I did look at my analytics for it and it did confirm a similar click number of 196 from Google during this time. Thats still off but fairly close.

      Now my question is, Am I shown as number one in all cities? I used different proxies though and all the US ones showed me as #1. Some of the out of country proxies showed me just a few spots down from #1.
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      • Profile picture of the author ericwoo
        Okay, so I looked deeper and saw that I could expand the term and got this info:
        Position in search results

        1 720 170 24%

        2 16 <10-

        3 22 <10-

        5 <10 <10-

        6 to 10 260 <10-

        2nd page 22 <10-

        3rd page +46<10-
        I don't see how my click thru rate is really only 24% on a number one spot. I guess I do suck at writing title/description tags. Or does anyone think this isn't actually accurate?

        I just don't know what to actually believe with all google's tools being extremely different or wrong.
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      • Profile picture of the author Jacob Martus
        Originally Posted by ericwoo View Post

        Okay, I didn't see this since I glanced at it. I changed it to the last week and it showed I only had a 17% click thru rate. I seriously don't believe this for a number one spot.

        It showed 1,000 impressions and 170 clicks. I did look at my analytics for it and it did confirm a similar click number of 196 from Google during this time. Thats still off but fairly close.

        Now my question is, Am I shown as number one in all cities? I used different proxies though and all the US ones showed me as #1. Some of the out of country proxies showed me just a few spots down from #1.
        It shouldn't matter in other countries. You said that search volume was 9k local, so that's US if you're in the US.

        I've never had much of a variance from the Google KW tool, it's always been relatively accurate for me. I guess that's just bad luck. Occasionally I will hit a #1 spot that has a 4k exact match search volume and I'll only get 40 or 50 UV's per day, but thats about right with Adwords.

        That may be what's happening. Maybe the majority of the traffic is clicking the adwords and that's it. If it's a search term that is a pressing need where people are looking for a specific answer and the adwords sites answer that question, searchers would have no need to continue looking.

        Sucks man. However, now that you're number 1, pay attention to your webmaster tools. You will start seeing long tails of that main phrase that you can begin targeting. And since you've already gained some ground on that main term, ranking for the long tails will be a bit easier.
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  • Profile picture of the author dietfood
    i say this over and over again all of google tools are graceless
    you can't rely on google tools to make money on the web
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  • Profile picture of the author Internet Undertaking
    Sometimes the keyword tool under-estimates and sometimes it over-estimates. Never rely on it as the sole reason for building a website.

    It should be used to show which keywords "may" have potential. Its not for sure. And also, do consider that you are not the only one on the first page of google. So if you are on page one, ranking 1st, 2nd, or 3rd, you will only get a fraction of the clicks yourway.

    I calculate, 30% of clicks go to the #1 spot.
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  • Profile picture of the author ericwoo
    Lucid, well it looks like I have a little testing to do. I do have the .... at the end of my title and description tag which I heard produces a worst click thru rate. So maybe I'll make a quick adjustment and see if traffic increases.

    You maybe right that the keyword tool is correct, but I still think it might get some keywords completely wrong. Even the Google Traffic Estimator Tool says adwords only get about 18 clicks per day. So where is all the traffic going.

    Could it be equally going to every listing (paid and free) on the page? If so, that makes more sense since their is 20 listings on the page including paid. 330 searches/20 listings=16.5 per day

    Or do you think that google is altering the first place listing and testing before it leaves it onto the first spot full time? That might be something to think about.

    Thanks for all your discussions and sorry for babbling too much. I enjoy discussions like this and just want to figure out what the deal is.
    -Eric
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  • Profile picture of the author timpears
    Use theSearch Based Keyword Tool and you will get a totally different number than the AdSense tool. I think the SBKT is more accurate, but I think they are both lying. Try it out and see for yourself.

    Search-based keyword tool

    Here is a tip: Find your top search value keywords in the Adsense tool snd then go to the SBKT and put them all in to search for. This should give you a very good lilst to work with. A tip I picked up from Sean Donahue. Hope he doesn't mind me sharing it. If you want to see the whole video about it, see his Firestorm WSO for the free videos. http://www.warriorforum.com/warrior-...rch-terms.html
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    Tim Pears

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    • Profile picture of the author ericwoo
      Thanks Tim. I used that in the past and it always shows a completely different number. It shows 4,400 per month for my search term.

      The great deal of variation from all their differnet tools is what makes me question the reliablity and true any of it actually is. But its free tools and sometimes hard to track so I guess its what one might expect.

      By the way, I think Google is altering the rankings for search results. I asked two different people from other states through Facebook where my website was. One said I was at number one and the other said I was at number 6.

      Does anyone else suspect that they place a site in test mode for the top few spots before its permanent? Im talking about testing bounce rate in comparison to other sites. If thats the case, I hope it gets more traffic later on because my bounce rate is only 30%
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      • Profile picture of the author tristen
        I agree with what admiral have said.
        The 1st spot only get 30% of the visitors.

        Nothing to blame... Just move on...
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        • Profile picture of the author ericwoo
          okay, I guess your right. thanks. But I am no where near 30% so I'll be testing different tags.

          Cheers,
          -Eric
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  • Profile picture of the author timpears
    Eric,

    You aren't going to get any better information as all the paid tools pull their data from Google etc. I don't know if Google is doing this on purpose or just that their process is faulty. I would be very much surprised if their process wasn't spot on as they have some brilliant people working there. But how can you say that they are feeding us bogus numbers? Something just doesn't smell right though.

    The only way to know for sure is to run an AdSense test and see the number of impressions. But you have to risk cash to do it.
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    Tim Pears

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  • Profile picture of the author webdesk
    I was really surprised at how inaccurate the numbers must be. I registered a domain name based upon a 45000 keyword result for the sole purpose of redirecting it to one of my main sites. In fact, I registered 3 sites, although the other 2 had much smaller numbers.

    At the time, I dominated page 1 of the SERP with positions 1 -3 (actually had 5 of the top 10 and another 3 on page 2). There was absolutely no traffic improvement except for a trickle of 1, 2, maybe 3 a month!

    I was dumbfounded.

    Now, I've let the SEO slide and the SERP is quite mixed - I figured what was the use? I mean 45000 searches bringing only 3 new visits? I didn't even bother to try to figure it out.

    Since I did this, competition for the keywords has mushroomed and search results have exploded, so plenty of other IMers must have picked up on the same 45000 stat numbers.

    I really question keyword analysis results and have found no real answer despite using 3 different sources. Now, I just went back and used their tool as I was posting this and it still shows 40500 global monthly searches.

    So I checked - suprisingly my site is still in position 20 currently on the broad search and 1 and 2 on the phrase (neither means anything, I know) - I haven't even been working the SEO on it... maybe I should try again and try to get to the top to see once again if there is any weight to the numbers vs top position(s) bringing traffic.

    But those 1st couple of months when I dominated it all... like I said, I was dumbfounded at the total lack of results.
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  • Profile picture of the author michealcdz
    u must had checked traffic estimator tool..its for ppc...well keyword checker tool is not that much accurate..or you must be ranked in google.com.uk or something like that...try to get rank in google.com
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  • Profile picture of the author Lucid
    > I do have the .... at the end of my title and description tag

    Yes, that will have an effect.

    > So where is all the traffic going.

    Obviously not clicking on links. Likely because nothing compels them to click.

    > Could it be equally going to every listing

    That's highly unlikely. It just doesn't work that way, it's not the way that people operate.

    > before it leaves it onto the first spot full time?

    There is no such thing as getting the first spot and retaining it for all time.

    > I think Google is altering the rankings for search results.

    The search engines are getting smarter all the time. They will take your location into account as well as other data and show you a different ranking then someone in another city, state or country.

    The "test mode", if there is such a thing, is the click rate of listings. Just like sponsored searches, if an organic listing doesn't get clicked on, it makes sense to show it in a lower position. Remember that Google wants the best quality.
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  • Profile picture of the author jaratvit
    In my opinion the Google keyword suggestion tool is often very inaccurate, even when using exact match. I have had far better results predicting how much traffic to expect from a phrase using the Google Traffic Estimator:
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  • Profile picture of the author discgolftraveler
    For me, the google keyword tool can be spotty. I created a blog with the intention of getting a piece of the 2,000 or so monthly hits according to Keyword Tool. I ended up #3 on google and only get 1 or 2 hits a month!

    The key is to look at google's yearly trends. I think the short-term data can be misleading sometimes.
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    • Profile picture of the author Kelly Dwayne
      Google keyword keyword tool is an right option to choose a good keyword for the website developing and SEO work.
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  • Profile picture of the author jazbo
    Most keyword tools I find are nonsense mostly. Use them to generate lists of variations and then target the ones that are lowish, dont ever take the numbers listed as anything more than a very broad guideline.
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  • Profile picture of the author jeswarrior
    Google keyword tool was not meant for SEO but for adwords, so you are using the wrong tool to begin with. There is no tool that can tell you the traffic available for a given keyword on google.com. That data Google will never release it as it is worth trillions. Anyway, even if that tool would show the traffic on Google.com, right now with Google's new algo. it would become more useless as Google is placing a block of Adwords at the top of the organic search results. So, #1 organic before, now it is #4.
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