Can Google AdWords Keyword Tool be Trusted to build keywords for an SEO campaing?

Introduction

The right choice of keywords is a crucial element of any SEO campaign if it is to be successful. Here one can use either Free or paid keyword suggestion tools.

When the Free Google AdWords keyword tool first appeared, many SEOs and webmasters decided that the days of Paid tools such as Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery or Wordze are now over.

Mostly because Google is the most popular search engine driving 39% (as of 2006) of all search traffic on the Web, and because AdWords keyword tool uses Google search statistics, whereas the paid tools use a third-party stats.

Thus there arose a question -

why use paid tools if they are neither Free, nor are they based on Google stats?!

The euphoria could have lasted long, but there appeared reports in the literature when people used the Google AdWords Tool for an SEO campaign and awfully failed. For example, Michael VanDeMar have done research and found that targeting keywords that have a high search volume, according to the Google tool, brought him almost no traffic. Exactly the same conclusion I have come to myself when trying to optimise my sites for “high” search volume key phrases using the AdWords Tool.

Fortunately, the mystery has now been solved, and the answer to the question is:

Google keyword tool is NOT to be trusted when building keywords for SEO!

If you don’t want to waste months of hard work and fail your SEO campaign completely, you’d better rely on Paid tools such as Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery or Wordze, or, if you have a lot of time are happy to do a lot of manual work, use Free keyword tools - Free Wordtracker or Free WordPot.

Why is Google AdWords keyword tool is useless for SEO?

The major reason is because Google AdWords keyword tool in addition to collecting stats from natural searches stats on Google, also collects stats from  Google Search Network, which is much bigger than Google Search.
As Google specifically states itself:

Local Search Volume and Global Monthly Search Volume statistics show the approximate number of search queries matching your keywords that were performed on Google and the search network.

And the Google Search Network represents a big group of websites and other sources, such as email programs and blogs, who have partnered with Google to display AdWords ads.
The Google Network, in turn, consists of two components: the search network and the content network, on which AdWords ads are placed based either on searches or content.

Thus the stats on search volume you get from Google AdWords keyword tool are biased towards PPC traffic, which (as my experiment in the next section shows) can be both overinflated and under-inflated.

Why? Because the merchants who sells their products/services via Google AdWords think in different terms when composing the adds, as compared to people who search Google naturally. Next section clearly demonstrates that.

Proofs that Google keyword tool is useless for SEO

An excellent proof has been presented by Michael VanDeMar who performed the following experiment: He targeted 3 phrases for his SEO campaign and brought his site to one of the top-3 positions on Google for all of them.  Those phrases, according to the estimates drawn from the Google AdWords tool, should have brought him 30 clicks a day of traffic in total. Instead, he received  5 clicks for those phrases over 3 months. In other words, he got ~150 times less traffic than one could expect from natural searches!

I have also conducted a similar research myself for one of my websites that was ranking top7 on Google.com for a phrase that according to Google keyword tool had ~3600 searches a month, or 120 searches a day. According to traffic distribution by google ranking research top-7 should give just over 3% of total traffic. Thus according to the Google tool I should have got 120*3.4%=4 visitors a day or 120 visitor a month.

According to Wordtracker, however, this phrase had 12 searches a day, and hence should have delivered 10 times less traffic than predicted by Google, i.e. 0.4 visitors a day or 12 visitor a month.

In reality, according to my own stats, I have got o.3 visitors a day or 9 visitors a month, which was very close to Wordtracker prediction and 120/9=13 times less than according to Google keyword tool!

My second experiment consists in comparing traffic predicted by Google AdWords keyword tool and a three other Paid keyword tools, all of which have free versions that I used for the experiment.  The table below summarises my research and presents daily search volumes for 12 SEO-related phrases predicted by Google AdWords, Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery and Word Pot keyword tools.

Keyword	Google Adwords	Word Tracker	Keyword Discovery	WordPot	GA/WT ratio	WP/WT ratio
seo services	1350	319	169	4249	4.2	13.3
advanced seo services	20	162	?	16	0.1	0.1
quality seo services	1	120	?	?	0.01	?
seo copywriting services	24	99	?	?	0.2	?
buy seo services	?	78	?	?	?	?
professional seo services	63	68	?	97	0.9	1.4
seo services provider	20	42	?	31	0.5	0.7
affordable seo services	120	28	?	112	4.3	4
best seo services	16	13	?	1	1.2	0.1
seo services uk	120	11	?	24	10.9	2.2
organic seo services	24	10	?	16	2.4	1.6
natural seo services	9	9	?	?		?

The last 2 columns represent the ratio of Google AdWords and WordPot stats to that of Wordtracker. Marked in red and blue and the ratios signifying noticeable over-exaggeration (>=2) or under-exaggeration (<= 0.5) of Google AdWords and Wordpot search volumes compared to those of Wordtracker, whereas  the green numbers (0.5 < ratio <2) represent a reasonable match between the three statistics.

Keyword Discovery was not chosen for comparison because it fails (shown by question marks) to deliver statistic on most of the chosen keywords.  In general, I must say, Keyword Discovery Free stats are much poorer than the other 3 considered here.

Why do I compare other stats with Wordtracker?
First, because, as you saw earlier, Wordtracker predicts traffic volume that very reasonably matches my own estimates from an attendance counter on my site and traffic distribution by google ranking research (see above). Secondly, because many experienced and successful SEOs (e.g., Seobook and Co., PageTraffic ) are using Wordtracker in keyword research for their SEO campaigns.

So what do we see from the table?
We see that disagreement between  Google AdWords keyword tool and Wordtracker is HUGE! If we admit that Wordtracker gives more or less reasonable search stats, than Google AdWords keyword tool can either over-inflate (by as much as a factor of 11!) or underestimate (by as much as a factor of 100!) it. There is also a noticeable disagreement  between Wordtracker and WordPot, but it’s much more moderate, especially on the underestimation side.

If Google AdWords tool is useless, what’s an alternative?

An alternative is either to use paid keyword tools, such as  Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, WordPot or Wordze. According to my observation, out of three tools analysed here Wordtracker seems to give traffic stats that are closest to reality. It’s also obvious that any of the paid tools is much better for SEO than Google AdWords tool. The latter is simple unacceptable.

Wordpot is the cheapest service ($25/mo) that I know of, but seemingly less reliable than Wordtracker. Wordze seems a nice alternative, it’s 50% cheaper than Wordtracker and offers quite a few extra features:

The current subscription prices (valid as of April 2009) for all 4 most popular keyword tools are summarised below:

Keyword Tool	Price per month
Keyword Discovery	$59
Wordtracker	$69
Wordze	$39
WordPot	$25

Out of the 4 services, my personal preference is either Wordtracker or Wordze, both of which offer free trial options. So if you are unsure which service to use, you could either subscribe for 7 day FREE Wordtracker trial or 1 day FREE Wordze Trial.

Of course, if you are tight on budget and have plenty of time to do the mundane work manually, you can use free keyword tools. I would recommend Free Wordtracker tool out of all I that I studied, as that is the most accurate free tool on my opinion.

However, bear in mind that using the Free Wordtracker tool can be quite cumbersome and time consuming, as it does not even have an export data function, plus it’s limited to only 100 search results for every keyword you enter.

If, on contrary, you are serious about SEO and would rather go for a paid Wordtracker version, you will enjoy a great number of extra features that will make your life much, much easier and will save you a lot of time.

Here is what a successful marketer, Mike Reining, from Mind Valley Labs says about Wordtracker:

While these free tools are great, I have to recommend Wordtracker as it has become the one tool that I can’t live without as an online marketer.

There simply is no better tool to help you build an outstanding keyword list in less time. I use Wordtracker instead of a free keyword research tools …because Wordtracker is much faster and much more powerful.

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