Why you shouldn't use Google's keyword tool for SEO 8
The internet is full of advice to use Google's keyword tool to work out what search terms to optimise for. Here's why you shouldn't do this - and what you can use instead.
On the face of it, Google's tool looks promising. You put in a keyword or search term you're interested in (perhaps because you want to know what words to use in a headline or what tags or sub-category names to use in your navigation). You get a list of related keywords. And you can see how many searches there are for each one. You then know which are the most popular - and can target those.
Except you shouldn't do this. Here's why.
Karen Gillan
Let's start with Karen Gillan, who plays Amy Pond in Doctor Who.
Logged out
If you use the keyword tool when you're logged out, you see this - and a warning to "Sign in with your AdWords login info to see the full set of ideas for this search" (the tool is free - but you have to register and log in to see all the data):
Karen Gillan logged out
(All these screenshots are based on google.co.uk searches (though see the warning at the end of this post) with a phrase match type - ie any searches which includes the words shown in the quote marks in that order.)
Logged in
Log in, and you see this:
Karen Gillan logged in
Annoyingly with a phrase search, the straightforward term you entered ("Karen Gillan" here) isn't showing.
But more importantly, as you can see by comparing the two screenshots, the logged out version of the tool didn't show you the most popular search term with the phrase "Karen Gillan" in - namely "Karen Gillan underwear" (nice).
Logged out again ...
You can force the logged-out tool to show you the result for "karen gillan underwear" by searching for that specific term:
Karen Gillan underwear - logged out
Comparing logged in and logged out
Now, fair enough, there was a warning to log in to see all the relevant keywords. But if you've been paying attention, you'll have noticed something a bit odd about the search volumes
Logged in:
- Karen Gillan underwear - 1,900
- Karen Gillan pictures - 590
Logged out:
- Karen Gillan underwear - 9,900
- Karen Gillan pictures - 3,600
The numbers aren't the same. But I suppose they're at least out by about six times each, so the same order of magnitude ...
Only, that's not always the case.
Jennifer Aniston
Let's look at Jennifer Aniston.
Logged out
If you're logged out, you see these results:
Jennifer Aniston logged out
Logged in
If you log in, you see these results instead:
Jennifer Aniston logged in
You should notice two things. First, "Jennifer Aniston pregnant" is at number two when you're logged in, with 18,100 searches a month. This search term didn't show when we were logged out, but fair enough, there was that warning to log in to see the full set of results.
But, secondly, the numbers don't match again. When logged out, "Jennifer Aniston's hair" was shown as having 60,500 searches a month. When logged in, there are only apparently 12,100 searches a month.
Logged out again
Again, you can make the missing search terms appear when you're logged out if you know what they are by typing them in the box. If we do that, we get this for "Jennifer Aniston pregnant":
Jennifer Aniston pregnant - logged out
Comparing logged in and logged out
To sum up, we're looking at these numbers:
Logged in
- Jennifer Aniston pregnant - 18,100
- Jennifer Aniston hair - 12,100
Logged out
- Jennifer Aniston pregnant - 49,500
- Jennifer Aniston hair - 60,500
It's not just that the numbers are different, they are in a different order. When logged in, the tool says people search for pregnant 1.5 times as much as hair. When logged out, hair is 20% more popular than pregnant.
What Google News thinks
To make matters worse, if you go to Google News and start typing Jennifer Aniston's name, you see this in the Autosuggest feature - which is supposed to show you what people are searching for right now:
Jennifer Aniston - Google News autocomplete
There's no mention of hair, and "Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt" is more popular than pregnant - even though when logged in, the keywords tool told us that people were twice as likely to search for her pregnant (18,100 searches) as with Brad Pitt (9,900 searches).
Katie Price
Here's a similar story.
Logged in
This is what you see when you search on Katie Price's name logged in:
Katie Price logged in
Logged out
And here are the logged out figures for two search terms.
Katie Price and Peter Andre:
Katie Price and Peter Andre - logged out
Katie Price video:
Katie Price video - logged out
Comparing logged in and logged out
Compare the figures again:
Logged in - the same:
- Katie Price and Peter Andre - 14,800
- Katie Price video - 14,800
Logged out - one is 50% higher than the other
- Katie Price and Peter Andre - 40,500
- Katie Price video - 27,100
When you're logged in, the tool says the search volumes are the same. When you're logged out, it says there's 50% more searches for "Katie Price and Peter Andre" than there are for Katie Price video.
What Google News thinks
Go to Google News, and you can see that the current second most popular Google Autocomplete is Katie Price pregnant - behind "Katie Price and Peter Andre" and with Katie Price video nowhere to be seen.
Katie Price Autocomplete in Google News
When you're logged in, though, the number of searches for Katie Price pregnant is negligible:
Katie Price pregnant - logged in
Which means that the term people are searching for right now, according to Google News, isn't even worth looking at according to the keyword tool.
What all this means
You can't trust the logged-out version of the tool, as it doesn't show you everything.
The search volumes you see for a specific search term are different when logged in or logged out. I've seen a supposition that, when logged out, you see total search volumes but when logged in you see searches that triggered an Adwords ad. This would make the logged-in version of the tool useless for SEO, as what it's showing you is determined by PPC budgets (when the money's spend, there are no more Adwords ads, so those searches are ignored). Alternatively, it's just a bug as suggested here. Either way, the data is screwy.
However, you shouldn't trust this data anyway, even if it was unscrewy, as the Adwords tool doesn't show search volumes. It shows "the approximate 12-month average of user queries for the keyword on Google.co.uk and the Google Search Network". This basically means it's counting EG adwords panels on parked domains as "searches" - and inflating the search volumes.
Even if you did trust it, for the search terms above, which do tend to be fairly newsy, I'll give you, the Adwords keywords tool isn't reflecting what people are searching for now.
To sum up - the data's odd, inconsistent, and out of date. Don't use it.
Well, what shall I use?
To decide what to optimise pages for, I tend to use a combination of Google Insights, Google Autocomplete for web searches and Google Autocomplete for News. The latter have their issues (such as these).
But by plugging what you see from the Autocomplete data into Google Insights, I think you get a much better picture of what people are really searching for. If you're up to APIs and stuff, rather than copying what you see, you can automate the autocomplete discovery. Or you can use this awesome keyword discovery tool that does the same thing (hat-tip to @rishil).
You might also like
- Google's bizarre and rubbish celebrity boyfriend / girlfriend feature
- Google keyword tool: only certain 'exact numbers' show
- What The X Factor tells us about Google's keyword and search-volume analysis tools
- Steven Gerrard: Google autocomplete finishes off The Sun's work
- Google security problem: logging in to two accounts at once
I'm having to use all my willpower to not see what results come up for "Karen Gillam Underwear".
Other than that, it's worrying that this tool is so inaccurate. I'd be interested to hear someone from Google try and explain it.
What's worse if you create or use another a/c the volumes change again. I've been discussing the issue in the Seobook community recently. I'll write a post at some point with some data samples.
Its also odd that you'll find that certain terms will have exactly the same number of searches, and long tail variants just seem to disappear into the aether.
Superb choice of research material. I guess you have a bra based client? No?
The biggest mistake doing search engine optimization based on the google adsense keyword tool is that few seo's understand the results. Most optimizers think the results are showing them the number of searches performed for their keyword search on the google search engine, this is not even close to the truth. The numbers are the results of how many times the keyword was used on the google ad network, the google ad network is any website that displays google ads. This tool is useless for determining how many times a month a keyword or phrase is search on a search engine. And another joke are all the keyword tools, it only takes me about 30 seconds to run my research and find the best keywords and phrases to use.
These errors have been in this keyword tool from day 1, however Google carried on and made it the default tool. I really don’t understand why they did this when the errors were so obvious.
Even more frustrating was when Google chose to remove a lot of the functionality of the old keyword tool!
They seem to have sorted the old keyword tool again now, so I’m back using that until they get these issues sorted out once and for all.
Very interesting post. I have always wondered about the accuracy of his tool, so thanks for highlighting this Malcolm.
I find Insights the best, usually.
One question: Which tool is the best for tracking breaking news search trends Malcolm?
David - sorry for slow reply, been on holiday. I quite like http://surchur.com as a way to track breaking news trends, though it's a bit US and celebrity based. Twitter's good, obviously. Most of the other free services tend to be a day or two old by the time they react ...